Category: porkbarrel politics

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

Water’s Value — in a Desert

It’s a dam shame.

There are plenty of private sector dams in the U.S., but the biggest are federal government projects, like those on the Columbia and Colorado rivers. These government-run outfits aren’t “free,” though. Indeed, they often prove to be good examples of typical government operations, providing special favors to some people at the expense of others.

Take the Hoover Dam, cherished as the nation’s highest symbol by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. The dam supplies water and electricity to Las Vegas, Nevada — at cut rate prices. A typical family in Las Vegas pays half for water what the same family would pay in Atlanta, Georgia, despite the fact that Atlanta gets 13 times more precipitation. These cheap rates have predictable consequences — overuse, for one. Which then leads local water authorities to foist on consumers some heavily intrusive conservation rules.

Andrew Wilson, in a report for the Property & Environment Research Center, writes that “A market-ready solution for Las Vegas water,” though not often talked about, would have far fewer negative consequences. And it’s not a difficult idea as such: “discard the historic cost-based pricing model and move instead to a pricing system that recognizes the scarcity value of water.”

Raising the prices for water and electricity to Las Vegas (and, for that matter, electricity to favored Bonneville Power Administration customers in the Pacific Northwest — along with many other federal government “business” products) would not only help forestall shortages and draconian lawmaking, it would be equitable. There’s no reason for the rest of the country to be, in effect, subsidizing Sin City.

Or any other city.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets porkbarrel politics too much government

Strings of the Puppets

It’s hard to push string. That’s something the marionette masters in Washington are finding out. They’re used to dangling money in front of people. Watch the puppets leap!

But dangling money in front of folks in turn for votes and donations, that’s one thing. Investing in business? Quite another.

You see, businesses serve customers. While government can, indeed, invest in business, that investment doesn’t ensure success.

Developing and offering products on the market that people want to buy — that makes for success.

No matter how nifty something may seem to the investor, if it’s too costly for the targeted consumer — or simply fails to spark consumer fire — the company will not make a go of it, no matter how progressive the government doing the investing.

Sunday’s bankruptcy filing by Beacon Energy, a maker of an innovative flywheel electric energy storage system — energy storage being awfully important for that dubious future where we must rely more on unreliable and uncontrollable sources of energy, like wind and solar — is just another in a long history of failed government investments. In this case, other investors failed to come through.

On the bright side, this time the $43 million in loan guarantees, similar to those pushed to now bankrupt Solyndra, came with better collateral. Thus, this failure didn’t leave quite as big a hole for taxpayers.

Politicians like investing other people’s money (ours) . . . with their own political strings attached. But they hate that those strings lead right back to them when their corporate puppets wind up dead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

Hating Cathedrals

According to Adam Gopnik, at the New Yorker, many of my readers and I hate cathedrals.

Well, he alleges that we oppose “beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains” (not cathedrals, exactly) for the same reason that “seventeenth-century Protestants hated the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome” — as “luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised.”

Hmmm. Disagreeing with Gopnik is a hate crime?

Americans have more than enough cause to oppose big, intrusive government. We know how it works (often not very well), we know how unfair it is (often quite unjust), and we have a traditional alternative ready at hand (Constitutional liberty).

Cluelessly, Gopnik just sees a pig-headed hatred of government that leads to a hatred of some really nifty things.

He should reconsider. Perhaps what we have is a love of liberty and justice. And that precludes some nifty things from being conjured up in certain ways.

I bet Gopnik agrees. Go back to something like a cathedral. Take Teotihuacan. The Aztecs sure made some impressive buildings. Big public works projects. But for the purposes of blood sacrifice? At the cost of constant imperial warfare and imperial rule?

No.

Same with some dream projects. No doubt taking a billion-dollar train to a trillion-dollar airport would be cool. But I’d rather spend my money in other ways. And is it really right to tax somebody else for my luxuriant transports?

No more than robbing Peter to pay Paul . . . even to build a cathedral.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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porkbarrel politics

Monuments to Megalomania

Some reform proposals are so modest they have scant hope of passing. Why? Because the people who pass the bills are so immodest.

Congressional egos would be severely bruised if Representative Michael McCaul’s proposal were enacted. His bill would prohibit lawmakers from erecting monuments to themselves glorifying the fact that they have dedicated huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to the erecting of monuments to themselves.

