Jeremy's Blog

I know, another post on Politics. I’m writing this on the 26th but scheduled it to be made public later so they don’t all hit at the same time.

At the beginning of this month, Dutch posted a link to an article that mentioned that Senator John McCain did not participate in the extremely common act of political “Pork-Barrel Spending” or “Earmarks” … For the confused, in a nutshell, this is where politicians request federal funding for projects. I promise, I wasn’t ignoring you Dutch, I just sorta forgot about the comment and lost track of it in everything else that was going on.

Anyway, the point of this entry is to point out that Obama does participate in this practice. It’s also to point out that he made his earmarks for 2008 public to improve government transparency. I was poking around earlier trying to find this particular list and noted that it was a little tough to find unless you were actually looking for it. Since I already did the leg work, I thought I would share the information with everyone.

Obama’s 2008 Federal Funding Requests

Read through a bunch of entries on that list. I believe the sum total of funding requests that he made came up to around $300 million, but specifically note the type of requests that were made. I read through most of the list before my eyes got tired, so I did note a few questionable ones, but I did note a lot of places where some federal money could go to some extremely good use.

I don’t necessarily agree with pork spending, especially in excess. Although, if it’s gonna be done, I like the way he does it. Not only is he honest (his list is public), but a lot of the projects he would see the funding invested in are (what I would consider) noble efforts.

To hit the point of economic policy, because Dutch also brought up policies that McCain supported, I’m just going to post a link to Obama’s Economic Plan. I think it sums things up far better than I could.

Obama’s Economic Plan