Readers will recall that I’m a critic of critics of “pork” and “earmarks.” For one thing, the potential for saving serious budgetary money by cutting these things is routinely overstated by anti-pork crusaders. What’s more, the definition of “pork” is inherently contestable. As long as you have a legislature in which people represent well-defined (and often relatively small) geographical constituencies, one man’s pork is going to be another man’s infrastructure. And last, an aversion to small-scale bribing of legislators via pork may simply push legislative leaders to make even more damaging policy decisions in order to get people on board with bills.

That said, there are some real problems with pork, well-illustrated by Jason Zengerle’s piece on the town that Jack Murtha built:

From his perch on the House Appropriations Committee, Murtha had, over the years, directed $2 billion in federal spending to his district. … “I’m certainly a Republican … and I don’t think Mr. Murtha and I would agree on everything,” Mark Pasquerilla, a Johnstown businessman who attended the fundraiser, later told me. But “on an economic-development level, he delivers.” In steel’s place, Murtha had become Johnstown’s economic engine, keeping it afloat with a steady stream of government cash that flowed to the city’s private businesses, its hospitals, even its airport–which, like so many things in Johnstown, now bore his name. Murtha was not just Johnstown’s congressman; he was its savior.

The problem here is that Murtha can’t stay in congress forever. So the river of pork will dry up at some point. And then the necessary adjustments will prove to have been delayed, rather than actually avoided. But not only will a lot of federal resources have been squandered on this unsustainable model, those resources will have driven an even larger expenditure of state, local, and private resources on investments based on the pork flow. Ultimately the quantity of taxpayer dollars squandered on a Murtha-based economy is going to be dwarfed by the amount of money Johnstown’s own residents plowed, over the years, into investments related to a local economy that’s going to be teetering on the brink of collapse when Murtha loses his juice. $2 billion for a town located in a county that only contains 60,000 households is an awful lot of money that could have been used to help people get a new start someplace else where there were more job and business opportunities.

I, for one, cannot think of a better man to serve as custodian of the Bush legacy:

Former President George W. Bush took a step closer Thursday to establishing an “action-oriented think tank” alongside his future presidential library by naming James K. Glassman, the longtime journalist and former administration official, as its founding executive director.

Mr. Glassman, who served in the Bush administration as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and later undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, will be charged with building a public policy institute intended to advance some of the issues that Mr. Bush embraced as president.

Glassman is, of course, better known to bloggers who like to make fun of know-nothing conservatives as the author of the late nineties bestseller Dow 36,000. I think that’s the kind of detachment from reality you need to dedicate your life to bolstering the reputation of the Bush administration.

David Brooks is not wrong to recommend the Brookings Institution’s report “Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth”. He is, however, being completely absurd to suggest that what’s gone wrong with the health reform process in the United States could be fixed by “ask[ing] Obama to go to the Brookings Institution Web site and read a report called ‘Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth.’” As James Suroweicki says:

I could be wrong about this, but I suspect that Obama is more than familiar with Brookings’s work on health-care cost-containment, particularly since Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, was a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and has spent a good chunk of his recent years working on the problem of how to contain health-care costs. And it’s not as if the Administration hasn’t been talking — I would argue perhaps talking too much—about “bending the curve” when it comes to health-care costs. Brooks’s piece is written as if the real hurdle to change is that the Obama Administration doesn’t realize what’s wrong with the health-care system, so that if Obama just read the right texts, he would be willing to push for fundamental reform. But the Administration knows more than enough about the problems with health care. It’s just trying to figure out how to come up with a politically possible solution.

The fact that the Brookings report’s title is chosen to echo a phrase popularized by the Obama administration should perhaps have been a clue that the administration is aware of the basic shape of the problem. The fact that one of the authors of the report, David Cutler, was Obama’s chief health economics adviser during the campaign also seems relevant. Unless this is just pure low partisan politics, Brooks seems to be manifesting a weird form of the cult of the presidency problem, in which he suggests that sheer White House willpower could generate congressional support for controversial cost control measures.

