09 26 05

When President Bush announced he would prefer to cut spending than raise taxes to pay for New Orleans’ reconstruction, many conservatives were concerned: WHAT DID YOU DO WITH GEORGE? Surely space aliens had swapped out Gee-Dub for some syntho-bot constructed in an orbital lab, because the Bush they know and love is not known for fiscal restraint.

Then again, who is? Many on the left view Katrina as an excellent opportunity to jack up taxes on the Hated Rich, those squat little guys in Monopoly-man suits who stroll around down thrashing the poor with their walking sticks. Massive national sacrifice is required, the left says, so let’s make the top quintile roll up their sleeves and saw off an arm. After all, tax hikes are partially responsible - rich people took the tax cuts, bought SUVs, set them on fire, which contributed to global warming. Or tax cuts somehow angered Gaia, who is exquisitely sensitive to marginal rates. She will hold her fury if the top rate’s 37%, but anything less and it’s Cat Five City.

But the President is correct, in theory: cut spending instead of taxing more. In fact, tax less – declare all of the New Orleans immune from corporate taxes for ten years, and the Mafia would go legit just to move there. But what to cut? Tom DeLay recently announced that the budget had been pared to the bone. Some thought he’d lost his senses – why, if you believe that, we have a $200 million bridge in Alaska to sell you. Perhaps it was a taunt: show us the cuts. If so, it fell on deaf ears, and ears of the sort unlikely to be converted into silk purses. Pork is a relative thing. Pork for me but not for thee. Eye of the beholder, and all that. Asking Congress to cut pork for altruistic reasons is like asking US magazine not to run stories about Oprah’s fluctuating weight, because it would be mean. Some other mechanism is needed.

To the blogosphere, Robin! Blogs are popping up with detailed lists of oink-related spending we could defer for a year, or two. Sites like XX have not only stepped up to the plate, but pointed out that the plate costs $422,934 and was funded by a rider to the 1998 Anti-Rider Bill. Theoretically, Congress could take their advice. Theoretically, Joe Biden could keep his remarks to less than four minutes.

Big highway projects, we can agree, aren’t always pork. Cities change; that two-lane interstate needs widening, if only so we can roll the tanks three abreast when the Bushitler Junta finally declares martial law. But almost $1.3 million for a pedestrian bridge to Clinton’s Little Rock museum? Two-point-three million for landscaping along the Reagan Freeway in California? Sixteen million for research grants to the Carter Killer Rabbit Control Center? Okay, we made that one up. Point is, pork is bipartisan, and so many of these geegaws hanging off the Highway Bill are wants, not needs – unless you think that the Constitution demands we tax people in Maine to pay for a Transportation Museum in Iowa. ($3.6 million.)

Pork works, that’s the problem. If the Robert Byrd Monorail takes you over man-made Lake Byrd, past the lovely Robert Byrd Public Ski Area on the slopes of Byrd Peak (when the snow comes, they call it Wizard’s Hat Mountain) to the Robert Byrd Public Library, you might well be inclined to cast your vote for that Byrd fellow. But it’s not hopeless. Say we reset the budget to the last bacon-stuffed multi-bazillion-dollar deal. Give every state delegation jurisdiction over the pork outlay for another state. The delegation that cuts the most gets a 10 percent increase in its own outlay. Let them bleed one another dry instead of the rest of us, in other words.

Like all satisfying solutions suffused with poetic justice, it has no chance of being enacted. So we won’t raise taxes, and we won’t cut spending. Whatever will we do?

Oh, right: borrow. Whew! Forgot all about that one. On to the next budget, then.

(Perm link.)