February 23, 2011
That’s what readers of a front page Washington Post article are undoubtedly asking after reading the first sentence:
“Is Rep. Harold Rogers the right man to break Congress’s addiction to spending?”
There is nothing in the article that explains an “addiction to spending.” It does describe efforts by members of Congress to get projects for their districts for which they can take credit, but it does not provide any evidence that this has been a major problem for either the federal budget or the economy. Virtually all budget experts agree that narrowly defined pork barrel spending, of the sort described in this article, is a small share of the total spending. Many projects are actually useful — members of Congress just want to circumvent the normal appropriation process so that they can take credit for it.
It would have been more reasonable to begin a piece with a phrase like “fear of deficits” as the disease that Congress needs to overcome, since tens of millions of people are now unemployed or underemployed because Congress has a seemingly irrational fear of running larger budget deficits.
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