Don’t bring back the pork barrel

I feel like I’m reliving my youth. It’s not a midlife crisis, I promise. Statistically speaking, I missed that opportunity many years ago. And neither flashy cars nor splashy parties have been or will ever be my thing.

Here’s what I mean. When I read the news of the day, it feels as though I’m rereading the biggest political stories of my youth.

I came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. While I have only vague recollections of the Watergate scandal, I closely followed the subsequent presidential election and cheered on former California Gov. Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge to Richard Nixon’s vice president, Gerald Ford. As a teenaged news junkie and 20-something journalist, I even more closely followed the rivalries within GOP politics and the conservative movement between Nixon loyalists and Reagan insurgents. During the same period, I read (and doubted) numerous stories about the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, the shrinking middle class, the fading American dream, and the superiority of European-style social democracy and Japanese-style industrial policy over American-style individualism and free enterprise.

Here we are again. The Populist Right has a new crush on Richard Nixon and ridicule conservatives like me for being “Zombie Reaganites.” The Progressive Left still yearns for social democracy. Both groups peddle gloom-and-doom interpretations of modern America that draw ready audiences despite their shaky empirical foundations. And both groups disdain unfettered markets in favor of national governments playing a larger role in economic planning and industrial development.

Closer to home, when I started writing about the North Carolina legislature in the late 1980s, one hot-button issue was pork-barrel spending. The Democrats then enjoying large majorities in both chambers had perfected the practice. Each loyal Democrat (and Republican willing to play ball) got a fixed amount of tax money to direct to infrastructure projects, public-safety agencies, and other headline-grabbing local causes. Lawmakers on the outs got little or nothing.

My colleagues and I railed against the pork barrel. Most of our peers and rivals did the same. The argument was never that local recipients lacked merit. Many put their subsidies to effective use. Few were fake, corrupt, or offering kickbacks to politicians to grease the skids. The exceptions did, of course, get plenty of attention from critics of the process. But the solution wasn’t to run the pork barrel more judiciously, we argued. It was to eliminate it entirely.

Under the North Carolina Constitution, the General Assembly isn’t a co-equal branch alongside the executive and judicial. It is, by design, more powerful than the other two. Only the legislature can levy taxes and appropriate the proceeds, for example. And unless an executive or judicial officer receives a direct grant of power within the constitution itself, the officer’s power is bestowed by statute. What the legislature gives, it can later reclaim and reassign.

Where I part company with some legislative friends of mine is their conclusion that because the General Assembly possesses the power of the purse, it ought to appropriate state dollars to specified local governments or private entities. For most legitimate functions of government, I would submit, lawmakers should appropriate funds either by fixed formulas or as pots of money to which localities, contractors, and other recipients can apply for funding. Competitive bids, evaluated on the basis of clearly articulated criteria, should be the norm.

Just as it would be unwise for the General Assembly to fund named state employees in a budget bill, it ought not appropriate tax dollars directly to specified local or private recipients.

The latest state budget contained hundreds of earmarks, some listed in the General Fund itself and others shifted off-budget to disguise the spending total. Thanks to some intrepid reporting by Carolina Journal, lawmakers are about to claw back an especially egregious $300,000 earmark for a homeowners association in Harnett County. A small step back toward fiscal responsibility, sure, but giant leaps would be better.

Pork-barrel spending is too retro for me.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.