Pork Barrel Spending

Pork Barrel Spending

Introduction

The modern U.S. budget estimates revenues and authorizes expenditures. Hence, the legal treatment of public spending should be more careful, at both constitutional and legal levels. Typically, it involves the financing for government programs such as economic and service benefits, concentrated in a particular area but costs among all taxpayers. Public works projects and agricultural subsidies are the examples most commonly cited, but do not exhaust the possibilities. The pork barrel spending is often allocated through last-minute additions to appropriation bills. The importance of government spending at the national level often changes with the nature of the federal budget. Many voters across ideological lines are, in fact, fiscally conservative. Conservative in the sense that few voters express preferences for increased government spending if it would mean increasing the size of the federal budget deficit. Thus, in election years when the deficit is an important issue, government spending also tends to increase in importance.

Pork is everywhere. The federal government's fiscal year '99 Energy and Water appropriations bill contained over 1,800 pork- barrel projects, three times more than the Transportation appropriations bill, which was second-highest. And although the Military Construction bill contained a little less than 500 projects, they accounted for 42 percent of all spending in the bill. One of the primary advantages accruing to incumbents, particularly legislators, is the ability to secure funding for projects meant to benefit local constituencies. In a positive sense, these programs can be considered distributive or particularistic. They are meant to distribute some amount of the general revenue of government back to specific geographic units: districts and states. Pork-barrel politics is characterized by a meteoric growth. Although the increase in the number of projects has been rising since 1985, the growth appears to be accelerating. The number of projects in five of the 13 appropriations bills doubled between fiscal year 1998 and 1999. These programs, especially when discussed in the media or by political opponents to such spending, are also called pork barrel projects or earmarks.

Discussion

One of the earliest examples of pork barrel policies in the United States was the premium account 1817, which was introduced by John C. Calhoun to construct highways linking the Eastern and Southern United States to its western border using the bonus earnings of the Second Bank of the United States. One of the most famous pork-barrels was big push in Boston, Massachusetts. The Big Dig was a project to make the existing 3.5 miles (5.6 km) road from one state to another, and put it back underground. This enables the delivery of federal funds to the district or the state's local appropriation committee member, often accommodating major contributors to the campaign. To some extent, it determines their ability to judge a member of Congress to provide funds to its components. The chairman and ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on appropriations is in a position to deliver significant benefits to their states.

Citizens against Government Waste outlined seven types of spending, which can be classified ...