The Swine Line

On December 28th, Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee held a conference call with bloggers.  Our friend Robert Bluey over at the Heritage Foundation made good use of our recent release on the candidates’ ratings and asked Gov. Huckabee about what he would do about the epidemic of earmarks.  Robert shared the exchange with us, so here it is:

Robert Bluey Question:  Governor, as you may know, Congress recently passed an omnibus spending bill with nearly 10,000 earmarks. President Bush is now considering canceling many of these pork projects. I’d like to know if you, as President, would issue an executive order instructing federal agencies to ignore earmarks?

Answer:  I think some of them ought to be vetoed. If they can’t be vetoed, then ignore them. But I’ll tell you another thing we need to do: push for total transparency of the expenditures of Congress, something we don’t have.

Every time the federal government writes a check, we ought to be able to access the information of that check on the Internet. We ought to know how much it costs to mow the lawn of the federal courthouse in Des Moines, Iowa, so if somebody looks at that, they could say, ‘Are you kidding me? I could do that for a third.’ A lot of things would change if we knew exactly how the money was spent and it was spelled out in plain, clear English and not in a bunch of governmentese.

 So part of it is transparency. Some of it is challenging it, exposing it and making people outraged. And if we had a transparent expenditure system, add to that a transparent tax system, which the FairTax is, you change the texture of this country in about 100 days. Because once people knew how their government was spending their money, and once they knew how much money the government was getting from them, you wouldn’t have to wait a long time before there were some cataclysmic changes in the way that Washington operated.

Hat Tip and Thanks to Robert!