« I Had Meant To Do This Yesterday | Main | The Recommendation »
September 12, 2006
In Which I Embrace Earmarks
Via Brad Plumer's article defending pork (which I've more thoughts on here), I spent some time playing around with the Sunshine Foundation's Earmark map, a cool web program allowing you to enter a city or zip and scroll across all the earmarks in the area. The applet, I assume, is meant to leave you furious at the wasteful ways of our lawmakers. But I was pretty impressed. In my home area I find we've earmarked a lot of medical technology, mostly for pediatric hospitals, a number of afterschool programs and school grants, an arts foundation for underserved youth. If I widen my search a bit, I find money for libraries in Los Angeles, the Braille Institute of America, an At-Risk program for African-American youth, chemistry labs for various schools, a mentoring program to fight child neglect and abuse, and so forth. The closest I came to obvious frivolity was $300,000 "naturally-occurring" Jewish retirement community demonstration in Los Angeles. I can live with it.
Anyway, I suggest you folks check your areas and see if the appropriations are any worse (put findings in comments), but for now, I'm a supporter. Given the content of the actual bills being passed, it looks like the earmarks are just about the only worthwhile things in them.
Update: Micah Sifry, an advisor to the Sunshine Foundation, e-mails to say that the organization seeks not to "disgust the user," but "to generate engagement." Looking back, he's obviously right: It was my assumption that they were against the earmarks, but their tool makes no sense from that perspective. It did, on the other hand, engage me, at least for awhile, and gave me a far better understanding of what earmarks actually go towards.
September 12, 2006 | Permalink
Comments
I entered Sugar Land TX just to see what DeLay brought home to his home town - and nothing shows up. hmmmm... what are the odds?
Posted by: Andy | Sep 12, 2006 11:28:24 AM
Earmarks, if properly handled, are not the evil some folks make them out to be. Under the current "system" there is way too much room for tomfoolery and waste. However, a system where there can be some accountability could be devised. I would think that a system could be developed where each Representative and Senator receives a base sum, or "bank," that each is allowed to use no strings attached on whatever projects they care to throw their bank money at. This bank amount could be adjusted up or down a bit for each Representative/Senator, to take into account district/state population and other relevant demographic factors. However, once a Representative/Senator's bank is used up that Representative or Senator must then seek, via a separate bill, approval of any additional funding for local projects (assuming other local representaives do not have sufficeint funds intheir combined banks to pay for the project) by a vote of the full House and Senate. This would provide some accountability, forcing Representatives and Senators to think about what projects they wish to spend their bank amounts on, knowing that if they go beyond their bank they will have to make their case before Congress in order to obtain additional earmarks--they will have to explain why the new project is so important that it needs additional funding ASAP, and force the claimant to defend the projects he or she spent his or her bank on ("if the new project is so important, why did you spend your earmark bank on those other, lesser projects?").
Posted by: bubba | Sep 12, 2006 11:37:06 AM
The oddest thing showing up in San Francisco was $200,000 for a college prep school in Oklahoma City.
Anyway, yeah, a lot of the earmarks are probably very worthy projects. A lot of them, I imagine, are filling in gaps left by the whackos' evisceration of federally-funded social services...which is part of the problem: systematized funding of the social good has been replaced with a catch-as-catch-can kind of deal, where funding genuine needs depends on the clout of your representative.
And of course what this shift does is change the credit the largesse from the government as a whole to the individual representative. Homeless clinic in Stockton? Don't thank the federal government, thank Richard Pombo. Your community can get what it needs, and you still get to hate the government--it's a win for incumbents, and a win for the anti-government jihad.
Posted by: Tom Hilton | Sep 12, 2006 11:41:14 AM
These are the earmarks for *one single appropriations bill*. What about the rest of the earmarks in the rest of the bills?
Posted by: Cardinal Fang | Sep 12, 2006 11:46:11 AM
I looked at Minneapolis, and there's $400,000 for the naturally-occurring Jewish retirement demo. So that's $700,000 so far.
Posted by: Paul | Sep 12, 2006 12:02:22 PM
I looked at the earmarks in my area. Biggest was $1 million for afterschool programs in Yonkers. Quite a slew of earmarks for hospitals. Earmarks seem to have become a substitute for access to capital markets.
