Posts Tagged ‘ earmarks ’

Should America Pork Out?

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011
Chip Lebovitz


Charles Lebovitz is a research assistant for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Chip Lebovitz

On his show last week, Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball recommended that the president “pork out.” Remember those pet infrastructure projects Republicans sacrificed at the altar of declared fiscal discipline? Matthews wants the president to serve up a feast of pork as a temporary jobs plan.

The basic premise of the Matthews’ plan is that the president packages–in one bill–all of the pet projects that were requested over the past two years by Congress but failed to become law. Discarding the projects that are wasteful or don’t create jobs, the president sends the bill to Congress testing where the GOP’s allegiance lies: with the nation’s 25 million unemployed or the political gain of depressing the economy.

Can a serving of pork really pass Congress and create jobs?

Possibly. Much of the pork spending is basically targeted infrastructure spending. Bipartisan support for earmarks has been historically pervasive, and remains widespread today despite a House enforced moratorium. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-Tenn.) threatened to shutdown the Senate over $50,000 toward deepening the Charleston harbor, and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) sneaked a $700 million bridge overhaul past the earmark ban by not listing the actual cost of the bridge in the bill.

Quick calculations state that if every $1 billion of federal spending spent creates 11,000 job-years and the jobs are temporary, one year long, then allocating $10 billion would create roughly 110,000 gross jobs. Funds could be weighted to ensure the states with the highest unemployment rates receive the most money.

Furthermore the current state of the economy is a rare moment of slack in the inherent tension that exists between federal spending and private investment. Worries that earmark spending muscles out the private businesses are exemplified in a Harvard study that found earmarking by certain Congressman can lead to a 15 percent decrease in that districts’ private sector spending — a worrisome proposition. Except, right now corporations are not spending and instead are sitting on $2 trillion in cash. Federal spending repercussions are lessened because there is little private spending to crowd out.

To preempt deficit hawks, the plan should be part of a long-term deficit reduction package or paired with back-loaded spending cuts to be revenue neutral. An ideal deficit reduction plan would include a much-needed boost to the job market through targeted short-term infrastructure spending supported by former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff while reducing the deficit over the long term. While a national infrastructure bank would be idyllic, political realities make pork a workable substitute for targeted infrastructure spending.

A good bully pulpit speech could help extinguish any other political opposition. The specificity and detailed local impact of the pork makes the plan a powerful political cudgel.

Envision the president trotting out to the Rose Garden bill in hand, declaring, “The economy is hurting, but I have a jobs plan right here that’ll create over 100,000 jobs right now at a time when 9.1 percent of Americans are out of work. It won’t add one dime to the deficit but it will pay for a wastewater treatment plant in Nevada where the state unemployment rate is 12.9 percent. Yet your representative, Dean Heller, won’t support it. It won’t add one dime to the deficit, but it will pay for a college in Florida where the state unemployment rate is 10. 7 percent. Yet your representative, John Mica, won’t support it.”

Rinse and repeat that speech for three days, and it’s hard not to expect a few Republican defections. Standing tall for spending cuts is fun and games until your district gets hurt. Even if for some reason the plan doesn’t pass, the tenor of Washington will finally be attuned to what the people want and need – jobs.

Photo Credit: Kejonbro

 

 

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix | No Comments »

Will Congress Regret Banning Earmarks?

Monday, February 28th, 2011
Lee Drutman


Lee Drutman is a senior fellow and the managing editor for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Lee Drutman

Over in the New York Times, Carl Hulse writes notes that one of the many unique aspects of this year’s unfolding budget clash is that this will be first budget battle without earmarks.

Generally, the disappearance of earmarks been seen as positive development, since everybody loves to hate earmarks. But say all you want about earmarks being wasteful or corrupt (even though that’s a debatable claim), they helped broker compromise. By giving enough members a stake in an omnibus appropriation bill, earmarks were mechanism whereby leaders could assemble a winning coalition to pass a budget bill, a powerful tool to avoid a government shutdown.

Here’s Diana Evans, a professor of political science at Trinity College, from a book about earmarks called Greasing the Wheels:

Pork barrel benefits, the most reviled of Congress’s legislative products, are used by policy coalition leaders to produce the type of policy that is most admired: general interest legislation. This book makes the case that buying votes with pork is an important way in which Congress solves its well-known collective action problem.

