the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

what's the bfd?

It's Saturday morning, and I've run into a temporary wall on my writing project for the week, so I'll now distract myself with some thoughts on the current Congressional goat-rope.

Yeah, I know nothing about economics. :) (Ok...not nothing, but my understanding is not the result of structured education. Y'all will point out my mistakes, I'm sure.)

What provoked this? I've just been reading up on The Great Earmark Debate in Congress. What are earmarks? I'm glad you asked, because...well, no one really seems to know for sure. They're technically different from "spending provisions," although said difference is, no doubt, merely academic. They are "pork-barrel spending" only to those who see the projects as unnecessary. As near as I can figure, based upon the conservative and hopefully neutral websites I've surfed today to figure out what's going on, "earmarks" are the medium of horse-trades between our Congresscritters to approve bills (usually the federal budget) using other people's money. Earmarks are rarely discussed in debate; they are added "in conference," which means that they are essentially silent additions to spending bills.

We have lots of attempts at "earmark reform legislation," which add requirements such as, well, it can no longer be done anonymously (the Senator who adds the $million$ to dig for grub worms will have to answer for it, should his opponents manage to unearth the actual earmark), he has to certify in writing that the earmark doesn't go to him or his immediate family, etc. Oh...and the senator has to tell us--the general public--on his webpage at least 24 hours before the measure is voted on, because we're all following politics so closely that we will notice not only when Congress is planning the budget, but what changes out Senator has made to his website. And we'll act on it. Right? Of course not.

So. We have hundreds of pages of the federal budget every year and, buried in that document, we have hundreds of earmarks.

It's rather brilliant, actually. I mean, from the I'm-going-to-game-the-system-anyway perspective of lawmakers. It works like this: they play up the importance of Doing Something about "pork-barrel spending." The media helps them, because the details of some of these "projects" are irresistibly lurid. They all sit down and vote for more fiscal responsibility. By this, I mean (of course) that they are conveniently defining fiscal responsibility in a way that will not in any way negatively effect their personal investments. Then they add even more text to an already cumbersome bill, fat and comfortable with the fact that the only people who will bother reading it before it is passed are society's fringe elements, who no one will listen to, anyway.

No, it isn't a conspiracy. They're just using human nature against us.

So why do we have earmarks? As far as I can see from my standpoint of admitted ignorance, we "get" two things out of them: Congress manages to get a bill through the house by bribing those who are playing hard-to-get, and they're bribing them with our money. That's a pretty sweet bribe. The other advantage is that Congress gets to decide where specific monies go instead of the executive branch doing it.

I don't really get the second one. Does this mean we have to be at the mercy of a self-interested Congressperson instead of a self-interested President? What? Is there really a difference?

So anyway. All this haggling over what was less than 1 percent of the federal budget last year. Here's my vote: so many conservatives scream about how we need to end earmark spending, let's do it. I want them to see what a worthless "cure" this is for the problem. It could be effective, yes. But only if Congress doesn't just spend that money-we-don't-have elsewhere, right? So good luck with that.

d