Author Archive | Tad DeHaven

Last week I discussed the tendency for policymakers to treat the Pentagon like a giant jobs program. It was prompted by an article from the Associated Press on members of Congress shoving unwanted upgraded Abrams tanks down taxpayers’ throats because retooling tanks sustains jobs back in the district. As it turns out, former Reagan budget director David Stockman touches on the Abrams tank situation in his new book, The Great Deformation.

In Chapter 5 – “Triumph of the Warfare State” – Stockman gives an account of the behind-the-scenes dealings that resulted in the massive military buildup during the Reagan administration. Stockman says political calculations – and not “one scintilla of bottoms-up program detail or even a single hour of professional analysis” – drove the new Reagan administration to champion 7 percent (real) growth in defense spending every year for five years (1982-1986), and from a already elevated level. According to Stockman, the “7 percent real growth top line” was a “blank check” for the Pentagon to go on a spending binge – much to the pleasure of the military-industrial complex.

From p. 74:

No fresh start or strategically coherent defense plan was ever developed by the Reagan administration. This immense, content-free “top line” was simply backfilled by the greatest stampede of Pentagon log-rolling and budget aggrandizement by the military-industrial complex ever recorded.

In a process that went on week after week for the better part of a year, the huge swaths of empty budget space under the new defense “top line” were converted into more and more of virtually everything that inhabited the Pentagon’s vasty deep. Much of it, which had languished for years and decades on the wish lists of the brass and military contractors, now got funded without much ado.

With defense funds being virtually slopped onto the waiting plates of the four military services, it is not surprising that much of it went to the conventional forces. Notwithstanding all the scary stories about the nascent Soviet nuclear first-strike capabilities, there really weren’t many concrete programs to counter it except for a new strategic bomber and an MX missile upgrade.

At the heart of the Reagan defense buildup, therefore, was a great double shuffle. The war drums were sounding a strategic nuclear threat that virtually imperiled American civilization. Yet the money was actually being allocated to tanks, amphibious landing craft, close air support helicopters, and a vast conventional armada of ships and planes.

These weapons were of little use in the existing nuclear standoff, but were well suited to imperialistic missions of invasion and occupation. Ironically, therefore, the Reagan defense buildup was justified by an Evil Empire that was rapidly fading but was eventually used to launce elective wars against an Axis of Evil which didn’t even exist.

That leads to the Abrams tank.  Continue Reading →

One of the realizations that helped me to dispense of the neoconish foreign policy views of my youth is that for federal policymakers, the Pentagon is like a giant jobs program. Regardless of need, a military installation or armament factory can generally count on the unwavering support of the member of Congress who represents the district or state where the facility is located.

On Monday, the Associated Press’s Richard Lardner provided a textbook example: over the past two years Congress has spent almost a half billion taxpayer dollars—and wants to spend another $436 million—upgrading Abrams tanks that experts and the Army itself say aren’t needed.

Who are some of the biggest congressional backers of the tank upgrading? Why, Republican “deficit hawks”!

Keeping the Abrams production line rolling protects businesses and good paying jobs in congressional districts where the tank’s many suppliers are located.

If there’s a home of the Abrams, it’s politically important Ohio. The nation’s only tank plant is in Lima. So it’s no coincidence that the champions for more tanks are Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rob Portman, two of Capitol’s Hill most prominent deficit hawks, as well as Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. They said their support is rooted in protecting national security, not in pork-barrel politics.

“The one area where we are supposed to spend taxpayer money is in defense of the country,” said Jordan, whose district in the northwest part of the state includes the tank plant.

Ah, yes, the “national security” excuse—probably the most cited justification by politicians to spend other people’s money since the ink dried on the Constitution.   Continue Reading →

The latest report by the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold on Beltway tomfoolery tells of what happened when both Democrats and Republicans asked government workers and the public for suggestions on how to reduce government spending. Apparently neither party had much interest in the responses.

Fahrenthold first looks at the Obama White House’s effort:

After President Obama set up a national online suggestion box asking federal workers for new ways to cut the budget, 86,000 ideas came in Some, inevitably, were a little odd.

…But many others were more serious, sent in by people who had seen real government waste close up: stop the “use it or lose it” budgeting policy, which leads agencies to blow taxpayer money at year’s end; stop giving paper calendars to workers who already have online calendars; stop letting every armed service design its own camouflage.

In the end, none of those things happened. Instead, those suggestions became a little-known part of the maddening story of Washington’s budget wars.

