EARMARKS. In his triumphant New Republic debut, Brad Plumer makes the liberal case for pork. "It's not," he writes, "because pork projects are defensible on the merits, although they sometimes can be. It's not because they create jobs, although they can do that, too. Rather, it's because, without pork, activist government would wither and die." Using the examples of Reagan's 1986 Tax Reform and Clinton's first budget, he explains that pork are bargaining chits that allow tough, controversial pieces of legislation to squeeze through the legislative process. I'll buy that, but I wonder if it's not becoming a relatively obsolete consideration: As Congress continues evolving into a more parliamentary institution and party loyalty grows easier to enforce, I think we'll begin seeing an easier ride for tough legislation. Think of the Medicare Drug Bill, which was anathema to the left and a grotesque mutant to the right, but which nevertheless squeezed through. If massive legislation with no natural constituency can survive, large programs satisfying long-held ideological desires should be able to rush through on party-line votes. Minorities, of course, are and will continue to be completely impotent. Nevertheless, I find it tough to get exercised over pork. While much of it is somewhat unnecessary, I don't really have a problem with less than one percent of the federal budget going to infrastructure, cultural, and commemorative projects around the country. All of them create jobs, many of them are worthy on their own merits, and a fair fraction make the country a culturally richer and more distinctive place. Indeed, to get a more accurate idea of what these earmarks actually represent, I spent some time playing around with the Sunshine Foundation's Earmark Exposer. It's a sweet bit of technology that lets you travel around the map and check out the earmarks created in the 2007 budget. It's supposed to generate disgust in the user, but as the first few items I saw from my home area were $300,000 for health information technology at Orange's Children's Hospital, $50,000 for an arts education program for underserved Huntington Beach youth, and $450,000 to Long Beach's Miller Children's Hospital for medical equipment, I'm actually coming away impressed by the quality of the appropriations. The �Bridge to Nowhere� is undoubtedly bad, but it may not be representative. But hey: Play around with the tool and see for yourself.
--Ezra Klein
