I disagree -- earmarks didn't "gut" the bottoms-up approach, they merely supplanted it. As a process, earmarking evolved after the Highway Trust Fund supply-chain disbursement flow became reduced from cost inflation and growing local resistance to unrestrained metropolitan highway construction derived from the traditional "bottoms-up" approach. Earmarks simply established a "trump-card" mechanism for the highest level of insiders in the Federal-Aid game of induced-development stimulus who had accrued truly astounding influence in their regions over a long period of time -- mostly through leveraging far-advance property acquisition into subsequent downstream profits from sale and syndication, which were then partly reinvested (recycled and perhaps laundered are both potentially applicable terms) into campaign warchests for political officeholders at all levels of government from local to Congressional and Presidential.
Steve Parker - 12 years ago
The earmarks program completely gutted the "bottoms up" approach that almost every state engaged in. Throw it onto the scrapheap of history.
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I disagree -- earmarks didn't "gut" the bottoms-up approach, they merely supplanted it. As a process, earmarking evolved after the Highway Trust Fund supply-chain disbursement flow became reduced from cost inflation and growing local resistance to unrestrained metropolitan highway construction derived from the traditional "bottoms-up" approach. Earmarks simply established a "trump-card" mechanism for the highest level of insiders in the Federal-Aid game of induced-development stimulus who had accrued truly astounding influence in their regions over a long period of time -- mostly through leveraging far-advance property acquisition into subsequent downstream profits from sale and syndication, which were then partly reinvested (recycled and perhaps laundered are both potentially applicable terms) into campaign warchests for political officeholders at all levels of government from local to Congressional and Presidential.
The earmarks program completely gutted the "bottoms up" approach that almost every state engaged in. Throw it onto the scrapheap of history.