This is some pretty fascinating journalism on behalf of PBS regarding where taxpayer money is going, and how earmarks for relatively useless but expensive items can be exchanged for champaign contributions. It's short, only like a half an hour but a pretty sharp critique of the system's flaws:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02222008/watch.html

February 22, 2008

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL and the PBS series EXPOSÉ: AMERICA'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS offer a hard and fresh look at how earmarks really work.

The broadcast profiles SEATTLE TIMES reporters on the trail of how members of Congress have awarded federal dollars for questionable purposes to companies in local Congressional districts—often to companies whose executives, employees or PACs have made campaign contributions to their legislators. The report also focuses on how earmarks for some products were added to the defense appropriations bill even in cases in which the military didn't want them in the first place. Example: a $4.65 million patrol boat the Coast Guard hadn't even asked for and decided it couldn't use was eventually given away by the Coast Guard to a California Sheriff's office. David Heath of the SEATTLE TIMES says: "They're selling a product to the military that they're not even using."

The TIMES reporters have kept their eyes on the bi-partisan issue of earmarks, recently tracking down earmarks by candidate: "John McCain abhors them. Hillary Rodham Clinton embraces them. Barack Obama does a little of both."

I don't know if we can trust anyone in the establishment to do anything about it though, it seems that both parties embrace it equally. It'd be nice if the Dems did some house cleaning, but I'm not too hopeful on that.

Earmarks are one of those things that I don't think are evil in and of themselves, but they can be abused, and certainly have been quite a bit recently, on both sides of the aisle. The real abuse is when an earmark is stuck in after the vote has occurred, and especially when the specific earmark was discussed and rejected, like that Don Young (R-AK) story about the highway exit in Florida.

I read a good piece about earmarks a couple months ago, and it explained pretty well why earmarks are a more efficient way to do the detail work of allocating funds on massive funding bills. If every line item of a $30 billion highway bill were in the language of the bill itself, it would be absurd. There do need to be better checks on how they are used though, I think we can all agree about that.

How often are they used to fund important civic work projects that actually require Federal assistance? I was under the impression that earmarks in their current form are used almost entirely to convince congresspeople to support a particular bill or otherwise gain their support. Additionally, I thought that for a goodly number of Federal projects, the congress appropiated X amount of money to be used for a particular purpose and then had state and local governments apply for a piece of the action. That seems like a more transparent way of doing things.

In answer to your first question, probably most of the time. Probably the vast majority of the time.

The reason you think otherwise is because the media has equated "earmark" with "pork", and the stories that you hear about regarding earmarks ARE about pork. Earmarks for popular projects that are rationally funded don't make for exciting news stories.

Perhaps it is a special type of earmark being referenced, but they used to be incredibly rare, and now there are hundreds of them per budget. Has the need for these types of civic projects to be funded in this manner increased anywhere near this rate?