Outrage over Pork Projects Misses the Point

Politicians and presidential candidates love to rail against questionable earmarks -- the now infamous bridge to nowhere proposed for Alaska, mohair research, the Lawrence Welk Museum, etc. All examples of fiscal irresponsibility and sheer waste in Washington.

The government spending watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste has been cataloging unauthorized earmarks slipped into spending bills for nearly 20 years. This year, they cite 11,610 earmarks that will cost taxpayers $17.2 billion in fiscal year 2009. Sure, there's some laughable items on the list every year, including some new ones - $188,000 for a lobster institute in Maine, $460,000 for researching hops used for beer and $743,000 for olive fruit fly research to be conducted in France.

GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting John McCain has been a happy crusader against pork for years, and he pledges to attack pork with gladiator zeal if elected. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also pledge to limit excessive earmarking. But so what if they do? Who really gets hurt when McCain goes to the mat over a small little earmark. What McCain and other anti-pork crusaders conveniently skip is the far more difficult and serious challenge of uncontrolled automatic spending in entitlements. On that, they're just about silent.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other automatic benefit programs, such as veterans health care, add up to about $820 billion a year, about 30% of the budget. Health care benefits alone, if left unchecked, over the next three decades will amount to the same percentage of the economy as the entire federal budget does today. You'd think the looming retirement of the baby boom generation would compel Congress and the presidential candidates to seriously address entitlement reform. It's hardly ever mentioned, though, even though everyone knows tough reforms will be required at some point -- trimming future benefits, limiting eligibility, hiking taxes, privatizing some parts or some combination of all.

But that kind of talk doesn't draw an eager crowd.

That was true enough last month. On March 30, prominent budget policy scholars urged Congress to end autopilot spending on entitlements and enact long-term, capped budgets for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. They also suggested a trigger mechanism that would force tax hikes or benefit cuts as costs of the programs escalate.

I'm being generous by saying the press conference was thinly attended. It received hardly a mention in the national press, nor has a congressional hearing been called to explore further the idea of capping entitlements. 

The debate may eventually get started when McCain and others in the anti-pork crowd acknowledge that the daunting challenge of curbing entitlement spending is far more important than a pittance in the budget for fruit fly research.