Greg Mankiw's Blog: Earmark Track Record

Greg Mankiw points to this from the Washington Post:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure more than $340 million worth of home-state projects in last year's spending bills, placing her among the top 10 Senate recipients of what are commonly known as earmarks, according to a new study by a nonpartisan budget watchdog group.

Working with her New York colleagues in nearly every case, Clinton supported almost four times as much spending on earmarked projects as her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), whose $91 million total placed him in the bottom quarter of senators who seek earmarks, the study showed.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the likely GOP presidential nominee, was one of five senators to reject earmarks entirely, part of his long-standing view that such measures prompt needless spending.

I'm not sure that the comparison between Hillary and Obama is entirely fair; she is vastly more powerful than Obama, and her husband is a key fundraiser for many senate Democrats, which Obama is not (yet). But it's nice to know that McCain has rejected earmarks; though they are far from the main fiscal issue facing the country, the principle is important.

Comments

The biggest problem with earmarks, besides the general lack of transparency, is how they are funded.
I don't know if this is currently the case, but through the 1990's at least, earmarks that were part of the military budget, a museum for the local military base, a new movie theater, or even something potentially useful for fighting, came out of the operations and maintenance budget. This is what paid for training and the basic general maintenance of equipment in the US. If this money were subtracted evenly across the entire discretionary budget, or even across the entire military budget, it wouldn't put as much of a crimp in the budgetary process.

Posted by jon | February 14, 2008 3:28 PM

I don't mind most earmarks so much. They are usually transparent. I suppose they are sometimes even warranted. The ones I really don't like are the secret ones that get snuck in during the reconciliation process. True, it isn't a big part of the budget, but it just screams of corruption.

Posted by Njorl | February 14, 2008 3:58 PM

McCain's principled stand is admirable, but a little misguided. I'm as against pork-barrel spending as anyone, but earmarks *in and of themselves* are not bad. It's not bad for congressmen to direct spending to their districts: after all, it might be good, and we DO elect representatives to spend our money. The problem with earmarks is not that they exist, it's that they are decided without review or without some standards to establish them.

For instance John Murtha, a despicable, despicable man, steered an $11 million earmark to Walter Reed to create a state of the art facility to rehabilitate amputee veterans. The hospital probably wouldn't have had the funds otherwise. Surely we can all agree this is a good thing. A small minority of earmarks are bridges to nowhere, a small minority of earmarks are amputee rehabilitation units, and the vast majority are debatable -- and that's the point. Let's have the debate! Earmarks now are not debated. That's the problem.

Posted by PEG | February 14, 2008 4:43 PM

For instance John Murtha, a despicable, despicable man, steered an $11 million earmark to Walter Reed to create a state of the art facility to rehabilitate amputee veterans. The hospital probably wouldn't have had the funds otherwise. Surely we can all agree this is a good thing.

Um no, it probably wasn’t a good thing. If we’re going to spend money on veteran’s care*, it should be part of a bill devoted to veteran’s care and not tucked away as an earmark in an unrelated bill. As far as the claim that the “hospital probably wouldn't have had the funds otherwise,” I call BS on that. Veterans are a very popular political constituency and there’s about zero percent chance that a standalone bill devoted to funding veterans care and only veterans care (as opposed to about a dozen other things) wouldn’t pass both houses and get signed into law by the President within a week of being introduced. Earmarks don’t make it easier to fund worthy projects, they make it easier to take on unrelated garbage that couldn’t and shouldn’t stand on their own merits and make the cost of funding worthy projects even more expensive than they are now.

* And I’ll go a step further, the fact that it may have been sold to the public for what many of us would probably regard a worthy cause doesn’t mean that it was a wise use of tax dollars. VA facilities have been a popular form of pork-barreling for decades among members of Congress and it’s entirely possible that we didn’t need to build a new facility much less one that cost $11 million to accomplish the same purported goal.

Posted by Thorley Winston | February 14, 2008 5:00 PM

Surely we can all agree this is a good thing.

Uhm, no. VA may have been started with the best of intentions but it is mostly an anachronism in the era of modern healthcare. If we have a problem with veterans receiving inadequate hospital care, and agree that it would be a good thing to give them access to it, it would be far better to direct the money into a veteran-specific single-payer insurance system.

Notice that the Post Office hadn't been semi-privatized very long before it discovered the value of the lesson, Don't uselessly duplicate infrastructure that you can contract from an efficient private carrier at lower cost. Most USPS packages are shipped via special contracts with FedEx and UPS, for example, with USPS handling the endpoint paths (acceptance and final delivery) only.

Posted by anony-mouse | February 14, 2008 5:29 PM

"If we’re going to spend money on veteran’s care*, it should be part of a bill devoted to veteran’s care and not tucked away as an earmark in an unrelated bill."

Yeah, that's actually precisely my point: the problem with earmarks is that there is no debate and no rules on them, not that they exist /per se/.

Posted by PEG | February 15, 2008 1:35 AM

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Posted by 岡崎市　不動産 | March 1, 2008 3:38 AM