1) Right-wing blogs are abuzz about Obama’s request for an earmark in 2007 for the University of Chicago Hospital, his wife’s employer, to build a new building that will increase patient capacity by one-third, and another $500,000 for The Children’s Health Fund which refers patients to the University of Chicago hospital. It does seem a little creepy at first glance. But I note that Obama requested earmarks for several other hospitals in 2006 and 2007 as well:
$2 million for The Thorek Memorial Hospital
$1 million for Alton Memorial Hospital
$4 million for The Children’s Memorial Medical Center
$1.56 million for the Swedish Covenant Hospital
$2.5 million for The Children’s Hospital of Illinois
$5 million for Northwester Memorial Hospital’s Prentice Woman’s Hospital
$10 million for the The children’s Hospital of Illinois
Dick Durban, Illinois’ other senator, requested $500,000 for the University of Chicago Hospital, for research for better detection of breast cancer in African-American women, and $2.5 million for the University of Chicago Hospital for testing and evaluation of a particular MRI technology to diagnose and treat traumatic brain injuries.
You can see Obama's full list of earmark requests for FY 2006 and 2007.
2) Obama released the list of his earmark requests voluntarily; Clinton has not done so.
3) The Citizens Against Government Waste provides this graph of federal government earmark totals from 1995 to 2007. Earmark spending in 1999 was $12 billion. From 2000-2006, earmark spending rose from $17.7 billion to $29 billion, before it was constrained to $13.2 billion in 2007.
It occurs to me, though, that it would make sense to normalize the earmark spending for GDP to get a more apples-to-apples comparison across years. So I did that, using nominal GDP figures from here and got these figures:
:Graphing the right column:
Draw your own conclusions.
4) McCain spearheaded a budget amendment to put a one-year moratorium on earmarks. Obama and Clinton backed McCain’s plan. The bill was soundly defeated 71-29 in the Senate yesterday.
4 comments:
Wow. Did you create those graphs? You are putting the rest of us to shame.
and FWIW, the analysis in terms of GDP is almost alway the right way to look at these things in my humble opinion.
I did create the table and graph. Did it in Excel, then turned them into jpgs. If there's a way to convert to jpeg within Excel, I couldn't figure it out, so did a screen capture, then used a graphics converter to crop it and save it as a jpeg. From there, it's just like inserting a pic.
I should have said earlier: very nice job.
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