Bruce Bartlett isn’t impressed with the budgetary implications of eliminating earmarks:
It’s obviously true that earmarks are not a significant cause of rising federal spending; eliminating all of them will save at most one percent of the budget.
Bruce, you gotta read your own blog! Here’s Stan Collender a couple of hours earlier:
As Andrew notes and I’ve remarked on previously, eliminating earmarks doesn’t actually reduce spending; all it does is change who makes the decision from Congress to an executive branch agency. Unless the appropriation is reduced at the same time the earmark is eliminated, which no one is suggesting, the amount that will be spent will remain the same.
This is, for some reason, one of those never-remarked aspects of earmarks. Everyone assumes that they raise spending, but they don’t. They just redirect it. I don’t understand why earmark opponents endlessly get away with pretending otherwise.
In fairness, if earmarks were eliminated and the related budget authority were eliminated too, it would cut spending a bit. But that’s not what anyone is proposing. Until they do, the posturing is even worse than Bruce suggests.
(There are, of course, other reasons to eliminate earmarks, as both Bruce and Stan acknowledge. The primary one is a belief that federal funds ought to be disbursed by federal agencies using neutral guidelines, not handed out as rewards/payoffs by members of Congress to favored interests in their districts. My tentative view is here: cap earmarks, don’t eliminate them. But I wouldn’t mind eliminating them either.)
