Downsizing Blog

I’m sympathetic to the oft-repeated saying that there are really three parties in Washington: Republicans, Democrats, and Appropriators.  This situation is likely to be demonstrated this evening when Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee provide enough votes for Democratic Sen. Harry Reid to close off debate and proceed to final passage of the pork-laden $410 billion fy2009 omnibus appropriations bill.

Greasing the skids for bigger government will be almost $8 billion in earmarks contained in the bill.  Fox News is pointing out that almost all of the Republican Senators expected or likely to support the Democratic measure stand to deliver quite a bit of pork to constituents and special interests.  Not coincidentally, all of the senators named, except Sen. Snowe of Maine, are appropriators.  As a matter of fact, if you look at the top 20 senators (both parties) in terms of dollars of earmarks secured for this bill, 15 are appropriators.

Bottom line: Appropriators love spending and they particularly love pork.  Sen. Snowe just likes the government spending other people’s money.

People who support expanded federal intervention into areas such as energy and health care naively assume that policymakers can make economically rational and efficient decisions to allocate resources. They cannot, as a Washington Post story today on FutureGen illustrates.

The story describes the political battle over the location of a $1.8 billion ”clean coal” plant. I don’t know where the most efficient place to site such a plant is, or  if such a plant makes any sense in the first place. But the story illustrates that as soon as such decisions are moved from the private sector to the political arena, millions of dollars are spent to lobby the decisionmakers, and members of Congress are hopelessly biased in favor of home-state spending regardless of what might be best for the national economy as a whole.

President Obama has promised to ramp up spending on such green projects. So get ready for some huge political fights over the big-dollar spoils, and get ready for some monsterous energy boondoggles.

Wow, a bipartisan effort to actually do something about government waste. From the Washington Post today:

A bill to end cost overruns in major weapons systems would create a powerful new Pentagon position — director of independent cost assessments — to review cost analyses and estimates, separately from the military branch requesting the program.

Those reviews, unlike in the current process, would take place at key points in the acquisition process before a weapons program can proceed, according to legislation sponsored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

This seems like a step forward, but cost overruns are a big problem across the entire federal government, not just at the Pentagon. Federal financial management of energy, highway, and computer projects has been appalling, for example. I’ve written about this here and elsewhere.

The government needs to buy weapons, and so we should try to improve the Pentagon process as best we can. However, the federal government does not need to buy highways, airports, air traffic control computers and many other things that have chronic cost overruns. Those items should be privatized.

Last week I blogged on President Obama’s “stimulus” rally prop Henrietta Hughes — a.k.a. “the face of the economic crisis.” Ms. Hughes and her son, who were homeless, asked our messianic president to help them since they’ve been stuck on a two-year waiting list at the Fort Myers, Fl., public housing authority. Using the government’s own numbers, I was able to determine that Fort Myers and surrounding Lee County received almost $70 million in U.S. Housing & Urban Development (HUD) money in the past three years. Some $41 million — or $600 per man, woman, and child in Fort Myers — went to the city’s public housing authority alone.

I concluded that HUD’s inspector general should investigate what the housing authority is doing with all that taxpayer change. And if a story coming out of Las Vegas about its public housing authority is any indicator, there’s a good chance a lack of federal funding wasn’t the problem in Fort Myers. According to the Las Vegas Sun,

The Senate stimulus bill apparently contains $2 billion for “FutureGen.” Here is what my assistant, Harrison Moar, found out about this project:

FutureGen was launched in 2003 by President Bush as a public-private partnership to build a low-emission coal-fueled power plant and demonstrate technologies to capture carbon dioxide. The government was to share the cost of the project with 12 private energy companies. The project was originally estimated to cost $1 billion, but by 2008 the estimate had ballooned to $1.8 billion. By mid-2008, $176 million had been spent.

