The Fetishization of Earmarks

So we hear a ton about earmarks. The President had steam coming out of his ears today, saying he's going to have his budget director look at "erasing wasteful spending" (I guess he found a line-item veto in his stocking this year). And Tom Coburn is rightly raising hell about how Don "Road To Nowhere" Young managed to get an earmark into the 2005 highway bill after it was voted on by both houses of Congress.

An Oklahoma senator who has been a strident critic of the "earmark favor factory" has asked for an investigation into how money was earmarked for a study of a highway interchange next to environmentally sensitive land in Florida.

The $10 million earmark was slipped into the 2005 highway spending bill, a $286.4 billion behemoth overseen by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, then chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has asked for an investigative panel with subpoena power to determine who placed the so-called Coconut Road study into the highway bill [...]

The earmark first drew the attention of Florida road planners when they learned they'd received $10 million for the study even though it wasn't one of their transportation priorities. They'd originally sought an earmark that would direct $10 million for the widening of Interstate 75 in Lee County, Fla.

An enrollment clerk changed language in the earmark after Congress had already voted on it, erasing I-75 and adding the words "Coconut Road" as it was being cleaned up to be sent to President Bush for signing.

And again, I agree with Coburn that we must investigate these extra-Constitutional means to add spending into a bill that nobody ever voted on (even though a later bill would fix the glitch and divert the money away from Coconut Road, a bill which Coburn is holding up until he can get an investigative panel). But I highlighted the amount in the bill: ten million dollars. A lot of money, to be sure, but the federal budget is in the trillions. Canceling one improper ten million-dollar earmark isn't going to get us out of our budget mess.

I'll tell you what would: reducing the obscene defense budget.

Last week, both houses of Congress approved the conference report on the Fiscal Year 2008 Defense Authorization bill, H.R. 1585. The bill includes $506.9 billion for the Department of Defense and the nuclear weapons activities of the Department of Energy. The bill also authorizes $189.4 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This funding is NOT counted as part of the $506.9 billion.

Center for Arms Control and Non Proliferation has an itemized description of what's in the budget.

The amount of Cold War lard is truly astonishing, especially given the fact that the military itself is hollering from the hilltops that it can't be responsible for all of our national security needs and that today's problems just don't have military (read "Cold War weapons systems") answers.

Keep in mind, today's defense spending is 14% above the height of the Korean War, 33% above the height of the Vietnam War, 25% above the height of the "Reagan Era" buildup and is 76% above the Cold War average.

And none of it would have stopped 19 men with boxcutters from getting on to commercial aircraft, nor will any of it get the Sunnis and Shiites to reconcile in Iraq, nor will it help lift hundreds of millions out of the crushing poverty that enables many of them to turn to radical Islam.

The defense budget is a joke. Somehow we're demagogued into believing that we must give as much money to defense contractors as possible, lest we be seen as soft on national security. That's a front for massive amounts of corporate welfare which would go a long way to balancing our budget, far longer than the spare earmark for a road.

But you'll never hear any of these so-called "pork-busters" talk about that. They'll rage against all kinds of federal spending, some of it very noble, as long as it's inserted into a bill in a particular way. Defense earmarks, which is where these two pieces of spending come together, totaled $12 billion dollars in 2005. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the total defense budget. Outdated weapons systems, useless missile defense programs, and the like are the way to fiscal responsibility, not Coconut Road.