To the Editor:
As “The Empty Earmarks Pledge” (editorial, Nov. 17) correctly reports, Tea Party activists can now claim their first victory: pledges by Congressional leaders and President Obama to end the earmarking of federal spending to finance specific projects within their home constituencies.
However, and not surprisingly, those wishing to “get the government off their backs” have gotten it backward. Removing selection of local tasks like widening crowded roads, improving harbors, purchase of police, fire and school equipment, from input by representatives and senators who know the area best and transferring that decision-making authority to bureaucrats in Washington is the absolute antithesis of Tea Party objectives.
When you simplistically live by the bumper sticker, you die by the bumper sticker.
Arthur L. Yeager
Edison, N.J., Nov. 17, 2010
Note from KBJ: This letter is a perfect example of motivated ignorance. It has never occurred to the letter writer that members of the so-called Tea Party might be acting on the basis of principle rather than self-interest.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 