Pigs Are Flying

Citizens Against Government Waste released their 2009 Pig Book today. It makes for delightful reading as you lick the stamp on your tax return.

Many legislators make a valiant defense of pork as the preferable way to spend taxpayers money. After all, either duly elected representatives decide what to spend money on, or unelected career civil servants. Why not the former?

The simplest answer to this line of reasoning is that rather than deciding the most prudent expenditure of limited resources, a committee of 535 is far more likely to defer the hard decisions and keep expanding the pie... and to guarantee that individual slices of that pie go to narrow, local interests. Such as:

$71,000 by Rep. Nydia Valezquez (D-N.Y.) for Dance Theater
Etcetera in Brooklyn for its Tolerance through Arts initiative. One
of the group’s ongoing projects is Angels and Accordions, which
according to its website is, “A site-specific performance/walking
tour of Green-Wood Cemetery... A cast of 30 angels, 10 accordions and a
classical music ensemble guide visitors through Brooklyn’s
historic Green-Wood Cemetery.”

$380,000 by Senate appropriator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) for
construction of a recreation and fairgrounds area in Kotzebue.
That works out to $123.30 for each of Kotzebue’s 3,082 residents.
Perhaps the town should have used the approximately $350,000 it
spent on lobbying since 2000 for the fairgrounds, saving federal
taxpayers a bundle.

Of course, there are the usual billions of dollars in defense spending aggressively brought home to specific districts, but FatCratz has a soft spot in its heart for the small, boutique earmarks. Somehow, they capture the absurdity of the federal budgeting process.

Comments

[Jon Mayer]

In case you're interested in accuracy (the Pig Book wasn't)- Dance Theatre Etcetera's federal earmark has nothing to do with our production of Angels & Accordions.

Instead, it's for our arts education programs, which provide students from one of NYC's poorest neighborhoods access to programming that seeks to instill critical thinking skills and civic engagement.

These programs have a demonstrated track record of improving student performance and attendance, and that is besides the profound impact they have on select students whose lives actually turn around because of their participation in these programs.

If you have a problem with the earmark process, that is your business, and I am happy you are voicing your opinion. If you are going to single out certain recipients as the most heinously egregious, though, I would appreciate if you would do actual research to find out that the programs you are identifying are indeed wasteful.

As an aside, your note about "narrow, local" projects will fall on deaf ears from proponents for earmarks- the fact that local representatives can address the needs they identify in their communities is probably the single most redeeming aspect of federal earmarks. It is the government's version of thinking globally and acting locally.

[Brian Lee]

Thanks for your comment.

Neither the Pig Book nor FatCratz stated that the earmark was for Angels & Accordions; it was merely referenced as an "ongoing project" of the recipient organization, Dance Theater Etcetera. But money is fungible. While federal funds received may be earmarked for a specific project, they also serve to promote the recipient organization as a whole. In our view, therefore, all public activities of earmark recipients are fair game for discussion and debate.

Further, we never said ANY projects of Dance Theater Etcetera were wasteful. We implied, rather, that federal funding for them was a waste of taxpayer dollars. That distinction is the crux of the matter in our view. I'm personally a big supporter of the arts and programs like yours. However, I believe that by and large they should be privately, and locally, funded.