So, what does an earmark mean for you and me?

So, what does an earmark mean for you and me?

Just imagine for a moment that you paid your son or daughter a $10,000 a week allowance.

If this were the arrangement, your child would be cleaning their room, emptying the dishwasher and taking out the trash for more than 389,800 weeks or 7,496 years just to cover the amount of earmarks that Washington approved last week!  

The omnibus bill, which President Obama is expected to sign, is "chock full" of special pork-barrel projects and adds red ink to the budget deficit as far as the eye can see.  According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, this bill included 5,224 earmarks costing taxpayers $3.898 billion.

Clearly, Congress failed to exercise any type of fiscal restraint when it comes to reaching into the taxpayer's wallet.  

Thomas Jefferson had it right when he said the following:

"I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt, and not for a multiplication of officers and salaries merely to make partisans, and for increasing, by every device, the public debt on the principle of its being a public blessing."

233 years later, Washington has it all wrong.

In the spirit of Jefferson, accountability and mere sanity, I have signed Freedom Works' Earmark Pledge because Congress has become ruthless with spending our hard earned money.

The pledge reads:

"'Earmarking,' the practice by which members of Congress divert taxpayer funding to special projects outside of the normal competitive and merit-based review process, has grown out of control and is open to waste and abuse.

THEREFORE, I, Tom Graves, in my capacity as Congressman, do hereby pledge that I will personally support spending reform in Congress by refusing to seek, support, or enact earmarks during the appropriations process."
 
We've got to stop this wasteful spending and get our country back on track . . . just like Jefferson would have wanted.