Hoyer: Earmarks are likely coming back next year - Roll Call
Roll them logs!
“I don’t expect it to be a partisan effort. Now that doesn’t mean that everybody does participate,” he said. “But I know there are a lot of Republicans on our side and a lot of Republicans on the Senate side who want to … have the ability to invest in their states.”
I guess the ellipsis shows that the quote was edited, but I’d like to think he paused a second to think of a euphemism.
Big (and good) if true!
what’s the nuanced version of the pro pork barrel position
I get that “this is how the sausage is made” and “the sausage is very tasty, and must be made” is the basic idea, but there’s a version of this running on a more concrete argument, right
Well, specifically that without earmarks, individual members have nothing to negotiate about on other than ideological grounds - with no chips for trading, the budget process goes from positive-sum to zero-sum and is much more likely to grind to a halt.
(Furthermore, especially given that we’re in a recession, increased spending on random infrastructure projects etc. seems like a positive externality to me.)
Basically, Tea Party style universal obstructionism is a lot harder when you can’t buy people off (“buy them off” with material benefits to the people in their district, that is, which to reiterate is a positive good in and of itself). Now, this is not the most efficient way to allocate government spending, but it’s better than not spending at all. And nobody benefits when there are government shutdowns and stuff constantly.
right, that’s the sausage making argument. I get the idea of the argument, it’s just not at all clear that it’s true.
naively pork barrel is clearly bad, and the glib “pork barrel good” take seems mostly like an appeal to contrarianism or elitism.
however, recognizing that I am not the target demographic of the op, I’d rather put that aside. if pork barrel really is good, I’d like to come to that conclusion. hence the desire to interact with a fuller, more concrete argument!
has the budget process gone from positive sum to zero sum?
do ideological and policy commitments alone offer no grounds for negotiations?
is an inability to buy people off the “real” reason negotiations are failing?
if a policy is bad enough that you can’t pass it without bribery, wouldn’t wasting extra money on bribery make it worse rather than better?
if a policy is bad enough that you can’t pass it without bribery
This is completely failing to engage with my argument. Republicans do not care whether the policy is good or not. If it might benefit a Democratic President, they’re agin’ it.
(And yes, this is asymmetric, as the CARES Act makes extremely obvious.)
right, so this is one of the assertions. I’m hoping to get a feel for, on the object level, if this is true.
for this particular assertion, the convincing evidence I would hope for would likely be some combination of cases where congressmen voted against proposals that were, from their ideological and material perspective good policy for reasons of political affiliation, as well some broad trends that back up the idea that this is happening more, and pivoted around the end of earmarking.
(I’m sure there’s a better word, but it slipped my mind - here I don’t mean ideology as in “hates obama” or something, but as in a conceptual framework of good policy. I would we would agree that congress should not pass policies they think harm America for local political benefit.)
in general, what I am fishing for, is a resource explaining in detail to me, a not terribly well educated individual who is against wasteful government spending, why something as obviously distasteful as pork barrel is really actually worth it.
(I searched “matt yglesias pork barrel good” in hope of securing that neoliberal wisdom and sure enough I got something, but not at the level of detail I was hoping for.)
they aren’t treating “the spending” and “the mechanism by which the spending is allocated” when they evaluate its return as a positive good (correctly)