McCaul says that these “monuments to me” are emblems of arrogance and “contribute to both political corruption and excessive spending.” Such contributions are prolific.

Remember Senator Robert C. Byrd (1917-2010), “serving” in Washington for more than half a century? Well, the construction industry in West Virginia sure does. Wikipedia devotes an entire entry just to listing the buildings and transportation and other projects named after the self-aggrandizing Senator Byrd. He was always eager to lug as much pork to his state as he could, and most of it is stamped with his immortal cognomen. There’s even a Robert C. Byrd highway to nowhere. A Wall Street Journal article by William McGurn gives a laundry list of other sites named after congressmen alive and in office when their names got slapped on.

The ban should be enacted. Even if this reform is small and symbolic, the abuse it addresses is real. And McCaul wants to know: “If we can’t do the little, obvious things, how are the people going to trust us on the big ones?”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

It’s the Season

Ho, Ho, Ho. It’s that time of year again. Shopping. Selecting the right gift. Thinking of those special someones.

Yes, it’s Omnibus Spending Bill time, the Satan Clause time of year, when politicians fill up the stockings of their naughty friends in the lobbying business, and give generously.

With our money.

This year, Harry Reid went all out. He pushed an omnibus spending package that included so many earmarks that Congress had to use its whole box of Crayons just to keep some order to the bill’s marked corners. Yes, there were over six thousand “special holiday gifts” for special interests.

As I said, “Ho, Ho, Ho.”

That’s not an elfin chuckle, that’s a popular euphemism for what the politicians are who cooked up this list without checking it twice.

But an unseasonable gust took the wind out of Reid’s sails. Pressured by folks back home, the bill was soundly defeated. As Daniel Mitchell put it, it was the American people — not the special interests — who got the Christmas present:

[F]iscal conservatives, libertarians, and Tea Partiers have won an important battle, but this is just one skirmish in a long war. If we want to save America from becoming another Greece, we better make sure that we redouble our efforts next year.

At last, special interests get a lump of coal. It’s something to celebrate. And repeat. Ho, Ho, Ho! Like that ol’ elfin chuckle.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

Good and Bad in the 112th

The 112th Congress is beginning to take shape, and, well, we have good news and bad news.

Good news first: Ron Paul has been slated to chair the Domestic Monetary Policy Subcommittee.

The Texas congressman has been toiling away at the margins of power on Capitol Hill for years. A proponent of a gold standard and a free-marketer of the “Austrian” School, he has been a voice crying in the wilderness. One of the few people in Congress who did not treat Alan Greenspan as a divine oracle, he is now one of Ben Bernanke’s harshest critics.

Of course, after recent events and bailouts and all, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke has lots of critics.

As chair of the subcommittee that watches over the Fed, Ron Paul has finally attained a position to accomplish something. This is a major reversal in the power structure. We can’t expect miracles (Ron Paul being but one man), but do expect fireworks.

Now, the bad news.

It’s been less than a month since Republicans in the House voted on a moratorium on earmarks. And already they are, reportedly, beginning to feel queasy. Perhaps as a sign of a general turncoatish nature, the next chair of the House Appropriations Committee is set to be Rep. Hal Rogers.

Sixteen-term congressman Rogers has earned a reputation for pushing pork. His hometown has received so much federal largesse it’s called “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Still, he says he’ll enforce the pork moratorium. We’ll see.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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porkbarrel politics

Bribing Our Way to Bankruptcy

Many of the voters who swept so many Republicans into Congress only a few short years after having swept so many Republicans out of Congress are trying to tell all politicians: “Stop your wastrel ways.”

Republican newcomers often get that the GOP is on probation. But many Republican incumbents don’t. GOP Senators Bob Bennett, Thad Cochran, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and George Voinovich all recently voted against a ban on congressional earmarks.

Is their recalcitrance no big deal? We often hear that earmarks are just a sliver of the overall bloated budget, so fiscal conservatives should therefore stop harping on them.

Well, first, it’s not as if all the individual million-dollar or billion-dollar expenditures don’t add up to the multi-trillions in ballooning budgets and debt now sinking the republic. But, second, assertions about the triviality of earmarks also ignore the fact that rationalizing earmarks and boondoggles as the price of power also makes it easier to rationalize larger-scale incontinent federal spending.

