As an Alaskan Republican senator's egregious earmark funding for the "bridge to nowhere" a few years ago proved, congressional earmarks may be one of the most visible symbols of profligate spending in Washington. Which is precisely why even serial Republican earmark abusers (think Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) decided to change their spots and sign on Tuesday to a tea party pledge to impose a moratorium - but not a permanent ban - on earmarking until after the 2012 elections.
In terms of meaningful reductions in deficit spending, however, this overly hyped moratorium is like using a teacup to bail out the Titanic. Republicans shouldn't believe the public can be snookered by the grandstanding they are giving their party's moratorium.
In the context of the federal government's overall annual spending, earmarks are virtually invisible. Last year's $15.9 billion in earmarks, for example, amounted to less than three-tenths of one percent of the total $3.55 trillion federal budget.
Had those special appropriations not been earmarked, moreover, they would not have reduced the $1.3 trillion budget deficit. Under Washington's usual budgeting and allocation process, that money would have gone instead into the general appropriations bill already budgeted, and subsequently allocated by an unelected bureaucrat to some other expenditure.
That isn't to say that earmark spending shouldn't be better controlled and scrutinized. In fact, the Democratic-controlled Congress has already instituted significant reforms over the past two years. It banned secrecy in the earmarking process and established transparency and accountability. House members now have to post their earmark requests on the House website for public scrutiny. They must certify that they have no financial interests in the earmarks they request. And they cannot direct earmarks to for-profit entities.
Given these substantive changes, it would be a mistake to assume that the new Republican moratorium on earmark spending will prove to be an ineffective salve for what ails Washington's budget making process.
A better way to prove their allegiance to fiscal discipline would be for Republicans to drop their demand to extend the Bush era tax cuts to the top 2 percent of household incomes, more than half of which have annual incomes of more than $8 million.
Those top-end tax cuts will cost $700 billion in new deficit spending over the next 10 years. They were never warranted in the first place, and they are demonstrably unaffordable. Republicans falsely claim, however, that those tax cuts for households with incomes over $250,000 (or over $200,000 in the case of single taxpayers) are necessary to help restore economic growth and to protect small businesses.
Neither is true. Just 3 percent of such earners run small businesses, economic analyses show. And the economy's poor performance since the top-end tax cuts were created in 2001 and 2003 prove precisely that their trickle-down benefits are virtually non-existent.
Indeed, people in the top 2 percent, and especially the ultra-wealthy in the top 1 percent, either save their money or spend as they will in any event. Nudging their marginal tax rate up for income above $250,000 will hardly affect their spending or savings rates.
The earmark process, however, can be valuable if held to publicly acceptable standards for justifiable need and transparency. East Tennessee, for example, badly needs specifically directed funding to finish rebuilding the Chickamauga dam lock to prevent the failure, due to concrete growth, of the existing lock, which allows economically important barge shipping upriver of the dam.
If the Army Corps of Engineers can't keep the lock as a priority in a tighter budget process, our representatives would need to preserve their earmark options.
Further reform of earmarks in the Senate, for stricter justification and tighter control, would be a good thing. But it would be a mistake to shut down the earmark process entirely. That's especially so if the purpose is to grandstand on false allegiance to fiscal prudence by a crew that wants to keep unaffordable tax cuts for the super wealthy while whacking other parts of the budget.