All three remaining presidential candidates All three remaining presidential candidates voted for the earmark moratorium bill. My reaction: Whoop-dee-crap. It’s amazing—and in John McCain's case, appalling—that candidates or other politicians dare to stake their “fiscal responsibility” creds on fighting earmarks.
My venerable UMBC colleague Roy Meyers, a leading expert on federal budgeting for about two decades now, recently gave a fascinating presentation on campus about earmarking. Bottom line: The estimates on earmarks, depending on your source and definition of what constitutes an earmark, run somewhere between $30-50 billion per year. This, mind you, is a fraction of a budget that runs to $2.5 trillion. To give you a sense of scale, this would be like a family that’s struggling to meet its monthly housing budget of $2,500/month for mortgage, insurance, utilities, phone, cable and so forth deciding that the path to familial solvency was to eliminate its Netflix subscription.
If McCain or, for that matter, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, think earmark reform is the path to fiscal solvency, they need a new abacus. But McCain is the real hypocrite here, because he has no problem pouring far more money down the Iraq drain every few months than could ever be saved by earmark reform. All his talk is diversionary gimmickry. Meanwhile, of course, he’s turned into Jukebox John (tune changes every four minutes or so) on the Bush tax cuts, which are a much more irresponsible fiscal measure akin, to extend the family budget metaphor, to deciding the best way to meet the mortgage bill is for Dad to quit his weekend moonlighting job on the premise that somehow bringing in less income will somehow lead to greater solvency. Point: McCain’s ideas are plainly absurd.
We'd all like to cut down the amount spent on wasteful porkbarrel projects, but anyone who thinks a government that alone spend more merely servicing its outstanding debt is going to balance the books on the back of earmark reform is deluding himself—or, to borrow a popular Obama term, trying to bamboozle the rest of us.
--Tom Schaller