But if you want to find villains in our failure to focus on controlling long-term costs, Obama is the last person you should point your finger at. The administration has done more than anyone else to focus attention on this issue. Second come moderate Democrats in congress who’ve also emphasized this. Third come congressional liberals, who don’t seem that interested in the subject but also seem perfectly willing to embrace it as a goal of reform as long as reform succeeds in expanding access. Then you’ve got the congressional Republicans who’ve given no sign of interests in bargaining in good faith. And then you’ve got the right-wing demagogues who now have every politicians in American convinced that any move toward cost control will get you denounced as eager to euthenize grandma. Insofar as respectable conservative like Brooks would like to see health care spending brought under control at some point, their failure to confront these voices is going to make that impossible.

As David Frum has written, the right is waging this war in a way that makes future conservatism impossible:

Even worse will be the way this fight is won: basically by convincing older Americans already covered by a government health program, Medicare, that Obama’s reform plans will reduce their coverage. In other words, we’ll have sent a powerful message to the entire political system to avoid at all hazards any tinkering with Medicare except to make it more generous for the already covered.

If we win, we’ll trumpet the success as a great triumph for liberty and individualism. Really though it will be a triumph for inertia. To the extent that anybody in the conservative world still aspires to any kind of future reform and improvement of America’s ossified government, that should be a very ashy victory indeed.

The perversity of winning this kind of pyrrhic victory is what convinced people that congressional Republicans might prefer to make a deal. But it seems that those who believed that were mistaken.

MacDougal Street, New York City (cc photo by Jim Linwood)

Ed Glaeser, taking a break from writing things about high-speed rail that make me mad, has a pretty great book review in the New Republic that expresses ambivalent feelings about Jane Jacobs and her legacy that I share:

Jacobs did help to make public decisions more accountable, which is an incontrovertibly good thing. There is little to like in arbitrary public power—but at this point the pendulum has swung too far. Today it often feels as if every neighbor has veto rights over every new project, public or private. When Jacobs’s heirs argue for limits on eminent domain and expensive boondoggle projects, I stand with them. When they impose more and more restrictions on private owners building on their own land, I shake my head. Jacobs herself did not oppose only highways and urban renewal, but also far more benign private projects such as NYU’s library. Education is crucial to urban success. Surely a twelve-story university library would not have hurt Greenwich Village. [...]

The Death and Life of Great American Cities argues that at least one hundred homes per acre are necessary to support exciting stores and restaurants, but that two hundred homes per acre is a “danger mark.” After that point of roughly six-story buildings, Jacobs thought that neighborhoods risked sterile standardization. (The one public housing project that Jacobs blessed, at least initially, had only five stories.) But keeping great cities low means that far too few people can enjoy the benefits of city life. Jacobs herself had the strange idea that preventing new construction would keep cities affordable, but a single course in economics would have taught her the fallacy of that view. If booming demand collides against restricted supply, then prices will rise.

The best way to keep cities affordable is to allow private developers to build up and deliver space. Jacobs was right that high-rise public housing is a problem, as street crime is much more prevalent in high-rise, high-poverty neighborhoods. But in more prosperous, privately managed buildings, height is not a problem. If you love cities, as Jacobs certainly did, then presumably you should want the master builders to make them accessible to more people.

The key fact here (interestingly, a fact Glaeser seemed determined to ignore during his HSR analysis) is that the overall rate at which a metro area’s population grows has relatively little to do with land use decisions in any one neighborhood or municipality. If existing cities in a growing metro area don’t get denser, then the metro area just winds up getting sprawlier and the existing good neighborhoods wind up getting increasingly unaffordable. It’s understandable that incumbent homeowners in an already great neighborhood often take an “I’ve already got mine” attitude toward further development, but it’s also regrettable and not something to be encouraged.

Very interesting video of Senator Al Franken talking to some upset constituents at a state fair: