Earmarks for All (& I Love Ezra)

This post over at Foreign Policy Magazine's blog, Passport, seems to sum up the ridiculousness of McCain's hollow, out of proportion rants against 'earmarks' and 'pork barrel spending.'

I remember working in the Governor's Office and encountering many kinds of earmarks. There was money for roads and bridges, schools and hospitals, stadiums and community centers. I remember thinking that everyone must have one of these projects in their backyard. And I thought about the Governor teaming up with Mayor Daley to go to Washington to ask for federal dollars for the regional public transportation network. When I actually worked for the regional commuter transportation agency, the Governor said no to a state-funded bailout package. I guess my point it that sometimes federal funding of infrastructure and community projects should come from the federal government, but there should be a mechanism for the Feds to work with State and Local authorities to prioritize, manage, monitor and evaluate projects on a case-by-case basis.

Hell, I live in an increasingly inequitable country where the State government continues to get subsidized infrastructure loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank at below market interest rates just because they ask for them. In China, hundreds of subsidized kilometers of roads and rail track are laid each year while the government holds $518 billion in US Treasury Bonds and fails to make any noticeable investments in education, poverty reduction, social security or health care.

I will take some earmarks any day, thanks.

UPDATE (10/03): Apparently, Ezra was having some similar thoughts. He has, of course, gathered some interesting sources that illustrate my point exactly.

The "how-a-bill-becomes-a-law" lesson from last night's bailout bill vote is pretty simple: Pork.

McCain loves to condemn pork, but the fundamental reality of lawmaking is that pork is how bills get passed. Brad Plumer wrote a great article on this for The New Republic back in 2006:

"The point is this: Any big-government program on the progressive wish list will likely prove even more difficult to pass than the 1986 tax reform or 1993 budget. Single-payer health care? Card check for unions? Reductions in carbon emissions? It won't get done without an orgy of earmarks to entice the inevitable skeptics in Congress. That won't be pretty, but if the price of, say, universal insurance is a bit of borderline corruption here and there, it's a tradeoff worth making."

Like a lot of McCain's posturing, his war on pork makes for good headlines and bad governance. If he were anywhere near as dogmatic on earmarks as he claims to be, it's impossible to imagine him passing any major legislation. Ever. Or voting for any major legislation. or approving budget bills and spending. Or having a working relationship with Congress. Or getting reelected, as every district in the country finds crucial programs and infrastructure subsidies are being cut.

Meanwhile, whenever the topic turns to earmarks, I always suggest that folks go play around the the Sunlight Foundation's interactive earmarks map. Earmarks are rarely obviously wasteful. Rather, they're small appropriations that exist beneath the urgency level that would merit federal consideration. So districts and states elect individual representatives and one of their side jobs is to push through local priorities. Those priorities may be odd, but relatively few are obviously wasteful. Type in my hometown of Irvine, and the nearest earmark is in Long Beach: $450,000 to outfit the children's hospital. Near to that is Mission Viejo, with $400,000 for the Neonatal and Pediatric Intensive Care Unity. And a tick over from that is Huntington Beach, which got $50,000 for an afterschool arts education program for low income youth. It's easy to talk about cutting studies on bear DNA. It's a bit harder to explain why you want to cut children's hospitals and afterschool programs. And it's nearly impossible to then say how you're going to pass bills after you do.