Most of the earmarks seem at least modestly worthy, but precisely the kinds of projects that should be funded through general appropriations. I'll second Tom Hilton's point that earmarks are evil, not because they're intrinsically worthless, but because they prop up a dysfunctional system.
Posted by: tomH | Sep 12, 2006 12:13:50 PM
My argument in favor of earmarks:
1994....0.4%
1996....0.2%
1998....0.3%
2000....0.4%
2002....0.6%
2004....0.8%
Those are the percentages of the budget that earmarks take up.
They may offend (viz Ted Stevens), but they are a rounding error. Worrying about them distracts from our very, very real problems. The only way in which I want to hear about earmarks is when we have evidence that they are used to keep in power those (like Stevens) who are making bad decisions on the big things.
Of themselves, they are a pimple tucked behind the ear of a government with giant boils on its face and neck.
Posted by: wcw | Sep 12, 2006 12:23:02 PM
The labor-H bill is the most pork-laden of the bills. After that is transportation (but there's only a Transpo bill once every five or six years), and after that is defense. Education is probably next.
Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | Sep 12, 2006 12:50:06 PM
My rep brought home a grand total of four grants amounting to $675,000. Nothing wrong with the projects. But my rep is a putative Dem who hangs on Atrios' wall of shame. Not much in return for screwing everybody by voting for the bankruptcy bill and the estate tax giveaway.
-- ml
Posted by: Martin Langeland | Sep 12, 2006 1:05:02 PM
I, too, found a misplace earmark: Tyler, Texas located in Austin, Texas, which is the are I looked at. A few earmarks, mostly good, except one the $100k for new facilities and equipment (no explanation of what that entails) for a religious organization called (http://www.newstartaustin.org/about.jsp).
It's a 501(c)3 but the text of its literature is clearly religious. For example, its vision statement is "Austin community transformed in Christ, through Christ, for Christ." It seems to be an org affiliated with the Presbyterian church, but I am not familiar with that denomination so I have no idea if they are a proselytizing church.
Posted by: Constance Reader | Sep 12, 2006 3:34:42 PM
The question is whether these projects should be funded by the federal government in the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations Bill. "An arts foundation for underserved youth" may be a worthy goal, but it is likely not one which should be be funded by federal tax dollars.
Posted by: Sammy Taylor | Sep 12, 2006 4:20:03 PM
"An arts foundation for underserved youth" may be a worthy goal, but it is likely not one which should be be funded by federal tax dollars.
That's precisely the sort of project I think federal tax dollars should be funding. My argument with it as an earmark is that it should be funded systematically and across the board, rather than simply going to districts with the best-connected representatives.
Posted by: Tom Hilton | Sep 12, 2006 4:27:41 PM
"Naturally-occuring Jewish retirement demonstration."
Whatever that means, it is so what I'm calling my band.
Posted by: apantomimehorse | Sep 12, 2006 6:32:06 PM
If earmarks are a natural part of activist government, then wouldn't it be in the interests of transparency and honesty to count them as "administrative costs" for national health care?
I mean, insurance companies have to count lobbying expenses as part of their overall costs, so it's only fair that government be required to report what it costs to get legislators on board as expenses of the system so we get a more apples to apples comparison between the private and public sectors.
Posted by: Adam Herman | Sep 13, 2006 1:07:00 PM
not sure about this particular demo, but naturally occurring retirement communities (norcs) are a real thing--in nyc, they're all over the place. Huge affordable housing buildings went up in the 60's and 70's, families moved in, the kids grew up and left, and all the parents stayed because it was rent controlled. now they're huge buildings full of middle income & lower middle income old people, and it's like a retirement community, only without anybody to organize the shuffleboard tourneys and meals on wheels.
If this is being spent right, it's seed funding to hire people to make sure that meals on wheels gets organized, and that health screenings by local hospitals get organized, etc. etc. It's coordinating funds to leverage other community services for the oldsters in what's a de facto retirement community.
That said, I dunno what the heck the "Jewish" angle is. Kosher meals on wheels? A shabbos goy for every apartment?
Posted by: theorajones | Sep 14, 2006 12:05:01 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.
