P.S.–From working on Capitol Hill for several decades, my sense is that very few members actually read the bills and, instead, they often rely on staff to do so.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/01/presidential_earmarks.html

And this site:

http://earmarks.omb.gov/earmarks-public/

No time to really explore the links, but the last line is interesting: “earmarks with no sponsor include explanations” How can you have an earmark without a sponsor??

Luddites, as I understand it, were against “machines” (and by extension, traditionally thought to be against “progress,” too) as opposed to the old, traditional way of crafting things by hand. I am not against mechanization/automation, if such mechanization improves our situation here in the U.S.

My argument is that by reducing our industrial base we are less secure that we were when we manufactured a large percentage of what we needed, and that, in addition, we are pretty much forced to take whatever kind of crap our suppliers send us, and we are, in reality, at their mercy, since we cannot make these items–including critical military items–for ourselves anymore. Moreover, it seems to me that it is our overseas suppliers who have really gotten the fullest benefit from automation in industry, not us.

Then, of course, there is the wholly different philosophical issue of whether it is preferable to have one very well-crafted and sturdy item, built to have a long service life, or several shoddily made, flimsy items that have to be periodically replaced; we seem to have fallen for the latter philosophy.

In these categories I place Senator Byrd’s transfer of the FBI fingerprint facility from the Capitol Hill to WV, the duplicative threat analysis center that Pennsylvania’s Congressman Murtha secured for his state, and the various large and costly, seriously underutilized airports that various congressmen have secured for locations in their respective states.

Bottom line; it may benefit a particular state, but if it does not clearly benefit the U.S. as a whole, it is a payoff or an ego trip, or both.

McConnell and the pro-earmark faction speak for an idea whose time to expire has come. But McConnell and the pro-earmark faction have not crossed the line; they have not become unreachable on most ideas and therefore our enemies. We know that their deep down devotion to this idea is self-interest. So be it. But tone and respect are awfully important here.

Someone rightly commented that the public defines, and hates, earmarks as stealth projects that are added to spending bills at the last moment, without debate or actual votes on their merits.

But, now it suits the purposes of some to greatly broaden that definition to encompass any spending delineated in specific terms by Congress–even if it survives the full appropriation process.

I absolutely hate the distortion of language and terminology in order to obscure issues. At the risk of revealing homophobia, I have always considered the corruption of the word “gay” to be a prime example. Another is the term, “reproductive rights”. I wish those folks privileged to have a public voice would immediately object whenever this tactic is attempted.

The U.S. is still a leader in production requiring highly skilled labor, management and complex machinery. Further, outsourcing production of “junk” allows more disposable income to American consumers. For instance, you may buy a high quality, robust, long lasting razor, but most people will spend only one-tenth of what you spent for your razor.

The areas we should be looking at are de-regulation, cutting taxes, stopping the funding of welfare to immigrants, repealing minimum wage and prevailing wage requirements, decreasing union influence and bringing back home energy production.

The United States used to be an industrial giant, in fact, a good case could be made that, rather than the U.S. overwhelming the Axis powers in WWII solely by our military might, it would be more accurate to say that we actually overwhelmed them with our productive capacity; aircraft and ships and weapons the Axis lost could not be easily replaced or–thanks to our bombing campaigns–replaced at all towards the end of the war but, once we got rolling, for every airplane or tank or ship or gun we lost, we built two or four or six more, and, eventually, the sheer weight of our material superiority just buried the Axis.; we might have well just dropped everything that poured out of our factories–guns, aircraft, ships and supplies–from the air on Japan and Germany, it would have just as easily done the job.

We used to have an enormous “industrial base,” and we took raw materials (many ones we found and extracted from our own lands) and made steel and aluminum, nuts and bolts, lubricants, copper wire and tires, and then we took those things and built ships and aircraft, sewing machines and cars, tractors, transformers and air conditioners, factories and a transportation system; we made our own TVs, we made our own textiles and clothes, we made our own telephones, and we made our own lathes and our own furniture.

Unwisely and suicidally our policy for quite a few decades now has been to change as rapidly as possible from a manufacturing to a service economy, from making concrete products to just doing research and marketing our ideas, from making products to importing products, and all of those millions of jobs that used to be the engine that ran a large part of our economy have been transferred overseas; we not longer sell to others, it is we who buy from them, we no longer make high quality, robust, long lasting products, we buy cheap, flimsy, quickly broken and replaced junk from China and elsewhere; and because of this we are dependent on our foreign suppliers.

To get some idea of how bad things are, look at this estimate from “The American Prospect,” that since 2001, 42,400 U.S. factories–large and small–have closed (http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_plight_of_american_manufacturing). I think that reversing this trend and making us again the world’s leader in not only research and ideas but in the production of goods might be a worthy goal for Conservative/Republicans.