Taxpayers for Common Sense was created as sort of a left-wing counterpart to the National Taxpayers Union. Back when the Antiplanner was still a mainstream environmentalist, Taxpayers for Common Sense asked me to be on its board of advisors — and I am still listed there, although they don’t ask me for advice very often.
Anyway, while I don’t agree with everything they say, they are taking the right approach on transportation. They are not impressed by proposals to raise gasoline taxes in order to repair decrepit bridges.
Instead, they say, Congress needs to take the earmarks out of transportation spending. Some of the earmarks they point to in the recent transportation and urban development appropriations bill include:
- Funding for a National Mule and Packers Museum
- Renovation of a music hall that happens to be in the district of the chair of the transportation subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee
- Awnings for a historic market in Roanoke, Virginia
- Renovation of a golf course lodge in Hamilton, New York
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All of these things are obviously top national priorities, but it isn’t clear just what the have to do with transportation, housing, or urban development. You can download a complete spreadsheet of all 1434 earmarks in the 2008 appropriations bill. (Remember, this is just the transportation, housing, and urban development appropriations bill.)
Earmarks steal from taxpayers in two ways. First, they often fund things that should not be funded by taxpayers in the first place. Second, they take funds that were originally authorized for activities that are ostensibly necessary (like bridge repairs) and spend them instead on activities aimed at pleasing special interest groups and getting members of Congress re-elected.
Earmarks are not new, but there are a lot more of them than just a few decades ago. In 1969, Aaron Wildavsky, founder of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, observed that the House Appropriations Committee, which was dominated by conservative Southern Democrats, viewed itself as “defenders of the public purse.”
Wildavsky believed this kept the federal budget within bounds, and in fact the federal government actually produced a surplus in the year the first edition of his book on The Politics of the Budgetary Process was published. But the Watergate scandal led to a huge turnover of Congress in the 1974 election, and incoming freshmen viewed the House seniority system as an obstacle to their liberal agenda. They replaced the seniority system with one based more on popularity, and the best way to be popular in Congress is to give out pork. With no one acting as a defender of the public purse, the result was a distinct acceleration in the growth of earmarks and deficits.
Wildavsky hoped that someone else would step into the Appropriations Committee shoes. While President Bush has tried — threatening to veto the transportation bill if it either raised taxes or required deficit spending — he is now due to be demonized for letting the Minneapolis bridge fall. I am no fan of Bush, but on this point I’ll defend him. Were it not for earmarks and the other problems with transportation planning I’ve described on this blog, we would not have such a backlog of deteriorating bridges and roads.
