Yesterday, U.S. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell announced his support for a two-year moratorium on earmarks, a form of appropriating money that is deeply unpopular with the Republican base, particularly those who associate themselves with the Tea Party movement.
The amount of money that goes to earmarks is large, as far as my family’s budget is concerned (about 15 or 16 billion dollars), but as a percentage of the federal budget, it’s quite small. It’s around 0.4% of the total budget and 1% or so of the discretionary budget(1).
In many ways, banning earmarks is a symbol, and if Congress can figure out how to use different tricks during the appropriations process, tracking this money could theoretically be more difficult under a no-earmarks rule than the current system, which is why I applaud the move, but with realistic expectations and a hefty dose of skepticism.
If you’re a no-earmarks person and this is your big issue, go ahead and break out the party hats, hang some streamers, and maybe have a few slices of layer cake. But don’t swallow too much champagne, and for the love of God, keep away from the mixed drinks at the bar (It may look like an open bar, but you’ll get the bill later). Considering the history that we (and by “we”, I mean the human race) have with politicians, we’ll need to stay sober and clear-headed to deal with whatever accounting/appropriations tricks they may invent the days ahead.
Codpieces
Thanks to the tireless efforts of the Transportation Security Administration(TSA), if you’ve ever wanted to be on a reality show, all you have to do is travel, and you can be the star of Who Wants To Be the Next Unpaid Nude Model?!
While Senator McConnell
In a little-noticed press release, they announced new guidelines for air travel that include detailed instructions for the “proper care, hygiene, and grooming of areas traditionally concealed beneath undergarments and viewed only by doctors, spouses/domestic partners, and congressional aides”. While not mandatory, adherence to grooming instructions is considered polite by TSA agents who are required to search the aforementioned area.
This is part of their recently-unveiled “no granny’s crannies left untouched” initiative, which is being put in place to inflict emotional pain, traumatize children, and humiliate millions of travelers without doing anything to prevent terrorism or make flying safer. They are also renaming the agency the Transpornation ‘n’ Nudity Administration (TNA).
Critics of the new initiative claim that it is being pushed by the International Sisterhood of Gynecological Technicians in response to the March passage of the Patient
The revised job requirements for Transportation Security Screeners are expected to include the following:
- Proof of U.S. citizenshipMany people are uncomfortable with the invasive nature of aggressive TNA security checks and backscatter imaging systems. Government sources assure us that backscatter images will never be stored, and TNA agents aren’t even allowed to bring a cellphone into the booth where backscatter images are displayed (one dollar per five minutes, quarters only please) to take personal pictures!
- High school diploma, GED or equivalent; OR
- At least one year of full-time work experience in security work or aviation screener work; or with x-ray technician work; OR
- The ability to work wonders with a speculum
How reassuring.
TNA safeguards explain why the website Gizmodo has published backscatter photographs that it received after a Freedom of Information Act request. The images on Gizmodo are very blurry because they were taken by a machine that takes much lower-resolution photos than the ones currently deployed at airports, so one would be wise not to feel too reassured by their extreme pixellation.
Here’s a great video on the subject. In all fairness to the Obama administration, a lot of this nonsense started under President Bush, but I don’t think that we crossed completely into creepy territory until recently.
In a bold move that lays the groundwork for the legality of broad-based, invasive, ineffectual searches done with no probable cause, TNA guidelines explain that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution(2), when understood as part of a living, breathing document, defines “unreasonable search” as “the search of an individual wearing a hijab or burqa”, so all non-Muslims are fair game.
This makes perfect sense, since a rabid alliance of Presbyterians, Reform Jews, Maasai, Shamans, Pastafarians, Zoroastrians, Satanists, Jains, Wiccans, and Buddhists from Plum Village are responsible for the majority of hijackings worldwide.
