Ryan Streeter
Lost in today's postmortem on the tax cut compromise and Julian Assange's arrest is an important story about earmarks. Remember earmarks? They were a big issue a little over a week ago.
During the run-up to the failed Senate vote to ban earmarks, no word was more often used than "symbolic." It made its way into the talking points of just about every Republican who sat for an interview on the matter. Voting to ban earmarks was a "symbolic gesture" aimed at showing voters that, yes, their voices had been heard and that congressional members were standing with them against Washington's profligate ways.
Today's story in Politico that Members of Congress earmarked 40,000 projects for themselves at a price tag of $131 billion forces us to ask: just how symbolic is it to vote against them?
Let's put that figure in perspective:
- In the debate about simplifying the tax code that the deficit commission sparked, $100 billion was the figure often used to say how much we would save by eliminating the mortgage interest deduction each year.
- If earmarks were a company, they would be Number 7 on the Fortune 500 list, just behind the $139 billion ConocoPhillips.
- If earmarks were turned into a federal agency, they would be bigger than every other part of the government except for Defense and Health and Human Services.
- If earmarks were a country's GDP, they would be the 57th largest country in the world, just behind Morocco and larger than 121 other countries.
My guess is that most Americans wouldn't view voting against special projects of that scope as "symbolic." They would view it as responsible. All of the other usual arguments about how earmarks serve as a check on Obama's fall flat on voters' ears. And I'm sure that banning earmarks doesn't sound "politically correct" to the average American, as Senator Inhofe suggested over the weekend.
John Boehner's statement of support for getting Jeff Flake on the House Appropriations Committee wasn't "symbolic" - I hope. Flake was the lone anti-earmark crusader long before being against earmarks was cool. And he would be a driving force for creating an effective oversight subcommittee that would keep appropriators in check, as Rob Bluey writes today.
Voters who don't think $100 billion worth of special projects is a symbolic problem in our budget should be encouraged by Boehner's support of Flake. I am.
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