Monday’s New York Times ran an article on Congress’ pork barrel spending and the eagerness on the part of some to earmark large sums of taxpayer’s money towards their own pet projects. Deeply embedded within the abstruse language of any given spending bill lays the allocation of millions or billions of dollars worth of wasteful pork proposing to be squandered.

We all know how it works: Politicians owe favors to people or groups that helped them get elected and subsequently try to appropriate federal spending in their favor, cloaked in the garb of necessary and healthy national expenditures. Recent highlights include Thad Cochrane (R-Miss.) seeing a legitimate federal responsibility to pay for “research on genetic marker-identification and mapping of sweet potatoes.”

Then there’s Don Young (R-Alaska) recognizing the need to allocate $320 million towards the construction of what has been dubbed “The Bridge to Nowhere” in rural Alaska. It is apparently essential that this bridge be higher than the Brooklyn Bridge and almost as long as the Golden Gate. Trying to curry favor with constituents, I reckon?

But The Times reported that, in an attempt to put an end to wasteful federal spending for programs to save hawks in Haiti and give $50 million to an Iowa Senator for an indoor rainforest in his state, Congress last year passed strict ethics rules requiring representatives to disclose where they steered taxpayer money.

According to the article, though, it has not been difficult for representatives to morph traditionally “hard earmarks” into “soft earmarks” which are undetectable under the new ethics rules.

“How to spot a soft earmark? Easy. The language is that of a respectful suggestion: A committee ‘endorses’ or notes it ‘is aware’ of deserving programs and ‘urges’ or ‘recommends’ that agencies finance them,” said the Times. It shouldn’t be too big a surprise to anyone that pays attention that any rule Congress ascribes for itself is a rule they can easily get around.

Hillary Clinton (of whom I desperately hope can vanish from my columns pertaining to the ’08 race as soon as possible) is the most shameful of the three remaining candidates on the issue of earmarks and pork barrel spending. She placed 10th in the Taxpayers for Common Sense ranking of porkers with $342 million in earmarks (almost four times what Obama pulled in).

She has thought it a worthy governmental responsibility for “local artist space” in Buffalo, firefighting equipment in Oswego, “clean fuel buses” in Syracuse, the Historic Seneca Knitting Mill in Rochester, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Center in Val-Kill, according to an article in Reason Magazine. Again, to anyone paying any attention, it is no news that Clinton sees a government role in practically every part of life in America.

Barack Obama has admittedly very little, in comparable terms, to show for excessive earmarks and pork, although he has only been in the Senate a few years and many earmark dibbs are based on seniority, so don’t be too quick to praise him for it.

Still, his silly excuses for legitimate government expenditures last year include pork for theatres, museums, and hospitals in Chicago. In any case, earmarks will likely be among the last pieces of government waste and excessiveness on people’s minds when Obama puts the entire healthcare industry under the bureaucratic domain of government profligacy. That is pork you can’t imagine.

John McCain, if I can give the man any credit at all in the political realm, has made it a priority to consistently return to his soapbox to trash on earmarks and wasteful spending. Technically his record on earmarks, hard or soft, is relatively impressive.

However, all that praise seems greatly diminished when his general voting record is taken into account. Voting against the Bush tax cuts and remaining vehemently against the roll back of the estate tax has, among many other things, effectively painted him as a Big Government, High Tax Republican (and rightly so). Not to mention the war he so adamantly supports and plans to perpetuate would cost, by some estimates, up to $3 trillion. Given that war is the health of the state (along with high taxes), McCain’s appeal as a no-earmark, no-pork crusader is impressively impotent and purely political.

The Founders did not design our government to be operating as a leaser of taxpayer money, playing favorites and reciprocating favors. As purposeful and genius as their design was, they did not account for a government that redistributes money and power through extravagant and bungling officialdom.

Perhaps if those in government did less of what they weren’t intended to be doing in the first place, they’d be doing a better job of accomplishing what they’re actually there for. Whether you’re voting Republican or Democrat this season, don’t count on a drop in government waste.

John Glaser is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]