The Concord Coalition, an influential bipartisan balanced-budget advocacy group based in Arlington, Va., takes a different tack. “Bailouts and earmarks are a very, very, very small part of the problem,” said Josh Gordon, policy director for the coalition. “The real federal budget problem is a long-term imbalance between spending and revenue.”

Gordon estimated that earmarks make up less than 1 percent of the federal budget, and said, “Most people agree that earmarks are directing spending that would otherwise happen to specific locations - it’s not that they’re additional spending.” However, he said, the practice does “tend to increase cynicism about why and how politicians make their decisions.”

Gordon said the nation’s budget crisis will worsen when, in two to three decades, health care costs and an aging population push spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid far above revenues or economic growth. “We advocate some mixture of spending cuts and revenue increases to achieve stability in long-term debt, so that we’re not taking on more debt faster than economic growth,” he said.

“Current fiscal policy is unstable, and there are no easy ways out of this, such as cutting waste, fraud and abuse, eliminating earmarks or growing our way out of the problem,” Gordon said. “Those things aren’t going to get it done. There are no easy answers.”