In 2007, the Department of Energy chose a single site for the project in Mattoon, Illinois. But after the project’s estimated cost started soaring, the department changed direction in 2008 and cancelled the Mattoon project. That was a good decision, but the government had still flushed $176 million down the drain. The department’s new idea was to focus on developing other clean coal projects in different locations at an estimated taxpayer cost of $1.3 billion.

FutureGen has involved pork barrel politics since the beginning. As the department originally considered various project sites in Illinois and Texas, the state governments in those states deployed aggressive lobbying to woo federal officials. Upon news of possible cancellation of the Mattoon project in 2008, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois swung into action using all his tools as the second-ranking senator to continue the funding to his state. He even threatened to block appointments to the Department of Energy unless it reversed its cancellation decision.

House Democrats have released a $825 billion plan to “stimulate” the nation’s economy. After reading through the 13-page press release, it is blatantly obvious to me that the proposal is nothing more than a conglomeration of traditional special interest favorites. Education pork? Check. Science pork? Check. Transportation pork? Check. Pork for state and local governments? Check and check.

Cato scholars have written extensively on most of the plan’s components at one time or another. For instance, anyone interested in the alleged stimulative power of more federal dollars being spent on higher education should check out Neal McCluskey’s post from Friday. Or see Chris Edwards and Peter Van Doren on infrastructure spending in this nifty piece.

In no particular order, I thought I’d pick out some of the programs targeted for “stimulating” and provide an example of how taxpayers can expect their money to be spent. Lest anyone think I’m cherry-picking, the following hardly scratches the surface:

Before 1987, Americans only needed to understand the word “billion” to get a handle on federal budget numbers. Today, the word “trillion” is the needed metric in budget discussions.

The Congressional Budget Office released an update to its budget projections today, and the figures show that the federal deficit for fiscal 2009 will be $1.2 trillion. That deficit represents 8.3 percent of GDP, the highest share of the economy since World War II. Thus, a burden the size of 8 percent of all income earned in the United States this year is being thrust onto tomorrow’s taxpayers.

Sorry, this blog has nothing to do with the Wall Street mess, despite the title.

Instead, consider this tiny story in the WaPo that reveals the general inanity of our subsidized nation. The article, “Federal Grant to Provide Help To Low-Income Students” reports on a $1 million federal grant to the state of Virginia. 

Will the grant money be used to buy books for poor kids, or to help pay their tuition? Nope. It will go to hire bureaucrats to train kids on how to grab more education subsidies: “The agency plans … to help educate students about college, with a sizable focus on how to obtain financial aid.”

For more about the follies of federal granting, see Federal Aid to the States.

The IBD has an excellent front page summary of the 1990s roots to the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disaster.

One issue IBD touches on is the ineffectiveness of the regulating agency OFHEO. OFHEO gave Fannie and Freddie a clean bill of health just last December.

One reason that having regulatory agencies is worse than having no suchagencies is the false sense of security provided to markets by such apparently off-base seals of approval.

The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — housed at the U.S. Dept. of Commerce because Dick Nixon wasn’t getting along with his own Secretary of the Interior — has determined that the decline in the harvest of Chesapeake Bay blue crabs is a “commercial fishery failure.”  With that declaration by the “stewards” of the nation’s fisheries, Chesapeake crab fishermen are looking at a bailout (popular word these days) of up to 15 million taxpayer dollars over the next three years.

The Examiner reports that Maryland Watermen’s Association President Larry Simns and his members were “elated.”  Go figure.  Simns says that this is not a handout because the money would be used to put the crabbers to work restoring fisheries, planting trees, etc.  Perhaps they can staff the exhibits at the NOAA-partnered Smithsonian Institution’s “Ocean Hall” opening this weekend too.

What kind of message does this latest government intervention send to other commercial fishermen?  Overfish, deplete your source of income, and the taxpayer will numb your pain.  Of course, NOAA bureaucrats will then cite resulting fishery depletions as justification for a budget increase.  Big Government 101.