The Earmark Game
From our friend, John Fund, in yesterday's WSJ Political Diary ($):
Polls show that earmarks -- the pork-barrel projects members of Congress "airdrop" into bills with little review -- are phenomenally unpopular with the public. But on Capitol Hill legislators continue to party with earmarks like it's still the Great Society.
Roll Call newspaper reports that the House Appropriations Committee has been so inundated with requests for slices of pork from members that its Web site slowed to a crawl last Wednesday. The committee was forced to extend its deadline for submissions until midnight tonight. All told some 90% of House members are expected to line up with their wish lists. And yet rhetorical opposition to earmarks has also never been greater. Senator John McCain even found himself joined in his call for a one-year moratorium by none other than Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
The disparity between public opinion and actual government spending practice was best explained by the late economist Mancur Olson: "Large groups with diffuse interests are less able to act in their common interest than small ones seeking concentrated benefits."
Nothing bears out that principle better than the scramble for earmarks. When officials in Culpeper County, Virginia, recently received an unsolicited offer of assistance from a Washington lobbying firm to obtain $3.5 million to construct a community sports complex, the county could hardly be expected to resist. The cost of hiring the firm worked out to about $90,000 in return for a grant nearly 40 times that size. "What's worse is that both sides understood that, with enough effort, the earmark was virtually guaranteed," notes Ron Utt, a former federal budget official. "So long as Congress has the power to grant earmarks, they will continue to flow. The temptation is just too great."
