After you’ve watched federal policymaking for a number of years, you realize that the actual effectiveness of federal programs has absolutely no bearing on their survival or level of funding. That’s because the purpose of federal programs is not to solve problems, but to provide a menu of levers that politicians can pull to appeal to certain types of voters.  

We see this at play in the 2008 election with “clean coal,” which has attracted the attention of both candidates. Obama wants to “significantly increase the resources devoted to the commercialization and deployment of low-carbon coal technologies.” Meanwhile, McCain has pledged to spend $2 billion a year on clean coal technology if elected.

Since these pledges make for good bullet points in speeches, the campaigns don’t really care about the actual track record of federal subsidies to clean coal. But after the election, the next president should hesitate to increase such corporate welfare. Here is what I noted in Downsizing the Federal Government:

Paul Gigot has an outstanding piece on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac today in the WSJ. “The abiding lesson here is what happens when you combine private profit with government power.” Exactly.

Here’s what I said about the twin-headed hydra in my 2005 Downsizing the Federal Government:

In a new campaign document, John McCain detailed some of his economic proposals today. The promise that caught my eye is a pledge to balance the federal budget by 2013. That is curious promise for him to make.

The Joint Committee on Taxation projects that federal revenues in fiscal 2013 — with the extension of the current tax cuts and AMT relief — will be 17.6 percent of GDP.

This year federal spending will come in at about 20.6 percent of GDP. That means that in four years a President McCain would cut spending worth about 3 percent of GDP, or about $427 billion annually in today’s dollars.

That would be fabulous, and Mr. McCain can read my Downsizing plan to find out exactly where to cut. Indeed, he might have already read it (see the picture). However, today’s plan from McCain includes few specifics on discretionary spending cuts, and his (laudatory) entitlement reforms would probably not generate major savings in just the first four years.

Here’s where fiscal conservatives get nervous about Mr. McCain’s intentions. In the same campaign document. McCain repeatedly lauds bipartisan efforts to fix the budget. Thus, if elected, would he actually fight for $427 billion in federal spending cuts? Or would he just trim some minor waste and earmarks, and make up the vast bulk of the budget gap with tax increases in the name of bipartisanship?

Federal cost-cutting should be a central focus of the next president. One effort that should be bipartisan is overhauling the government’s out-of-control procurement system. Federal contractors routinely get away with outrageous cost overruns at taxpayer expense. From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Despite billions of dollars in cost overruns and years of delay, Lockheed Martin Corp. and U.S. Navy officials are confident they will hang on to next year’s funding for development of a new presidential helicopter…. The program initially called for about $6.1 billion in spending to develop and build the next generation of so-called Marine One choppers…. [B]ut the expected cost of the program has now ballooned to an estimated $11.2 billion…. This program fits the pattern of Edward’s Budget Law — when the government claims that a new project will cost $1, the ultimate taxpayer cost will be about $2 or more.

An irony of modern presidential campaigns is that they bring on board top tier economic advisors, but that doesn’t stop them from injecting economic nonsense into candidate speeches.  

Candidate Obama just added some skilled economists, but that didn’t prevent him from making ridiculous claims about recent economic policies in a speech yesterday. Take one Obama statement: “our president sacrificed investments in health care, and education, and energy and infrastructure on the altar of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs.” Obama is wrong on every point in this remark.

Here are the facts from the federal budget looking at Bush’s first 7 years in office (FY2001 to FY2008):

Recently I blogged about the federal government investigating businesses for keeping the price of milk too high, even though the government’s own policies push up milk prices.

America’s supposed hunger epidemic is catching up to crocodiles in the sewers as the most popular urban legend. The difference is that the hunger epidemic is being promoted by the nation’s major media.

Federal cost-cutting should be a central focus of the next president. One effort that should be bipartisan is overhauling the government’s out-of-control procurement system. Federal contractors routinely get away with outrageous cost overruns at taxpayer expense. From today’s Wall Street Journal:

News of the intellectual demise of the Republican Party comes almost daily. In its coverage of the bipartisan vote in favor of the farm bill (which overrode a well-deserved Bush veto) the Washington Post included this reaction:

The latest Rasmussen national survey “found that 62% of voters would prefer fewer government services with lower taxes. Nearly a third (29%) disagrees and would rather have a bigger government with higher taxes. Ten percent (10%) are not sure.”

No doubt that if Downsizing the Federal Government were on college reading lists, support for reform would jump from 62% to at least 90%.

Still, no matter how well-informed the public becomes, Congress poses a barrier to reform. The magic of Congress is its ability to consistently transmogrify the long-standing public preference for smaller government into ever larger budgets. Part of the trick is that members always claim that they support budget restraint in general, while arguing at the same time that each particular program, when it is up for a vote, desperately needs to be expanded.

How then can we realign congressional procedures to better reflect the 62 percent support for government downsizing? Part of the answer is to impose a cap on growth in the overall federal budget, allowing it to grow no more than the average family budget each year.