I disagree. I think most state governors have a line item veto and it works well for them. They operate similarly enough to the federal government I think their experience with a line-item veto is a useful benchmark.
I would say that, in general, state legislatures are much weaker than the Congress. I think the current presidency is a warning to policies that would, in general, give greater power to the Executive Branch to convince Congress to bend to the will of the Chief Executive.
Federal Pork is the result of the Federal Government having too much money and reach. It would not be pork if it was a local sales tax that paid for the local building. Federal Pork is a poorly managed tax dollar redistribution system that rewards political connections.
Reduce the Federal reach and you will reduce the Federal Pork. You will then have to chase the pork down at the State level, but the closer it gets to home the easier it is to control (IMHO).
Mind you - the chance of this libertarian wet-dream is minimal.
No, they don’t. The governor is elected by means of a vanilla first past the post majority rule election. He has a broad coalition of support, and has to reward people with public goods all over the place. I live in New York: any governor requires the support of one or more regional voting blocs and has to reward all of them to stay in power. This will have a positive net to pretty much everyone, because pork to NYC will likely have some positive externality on upstate, and likely the reverse.
The presidency is a different ball of wax. He is effectively elected by a small group of swing states. If he is a democrat, he does not have to reward NY or CA, his biggest population centers. If he is a republican, he does not have to reward TX. It is extremely unlikely that in the short term, this lack of reward will swing the vote in solidly red or blue states.
Instead, he will use his line item veto to make sure the few purple states that elected him stay either red or blue to net him another term.
Local money diverted upstate is not going to kill me, because it is likely that somehow I will benefit. So a little NY pork is not that insidious, because the governor has a lot of ground to cover to keep his job.
Federal money diverted to purple states does bother me quite a lot, as not only does it not do me any good, it just turns an existing problem from a strategic problem that concerns only the legislature to one that concerns the executive as well. Letting the president have access to pork to reward a few purple states is not exactly my idea of democracy.
Pork is a classical example of a n-person prisoner’s dilemma. Each individual senator benefits from increasing pork but every senator overall suffers. On a pure theoretical side, n-person prisoner’s dilemmas play exactly the same as a two person but on a practical level, it’s much harder to keep the system from breaking down as the number of players increase.
Probably the best course of action is to lobby for increased openness and an attitude of antagonism towards other district’s pork. Congressmen could campaign on how they’re going to fight to reduce the pork from the next district over so that they can put the money back in your pockets.
People only hate pork that’s in somebody else’s district. They love it when the pork fairy visits their town. And congressmen are only answerable to the people in their own district. So barring a major change in the way American government works, pork is here to stay.
Pork (a politician’s ability to get and spend OP’s money) is the reason d’etre of politics. Take away a politician’s abiliy to sell jobs and take graft-and what is he? A politician is only worth what he can deliver/per dollar paid-which is why lobbyist spend>5 billion$ on Congress. Take Ted Kennedy-he is a powerful man-he doles out favors, according to how much he can get for his own state.Take away this, and he’s just an old wino. So, pork will always be with us-fight for your share!
I’m pasting this post on my wall, under the heading “REASONS TO SUPPORT A STATE-RUN ECONOMY: #1) You clearly can’t get much corrupt and wasteful than our current system already is.”
Let me shore up this explanation, because I am not sure that it is altogether clear though it is probably correct.
A legislator has two choices: put in for pork or keep his hand out of the barrel. The latter choice would be better for everyone: no stupid projects whose benefits exceed their costs. But this latter choice is only optimal for the individual if he believes that every other player is going to play the same way. If no one puts in for pork, then everyone wins with the biggest payoff.
But if one senator puts in for pork, he gets some sort of payoff for bribing his voters but every other senator has to pay for it. Only the porker gets the payoff, but everyone else pays the price.
So even though it would be better for everyone if all the senators coordinated and played no pork, every senator wonders whether any of his colleagues will betray the agreement and put in for pork anyway. So his strategy is determined by his estimation of the likelihood that other senators will play pork. The senator’s odds of playing pork vary directly with the odds of everyone else playing pork. So as you increase the number of senators, those odds go up and up, everyone can perceive this, and no one wants to be left out.
The outcome of this very simple model is that everyone plays pork all the time and we all end up paying for it.
Even so, that’s not where all the money goes. There are most definitely too many silly things that get funded by the pork process, but there’s far too much emphasis on the pork and not nearly enough on the rest of the budget - which is where the real money is.
In my view, generally speaking, pork for geographical constituencies is good … they are essentially the services that governments are supposed to offer (except for the occasional bridge to nowhere).
The outrages are in the “class-based” pork, like funding for faith-based services and outsourcing of government work to private contractors (who are far less efficient than government employees).
