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Ht: Barry Day for his comment on “Is Ron Paul Worthy?”

Ron Paul took the liberty to defend his earmarking binge thusly:

Because earmarks are funded from spending levels that have been determined before a single earmark is agreed to, with or without earmarks the spending levels remain the same. Eliminating earmarks designated by Members of Congress would simply transfer the funding decision process to federal bureaucrats rather then elected representatives.

…

The real problem, and one that was unfortunately not addressed in last week’s earmark dispute, is the size of the federal government and the amount of money we are spending in these appropriations bills. Even cutting a few thousand or even a million dollars from a multi-hundred billion dollar appropriation bill will not really shrink the size of government.

Dr. Paul is correct on his second point. The bigger problem is the size of the total budget–mainly entitlements–of which earmarks are a relatively small portion.

His first point, however, is wrong. While it is correct that funding is appropriated before they are earmarked, it is incorrect to suppose that more requests for funds does not contribute to the growth of government.

If fewer congressmen (like Dr. Paul) requested earmarks, and less money, on the whole, was spent on earmarks than was appropriated for them, that money would go idle. Consequently, it would go towards financing other parts of the federal budget, over $200 billion of which is unfunded this year. Therefore, by reducing earmarks we could reduce the federal deficit, which reduces the size of government by reducing the amount of money the government needs to borrow from the private sector.

Also, if fewer congressmen requested earmarks, that would lower the demand for discretionary spending. If that happened, the next year’s amount of funds appropriated for earmarks would be reduced because of the fall in demand. When basic supply and demand is applied to the earmarking process it shows that if Congressmen would restrain their corrupt urges to appease special interests through pork barreling, it would reduce the impetus for earmarking in the future.

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The The Economic Consequences of Earmarks by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.