And here’s Scott A. Frisch and Sean Q. Kelly, writing in the National Journal last November:

The reality, as we see it, is that without earmarks it will be much more difficult to get moderate and liberal members to go along with spending cuts that may be necessary to reduce the deficit – one of the major goals of the tea party movement.  By eliminating earmarks, tea party supporters may have lost one of their most effective tools for building coalitions to make painful cuts in spending. Earmarks can be viewed as the spoonful of sugar that makes the bitter medicine of deficit reduction go down; without earmarked projects, enacting tough legislation will be even more difficult.

(Frisch and Kelly are the authors of a book called Cheese Factories on the Moon: Why Earmarks are Good for Democracy.)

Remember, even at their height, earmarks accounted for roughly two percent of all appropriations expenditures. And that two percent hasn’t necessarily been cut out of the budget – it’s just been transferred the executive branch for allocation instead of being Congressionally-directed.

Now, I understand that there were some lobbying abuses in the world of earmarks, but my sense is that most offices were actually remarkably transparent about their earmarks (and indeed happy to brag about their projects). I never saw any reason for banning them and thought it was all silly red-herring type politics that distracted us from more difficult but far more consequential fights over entitlements.

Maybe the folks in Congress will figure out how to come to some sort of eventual budget agreement without a bunch of earmarks to grease the wheels, and we’ll all be better off because of it. But I’m beginning to wonder if, when budget negotiations grind to a standstill, the good folks running Congress might wish that they hadn’t prevented themselves from sweetening the pot with a few special district spending programs.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | No Comments »

Playing Out the End of the Lame Duck Congress

Friday, December 17th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

The end-game of this congressional session has suddenly come alive with developments that could have a major political impact down the road, if not sooner.

Last night’s House approval of the Obama-McConnell tax deal is a case in point.  The White House survived its most emotional collision yet with the left wing of the Democratic Party, and managed to secure a majority (139-112) of House Democratic votes for the deal, despite an earlier Democratic Caucus resolution disapproving it.  It’s probably worth remembering that in his own disputes with House Democrats, Bill Clinton wasn’t always so successful: majorities of House Democrats voted against NAFTA in 1993 and welfare reform in 1996.

If you look through the roll call on the tax deal, the Democratic votes are generally not surprising: most “nays” came from the more liberal Members, including, interestingly enough, all members of the leadership other than Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi (who didn’t vote).  There was, however, a smattering of deficit hawks among the naysayers.  The vast majority of true “lame ducks” (defeated or retiring Members) voted for the deal.

Approval of the deal will obviously create another big tax debate during the 2012 presidential campaign.  But more immediately, it will be interesting to see to what extent the deal and the debate over it has set back efforts to build bipartisan support for deficit reduction measures.  Without question, congressional Republicans will now be under more pressure than ever to cut “liberal” spending programs, but the very limited Democratic support for such steps probably got a lot weaker during the tax deal debate.

That brings me to the other big development yesterday: the defeat-by-threatened-filibuster in the Senate of an omnibus appropriations bill for the current fiscal year.  This outcome resulted from no fewer than nine Republican senators reversing earlier support for the bill, and was very heavily influenced by publicity over earmarks—many inserted by Republican senators—which is now officially a no-no for Republicans.

Tea Party types were actually upset not just by the earmarks, but by overall levels of spending.  And Republicans may have bought themselves some early trouble: after a short-term continuing resolution, they will bear new responsibility for drafting a House version of either individual or omnibus appropriations bills, and will finally have to admit that items more popular than waste, fraud and abuse would have to be cut to produce sizable savings.

On the other hand, as David Dayen has pointed out, by losing the omnibus appropriations fight, Democrats could have set the table for undoing the stimulative effect of the tax deal.  If Republicans succeed in securing major appropriations cuts—say, an across-the-board reduction attached to a continuing resolution—then that could indeed reduce aggregate demand, particularly in conjunction with the wide-scale spending reductions that will soon be initiated by state governments who can no longer count on the safety net dollars of the 2009 stimulus legislation.

Other bills kicking around the Senate at the end of this session also carry a lot of political freight: the DREAM Act, which was once an acceptable Republican vehicle for offering a hand in fellowship to Latinos, yet is now an opportunity for casting an angry anti-immigrant vote; the DADT repeal, which is inevitable, but is also still a source of great angst in Christian Right circles; and the START Treaty, which could determine whether anything like a bipartisan foreign policy can be carried out in today’s polarized atmosphere.

