For those who wonder why Congress seems to be stuck in a cycle of constant fiscal crisis, your pie maker suggests that the problem lies in a lack of pork in its diet.
At its worst, so called "pork barrel" spending made up a tiny fraction of the federal budget and funded many useful roads, dredging projects and interesting military prototypes. Almost more importantly, it gave deal-making politicians something tangible to (a) show their constituents that voting for them was a good idea and (b) a means of directly rewarding supporters in their own districts.
The real key is (b). Right now, a Republican from a safe district will almost certainly lose his job if the Club for Growth says so because they can mobilize more money for a primary campaign and whip up a core of energetic RINO hunters. With nothing to offer the local business community but the hope of saner government in the future, who could they convince to stand against the tide and possibly see their businesses blacklisted by the local talk-radio set?
The system was not without its problems. There were a few incredibly ill-founded projects, and groups like research universities had begun using direct appropriations to subvert merit-based funding awards. However, eliminating one of the leadership's key tools for whipping votes to bring about good governance was the work of daydream believers.
The sad truth seems to be that we need pork. When it returns it should come with stricter rules on what could be funded via earmarks and perhaps rules-based agreed limits on the percentage of any agency's budget that can be directly earmarked. That has two huge potential benefits:
(1) Deal-making Congressmen will have something to show for their efforts, and
(2) Congress would have a clear, if small, role in the setting of Executive priorities.
Most importantly, however, is that pork lets us talk about real interests instead of ephemeral values. As any good pork pie recipe will tell you, a little bit goes a long way towards helping disparate ingredients come together.
1 comment:
Straightfoward and simple to understand to anyone with half a brain and a rudimentary education in politics.
Which is an insignificant subset of the voting population, sadly.
Anti-pork regulation will only tighten, since while people may like the pork their own Congressperson brings home, that pork is being made with everyone else's bacon.
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