{"id":875,"date":"2004-05-28T09:56:24","date_gmt":"2004-05-28T17:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/05\/28\/why-should-we-restore-fiscal-sanity-to-washington\/"},"modified":"2004-05-28T09:56:24","modified_gmt":"2004-05-28T17:56:24","slug":"why-should-we-restore-fiscal-sanity-to-washington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=875","title":{"rendered":"Why should we restore fiscal sanity to Washington?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at The American Prospect<\/i><\/a>, a centrist democrat and a liberal (Will Marshall and Robert Kuttner) are proposing economic strategy for the Democrats, under the slogan “If these two can agree on a progressive strategy, so can you!”<\/p>\n

I actually agree with a lot that they say – or where I disagree, it’s only because I think they don’t go far enough. (Then again, I’m to the left of both of them). But part 1 of their plan – entitled “Return fiscal sanity to Washington” – seems to me to cast the problem of an unbalanced budget in ways that make little sense.<\/p>\n

As we learned in the 1990s, restoring fiscal discipline is integral to sustained economic growth as well as responsible government. It drives interest rates down, giving consumers and businesses the equivalent of a tax cut while also encouraging private investment.<\/div>\n

Interest rates? Whatever you think of Bush’s economic policies, you can’t plausibly claim that the problem with them is that interest rates have been too high<\/i>. (In fact, interest rates have been considerably lower under Bush than under Clinton<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

There’s then a bit about repealing “the Bush tax giveaways to families earning more than $200,000 a year,” which I fully agree with.<\/p>\n

Next comes a discussion of “pork.”<\/p>\n

The right has done almost as much damage on the spending side of the national ledger as the tax side. No one doles out pork like the GOP: The recently passed transportation bill was larded with 3,251 “earmarks” — money added specifically for a particular member’s state or district, or a special interest. This compared with just 538 in the 1991 highway bill.<\/div>\n

What’s so bad about this? Pork projects improve the infrastructure of a community and create jobs.<\/p>\n

Citizens Against Government Waste<\/a> (an anti-tax group) says that pork projects in this highway bill will cost $11 billion over the next six years, or about $1.8 billion a year. (For comparison’s sake, the non-pork portion of the highway bill is about $264 billion, or $44 billion a year).<\/p>\n

So what sort of projects are paid for by $1.8 billion a year? According to Citizens Against Government Waste:<\/p>\n

-$4,000,000 for the Jones Falls Greenway to construct Phase II of this urban trail in Baltimore City, Maryland;<\/p>\n

-$3,000,000 to construct two Missouri bridges and their approach roadways in Nebraska;<\/p>\n

-$3,000,000 for the construction of a bicycle\/pedestrian bridge to connect the shores of the Salt River in Arizona;<\/p>\n

-$2,000,000 for improvements to increase beach access, prevent storm drain failure, and accommodate increasing pedestrian traffic on The Stand in Manhattan Beach, California;<\/p>\n

-$2,000,000 for a high-speed catamaran ferry in Massachusetts;<\/p>\n

-$1,500,000 for the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan;<\/p>\n

-$1,000,000 to restore and expand a maritime heritage site in Bristol, Rhode Island;<\/p>\n

-$1,000,000 for a parking lot in San Diego, California;<\/p>\n

-$1,000,000 to implement improvements for pedestrian safety in Bronx County, New York;<\/p>\n

-$593,000 for a sidewalk revitalization project in downtown Eastman, Georgia;<\/p>\n

-$500,000 to upgrade sidewalks, lighting and landscaping from Cherry Street
\nto Hampton Street in Montezuma, Georgia;<\/p>\n

-$250,000 for the Blue Ridge Travel Association website;<\/p>\n

-$200,000 for a parking lot in Oak Lawn, Illinois; and<\/p>\n

-$50,000 for a feasibility study for platform mobile phone service in subway stations in New York, New York.<\/p><\/div>\n

Okay, a quarter million dollars seems like waaay <\/i>too much to spend on a website (although what do I know?). But other than that, these all seem like defensible projects to me. They create real improvements that will improve lives for people or help local economies, and they do so while creating jobs. What’s wrong with that?<\/p>\n

Also, let’s keep a sense of scale about all this. The US Federal government spends over $2 trillion dollars a year; $1.8 billion is less than one-tenth of 1% of that. Pork in the highway bill is not the cause of our unbalanced budget.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

There is, to my mind, a good reason to bring the budget into balance: because the less debt the US owes, the less of our taxes goes to paying interest on the debt. Paying interest is bad for the US in the exact same way it’s bad for consumers: if you have to borrow money to buy stuff, you end up paying more for that stuff. That’s true whether the stuff bought is a Playstation 2 on my VISA or an extended war in Iraq paid for by future generations. Pay-as-you-go is a cheaper, more effective use of tax money.<\/p>\n

That said, it’s not the end of the world if we do go into debt. Sometimes it’s a good idea; we went into debt to buy our house, but in the long run that will (hopefully) turn out to be a sensible use of debt. Similarly, in a time of high unemployment, pork projects that create jobs and add value to communities may be worth going slightly further into debt for.<\/p>\n

(Link to Prospect <\/i>article via Matthew Yglesias<\/a>).<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/b>: Edited to add the phrase “in the highway bill” to one sentence; the first version of the sentence didn’t make it clear I was talking about pork in this one bill, not in the entire annual budget. Sorry about that.<\/p>\n

UPDATE 2<\/b>: Overall, according to CAGW<\/a>, the annual pork bill is $2.29 billion, or a little over 1% of total federal spending. That’s not chump change, but neither is it a major cause of the deficit. (For comparison’s sake, Bush’s tax plan will cost the federal budget an average of $147 billion a year<\/a>, or about 64 times what we’re spending on pork)..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at The American Prospect, a centrist democrat and a liberal (Will Marshall and Robert Kuttner) are proposing economic strategy for the Democrats, under the slogan “If these two can agree on a progressive strategy, so can you!” I actually … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics-and-the-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}