Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered
The right to earmark is the sole duty and power of one house? I can only imagine the discrimination suits. Does this extend to taxes? Or is it just about where the government spends its money?
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Depends on how much, if any, discrimination there is, surely?
The idea is to keep the first house from pork-barreling in their ridings, or putting all the bad stuff in the ridings of the opposition, as well as to keep them from getting elected by promising , for example, $1,000,000 tax-free and non-repayable to anyone in my riding who asks for it. Of course, they could still put in a provision allowing X number of people to collect $1,000,000 tax-free and non-repayable, but it would be up to the second house to decide where the requests could come from. They might, for example, allow it nation-wide but only the first 3 persons from each riding.
I hadn't thought about it, but yes, it applies to taxes, too. The first house can allocate $36,000,000 to build those prisons, but the second house gets to decide exactly how the $36,000,000 gets allocated in building those prisons. I.E., the second house can't divert any of the $36,000,000 to projects other than those particular prisons, they can't spend more on those prisons without an additional allocation from the first house and any unspent portion of the $36,000,000 goes back into the General Revenues for re-allocation.