Yesterday, I was a panelist on CNN’s Paula Zahn Now discussing Congressional earmarks and pork-barrel spending.

As is often the case on those prime-time news shows, you go in with enough discussion ideas to fill an entire hour. And then you find yourself in a short segment with enough time to cram in a few sentences in before the music starts getting louder and the producers whisk you off the set.

So I didn’t get a chance to mention Porkbusters and their fight to bring greater transparency to government spending. Porkbusters’ current campaign is to reform the use of legislative amendments called earmarks.

Earmarks allow Congressmen to load up bills with unrelated spending items without revealing to the public who inserted them or why. Politicians use earmarks to steer taxpayer money to special interests and pet projects in their districts. And although it’s not always the case, earmarks all too often waste money on things that are of dubious value or just plain illegal.

Right now, nearly $20 billion dollars in taxpayer money is allocated each year through earmarking. Split that up among all American working-age adults, and your personal share of the earmark bill is over $100. Every year.

Using taxpayer money to do favors for supporters and act like Santa Claus to various voting blocs must be quite a tempting proposition for politicians, especially if they can be sure nobody ever finds out. And that’s exactly why the party in power—whichever it may happen to be—probably won’t be dismantling this incumbency protection racket any time soon.

Most Americans—regardless of party or ideology—understand that the current system is corrupt. So the out-of-power Republicans get a chance to sound noble and score political points even though they had 12 years to fix the problem but didn’t. And Democrats, who made such grand promises when gaining control of Congress last fall, have been reminded of how politically useful earmarks can be. When it comes to preserving the status quo on earmarks, it seems the two parties always disagree. It’s just that their positions keep flipping depending on whether they’re in or out of power.

Congressman David Obey—the Democrat responsible for shepherding earmarks through the House—has decided he’s been so overwhelmed with earmark requests that he won’t be able to make them public for months. Conveniently, he’s pledging to make the earmarks public only after they’ve been attached to bills and can’t be removed, and just before the bill comes up for a final up-or-down vote. With tens of thousands of little earmarks attached to lots of unrelated bills, the public will have no time to debate or even discover the earmarks. If particularly malodorous provisions are found in a bill, by the time enough people become aware of the problem to oppose it in any organized fashion, the voting will have already happened.

Effectively, Congressman Obey’s excuse is that because his colleagues are making so many special spending requests—some 36,000 so far this year, more than double last year’s figure—he can’t get all his work done in time. Congress routinely churns out multi-thousand-page bills without breaking a sweat, but now that taxpayers are asking for a little transparency, it’s too much effort to comply in any meaningful way. But at least Congress has the courtesy to tell us after it no longer matters.

Obey’s feeble rationale for keeping information from voters and taxpayers inspired this novel idea from Porkbusters:

To House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey:

I read with interest news reports that you may only include earmarks in last-minute, un-amendable conference reports, as opposed to amendable House appropriations bills, because you and your staff reportedly need “extra time to evaluate the 36,000-plus earmark requests members have submitted to the Appropriations Committee this year.”

You have also been quoted you as saying: “I think we have a helluva lot more ability [to root out bad earmarks] than the individual working alone.”

Chairman Obey, I share your concern about unworthy projects receiving federal funding due to a lack of careful and thoughtful evaluation, and I agree that one individual working alone would have a very hard time completing this task in a timely manner.

Therefore, I would like to personally volunteer my time to help you and your staff in evaluating this year’s earmark requests.

As you know, Internet technology has made research faster and easier than at any previous time in human history. By releasing your 36,000 earmark requests publicly, I and other taxpayers across the country could work together in a cooperative effort to determine which Members of Congress may have financial conflicts attached to their earmark requests, which local projects may be unworthy of federal funding and which may have value to the taxpayers.

Under the threat of incarceration, we fund Congress’s earmarks whether we like it or not. So it is not unreasonable to demand transparency in government spending. After all, it’s our money to begin with.

And considering that the IRS routinely subjects citizens to rather unpleasant experiences in forced transparency—tax audits—we have to ask: why is our government held to a lower standard than we are?