Count on Bloomberg to give Congress a financial literacy quiz. Of course, also count on Bloomberg to slant so severely in the direction of fiscal conservatism so as to dull its credibility to near-zero figures. Still, occasionally we get a half-way amusing passage out of the piece.
8. The purpose of the tax code is:
a) To empower astute government bureaucrats to pick economic winners and losers. (For a history of recent picks, see ethanol subsidies, which contributed to food shortages, hundreds of millions of dollars in food aid for developing countries and an increase in greenhouse gases.)
b) To ensure full employment for lobbyists;
c) To encourage “good” behavior, such as homeownership, and discourage “bad” behavior, including smoking and drinking.
d) To create enough lucre to pay for the 11,610 pork-barrel projects in fiscal 2008, the second highest ever and a 337 percent increase from 2007, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, a private, non-profit group dedicated to eliminating waste in the federal government. This is after “Congress adopted earmark reforms last year,” the CAGW says.
A Financial Literacy Quiz for Congress [Bloomberg]
Commentary by Caroline Baum
Earmarks for “pork” are approx USD 18b, roughly 0.5% of the federal budget. Compare that against roughly 170b/year trying to spread “democracy” in the Middle East. I don’t have the figures for spending on entitlements.
Summary: pork barrel reforms are awesome for elections, but trivial in overall magnitude. However, considering the absurd cost-utility functions of the voting masses and their representatives in Congress, it does not surprise me that the issue of pork gets so much facetime.
I have a personal entitlement program which allocates some of my income to purchasing pork sausages when I consume eggs. Hence, pork is good.
I’m gonna call you on that. Yeah, earmarks are small, but they promote the idea that the role of congress is to go to washington and bring back goodies for their respective districts. So a lot of horse trading goes on. Not for the good of all america. An attitude that winds up impacting other spending as well.
The bigger problem is indirect pork-barrell spending. It’s not the discrete earmarks that hurt the budget ($1m here for a walkway, $2m there for a ‘research’ institute investigating the intoxicating effects of alcohol) it’s the massive nationwide programs brought home to local consituencies that matter. The energy bill is the recent favorite of pundits. Think about kind of pork ‘spending’ is part of mandated price floors for corn (taxpayer money), while maintaining a tariff on imported sugar. Taxpayers get hit on the food prices (corn and corn derived foods like pork), energy (foregone traditional oil e&p), and absorb the political fall-out that will soon follow. That alone doesn’t put a dent in the budget, but when you roll all of the implied pork together you get…well…government spending.
Just because you douches dont go to DC or lobby for yourselves, dont act so uppity to those who do. If it werent for ethanol spending, how would the Iowans afford NY trips?
I took that quiz and it was weird. On a number of questions there were no “correct” answers that I could fathom, but there was no “none of the above” choice either. None of the definitions of “CDO” was close to being correct. It correctly summarized what Ben Bernanke had done, but you had to recommend a future course of action and the choices were really lame.
The beauty of government pork is that it’s one thing both Dems and Reps in Congress can wholehearty agree on.
Let’s face it, pork doesn’t exactly hurt one’s chances at reelection.
Shouldn’t all this talk about pork wait until after Passover?
“The beauty of government pork is that it’s one thing both Dems and Reps in Congress can wholehearty agree on.”
… except for Senator Goldfarbenstein and Rep. Mohamed.