Earmarks Don't Matter, Contributions Do

Money Grab by Steve WamplerThe New York Times reveals that, surprise, surprise, private for-profit companies have found ways to circumvent earmark restrictions.  It turns out, setting up a nonprofit controlled by a for-profit company isn't terribly difficult.  For all the sturm und drang generated by stories of squirrel bridges to nowhere, earmarks don't really matter all that much.  A million dollars is a lot of money, unless you are talking about it in the context of a national debt of trillions.  That said, the earmark discussion did point out an area of real concern:

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Corporate Politics

Keeping an eye on corporate political spending - by laverrueJeb Golinkin at the FrumForum thinks the Democrats are making too much of the Citizen's United decision:

Does anyone really think that the CEO of a Fortune 500 is going to be stupid enough to fund campaign advertisements? Think about it logically. It’s hard to imagine a more “Red” corporation than Wal-Mart. But consider the following facts: Each week, about 100 million Americans head to Wal-Mart to shop. A poll in 2004 found that 76% of voters that shop at Wal-Mart once a week voted for Bush. That’s an astonishing margin. But that still means that 24% of Wal-Mart shoppers voted for someone else (23% said they voted for Kerry). If you do the math, if 100 million customers make it to Wal-Mart next week, 23 million might be liberals. If Wal-Mart runs an advertisement supporting a candidate or makes campaign contributions to a candidate, it runs the risk that the New York Times finds out about it, puts a story on the front page, and as a result, 23 million of their customers may take their business elsewhere. Not only that, if they contribute, and then lose, they have pissed off the other party unnecessarily. Tell me, what good does that do?

A major corporation with major spending power would stand to gain very little from attempting to tip the balance of a few House or Senate races.

This logic makes superficial sense, except that the whole point of the legislation currently under discussion is to force corporations to disclose that they funded advertisements.

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Pay Attention to the Number of Zeros

We've all heard the stories of primitive humans only possessing words to express "one", "two", and "many".  Yet most modern people still think of numbers in terms of these basic units.  When we visualize three of something, we think of one group of one and one group of two.  Four is two groups of two.  Five is two groups of two and one group of one, etc.  Certainly, for things like money, we have relative anchors to which we assign values.  For example, one dollar is roughly the amount of money that buys me one pack of M&Ms.  Ten dollars buys me a used Bloodsport DVD.  300 dollars buys me a Playstation 3 or pays for one-month's rent in a mediocre apartment.  7,000 dollars buys me a ten-year-old economy car in decent condition.  A 100,000 dollar loan puts me through business school.  If I'm lucky and work hard, in ten years, 200,000 dollars could be my annual salary.  If I make the right choices, use my money effectively, and save, I might even be able to buy my one million dollar dream house in twenty-five years.  This is the absolute limit for 95% of Americans.  Numbers above this limit often are simply assigned the value of "many".

So it's no surprise that people all over the country are getting all up-in-arms about stimulus scandals and banker bonuses.  But, to put it in perspective, here is a list of "many"s expressed in terms of dream houses:

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Leaders instead of Politicians

During the Bush years, it inspired despair to consider how many things in this country desperately needed to be changed even as we had leadership that seemed blithely unconcerned or unaware of global warming, the exploding cost of health care, income disparity, burgeoning prison populations, a drug war on our own citizens, and on and on, with no end in sight.

Oh, but now, we have Obama and his change we can believe in! And truly it is nice to have a leader who at least seems to acknowledge that things could be done better. Yet, his preference for pragmatic, popular solutions rather than really exerting political capital on anything leads to “better than nothing” bills like Waxman-Markley. The problem stems from Obama’s preference for delegating the details of legislation to Congress, because at this point Congress is a fundamentally inept institution.  At least Bush, almost exclusively for the worst, was incredibly skilled at getting Congress to do whatever he wanted, usually by framing dissent as unpatriotic.  Unfortunately, the founding fathers wanted a system isolated from “sudden breezes of passion”, yet it seems that the opposite has happened, and Congress is unable to do anything at all without campaign bribes and “sweeteners.”

The truism goes: “all politics is local.” This is borne out by polls that show that while Congress as an institution inspires dismal support nationally, most voters rate their own Congressman fairly highly. It is no surprise then, that most politicians win not on issues of national importance, which they have little control over, but by “bringing home the bacon.” Thus, the most effective strategy for getting a bill through Congress is to ensure that it will benefit many locales, even if it is of dubious national importance.  It is difficult to read Nate Silver analyzing votes for Waxman-Markey based on the carbon cost of each state, as though that is of any importance to the bill, which can be understood exclusively on a national level. Voters are like a sick person who is afraid of needles – see California referendums that always increase services but never increase taxes - they need someone to convince them to take their medicine. That is the entire point of representative democracy; politicians are supposed to be able to make hard decisions because they are the best suited and informed to do so.  Yet everyone not only tolerates, but expects politicians to be liars and cowards, saying what they think we want to hear and doing only what they think will keep them in office.  Does anyone think Obama is really against gay marriage?  Yet gay people will explain why he shouldn’t die on that battlefield.

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