IN ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ACTS IN THE HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, MARTIN LUTHER NAILS HIS HERETICAL 95 THESES TO THE DOOR OF A CHURCH IN WITTENBERG, GERMANY

I confess to being something of a heretic regarding this whole “Porkbusters” crusade that is being championed by some of the heavy hitters in the Shadow Media.

What am I saying? Not just some of the biggest but the biggest conservative websites around. Glenn Reynolds, Ed Morrissey, and Michelle Malkin, are promoting the idea that if enough bloggers can find specific instances of “pork” in the federal budget and have their Congress Critter commit to cutting that spending request from the budget, the cost of rebuilding several thousand square miles of United States territory along the Gulf Coast can be offset and the budget deficit can be reduced.

First, let me congratulate those worthies for initiating and supporting this exploration of the capabilities of the New Media. In all seriousness, unless we try and understand just what the blogosphere can and can’t do, we’ll never get a handle on what is real and what is an illusion about blogs. Perhaps a campaign like this will actually define the political part of the conservative blogosphere in that it will measure true political influence in Washington and in the nation at large.

That said, this is an effort doomed to fail from the start. It isn’t just that most of the “pork” to be cut, even if taken together, represents a painfully small pittance when placed against what actually needs to be spent to make the Gulf Coast whole again. The entire “Porkbusters” campaign misses the point of what the federal budget is and what it represents.

I hope you are not naive enough to believe that the federal budget is even remotely related to what we generally think of as our own household budgets. In real life, we have a certain amount of money coming in and another amount that goes out. Hopefully, after the numbers are tallied there is even a little left over to put away for our retirement.

But the federal budget is not real life. It represents the dreams, the hopes, the desires – both noble and base – of 270 million of our fellow citizens. The long and short of it is one man’s pork is another man’s bread and butter. And while it may be tempting in carrying the metaphor even farther by stating that the two together make a BLT, it isn’t that simple either.

I have no doubt that if we look closely enough at the budget, we’ll experience many “aha!” moments where we will find several million dollars to build a bridge to nowhere. Or several hundred thousand dollars to construct a Post Office for a town of 12 people. Or a couple of million to redecorate the offices of top bureaucrats. Or, if we’re really looking with gimlet eyes at the whole budget, we could probably find a couple of billions to cut from the Department of Defense.

The same could be said for every other department of government. Great red swathes could be cut through the federal budget, inking out programs for rich corporations, anti-poverty NGO’s, as well as various freaks, bunkum scientists, and just plain charlatans.

In the end, you would barely scratch the surface of what would be needed to offset Katrina spending over the next few years. And the dent made in the budget deficit as a whole would be a joke.

And the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the Congress but in ourselves. The fault lies in our own expectations for what government should be doing for us. It lies in what we think government is capable of doing for all of us. And it lies in our own projected aspirations of what we think freedom and democracy are in this modern, industrialized, urban country of ours.

This is not a political dispute as much as it is a clashing of dreams. In perusing NZ Bear’s excellent web pages on the work being done by hundreds of individual bloggers in ferreting out spending they see as wasteful, I am struck by how cavalierly people wish to cut transportation funds. Now clearly, in legislation that proposes spending as much money as the transportation bill, there are literally billions of dollars being spent that would have a hard time passing the rancid bacon smell test. But what most of my conservative and libertarian friends fail to grasp is that almost every one of those projects represents the dreams of individual communities to improve the quality of life just a tiny bit or, more fundamentally, the return of a small portion of monies the people send to Washington to redeem expectations that people have of the federal government.

I’m sure my libertarian friends would point out that those expectations are unrealistic and should be discouraged or even changed. I would say go ahead, be my guest. Don Quixote needs some companionship. For in order to change those expectations, you must not only elect representatives that will reflect your desire for reform but you must also change the fundamental relationship in the United States between the people and the government as it exists in the 21st century.

If you are so inclined, might I suggest you attempt something more simple at first? Like, say changing the gravitational constant of the universe?

Simply put, only national defense is more important in America than building or improving roads and transportation. In a continental nation, road building is an Ur issue, as vital to small and medium sized communities as it is to large cities and the nation as a whole. Trying to pick out “unnecessary” road building projects is an exercise in futility. An outsider looking at any specific project has no clue about local conditions that may have necessitated the request in the first place. What looks like pork to some means something entirely different to the people directly affected.