We’ll know a lot more after a frenetic weekend that could feature a DADT vote on Sunday.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Daily Fix, Political Memo | No Comments »

Lame Ducks, Unresolved Races, and the 2012 Horserace Begins

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

With the congressional lame duck session underway, ruminations on the midterm elections will yield to real-life events, but the furious partisan spin will if anything intensify.  Republicans will seek to stall action on major legislative items until they swear in their new members in January, but must take some sort of position on the public debt limit, overdue appropriations, expiring tax cuts, unemployment benefits, the START treaty, and other items Democrat will bring to the House and Senate floors.  Recently most of the intra-Republican maneuvering has involved conservative efforts to force the GOP Senate leadership to embrace a ban on so-called “earmarks,” which appears to have succeeded.

It’s the tax cut issue that could be the most complicated and contentious.  The White House’s position (shared by progressive Democrats) has long been that expiring Bush income tax cuts should only be made permanent for middle-class taxpayers (defined, actually, as 98 percent of taxpayers), while Republicans are holding out for a straight and permanent extension.  Polling backs the Democratic position, but the business community is poised to shriek about the negative economic impact of hiking taxes on anyone in a recession, and the small business lobby will claim any personal income tax hike for the top bracket will hurt its constituency badly.  Blue Dog opposition to a partial extension helped delay resolution of the matter until after the midterms, and now Republicans are pressing for a temporary if not permanent extension of all the tax cuts.  The impact on the deficit of any extension is another factor in the debate, though most Republican self-described deficit hawks have long internalized the conservative argument that failure to extend a tax cut is a tax increase and thus should be off the table.

An unwelcome distraction for Democrats is the ethics committee proceedings involving Rep. Charles Rangel of NY, who was found guilty by the panel today of 11 rules violations.

Outside Washington, there is continuing drama in a few unresolved 2010 races.  The main event is in Minnesota, where Republicans appear to be digging in for a long legal battle to prevent the inauguration of apparent gubernatorial winner Mark Dayton.  What they hope to produce is a situation where the newly elected legislature (both chambers were won by the GOP) takes office and works with holdover Gov. Tim Pawlenty (who under state law remains in office until a successor is sworn in) to rapidly enact conservative legislation.  This patent offense to fair play and voter intent is rationalized by Republicans through the inevitable claim that Dayton benefitted from vote fraud, and Pawlenty, who is almost certainly running for president, will undoubtedly welcome the national attention he’d get for thumbing his nose at Democrats.  GOPers also think of this scenario as payback for the 2009 legal battle by Democrats on behalf of Sen. Al Franken.

Aside from Pawlenty’s maneuvers, 2012 speculation has been fed by a batch of twelve Public Policy Polling surveys of 2010 Republican voters (in AK, FL, KY, ME, MN, NV, NC, OH, TX, WA, WV, WI) measuring their early presidential preferences among Mitch Daniels, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Pence Mitt Romney.   In all twelve, Romney, Huckabee, Palin and Gingrich are in double digits; Pawlenty breaks double digits in his home state of MN (with 19 percent).  Palin leads in ME, OH, TX, WA, WV, and WI; Huckabee leads in AK and KY; Romney in FL and NV; Gingrich in NC; and TimPaw in MN.

Nate Silver of 538 posted an argument that dark horse candidates are very unlikely to break through against the Big Four of Gingrich, Huckabee, Palin and Romney, while Jonathan Bernstein responded: “Early good polling based on name recognition for weak candidates really is meaningless — see Rudy Giuliani ’08, among many others.”

Photo credit : Thomas Hawk

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics, Issues, Political Memo | 1 Comment »

Another Teachable Moment

Friday, February 5th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has done a very irresponsible thing that nonetheless offers Democrats a classic “teachable moment” about the true fidelity of Republicans to fiscal discipline. Shelby put a hold on all presidential appointments (70 are pending at present ) until he gets his way on a couple of big projects — one involving a Shelby appropriations “earmark” — benefiting Alabama.

Some may recall that during the 2008 presidential campaign, Republicans talked as though earmarks were the primary cause of the federal government’s budget problems. And here’s one of their own gumming up the entire executive branch over one of them, while also trying to control the exact language of a federal contract on another project to steer money to his own state.

Shelby’s action could also help draw attention to the disgraceful pattern of Republican obstruction of presidential appointments, which has left dozens of federal agencies without key personnel.

“Holds” by senators are an atavistic tradition in the first place. Democrats should not let Shelby get away with the unprecedented step of a “blanket” hold, in order to shake down the administration for earmarked money, even as his party demagogues endlessly about runaway spending. Congressional Republicans should finally begin to pay a political price for their hypocrisy and cynicism on fiscal issues.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Daily Fix, Fiscal Responsibility, Fixing Our Broken Politics | No Comments »