…Obama, for instance, chose 67 suggestions out of those 86,000. While some produced results, many seemed unambitious. Often, the administration picked ideas that applauded what it was already doing, instead of forcing it to start new reforms. Still, the White House considers that a win.

Of course it does.

Fahrenthold then turns his attention to the GOP’s “YouCut” website. Created in 2010 and run by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, regular Americans were to be given menus of potential spending cuts, and they were asked to vote for one. Winning ideas were then supposed to go to the House floor for a vote. In the end, only two of the 36 winning ideas became law. No bill was introduced for nine of the winning ideas, and 12 were “introduced only,” which means that they never even made it to the floor for a vote.

Like the administration and its online suggestion box, Cantor’s office claims that YouCut was a success:

“The purpose of the YouCut program was to change the culture of Washington,” Rory Cooper, a spokesman for Cantor, said in an e-mail. “Today, as is evident to anyone paying attention, that culture has been changed.”

Of course it has.

And now that the “culture has been changed,” it appears that the people’s input on spending cuts is no longer needed:

YouCut appears to be dead. No new votes have been held in the current Congress. Cantor’s spokespeople did not respond to questions about the program’s status this week.

Note: For more on the awesomeness of the GOP’s YouCut endeavor, see commentary from Chris Edwards and me here, here, here, and here.  Continue Reading →

The Washington Post notes the following quote from Rep. Paul Ryan in his CPAC speech:

“We don’t see the debt as an excuse to cut with abandon, to shirk our obligations,” Ryan said. “We see it as an opportunity to reform government, to make it cleaner and more effective. That’s what conservatives stand for.”

That’s interesting because more effective (or efficient) government is also what liberals stand for.

As I wrote upon the release of Ryan’s latest budget proposal, more efficient government isn’t the same as limited government. I appreciate the argument being made by some limited-government advocates that Ryan’s budget is a “step in the right direction” because it would slow the growth in federal spending versus the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline. That’s a good thing—especially when compared to the bloated alternative put out by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). But I think that proponents of limited government should consider a “step in the right direction” to be a budget that actually attempts to extricate the federal government from involvement in every facet of our lives. In that regard, Ryan’s budget only represents a step toward a slightly cheaper big government. Continue Reading →

The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has identified another budget zombie. This time it’s an obscure grant program administered by the Federal Aviation Administration that dumps money on tiny airports with scant activity.

From the article:

Along a country road in southern Oklahoma, there is a place that doesn’t make sense. It is an airport without passengers.

Or, for that matter, planes.

This is Lake Murray State Park Airport, one of the least busy of the nation’s 3,300-plus public airfields. In an entire week here, there might be one landing and one takeoff — often so pilots can use the bathroom. Or none at all. Visiting pilots are warned to watch out for deer on the runway.

So why is it still open? Mostly, because the U.S. government insists on sending it money.

Every year, Oklahoma is allotted $150,000 in federal funding because of this place, the result of a grant program established 13 years ago, in Congress’s golden age of pork. The same amount goes to hundreds of other tiny airfields across the country — including more than 80 like this one, with no paying customers and no planes based at the field.

And why does the federal government insist on sending Lake Murray—and other seldom used airports—money?  Continue Reading →

The media’s harboring of a pro-government spending bias isn’t exactly news. But an article in Politico is notable because it illustrates the tendency for local newsrooms to push human interest stories that emphasize the pain of spending cuts.

According to the article, it’s pervasive:

Journalists from Florida to Washington state told POLITICO that their editors are hungry for stories that turn bureaucratic doublespeak about automatic cuts into a human story of real-world pain—from layoffs to cutbacks in treasured hometown programs.

Ask Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, who got hit with a question about the Blue Angels during a Jacksonville TV station segment of locals upset that the famed flying aerobatic team may be grounded and 30 air shows canceled if sequester takes effect. The Democrat insisted the cuts won’t happen as long as “reasonable people” figure out a solution. “It’s a Navy town,” he later told POLITICO. “I knew a question was coming up, so I didn’t wait for it.”

The appetite in local newsrooms for that kind of story is widespread, local reporters say.

Not surprisingly, special interests have been more than willing to assist reporters in spreading the doom and gloom: Continue Reading →

The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold recently took a look at the $38 billion in spending cuts that Republicans and Democrats agreed to in 2011 in order to avoid a government shutdown. Fahrenthold estimates that $17 billion of those “cuts” were little more than budgetary gimmicks. For instance, $6 billion in authorized spending for the previous year’s decennial census were merely wiped off the books and counted as a “cut.”

