Earmark Nation
14th May 2009
When earlier this week President Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running through the fall, every account of the event noted the 800-pound contradiction in the room. Mr. Obama had campaigned against earmarks, even saying he would cut them back to levels before 1994, the start of the Gingrich-GOP interregnum. Now here was Obama as president signing a bill soaked in earmarks.
Here’s another way of putting it: The U.S. budget is now history’s biggest mountain of swag; it is uncountable goodie bags filled with tax revenue. Mr. Obama’s swag mountain, the fiscal year 2010 “budget,” is $3.59 trillion high (25% of total GDP of about $14 trillion). His $800 billion stimulus bill was another pile of public cash. We the people have concluded that if we don’t use the Honorable John or Nancy or Ted in Congress to get our piece of it, someone else will get it.
Barack Obama isn’t a reformer. He’s the president of Earmark Nation. We are about to enact the Obama federal health-insurance entitlement, which on top of all the other entitlements and their limitless liabilities will require pulling trillions of dollars more into the federal budget. Whatever nominal public good this is supposed to achieve, it means that they, these 535 pols, most of them gerrymandered for life, will decide in perpetuity the details of how to dole it out.