Reading the discussion of Ted Stevens’ vices and virtues in the Pit, I got to wondering whether there’s any conceivable way that getting goodies for one’s own state (district, county, etc.) could be discouraged? That is, could Senators (and representatives, etc.) get some sort of powerful DISincentive to bring the pork home, in addition to the obvious incentives that are already in place?
This seems to me one of McCain’s talking points that I actually agree with (though I wonder about his sincerity on GP) but what possible alternative routes are there to this end, what problems crop with each route, what loopholes could pols find?
Or should we just accept pork as a given of the political system? Certainly people who have benefitted massively from it (such as Alaskans) tend to see it as a good thing.
I’m not sure it’s possible, or even especially desirable. After all, Senators and Representatives are elected to represent their people. In practical terms, that means making sure their constituents get a piece of the action. I plan to vote against Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) this fall because he seems to be less interested in helping out his economically-devastated state than he is in playing politics and griping about the war in Iraq. If he brought home a bit of pork now and then, I’d most likely vote for him.
With as little cynicism as I can bring to the question, the answer has to be “no.”
One of the duties of a 20th/21st century politician is to advocate for the actual needs of his/her district. Post offices get replaced, highway reconstruction moves up the priority list, a military detachyment leaves or stays, according to what the particular representative deems important to press. To some extent thi is good: with someone who knows what the conditions in NW South Dakota are, brcause that area holds a lot of his constituents, there’s no need for everyone else to be expert on it. If there are areas in the couhtry where job outsourcing has resulted in widespread unemployment, and extended benefits and retraining programs are needed in consequence, you can be sure that the local state reps. and congresscritters will be snorting about it like rutting elk, getting help for their constituents and not inconsequentially some rep. points towards their reelection.
Pork of course is the abuse of this system, where the 3rd district of West Indianvania has been reelecting the congressman who is now the ranking member for his party on the House Blinking, Twitching, and Nods Committee – and has the power and leverage to get almost anything he chooses for his district. And will, whether or not they strictly need it, simply for the good press he gets among constitutents. “Bringing your tax dollars back from Washington to help Buggsburg” is never a bad thing in constituent eyes.
Now, my point is that the line between proper and beneficial advocacy and seeking out pork is pretty close to purely subjective. There’s a pretty smooth spectrum between replacing the 1910-vintage 500-square-foot post office with something large enough to accommodate the burgeoning suburb, or funding a fire-training school for emergency responders in forest fire country, and the $7.5-million Museum of Basque-American History that the district’s 150 Basque-American constituents want, and that Congressman Chairbound has the seniority to get.
Some years back, I helped write a successful grant proposal for slightly over $100K to document, stabilize, preserve, and restore a town hall that was virtually the only intact, non-‘modernized’ example of early 20th century frame-structure municipal architecture anywhere in the state. My colleague and I felt it was worth preserving from a historicl point of view, as did the town government and the volunteer history buff who worked with us. But was the money appropriated to aid that effort pork, or not? Your call. Could that $100K have gone to help inner-city kids? Pay the drastic increase in fixed-income widows’ heat expenses? Where do you draw the line? What’s needed; what’s pork?
When I first saw this I assumed you meant the food and thought why, other than for religious reasons, would anyone want to get rid of pork?
I see now that this is a political thread.
Pork is not a term I am familiar with could someone please explain what it means in this context? I assume from the previous posts that it is some form of representation for reward, is this correct?
Pork or pork-barrel politics is the practice in which representatives get jobs and money for their constituents by creating projects that are often considered unnecessary. It’s basically part of a system of tradeoffs: I support a project in your district, you support one in mine. It’s much criticized for wasting a lot of tax money.
I still remember what I learned on this topic in a college government class, because I’d never heard this take before: it’s not a bad thing, it’s part of how the system works- generally it benefits most people and it helps elected officials get things done. Whether that’s true or not, I think that’s the basic reason it can’t be eliminated.
Can’t be done. No one can agree on what pork is; one man’s critical water project is another man’s pork. There may be some blatant abuses like the Bridge to Nowhere, but the day to day pork cannot be eliminated because it defies definition.
One man’s pork is another man’s vital need. I would say that if somebody brings home more bacon than is demonstrably based on need or disproportionate to the size of their electorate, it might be pork, but according to whom? And what’s their agenda? And there’s the rub (and I prefer a dry rub on my pork).
ETA: Fear Itself beat me to it…no pork for you…30 days!
If we elected Congress by a straight party-list system of proportional representation, there would be no element of geographic representation at all, therefore congresscritters would not have geographic constituencies, therefore there would be little or no porkbarrel – on a geographic basis, that is; there might still be a functional equivalent of porkbarrel WRT the demographics and interest groups making up the electoral constituency of a given party’s caucus – but that would be a feature, not a bug.
There are serious, serious problems with PR. Although competing voting systems is not really the topic here, I just want to make sure you aren’t positioning PR as a panacea to pork. It’s not, and in many ways, it can make the problem of pork far worse.
Politicians need to reward the people who elected them in order to stay in office. They have a choice: do they reward their voters with public goods or with private goods? In general, public goods rewards are much cheaper. So the larger the group of people who elected you, the more likely you are to turn to public goods to reward them. If the opinion of only a few people really matters in your election, you reward them with private goods.
In a nutshell, PR decreases the necessary size of your backers. If you have very few backers but are in power, you can reward them with private goods, aka “corruption”. Alternatively, if your set of backers is small and you form a coalition, you can only keep the coalition together by trading horses. PR is definitely an alternative, but it is not strictly superior to our current system and will by no means reduce or eliminate the masquerade of private interests.
Well, is there a significant amount of porkbarrelling in the UK? I’ve noticed that your MPs’ connection to their boroughs seems to be less essential than American Congresscritters’ connections to their districts/states.
No, I don’t think it really would. In fact, it could have the opposite effect. The legislature would just have a slightly different strategic problem: when trying to bring a piece of legislation from end to end, what kind of pork would the president be least likely to veto?
Answer: the kind of pork that pays off the voters who actually voted for the president.
The line item veto does not remove pork, it just redirects it to states that the president would not mind rewarding. This is more dangerous than the usual pork trade that occurs already among the legislature.
Make the limit of pork going into a state or district in direct proportion to the federal taxes going out. I got no problem with Alaska spending their share of federal taxes on a bridge to nowhere.
If anything, with smaller consituencies, the connection is greater. As for pork, it usually arrives indirectly: more funding through the NHS for a local hospital, special funds via the DoE for a ‘deprived area’, defence work for a local shipyard or other employer, and so on.
We could just pass legislation up here that allows us to develop and market our oil, copper, gold, etc. to whomever we please and pocket the profits. What a state produces is more than just tax revenue.
No. The line item veto was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. However, Bush has issued an executive order directing agencies not to comply with earmarks unless they are written into law. The vast majority of earmarks are not law, but rather based in explanations of how funds appropriated by law ought to be spent.