Fahrenthold’s piece is a good reminder of how unserious politicians from both parties are about cutting spending. But I want to make two additional points.

First, real or not, let’s not forget that the $38 billion in “cuts” were a drop in the bucket that year compared to total spending, the deficit, and even interest on the debt:  Continue Reading →

Beltway politicians like to pretend that smaller spending increases amount to spending “cuts.” As Dan Mitchell has pointed out numerous times (see here for one example), that’s baseline budgeting baloney. Now that the 2011 Budget Control Act’s spending caps are in place, politicians are making an even more ridiculous claim: the so-called “cuts” have alreadyoccurred.

The caps apply to spending over ten fiscal years – the last year being 2021. We are obviously not in the year 2021, so it’s impossible for the so-called “cuts” to have already been implemented. Yet here are two examples from a recent Politico article where politicians suggest that to be the case:

“There are people that think we need to cut more,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) acknowledged in an interview. McKeon said he’s been pushing back against budget hawks in the GOP conference by pointing to the nearly $600 billion in spending cuts that the Pentagon has already absorbed in recent years — and that’s before sequestration would even begin.

…

“I think there’s spending that can be taken out of all departments,” said freshman Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.). “And I’ve talked to people from the Pentagon. There’s just areas that, yeah, we can pull back a little more, even though they did their $470 billion already. They said it hurt, but we possibly could.”

I’ll cut Rep. Yoho a little slack because the article indicates that he’s open to cutting defense. Rep. McKeon, on the other hand, deserves no such leniency. (Why McKeon said $600 billion and Yoho $470 billion I have no idea.)

The following chart illustrates why it is ridiculous to act as if smaller future increases in projected spending amount to realized spending cuts. The chart shows the Congressional Budget Office’s August 2001 baseline estimate of defense spending from 2002 to 2011 versus the actual outlays: Continue Reading →

Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist A. Barton Hinkle recently made what should be a simple point to understand, but it’s unfortunately one that few people seem to appreciate. Writing about the supposed win-win situation whereby states expand Medicaid coverage and the federal government foots most of the bill, Hinkle reminds readers that the “free” federal money isn’t really free:

In Virginia, officials estimate expanding Medicaid would cost the state $137.5 million over nine years, while the state would receive $23 billion from Washington.

Other states report similar figures. California expects to enroll up to 910,000 residents for a cost beginning at only $46 million a year, while collecting $44 billion in federal funds over a six-year period. An Illinois study estimates that state would spend about $2 billion on expanded Medicaid over the next decade, while reaping $22 billion in federal funds. According to Danielle Holohan, who is in charge of New York’s insurance exchange, Medicaid expansion “actually works out to be an enormous savings” for the Empire State. And so on.

This all sounds great—if you are a state official. But if you are a lowly taxpayer, it leaves out one rather significant point: Where is all that federal money coming from?

No great mystery: Most of that money would come from taxpayers who live in the very states that are looking forward to these supposed windfalls. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, if every state signed up for Medicaid expansion, then the federal government would spend nearly $1 trillion over the next nine years—paid for by you.

So you don’t have to wait for Medicaid expansion to reap this sort of “windfall.” Just take 5 bucks out of your left pocket and put it in your right. As far as your right pocket is concerned, you’re 5 bucks richer. It’s free money!

In addition to not being free, federal subsidization of state spending makes it harder for taxpayers to understand and appreciate where their money is going and how it’s being spent. A Cato essay on fiscal federalism explains: Continue Reading →

via the CATO Institute

A study [$] published in the winter edition of Political Science Quarterly considers two possible reasons for why the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) failed to sprinkle Uncle Sam’s magic dust onto those areas of the country that were being hardest hit by the recession.

Was it because well-positioned politicians were successful in delivering the pork?

Or was it because the recession created a “window of opportunity” for politicians to quickly spend a bunch of additional money on pet causes, which had the effect of benefitting certain areas of the country?

I’m going to skip right to the answer: the uneven geographic distribution of stimulus funds had only a little to do with traditional pork barreling and much to do with Obama’s then chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s famous quip that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

On the possibility of traditional pork-barreling, the authors found no statistically significant relationship between the distribution of funds and whether a county was represented by a politician serving on a congressional committee relevant to stimulus funding. Nor was a relationship found between funding and counties that were represented by a Democrat in the House or Senate. However, a relationship was found between funding and those counties that overwhelmingly voted for the president:  Continue Reading →