Want to Solve Government Corruption? Earmarks are Small Potatoes

I want to lay a number on table: 5,794,392,523.36.

That number is the reason why, no matter whether we outlaw every single earmark, no matter how much John McCain silences our voices on the eve of an election, and no matter how much someone rails against “corrupt money politics” or vows to bring “honesty” back to the halls of Congress, we will ever have anything but a Federal government driven by cash.

That number is how much every single member of Congress has the power to spend if they pass
President Bush’s $3.1 trillion budget.

That, folks, is a big honking number.

Now you could make the argument that power over the budget is not spread out evenly. You could say that we are locked into a certain amount of entitlement spending. You could say a lot of things, but nothing you say can get around that number.

Let’s look at the little nibble we want to call earmark reform. The Politico says that this fiscal year, the Federal budget will include between 18 and 20 billion dollars’ worth of pork. That’s a lot but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget. That amount is .06 percent of the 3.1 trillion – not even one percent. So even if we got rid of earmarks entirely, the budget wouldn’t even be one percent smaller than it is right now.

And earmarks aren’t even a significant chunk of each legislator’s “allotment”. Remember the Bridge to Nowhere, from back in 2005? That was 320 million dollars and once it came out, folks nearly fell into foamy-mouthed seizures at the amount. But do the math. That bridge was only 5.5 percent of one Senator’s share of the budget, assuming that only one Congressman put in the whole earmark. That still left him with nearly 5.5 BILLION dollars to give out in some way or another.

Now, I’m not saying that earmark reform isn’t important. If we ever hope to shrink the size of the Federal government, we’re going to have to start somewhere. Earmarks are the most obvious sign of the rampant selfish greed that typifies Congress and no one, not even Ron Paul, is immune. That there are over 11,000 of them in the latest Omnibus bill is a travesty. But they’re only the first step in dealing with the problems of our government and they are by far the smallest.

And I’m not terribly interested in hearing about “discretionary” spending. All spending is discretionary. Every year Congress votes on how much money to spend and where to spend it. Programs such as Social Security and Medicare are part of that vote as well. If, tomorrow, Congress decides to vote no money at all for Medicare, the program would disappear. The entire budget is discretionary. Let’s remember that.

Oh, but what about the promises we made? Entitlements are not a promise; they’re a bribe. We do not have the right to take anyone else’s money to spend on the care of another. We’d not allow it if you or I tried it ourselves. Indeed, we call that theft. What our government has been doing with our money, even if you assume the most aotruistic motives, has been bribery. And bribes can be taken back.

Now reality may dictate that we spend a certain amount on these alleged “promises” and I’d probably agree that we should. But we should be looking every year to reduce them and move people back into the private sector where the medical care is better, cheaper, and more efficient. Whatever incentive programs have to be developed to make that happen should be considered and we need a hard dealine on when we make these throwback programs to a failed statist dogma a rapidly receding blip on the horizon. We simply can’t keep them and survive.

Remember that 5,794,392,523.36? That number is getting bigger every year. That’s more of your money falling under the control of someone who doesn’t know you and will likely never know you. In fact, if most of them think of you at all, they think of you not as an individual but as a group – a voting group. They aren’t interested in what you really want. They’re interested in what they think you need, which by an amazing coincidence intimately involves spending billions of your dollars and keeping themselves in office. Taking our money back isn’t just an exercise in small government. It’s an exercise in rational self-interest.

And there’s an unseen bonus to doing all of that. Every time we shrink the Federal government, we shrink the amount of influence that lobbyists have in Washington. How that works is pretty simple. Let’s say that Congress is mulling over a change to the Prescription Drug Plan that would put a few more drugs onto the plan. MegaPharmaCorp has a vested interest in seeing their drug make the plan, and if it does, it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue over the coming decade. So MegaPharmaCorp hits a few key Congressmen and drops a quarter-million bucks into their campaign buckets, maybe ten million dollars in total among all of them. In exchange, they put in a few good words about MPC’s amazing new drug. The drug makes the bill, the bill passes, and MPC’s in great shape. The company isn’t trying to screw the taxpayer. Indeed, the company has no malicious intent whatever. The company is doing what companies do: identify a market, buy some advertising, and get their product into that market. And the return on that relatively small investment is incredible.

Now, imagine what would happen if the Federal government didn’t have such a plan, but a bunch of states did. MPC would have to spread their efforts around a much larger number of legislators. They’d have to hire more lobbyists to cover all that ground, and the potential return wouldn’t be naerly as large. You would also have more influence in the decision because you have a lot more access to your state representatives than you do your members of Congress (Don’t believe me? Try to set up a quick meeting with any of them and tell me which one happens first.). By making the Federal government smaller, we not only diffuse the power of money to influence government but we also give each of us more control of how our money is spent. Isn’t that the kind of deal we want?

I’m not saying that folks who are chasing down the earmark gluttons are tilting at windmills. What I am saying is that once we finally get rid of them, we will have one very small battle in a much larger and more difficult struggle. We might as well start looking at earmarks as the tip of the spending iceberg right now. Those folks who scream loudest about the corporate state and money’s corrupting influence ought to be most amenable to shrinking the Federal government dramatically. If they’re not, they’re liars and you can quote me on that.

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