Symbols matter
Human beings use symbols incessantly and instinctively. In his essay “The Delta Factor”, the late philosopher/novelist Walker Percy imagines looking at humanity from the outside, the way that a Martian would, and explaining how he appears: not “Homo sapiens, because attributing sapience already begs the question... as Homo loquens, man the talker, or Homo symbolificus, man the symbol-monger?”
Using symbols is part of our nature, much like recognizing and using patterns is, for good and for ill. They set us apart, as far as we can tell, from other animals. As Percy suggested, we are Homo symbolificus, and the symbols that we choose say important things about us.
Symbols matter.
The American flag is, for example, “merely” a symbol. It stands for the self-evident truths that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
When the American flag is desecrated or burned, we feel affronted. We become angry and offended, because it is an assault on what the flag stands for: our ideals, those self-evident truths that we hold dear, the one nation, alone in the history of the world, that is founded on a creed: Liberty is better than tyranny, a government that promotes liberty accords with natural law in a way that no other can, and government exists for the sake of promulgating liberty and protecting citizens from the tyranny that is a natural by-product of unconstrained man ruling as he sees fit.
When politicians do things that seem foolish or dangerous, we can and often do understand and forgive them.
When they become venal, we recoil. We react, much as we do to a burning flag, with an sense of anger and revulsion, our emotions and reason both offended. A crooked politician is to be expected; a politician who is openly the property of a corporation or an interest group makes us sick. (Who though, I wonder, really owns whom?)
I think that maybe this is why earmarks are so unpopular. They are signs of ownership, not democracy. The more politicians use them to cement their power, the more power accrues to them, and the more they are able to remake the nation in their image. With the explosion of the budget and expansion of the government, there is a palpable sense that tyranny is taking over the house where liberty’s flag is supposed to fly.
This brings us to the symbolic meaning of excessive power at the TSA. The symbolic meaning is... Oh, c’mon. Who are we kidding? We are unwilling or unable to rein in politicians who have been happy to dole out power to an army of bureaucrats and security guards. The TSA is beyond ridiculous, a caricature of a government agency given too much power and too few restraints.
If the TSA/TNA nightmare is symbolic of anything, it’s that we are willing to give up privacy, decency, and liberty on the off chance that maybe a backscatter machine will help prevent a single terrorist from crashing a single plane, if he (or she!) manages to get through every other security check and isn’t particularly original.
One would think that recent history would teach us something: Nineteen perverse individuals armed with box cutters, solid training, and a fixation on virgins in paradise were able to destroy the World Trade Center using two airplanes as cruise missiles and then repurpose the Pentagon as a crash-landing pad. We’ve prevented plenty of attacks since then, and this is due to a combination of luck, good human intelligence, our choice to take the war to the enemy, and intercepted communications, not from mandatory, forced sexual contact between a security guard and a group of devious debutantes from Dubuque.
[Quick aside: I don’t mean to impugn individual TSA agents. They don’t make the rules, and I’m sure that they’re hard-working, decent individuals. It’s not their fault that politicians have given too much power to the TSA and created rules and regulations that they are required to follow. They deserve our respect and appreciation, as their job stinks and they’re not compensated all that well (avg salary = ~30K).]
Hard facts matter too
Symbols are important, and objective facts matter too. We can eliminate every earmark in the budget and not spend those funds on anything else, and we’ll only scratch the surface of our spending problem. (Quick note to my progressive friends before you say it: The problem is not that we tax too little; it is that we spend and regulate far too much.)
Earmarks are a step in the right direction, but they’re only a step. The government needs to scale back discretionary spending over, say, twenty years by a fixed percentage (maybe 5-10% a year), and then cap it, indexed for inflation. We should slowly defund and dismantle those agencies and programs that do not perform the essential, Constitutional functions of government, and we should do so quickly for those whose actions are counterproductive to government’s limited, proper functions.
Non-discretionary spending is even more important. Entitlement reform is something that the government will have to do in order to prevent a complete financial meltdown (a la Greece), and the sooner the better. (We have ~$107 Trillion in unfunded liabilities between Medicare and Social Security. Click here and scroll about 2/3 of the way down for a visualization of how much money $100 Trillion is.)