The Heritage Foundation points to a strong correlation between high numbers of earmarks and high spending overall. This isn’t mysterious. The congressman who trains himself to be indifferent to what he does with taxpayers’ monies in “small” ways also learns to inure himself to greater temptations.

Those who can’t resist such temptations enter the current realm of mutual bribery: To get their earmarks, they’ll endorse bills with spending they nominally oppose.

Sweat the small stuff. Including the millions and billions in earmarks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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porkbarrel politics

Fitting Tribute

Senator Robert Byrd has passed from this world, ending a 58-year perch in power, the longest stint in the entire history of Congress.

Politics isn’t a sport, though sometimes it’s blood-sport . . . thus there’s no jersey to retire.

So what do you offer to the memory of a man who in life already appropriated nearly everything possible? What’s the proper homage to the King of Pork?

Retire the earmark, once and for all.

Congress had a good run with earmarked pork barrel spending, and Byrd was that run’s poster boy. He had bridges named after him, highways and freeways and a stadium or two. Airports. Special rooms in the legislative wing. All paid for by taxpayers, most often funded by Congress through sneaking said projects into legislation without requiring a separate, conscious and above-board vote.

You might think it nicer, if not wiser, to commemorate the man for his habit of keeping a pocket Constitution on his person at all times. Or for his knowledge of history. Or arcane Senate rules. Certainly, it wouldn’t be polite to mention his “youthful” organizing of his state’s KKK.

But West Virginia’s senior senator was so closely associated with self-aggrandizing earmarked spending that no other honor comes close — we should push for a true monument to outshine all others. And that’s why I suggest cutting out the earmark.

Make the porkers squeal.

And let the tumult stand as a salute to Sen. Byrd.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

How to Simulate Stimulation

Historians have noticed something interesting about the Great Depression: The bulk of Roosevelt’s New Deal money and effort wasn’t directed at the hardest-hit states. It was directed at swing states.

FDR’s New Deal could thus be seen as a vast re-election drive.

Economist Veronique de Rugy, of the Mercatus Center, recently testified before Congress about her studies of recent stimulus spending. She noticed that Democratic districts received bigger bucks than did Republican ones. Coincidence?

Nick Gillespie wrote about this on Reason magazine’s blog, Hit and Run. And, nestled in the comments section, is testimony from someone in the federal government about how stimulus money is actually spent. The government does not look for especially hard-hit areas. It looks for prospect projects that have been designed and engineered and ready to be funded to reach completion quickly.

This is useful to know. If believed, I’ll leave to you the explanation why Democratic Districts might be further along this pork-project train than Republican Districts. But it’s worth noting that this method does not really show any targeted expertise on the part of the federal government. It’s just a spend-and-spend-quickly program. Throw out enough dollars and hope something “sticks” . . . to produce real growth.

You see, this is nothing like how markets for capital projects work in the private sphere. And it’s nothing like a good way of jump-starting a wounded market economy.

It’s just government-mismanagement-as-usual.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

Way More than Enough

“Enough is enough.” We say that when we’ve had too much.

When do we reach enough government spending?

One way to figure this out would be to determine what is the real public interest and spend enough to cover that, and no more.

Take defense. A good diplomatic policy, backed by adequate military might, serves us all. We can argue what that good policy is, but we certainly don’t want more spending than required to serve said policy.

And yet, a much-ballyhooed current defense spending measure is laden with line-item spending projects that the Pentagon didn’t ask for.

President Obama, when he was a candidate, promised to crack down on such spending. It’s usually called “pork.” Unfortunately, politicians like pork.

A fascinating post on the USA Today website explains how our prez signed “a pork-laden spending bill left over from the previous year but vowed to be more vigilant going forward. Now, his administration is lauding a $636 billion defense spending bill, for the fiscal year that began Thursday, that includes $2.7 billion in earmarks” — including funding for destroyers and cargo planes the Pentagon didn’t ask for.

Such spending doesn’t serve us all. It serves a few, back home in some districts. And it helps re-elect their representatives.

All at our expense.

By definition, it’s more than enough. It’s too much.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.