Comment & Debate
Bradford Plumer. “The liberal case for pork”. The New Republic. September 12, 2006 – If deficit hawks and goo-goo groups had their way, many perfectly good bills would never pass. In 1986, the Reagan administration was trying to shepherd a surprisingly progressive tax-reform bill through Congress. (Although the bill would have reduced the tax rate on the top income bracket, it also raised corporate taxes by $120 billion over five years and simplified the tax code by closing about $300 billion worth of corporate loopholes. More importantly, the bill effectively eliminated federal income taxes for those under the poverty line.) At the time, liberals cheered, while right-wingers in the Reagan administration were furious. William Niskanen, the president’s acting chief economic adviser, reportedly said of the bill, “Walter Mondale would have been proud.”
The problem was that the reform bill faced an uphill battle through the Senate. A multitude of businesses and special interests risked losing their much-cherished tax breaks, and they lobbied hard against several provisions in the bill. The only way to ensure that the bill survived was to grease it up with pork. A large number of temporary tax preferences–known as “transition rules”–were added to the bill, at the behest of individual Senators, for over 174 beneficiaries, including a variety of cities and municipal facilities. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole worked to get his party behind the reform, and for his efforts received a tax preference for the redevelopment in his home state of Kansas. Even Ohioan Howard Metzenbaum, a longstanding opponent of narrowly-tailored corporate tax breaks, secured exemptions for convention centers in his home state.
As Alan Murray and Jeffrey Birnbaum reported in Showdown at Gucci Gulch, the definitive account of the 1986 tax reform, “Every time [Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bob] Packwood ventured onto the Senate floor, his colleagues stuffed pieces of paper into his jacket pocket, with additional requests for transition rules.” It was a feeding frenzy. It was obscene. But it also worked: “The transition rules were a necessary evil; they would help assure passage of the bill.” And since the exemptions cost little in the context of the larger bill, it was well worth the price.
Less than a decade later, Bill Clinton discovered the virtues of pork while trying to pass his deficit-reduction package in 1993. Since Republicans flatly refused to support the president’s budget, Clinton had to strong-arm several holdout Democrats into supporting the bill and its unpalatable tax hikes. Legislative bribery did the trick. Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini stopped opposing the budget after he was promised a cut on Social Security taxes, benefiting seniors (a key constituency in his state). Dianne Feinstein wavered on the bill until she received R&D subsidies for California companies. The budget ended up squeaking through the Senate on Vice President Al Gore’s tie-breaking vote and paved the way for balanced budgets late in the decade–a previously unthinkable task which some economists credit with helping to spur the economic boom in the ’90s. Pork made it all possible.
The point is this: Any big-government program on the progressive wish list will likely prove even more difficult to pass than the 1986 tax reform or 1993 budget. Single-payer health care? Card check for unions? Reductions in carbon emissions? It won’t get done without an orgy of earmarks to entice the inevitable skeptics in Congress. That won’t be pretty, but if the price of, say, universal insurance is a bit of borderline corruption here and there, it’s a tradeoff worth making. And, while it’s true that conservatives can use earmarks to pass their own massive spending programs–the prescription-drug benefit comes to mind–in the long run, institutional mechanisms that enable activist government will favor liberals.