Earmarks of the spending bill are filtering their way down to voters. Examples are too political to list; they make different people indignant about them. But you can seek the news organization you favor to find the ones that will upset you the most! I linked to one from reason.com below if you are so inclined.
Why do these persist? Because it is hard to squelch human nature is my view.
People love to be in a position of giving things away, it is a feeling of power. It may be a secret reason politicians seek these jobs, and being a “good” politician that is voted into office election after election probably depends on doing this well. The best ones are probably the ones who protest the most against it yet punch above their weight in both obtaining the most funding AND funding the right organizations back home.
An anecdote that leads me to this conclusion… Many years ago I worked for a large corporation. Over an 18 month + period, we were overwhelmed with new business, and we all focused on a particularly “hot” product that drew our time and attention away from other products and caused us to falter on the normally very high level of customer service we had built a reputation for. Complaints mounted. Emotions ran high with important clients frequently. This caused huge amounts of time to be wasted, further eroding our service. There was damage being done to our reputation.
I came up with a way to automate a workflow that would have vastly reduced management time and promised to reduce errors to near zero. I spent time on a presentation and then delivered it to my boss’s boss.
He said he loved the idea as a major step forward, potentially a breakthrough, but it won’t be approved by the managers who produce these products. These managers whose time you will be saving with this new process relish being in the position to allocate, and relish being in the position to fix mistakes, because clients need to curry favor with them. This is power. This is the practice of earmarks.
Article HERE