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Monday, August 25, 2008
A Billion Here, A Billion There
Last week I wrote on the BudgetBlog about a new Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) analysis detailing the status of earmark in the FY 2009 House and Senate appropriations bills to date. I wrote at the end of the post that cutting earmarks does not save "any" money, which as it turns out, isn't exactly true.
Steve Ellis from TCS wrote a helpful email I'm republishing here with his permission. Steve helps to clarify where/when savings are possible from cuts in earmarks.
Hey Adam,
Hope you are well. Thanks for the plug of our interim earmark report on your blog. Not to be too niggling, but I wanted to make a friendly suggestion - your kicker comment about cutting earmarks doesn't save "any" money is not accurate. The FactCheck story you link to says it would save "little." Of course that depends on how you define little.
Our analysis found $18.3 billion congressional earmarks last year, and as we and others have indicated, in many cases these are just divvying up a spending pie that already exists. But not always. Large and small amounts of money are added to earmark pots and if the earmarks were eliminated that funding would go away. Particularly in defense you can see plus ups across [Research Development Test & Evaluation] — and that bill contained $7.9 billion worth of congressional earmarks last year.
And none of this gets to the indirect cost — money going to wasteful projects, less money going to worthy or critical projects, delaying completion and increasing costs, etc. And that doesn't touch the corruption aspects, opportunity costs, failed oversight, bad products (the most clear-cut example of bad products is the Rep. Wu (D-OR) earmark that got synthetic shirts for Marines that melted to their bodies in the heat when their armored vehicle was attacked).
Anyway, I just wanted to highlight that cutting earmarks can save money, it just isn't as simple as 1 to 1, but it's not 1 to 0 either.
I'm still not convinced that the actual savings Steve is talking about is more than a couple of billion a year, which in a $3 trillion budget is really nothing to get too excited about (I know, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking about real money). But Steve makes a great point about the indirect costs. Not only is there a monetary opportunity cost to an inefficient system that funds the wrong projects and services, but it also undermines the trust the public has in our government to provide for the common good.
Posted by Adam Hughes
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