New at Reason

January 10, 2007

Jacob Sullum asks whether Congress's ballyhooed lobbying reforms will amount to much at all.

Comments

|1.10.07 @ 9:00AM|#

A few years back I sat in a presentation by a fellow (whose name I forget) who had compiled data on the net cost vs. savings of all legislative actions in congress over something like forty year. He compared this data against the voting records of all members of congress. He said he expected to find a correlation between party membership and spending, but found absolutely none. After looking at a number of variables, he found one that was strongly predictive of whether a legislator is a net saver or a net spender: how long that member has been in congress. In short, the longer someone is in congress, the more he spends. This crossed party lines and was almost universal in its predictive value.

Of course there are some reasons for this, such as committee rank and so forth, but when members of congress are surrounded by sycophants who tell them that spending money will solve everything, and they can do it, I think they start to believe their own press.

So no, earmark reform won't accomplish anything since the folks using earmarks consider them a legitimate means to accomplish the good deed du jour.

I come from Alaska, which is arguably one of the most libertarian states, but we keep reelecting the execrable Don Young and Ted Stevens (how many senators get an airport named after them while they are alive?). The argument is that the have seniority and if we elect anyone else, there goes Alaska's influence. Of course one could have said the same about Sen. Murkowski, but when he got out of Washington and everyone in the state saw his arrogance (I knew one of his former staffers who flat out said Murkowski was one arrogant SOB), he was bounced out of the guvna's chair pretty quickly.

Fevevad

|1.10.07 @ 10:06AM|#

I think this article misses the point of the reforms a bit. They are intended to stop legislators from using earmarks for personal financial gain (although it seems it won't completely do that). They are not intended to stop earmarks altogether, nor stop their use for political gain.

|1.10.07 @ 10:52AM|#

Get your "reforms" now, 'cause they'll stop altogether in a month or so. joe's touching faith in the Democrats aside, there's no sign of any great changes here. At least they're talking about some reform still. Maybe some public outcry will come that will keep that alive a few more weeks. . . .