In praise of pork - pork barrel spending

Public Interest, Wntr, 1993 by John W. Ellwood, Eric M. Patashnik

The wrong culprit

But if the quest for local benefits leaves an unmistakable imprint on fiscal politics, the argument that pork barrel spending has been the engine behind the growth of federal outlays in recent years is simply wrong. In cataloguing the various types of taxpayer-funded pork, Stockman included billions of dollars spent on social-insurance entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. While there can be no doubt that these programs benefit organized groups whose members include many well-off citizens not in dire need of government assistance (that, after all, is why they are so popular), they certainly are not pork barrel programs in the classic sense.

While traditional pork barrel programs provide benefits to specific geographic constituencies as the (apparent) result of the actions of individual legislators, entitlement programs confer benefits on every eligible person as a matter of legal right. Thus, as Mayhew writes, "congressmen get no credit" for the mere handing out of checks. Were individual congressmen truly attempting simply to maximize their chances of receiving electoral credit it would be hard to devise a less effective way of spending taxpayer money.

Yet it is precisely these entitlement programs, which give congressmen negligible opportunities for credit-claiming, that are primarily responsible for the tremendous growth in federal spending. Entitlement payments and other mandatory outlays climbed from 5.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1962 to 11.0 percent in 1980, and to 11.3 percent in 1991. About half of all federal spending now goes towards mandatory programs.

By contrast, expenditures for domestic discretionary programs declined from a high of 4.9 percent of GDP in 1980 to 3.5 percent of GDP in 1991. In other words, while all programs grew when New Deal and Great Society liberalism dominated Washington, when the nation turned to fiscal conservatism in the 1980s it was domestic discretionary spending, not entitlements, that got squeezed.

What is most remarkable about this pattern is that some of the biggest discretionary cutbacks occurred in programs with the largest concentration of geographic benefits:

Water and Power Projects. When measured in constant 1987

dollars, direct federal spending for the construction and reha-

bilitation of water and power projects fell from $5.8 billion in

1980 to $4.3 billion in 1991, a decline of 26 percent. During

this same period, overall federal spending rose by 35 percent

in real terms.

Construction Grants. When measured in constant 1987 dol-

lars, expenditures for grants to state and local governments

for the construction of buildings and other facilities declined

from $27.6 billion in 1980 to $23.8 billion in 1991, a decline

of 14 percent. Several large grant programs were dismantled

altogether.

Other Intergovernmental Grants. When measured in constant

1987 dollars, expenditures for the wide variety of non-con-

struction grants-in-aid other than those for formula-driven pay-