John McCain makes a big deal about his opposition to earmarks. During the debate, Barack Obama juxtaposed McCain's taxcut proposal that would cost $300B with the $18B represented by earmarks.
While some earmarks are clearly booty from the taxpayer to local interests, many can be justified as sound policy. Obama could, if he wished, run an entire campaign, Congressional district by Congressional district, identifying a few "earmarked" expenditures that that district loves and that McCain voted against.
More to the point, however, is that McCain has voted for loads of tax loopholes during his 26 years in the Senate. Why loopholes are morally superior to earmarks escapes me.
Let us postulate that there are some justifiable earmarks and some justifiable loopholes. The arguments against the rest are both process and substance. The process, I'll-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine, however unseemly, is the same for both.
The substance is also identical. A loophole allows an individual, or company, or sector not to pay taxes on a certain category of income. The rest of us have to make up that shortfall. The earmark is most often a local project for which general tax revenues are spent. The rest of us have to pay for that too.
The Member of Congress takes credit for the earmark ("look at what I brought home for you") and the loophole, but the latter is rarely said aloud. That should tell us something. The earmark is more often a project for which the Member can tout its benefit to the larger community, whereas the beneficiaries of the loophole are likely to be more limited, but there are certainly examples on both sides that contradict this description.
Thus, Obama was on to something in his last debate with McCain, and the point ought to be made more emphatic. It would behoove his research staff to come up with examples of loopholes, and how much they cost the taxpayer, for which McCain voted. It is not to justify earmarks, but to show the hypocrisy in McCain's holier-than-thou rhetoric.
My bet: the total will be at least 1000-fold larger than Obama's earmark requests, and 10-fold larger than all earmarks combined.
I would like to hear McCain defend his tax loopholes in the next debate. It should be interesting.