Matt Yglesias

One Man’s Pork is Another Man’s Vital Local Project

I think we all understand the dynamic by which the earmark for your district is a wasteful boondoggle, whereas the earmark for my district is addressing serious problems in a concrete way. But the way this game is supposed to work is that we both vote for the bill since we’re both more interested in claiming credit for our own project than we are in complaining about each other’s projects.

It’s win-win, basically, though it does result in a structural misallocation of funds toward regions that happen to have politically powerful elected officials.

With the stimulus bill, though, the opposition (mostly Republicans, but but Democrats too) perfected a new approach to this. First the denounced the whole thing as unnecessary wasteful spending. Then they all voted against it. Then many members turned around, went home, and started bragging about all the good stuff they’d brought home to their district. Now it seems that Reps. Pete Hoekstra and Mario Diaz-Balert are up to the same tricks with the omnibus appropriations bill.

It’s not surprising, I guess; having gotten away with this once in the future probably everyone will be doing it.

Why Republicans Need Earmarks

A very shrewd post by Mark Schmitt explores why it is that Republicans like Lindsay Graham who profess to hate earmarks can’t actually bring themselves to give up their own earmarks; his conclusion cuts wider than petty hypocrisy:

There’s nothing partisan about earmarks — Republicans do it, Democrats do it, and if you were a member of Congress, you’d do it, too. But for the moment, Republicans are far more dependent than Democrats on their ability to take some credit for federally funded projects. In the world with earmarks, Lindsay Graham is able to stand against the president on stimulus, on the budget, on Iraq, on health care. And then he’s able to go home, cut a ribbon, get his picture in the paper, and tell everyone that he delivered the money for the new Myrtle Beach Convention Center.

But in a world without earmarks, what does Lindsay Graham bring home? Just words, and great stories about how he fought bravely against health care and economic stimulus.

Whereas a Democrat in a world without earmarks will be able to go home, ideally, and tell her constituents that she supported a popular president, that she helped rescue the economy, that she’s moving us toward universal health care.

Of course a certain number of Republicans are so solidly safe that they can get along one way or the other. But the bulk of members of congress need to be able to say to constituents and donors alike that they’ve done something. And absent earmarks, that would require members of the minority to forge some kind of compromises with members of the majority on the big issues of the day. Which is precisely what almost no Republicans seem inclined to do at the moment.

McCain, Dowd Substitute Mockery for Understanding

You understand why politics might get up to dumb gimmicks. They’re trying to get press, they’re trying to get elected, whatever. But even though lots of people do it, I genuinely don’t understand why someone would go into political journalism despite a total lack of interest in trying to actually inform the public. If you want to operate with a reckless disregard for the consequences of your actions, there’s a lot more money to be had in banking. At any rate, Maureen Dowd loves John McCain’s Twitter feed:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted. …

$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” …

$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

The tattoo removal anti-crime program has already been dealt with in some detail. But it’s worth dwelling on this for a bit. The cost per-prisoner of incarcerating someone for a year is enormous. If this program generates as little as ten person-years less of imprisonment that’s a net fiscal benefit to the government even if you ignore the benefits of reducing crime which, obviously, would be absurd. In other words, the marginal benefit of preventing a serious violent crime is extremely high—much higher than might be apparent if you didn’t bother to consider the issue at all. Which is exactly how McCain proceeds.

As Jon Chait says:

And McCain’s method of indentifying waste, gleefully repeated by Dowd, is a disgrace. His technique is to focus on programs that mention animals or food, or anything that sounds silly. He’s clearly not interested in learning whether any of the programs he targets have merit. [...] I don’t know whether or not cricket control is a necessary program. Maybe crickets are doing many times that amount in crop damage every year. Maybe it’s a boondoggle. I don’t know about the astronomy program, either, though I do think there’s a role for federal support of the sciences, even in silly-sounding places like Hawaii.

I’m just a blogger, not a U.S. Senator or a powerful newspaper columnist with access to a research assistant, but it’s not so difficult to make some inquiries into this sort of thing. What’s the deal with Mormon crickets? Well “Mormon crickets become pests very sporadically (about once or twice in a decade) when populations build to high levels and they migrate over large areas. If an alfalfa field is in the path of a migration, Mormon crickets can cause severe damage by devouring the plants.” Are Mormon crickets a problem this year? It seems they are. Now that bit of Googling is hardly the last word on this, but we’re at least getting somewhere. Dowd and McCain both have a lot of resources at their disposal and big megaphones—maybe they should try to figure this stuff out and help people distinguish the worthy programs from the wasteful ones instead of just making jokes.

Jason Chafetz is Hardly Working

It seems to me that residents of Utah’s 3rd congressional district could use a member of congress who does more for his district and does less bragging about how little he does. Just saying.

The Earmark Apocalypse

One of the odd things about John McCain’s campaign is that it’s extremely difficult to say based on his campaign pledges what would actually happen if he became president. One good example concerns the question of his pledge to veto any appropriation bill that features earmarks. Well, all the appropriations bills feature earmarks. And even Republican members of congress say they have no intention of giving up on earmarking. So bills get passed and then he vetoes them all . . . then what?

If both sides stick to their guns you could have, in principle, a government shutdown. Which would seem like a very strange thing to happen over an extremely small amount of money and an issue where it’s genuinely hard to see what the question of principle is. But it could happen. Or congress could back down. Or, most likely I guess, McCain could back down. But it’s really a very open question. I don’t think there’s any precedent for a president choosing to start his term in office with an apocalyptic battle with both parties in congress over a basically trivial issue. But, I dunno, it’d be pretty mavericky.

The Weird War on Earmarks

I didn’t see it at the time, but it turns out that on Wednesday John Dickerson wrote a very good Slate column on the bizarre and dishonest earmark rhetoric coming from John McCain:

McCain also vowed, as he always does, to make the authors of earmark legislation famous by embarrassing them as a way to cut down on the practice. I wonder. Most earmarks are not ridiculous boondoggle programs. They fund things like schools and hospitals, which are not the kinds of things that their supporters feel embarrassed about. They also fund things like abstinence-education programs (in swing states like Pennsylvania), which many of McCain’s voters favor.

Is Sarah Palin, who promised to be an advocate for special-needs families when she’s in the White House, really going to slash earmarks for special-needs schools? Will McCain really “make the authors famous” when they’re Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Republican allies who support an earmark for services aimed at families with autistic children? If they’re so evil, why not do it in this election year, when Collins is a vulnerable incumbent? Earmarks get really tricky really fast.

And of course, to repeat something we’ve observed before, McCain’s proposal to eliminate earmarks is, among other things, a proposal to end American aid to Israel. I doubt a President McCain really would eliminate aid to Israel, or eliminate services to support families with autistic children, or do any of the other politically unthinkable things that following through on his pledges would entail. But that just goes to show what a fundamentally daffy proposal this as. Being the lonely Senator who votes against uncontroversial earmarks, sitting alone in the corner railing against “pork” as things fly by on 94-1 votes, is a nice way to grandstand and to get some press coverage. But a president actually needs to take responsibility for the implications of his proposals and not just say stuff to get in the headlines.