Progressive-Democrats in Congress are moving to bring these back. On this, I tend to agree.

Go ahead and do earmarks; they can be useful horse-trading tools. Just set aside 1% of the budget, the rough amount historically spent on them, as a separate line item.

Then require all earmarks in their aggregate to fit within that 1%, and require each earmark to be individually debated on the record and on the floor of the House and the Senate.

Let the public see, up front, what their tax dollars are paying for, and let the particular constituents see how effective their Congressman and Senator really are in representing them in each Congressional session.

The Biden administration (or, as they like to style it, the Biden-Harris administration (can anyone remember the last administration that was referred to as the President-Vice President administration? The Kennedy-Johnson administration? The Carter-[mumble] administration?)) is making economic recovery promises. Here’s one from his brand-spanking new Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellon:

I’m anticipating, if all goes well, that our economy will be back to full employment—where we were before the pandemic—next year, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that without this, it could probably take until 2024.

Yeah. Obama made similar promises regarding unemployment post his Panic of 2008 “stimulus.” The levels of unemployment embodied in those promises weren’t matched–his promises went unfulfilled–until some years after his promised date. Those failures were at least in part due to the explosion of regulations the Obama administration wrote.

Biden is making the same promise, through Yellen, engaging in the same regulatory explosion, and adding the fillip of overt attacks on our energy industry. And our economy will suffer the fate, exacerbated by that attack on our energy.

Leave it to Progressive-Democrats to want to bring this exemplar of spendthrift back. You know what earmarks are:

“member-directed spending,” [that] are provisions discreetly tucked away in large spending vehicles that directly fund a pet project championed by a specific member of Congress for the member’s own constituents.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D, CT) and Senator Pat Leahy (D, VT)—the respective chairs of the House and Senate Appropriations committees are about to introduce legislation that would restore the business.

In contrast, Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) and Congressman Ted Budd (R, NC) are pushing the Earmark Elimination Act, which would ban earmarks permanently. Citizens Against Government Waste President Tom Schatz told Just the News that

Earmarks are the most corrupt, costly, and inequitable practice in the history of Congress. They led to members, staff, and lobbyists being incarcerated. In a form of legalized bribery, members of Congress vote for tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in appropriations bills in return for a few million dollars in earmarks. Earmarks go to those in power, as shown during the 111th Congress, when the 81 members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, who constituted 15% of Congress, got 51% of the earmarks and 61% of the money. Restoring earmarks will lead to the same results.

I’m not as adamantly opposed to earmarks as some: they can be useful horsetrading tools, usable to facilitate political tradeoffs to get important legislation passed—or other useless legislation blocked.

The major problem, it seems to me, has been the secretive nature of earmarks. They tended to be negotiated behind closed doors, out of the public’s view, and then buried in one or another appropriations bill. The process needs to be better structured.

In that 111^th Congress, the total amount that wound up being spent on earmarks amounted to some 3% of that session’s first year budget. Accordingly, break out those 3% into a separate appropriations bill as a sort of earmark slush fund. Then have every earmark proposal individually debated on the House and Senate floors until the 3% is committed, and where differences occur between the final House and Senate slush fund appropriations bills, let the bills be reconciled via House-Senate joint committees, just as every other bit of legislation is.

Let the horsetrading occur in plain sight of the House and Senate member constituencies. Ordinary Americans can handle the sight of sausage making. Honest.

And they’ll take appropriate action at the next election. ‘Course, that’s what the politicians are afraid of.

This time on “child care” checks written by the IRS.

The [House Progressive-Democrats’] 22-page bill proposes that the Internal Revenue Service provide $3,600 to every child under the age 6 and $3,000 per child ages 6-17 to families earning less than $75,000 per year, or couples earning less than $150,000. The payments would be distributed monthly, over the course of a year, beginning this July.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D, MA) compounds the cynicism of this move:

The pandemic is driving families deeper and deeper into poverty, and it’s devastating. We are making the Child Tax Credit more generous, more accessible, and by paying it out monthly, this money is going to be the difference in a roof over someone’s head or food on their table[.]

That’s plainly not true. The Wuhan Virus situation has done/is doing no such thing. Governments at a variety of levels of jurisdiction are driving, devastatingly, families deeper and deeper into poverty with those governments’ mandates to close down all businesses, churches, and other public gathering places, thereby depriving families of their jobs, without any regard to the uselessness of those lockdowns.

We don’t need any IRS checks. We need our economy reopened so our businesses can go back to making and selling, our citizens can go back to work, and our families can go back to making their way.

At least the bill is amazingly short and blatant, though.