After the experience here in Missouri I'd rather get the states out of it entirely, to be honest. The Republican Governor and legislature took over 100,000 people off of Medicaid. They never claimed that the people didn't need the help, that they weren't poor and had health problems and many were in fact disabled. They just said that it was a budgetary issue, not an ideological one. Yet when the state's economic fortunes turned around and they could easily have been restored to the program the Republicans refused to do so. Now they've eliminated Medicaid effective later this year and replaced with another program entirely. There are lots of questions about the new program and frankly, I think it's going to be an unmitigated disaster because while the principles behind it sound good on first examination I have no reason to believe that it will be funded properly for it to have a chance of working. I also think that the Republicans behind it know and don't care. It will be another government program for them to condemn as being worse than the private sector, while conveniently not mentioning that they designed it that way.

Think about that, Paul. Because of balanced budget requirements at the state and local level, these programs would have to be slashed to the bone if not eliminated when they are needed the most. That would be the inevitable consequence of leaving social programs, or even most of responsibility for them, to the states. I have never seen a reasonable conservative answer to that flaw in their ideology.

???

Both are unsustainable in their current forms.

The most that can honestly be argued about them in their favor is on utilitarian grounds only — that some will not be able to avoid poverty in old age or health care if they didn't exist. That is all that can be claimed for them. Emotive arguments have no supporting or other value whatsoever. In fact, these are programs that properly and rightfully should be undertaken instead (if at all) by state and local governments; proponents lose on federalist and legal as well as other grounds.

* * *

Taxing and redistribution, which always has strings attached (the most notorious example being highway funds; Medicare extended to everybody would be insanely corrupting), is wrong; if states or localities want something, they should levy their own taxes and make their own expenditures. It's wrong and wrongful to have the federal government levy the taxes and then having people clamoring for it to be redistributed to them, like children clustering around someone holding a bag of candy.

* * *

Nobody is talking about “blindly” lowering taxes (and federal expenditures), which is an unearned, dishonest-if-continued pejorative. Overgrowth and over-interventionism by Washington has long proven itself failed and wrong and should be corrected. Morality is on my side of this position, without (serious) question.

Leading a charge to end earmarks will be a good indications of leadership. Finding a way to institutionalize them is a failure of leadership.

Social Security $586.1
Military: 548.8
Medicare: 394.5
Unemployment and welfare: 367.0
Medicaid: 276.4
Debt service: 243.7

Medicare is growing the fastest (12% per year) so it should have great concern but your statement that we spend more on Medicare than on defense is simply untrue.

All of this is beside my point which is that concern about earmarks is disproportionate to their presence in the budget. If we really wanted to be concerned about something it should be debt service which constitutes 8% of the total budget and doesn't do anybody a bit of good, merely representing prior years' unwillingness to make our revenues and expenditures balance out.

Also, I agree with those who feel that some amount of taxes collected by the Federal Government should more appropriately be collected by local, county and state governments for the local good.

And I support redistributed funds that serve the national interest in the form of environmental protection (Levees) , national security (Border control), and the like. I don't see these as black and white choices but complex resource management that invites pragmatic, open minded people to work together to set priorities.

I pay a lot of taxes but my concern is not that taxes be blindly lowered but rather managed efficiently. Social Security and Medicare are treasures that demonstrate our humanity and compassion as a society, and will not go away. I would prefer that taxes don't go up but I accept that obligation if that preserves the wellbeing of my family, friends and neighbors.

And that's the problem- I don't think that's possible to accomplish. Therefore I'd rather see the transparency happen at the level at which the projects are written into the legislation. If the project can't be defended as being beneficial to the NATIONAL interest (and with sufficient priority to take place at the national level), it has no place being in the federal budget.

As for the earmarks, serious people want them ended, not “fairly apportioned” — that smacks of political and fiscal prostitution.

If we're going to achieve fiscal sanity, either we're going to have to reduce spending on the major expenditure items like Social Security, defense, and Medicare or we'll need to increase taxes. The English language is sadly lacking in an inclusive or.

The economy just isn't going to grow fast enough to achieve fiscal sanity painlessly. We must make choices.

As an indication of the importance of this debt service dwarfs earmarks as a percentage of the federal budget. It's not even close. That's the price of refusing to make hard decisions in the past—you don't have as much to spend on things that you really want in the future.