No One Cares About Earmarks
by Jonathan Singer, Wed Mar 11, 2009 at 02:03:35 PM EDT
A few minutes ago I was carping to Josh about the fact that there was a debate on MSNBC's "Hardball" about whether Barack Obama was doing enough to combat earmarks. Lo and behold, Josh informs me that at about the same time CNN was running nearly the same debate.
With so much attention being paid to earmarks, you'd think that (a) people cared about them, and (b) they mattered. But as is the case with all too much coverage of American politics by the establishment media, neither of these situations is the case.
For instance, take a look at Pew polling (.pdf) in the field immediately following the 2008 election. Pew, better than anyone else, does a great job of measuring what Americans care about. When asking voters their top priorities, Pew leaves it up to respondents to give their own answers. This open-ended model, at least from my perspective, gets closer to finding out what people are actually thinking because it does not force them into one of just a few boxes.
So what did that mid-November 2008 Pew survey find? No one cared about earmarks. No one. Respondents were allowed to make multiple selections, and even Socialism and the candidates' religiosity showed up. But fewer than a half a percent of respondents (from what I understand, Pew rounds on these issues, so only a half percentage response is required to make the list), and perhaps even not a single respondent, indicated that earmarks were one of the most important issues in determining their vote.
As to the second point, whether earmarks actually matter, I'd point back to a post I wrote about a week ago on the topic:
Earmarks make up a miniscule proportion of expenditures, and don't significantly increase the budget. Rather, they shift decision making power on certain projects from the executive to the legislative branch, which isn't necessarily the worst or most nonsensical thing as Congress is elected to legislate on matters like funding of programs.
With no one really caring much about earmarks, and earmarks not really mattering so much beyond the potential in a few instances to be corrupting (an aspect of the expenditures that the President directly sought to combat today by requiring earmarks for for-profit entities to go through a competitive bidding process), you might think that the Beltway press would stop spending so much time following John McCain's lead in excessively focusing on them. Apparently not, though...
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