This is not to say that there aren’t thousands of projects that are wasteful from the perspective of those who wish to place the good of the nation above the good of individual communities. Or even that opposition in communities to specific projects that will tear up green spaces (although this is done less and less recently) or allow property to be seized by local government to make room for these roads and improvements shouldn’t be looked at carefully. But it should be noted that the ancillary benefits including job creation, reduced traffic congestion, and safer travel are rarely mentioned when talking about a particular project’s designation as pork. I daresay few who propose such cuts are qualified to make that kind of analysis so that this kind of criticism is, in the end, an exercise in sophistry.

The Transportation Bill is part of the federal government’s discretionary spending as opposed to the mandatory spending on entitlements. For FY 2006, discretionary spending represents approximately 1/3 of the entire $2.5 trillion dollar budget request. Even if we were to freeze discretionary spending at last year’s levels, we would save barely $30 billion dollars – a good start but hardly the meat and potato cuts necessary to affect the amount that will be needed to rebuild a large part of three states, not to mention the reconstruction of a modern, industrialized city like New Orleans. Only cuts in basic entitlements like food stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), housing, and most important of all Social Security will reductions be significant enough to make a difference in both hurricane rebuilding and the budget deficit in general.

And here is where the budget leaves the realm of what is real and enters the stratosphere of hopes and dreams, expectations and necessity.

There is a story told by David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s OMB Director, of how he tried to show the President how hard it was to cut entitlements. Stockman, a former Congressman and a man with a nimble and penetrating intellect, was charged with turning Reagan’s campaign rhetoric about cutting the fat from the budget into reality. In the course of educating the President, he gave Reagan a list of programs and asked him to check off which one’s should be cut. When he got the paper back he made some quick calculations and showed Reagan that he had just cut less than 10% necessary to reduce the then ballooning budget deficit.

The story proves it is one thing in the abstract to advocate cutting programs for all but the “deserving” poor while it is quite another to actually change the relationship between government and the people. For what makes entitlements almost impossible to cut is contained in their very name; the government comes up with criteria of eligibility and as long as you meet that criteria, an individual or family is “entitled” to receive that benefit. It doesn’t matter if we’re at war. It doesn’t matter if we have massive budget deficits as far out as can be projected. As long as a citizen (and, of course, non-citizens as well) qualify under the law, the government is obligated to dispense the benefit.

And while it may seem easy to simply change the criteria of eligibility, in practice it is a virtual impossibility. For example, in order to deal with the crisis of social security solvency in the past, Congress has responded by usually raising the age of retirement so that today, one cannot receive full benefits from social security until age 70. But Congress cannot raise the age fast enough to keep up with the longer life spans experienced by the American people. Hence, our current crisis and one that requires even more fundamental tinkering with the system in order to avoid catastrophe.

And if all this isn’t enough to torpedo any kind of blogosphere-wide effort to cut the budget, there is always the politics of the budget to consider. You may notice how many of those Congressmen and Senators who have responded to the questionnaire say that it is important to cut spending but that most spending bills they vote on contain both elements they support and parts they oppose. This makes it virtually impossible for Congress to cut much from the budget as those bills represent deal making both in conference between the House and the Senate as well as in the cloakroom between parties so that the bill would garner as much support as possible. If these elements were not present, the federal government would come to a standstill and no spending bills would have a chance of passing. The art of politics has always been the art of what is possible. Perhaps a line-item veto for the President would solve such an impasse, but it is doubtful whether enough Congressmen and Senators could be found to support the emasculation of their own power. And it is by no means certain that such a measure would be constitutional under the separation of powers articles.

So while I applaud the effort of the blogosphere to take on the federal budget, I question whether such a project could even partially succeed. It may be that even tens of thousands of citizen journalists are no match for the tens of millions of Americans who would be directly affected by the kinds of cuts being proposed.

UPDATE

Jon Henke and I were on the same wavelength this morning. The difference is that John, being much smarter than I am (that’s okay, I’m better lookin’), actually has some common sense ways to change the dynamic of the budget debate as well as some very interesting thoughts along the lines that I was struggling to elucidate; that there must be a change in the relationship between citizens and their government.

That’s very nice, but—like Porkbusters—it’s the tip of the iceberg. Without structural reform, they’re merely playing at the corners of the budget. As Steve Verdon wondered, “Where was this kind of drive a year ago, or for that matter from the day Bush opened up the Federal coffers and started spending like a heroin junkie with a major jones? I’ll tell you where, nowhere. Nobody cared. Nobody will care in a few more weeks”. John Cole wrote of Porkbusters, “it is a short-term gimmick, when what is needed is a long-term shift in attitudes about spendings, taxes, and priorities”.

RTWT.

Also, Matthew in the comments points out that there is no such program as AFDC any longer. It has been replaced by something called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which replaced AFDC in 1996.

Thanks to Matthew for the correction…I’ve been away from Washington for 15 years and it shows sometimes…