Department of Visual Aids
Downblog, joe John Schwenkler makes the obvious jape I forbore:
Don’t forget about earmarks, Jim! The first step to fiscal sanity runs through the earmarks!
Here’s my idea. To get across the fiscal immateriality of earmarks, why not literalize the metaphor? Make an actual mark on your ear with a pen (water-soluble!) and say, “This little slash, compared to my whole body, is the proportion of earmarks to the budget.”
Comment by John —
September 19, 2008 @ 12:18 am
Joe? Joe? That was JOHN, dude …
Comment by John —
September 19, 2008 @ 12:19 am
(I.e., me.)
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 19, 2008 @ 12:20 am
Really?
Why the hell were you pretending to be Joe???
Comment by Monte Davis —
September 19, 2008 @ 4:45 am
The earmark fixation is of a piece with the campaign positioning: “We’re maverick reformers, we have nothing to do with the incumbent president or the party in power over most of the last forty years.”
It is of a piece with this week’s focus on Wall St. greed and mismanagement: “We abhor regulation, we believe the free market always optimizes, so any downside must be the fault of a few bad apples.”
(Actually, I welcome the latter because to some extent it may pre-empt the Democrats’ own impulses toward populist perp-walk outrage.)
Comment by Barry —
September 19, 2008 @ 8:15 am
“(Actually, I welcome the latter because to some extent it may pre-empt the Democrats’ own impulses toward populist perp-walk outrage.) ”
We need perp walks. To me, the most important lesson in the past decade or so of corporate scandals is that Wall Street will not police itself. Given the situation, large-scale corporate fraud looks like a good deal, to the rational criminal.
Right now we’re looking at $1(followed by many, many zero’s) of losses, with fewer people doing time than a marijuana ring with no violent crimes.
Comment by Monte Davis —
September 19, 2008 @ 10:40 am
Barry, I’m not exculpating anyone. I’m saying that the total going to fraudsters is a small fraction of the value currently being destroyed — just as earmarks are a small part of our budgeting dysfunction. Obloquy and punishment for the deserving are fine, but should not become substitutes for the systematic changes needed.
Comment by Tony P. —
September 19, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
There ought to be a law:
Nobody is allowed to speak, write, or otherwise communicate a federal budget number of any sort except in per-household terms.
This draconian abridgement of pols’ and and pundits’ right to free speech is made slightly less onerous by the convenient fact that there are roughly 100 million households in the US. Thus, one billion federal dollars correspond to ten household dollars.
So, in household dollars:
National debt is about $100,000
Dick and Dubya’s Excellent Adventure, $10,000
AIG’s payday loan, $850
Bridge to Nowhere, around $3
Earmark to study the DNA of bears for either criminal or paternity purposes, around 5 cents.
The downside to successful implementation of this law would be that
“$10 here, $10 there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money” just doesn’t sound as funny.
–TP
Comment by radish —
September 19, 2008 @ 2:52 pm
Yeah, sure. But I’d be a lot more sympathetic to that view if it weren’t also a perfectly sound argument for allowing a burglar to keep the silverware after they burn the rest of house to the ground. As long as you let people think they can accrue $100k worth of personal benefit by destroying $1b worth of somebody else’s value they’re gonna keep doing it.
Comment by Monte Davis —
September 20, 2008 @ 9:01 am
if it weren’t also a perfectly sound argument for allowing a burglar to keep the silverware
What part of “Obloquy and punishment for the deserving [those who defrauded or broke other laws] are fine” don’t you understand?
Comment by radish —
September 22, 2008 @ 12:19 am
I understood it all just fine. I was responding to what I consider a misplaced emphasis, not disagreeing outright. Thus the “I would be more sympathetic” rather than “that’s totally fucking crazy.”
Systematic changes without perp walks are (IMO) no more desirable, and perhaps less so, than perp walks without systematic changes.
Prosecution — even failed prosecution — can be effective in a way that the anticipation of systematic change cannot. Systematic changes are hellishly difficult to design, take a long time, and tend to have a lot of unintended side effects. Worse, trying to make systematic changes without first attempting to hold particular individuals responsible for particular acts often leads to poorly designed systematic changes, or changes which aren’t really necessary.