I downloaded the spreadsheet of member items for my Assembly Member, and found that he has magnificently bestowed on his district $386,000 over the past three fiscal years. Moreover, looking at the specific list of grants, I found there isn’t a howler in the bunch. He sent $4,000 per year to every school in the district (not just those in Park Slope but also those in Parkville), for things like after school enrichment, software, contacts with parents, “multi-cultural” books, programs in music, bookcases and file cabinets. He provided grants for computer training and gardening for senior citizens, along with day care and transportation. He funded Pap test for poor women, language training for immigrants, assistance with safe homes and
crime prevention, a newsletter for businesses, etc. etc., generally with grants of $3,000 to $6,000 per year. Who could be against such things? Goes this mean I agree with the Daily Politics poster that “Everybody seems to forget that one man's pork is another's ‘vital infrastructure improvement?’” Absolutely not!
All these grants meet my definition of pork. Pork is a grant from a higher level of government that does not amount to a significant share of the funding for an essential public service, and/or which the affected community would not have chosen to pay for with its own money even if it could have afforded it, but only accepts the grant because it appears to be “free.” But it isn’t free. To get that $386,000, the residents of this district may have had to pay that much in state taxes, and may have had to pay far more. Forced to ante-up for the poker game, our section of Brooklyn may have won and may have lost (I suspect it lost). In a broader sense, however, we are all losers, because spending isn’t going to be scrutinized if people don’t realize they are in fact paying. And, from what I read, other legislators have made far more questionable choices than my Assembly Member.
Not significant? Would not have chosen to pay for it? Well, let’s consider a few of these member items.
Take the $4,000 annual grant to the elementary school down the street for multi-cultural books. That school has an annual budget of approximately $4.7 million, according to the most recent school report card, so the $4,000 provided less than 0.1% of the budget, or about one of ever 1,175 dollars spent at the school. If the multi-cultural books were a priority, don’t you think they could have been funded out of the $4.7 million? In comparison to the total budget, was a grant that size significant? And was it significant compared with how much larger the budget would have been if the City of New York had been getting a slightly fair share of state school aid all these years?
How about the $6,000 given to the Flatbush Development Corporation for newsletters, directories, and other items to attract business? According to the 1997 Economic Censuses, the retail stores in zip code 11226 alone over $250 million in sales, and that was nearly a decade ago. In 2004, according to County Business Patterns, the payroll of businesses in this zip code was $175 million. Don’t you think the businesses there could afford their own newsletters and directories, or couldn’t fund them with ads? Could it be that the newsletters and directories aren’t worth $6,000 to the businesses there, but they are fine if they are “free?”
How about the Pap Smears? Nearly $20 billion in Medicaid money was spent in NYC in 2002 – far more today. You mean with all that, poor women do not get Pap Smears? That’s terrible. Is it much better that most poor women don’t get them, but a small number especially lucky women benefit from my Assemblymember’s $2,000 gift?
The only good news here is that $386,000 is not enough to significantly increase my taxes, or to divert significant funds from other priorities. The overall $200 million on member items and other pork is less than 0.1% of the $219 billion in total state and local government spending in New York State, of which $133 million passes through the state of New York (which also has a big say in money both raised and spent locally). In that sense it doesn’t matter what it is spent for, as long as there isn’t much of it.
The bad news is that in exchange for the privilege of dispensing that $386,000, my Assembly Member, and all the other legislators, have voted in favor of budgets and other decisions that have done real damage. This $200 million tail, as I wrote earlier, has wagged the $219 billion the dog. It is the fact that the other $218.8 billion that is often treated as pork to be dispensed to interest groups that is terrible.
But why be cranky at Christmas. Instead, in the seasonal spirit of giving, I have attached a Peanuts cartoon from my childhood collection of books, to honor the generosity of our Assembly Members, State Senators, and also (for similar reasons) our City Council Members and Congress People. Thanks for the gifts you have so beneficently bestowed upon your humble and grateful subjects this year, you heirs of Good King Wenceslas.