Mark Schmitt has a must-read post about proposals to finance Katrina reconstruction spending with cuts in pork spending.
After just a few days, the project has identified over $14 billion in spending that could be cut, a small downpayment on the $200 billion reconstruction project. And a lot of it is true waste, mostly the earmarked projects in HUD and Transportation spending that were under control in the late 1990s but have exploded recently…. But cut all these million-dollar boondoggles and you would still never have anything close to the cost of reconstruction. I did a quick skim of the list, and there are only three items that amount to more than bike trails…. just by looking closely at the two biggest suggestions, that $14 billion becomes $8 billion.
The thing I’d add is that there are many cases where the label of “pork” is a tendentious one, and where the anti-pork crusade targets not only appropriations process but legitimate appropriations as well. In fact, the line between the two may be hard to draw. For instance, Transportation spending on bike trails and light rail systems may well not be cost-efficient or an optimal use of funds, but cutting them entirely is in essence pulling the rug out from underneath whatever paltry alternative energy policy our government currently has. In fact, reading over the Porkbusters list, it’s hard not to notice how many people seem to object to any non-private-automobile transportation spending as (at best) “nice but not necessary” or (at worst) “ludicrous.”
Similarly, it’s easy to pick on expensive seismic studies for Golden Gate bridge, but wasn’t it that mentality that left proposals for shoring up the New Orleans levee system or repopulating a buffer zone of wetlands lingering in the first place? Between the obvious cases of legislator vanity projects and the obvious cases of useful spending lies a continuum of appropriations which we should be careful about slotting facilely into “waste” or “useful” categories.
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