I also believe that, generally speaking, “earmarks” are good. We want the legislature to be able to control spending. That’s the whole purpose of a legislature and they are the group that’s generally answerable to the public.
Line-item veto? No way! We should be reducing the power of the executive, not increasing it.
Cite?
And the difference is … ?
The parliamentary system developed in Britain and used by other Commonwealth countries has a considerably more disciplined approach to appropriating public funds than does the US congressional system, because of three things: the greater control of the Cabinet over appropriations, the more rigourous control that the non-partisan Speaker has over the content of bills, which prevents riders being tacked on, and party discipline.
Maeglin’s summary of how it’s in the interests of US Congress folk to spend money highlights how much authority each one has to influence the appropriation process. Because of the difference in constitutional structures, individual MPs in a parliamentary system don’t have as much power.
The key difference is that an appropriation bill essentially needs the consent of both the Commons and the executive. An appropriation bill cannot be introduced in the Commons unless the Crown advises the House that the proposed funding is recommended for the public administration.
I’ll use the Canadian example since I’m more familiar with it, but it’s derived from the UK Parliament, so the same general principles apply there.
The Constitution Act, 1867 provides as follows:
As with almost all the other powers of the Crown, the Governor General exercises this power only on the advice of Cabinet, which is composed of the party which commands a majority in the House.
So the Honourable Member from Cracked Axle can’t just introduce a bill in the Commons to spend money in the Cracked Axle constituency. The House is barred from considering it unless the Governor General recommends it. That means that the Honourable Member from Cracked Axle has to convince the government of the utility of the expenditure. That in turn means going to the Treasury Board, a committee composed of Cabinet members, to explain the utility of the expenditure, why it’s needed, and so on. The Treasury Board in turn calls on the civil service to do detailed analysis of the proposal, the pros and cons, what public interest it serves. Only if the Honourable Member is able to convince his colleagues that the expenditure is warranted will it be included in a spending bill. As a related matter, there’s no such thing as “earmarks”, where individual members get to put in a note to say the money is to be spent on a particular project.
The second control over spending is that it’s a principle in parliamentary systems that bills are to address a specific subject matter. If it’s a bill to say, amend the Criminal Code, you can’t add a rider to do something completely unrelated, like create a commission to investigate the feasibility of a bridge over the Cracked Axle gully. The Speaker, who is impartial, would rule such an amendment out of order, as contrary to the unified subject matter rule. So an individual Member of Parliament’s bargaining power is not as great - he can’t say, “I’ll only vote for your bill if you allow me to amend it to add something that helps my constituency.” If he wants a bill to establish a commission to look into the feasibility of a bridge in Cracked Axle, he has to either convince the government of the need for the commission, or introduce it as a private member’s bill, which normally don’t have much chance to pass. Either way, the idea of spending money for the bridge is made the subject of legislation dealing specifically with that topic, not being an obscure sub-section tucked away in a bill to amend the Criminal Code.
And third, there’s party discipline. If the Cabinet and Treasury Board decide that the proposed Cracked Axle Bridge will be a waste of the taxpayer’s money, the Honourable Member for Cracked Axle either sucks it up and votes for the appropriation bill even though it doesn’t provide for the Cracked Axle Gully Bridge, or is faced with the option of leaving the party and agitating for the bridge from the Opposition benches. Most will stay with their party, in hopes of gradually convincing their colleagues of the pressing necessity of the Cracked Axle Gully Bridge.
The overall effect of this system is considerably more discipline over public appropriations. Which isn’t to say it can’t be abused - if everyone in Cabinet and on Treasury Board wants to spend like drunken sailors, as happened in Canada during the 70s, then money will be spent. But it also means that by and large, there is greater transparency in the decisions to spend money, because they are made at the Cabinet level and announced by the Finance Minister in the annual budget. They then are examined in detail, and heavily criticised, by the Opposition in the Public Accounts committee. Spending decisions aren’t made as backroom deals between a smaller number of representatives, each pushing their own pet projects for their districts, without considering the broader public interest. There’s no “senatorial courtesy” or anything like that: the role of the Opposition is to oppose, and bring spending proposals into the light of day, not to be in a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” position.
A line item veto would permit the prez to green light all his parties spending bills and reject the opposite party bills. It would increase the power of incumbancy and help keep a party in power longer . None of these are helpful to a democracy.
See generally Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.
Plus personal experience.
Privatization of governmental functions increases costs to the public through overhead, waste, and general corruption, at the same time worsening working conditions for the people doing the work.
Do you have an online, unbiased, cite?
Having personal experience myself in both the public and private sectors, I cannot accept that. I’ve seen privatisation / outsourcing do well, be neutral, and do worse. The biggest problem I’ve seen is that those privatising don’t realise how much the department (or whatever) they’re outsourcing actually costs and cock up the contract.