Just as a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (Lao Tzu), reining in a budget that threatens the ultimate destruction of our republic begins, perhaps, with ending a few billion dollars in earmarks. Maybe a little discipline in the basic things will stiffen the spines of our representatives and encourage them to fix the perpetual crisis called the federal budget.
On our other topic today, the power of the TNA, the reality is so harsh and stark that it overwhelms any symbolism. In order to travel by air, we submit, willingly, to being treated like criminals entering a high-security prison. Slightly worse than the fact that we are gladly embracing tyranny in our airports is that we are doing so without making travel any safer. We can improve security for less money, with less hassle, by following Israel’s security model. I recommend this article for an overview by Rafi Sela, a security consultant.
A Note on Etymology and Who Owns Whom
The word “earmark” comes from the livestock trade. Sheep and cattle have their ears docked in specific shapes that allow the owner to identify them easily from a distance. This is similar to branding, and the two are usually used in conjunction.
It enters the financial world through English common law:
“EARMARK.—§ i. Property is said to be earmarked when it can be identified or distinguished from other property of the same nature. The term is chiefly used in respect of money, which differs from most other things in being rarely capable of being earmarked. As a general rule ‘money has no earmark,’ and therefore if a sum is paid to a banker and is mixed by him in the ordinary course of business with other money in his custody, that particular sum is incapable of being distinguished from the rest. But if money is received by a person for a special purpose, and is kept separate from his other money or is invested in some property or security which can be identified, then the money is said to be earmarked, and can be ‘followed,’ that is, claimed and recovered, by the person entitled to it. The question is of importance in cases where the receiver of the money has become insolvent, for unless it is earmarked the person entitled to it can only share in the general assets instead of recovering the whole sum.” (from A dictionary of English law by Charles Sweet, 1882)In other words, earmarked funds are set apart and, essentially, treated as more important than general funds. Their use for specific projects is guaranteed, and so that project can be said to “own” the funds, similar to how a rancher owns his livestock.
I’ve been a bit loose with the word tyranny in this piece, and that may upset a few individuals. It is a strong word, but recognizing a problem will allow us to address it, slowly, through Constitutional, democratic means.
I use the word tyranny because it fits; the way that I see it, misappropriated funds and statutory sexual assault are tyrannical. The latter makes its own case, but I think that the former is more insidious because it occurs slowly and, in many ways, invisibly.
Taxes aren’t voluntary. They’re taken forcibly, “at the point of a gun” to borrow from Ayn Rand. The government owns those confiscated dollars, and by using them for pet projects, a lawmaker attempts to build a safety net for his re-election. He is using your money--taken at the threat of your imprisonment--to buy votes. Banning earmarks won’t eliminate fiscal tyranny, but it’s a start.
Those in favor of campaign finance reform claim that corporations and special interests own lawmakers. If, though, politicians can earmark funds so effectively that he buys thousands or millions of votes, then who owns whom?
1. A note on Non-Discretionary and Discretionary Spending
The government has obligations that it is legally required to keep, and this part of the budget is non-discretionary. It’s a bit more than 60% of the total and accounts for defense, Medicare, and Social Security, each of which represents approximately 20% of the federal budget. The rest, which they can spend as they like (essentially) is 40%. I’m pretty good with Excel and balance sheets, but the way that they define some things requires the skill of a forensic accountant.
When Reagan was President, the discretionary/non-discretionary breakdown (in billions) went from $380/$300 to $650/$400. Under Clinton, the breakdown grew from $850/$550 to $1,100/$680. Under George W. Bush, $1,200/$685 to $2,000/$1,000. The 2010 estimate is $2,300/$1,400.
In other words, in the last thirty years, Defense + Medicare + Social Security spending went from $380 billion to $2.3 trillion. That’s roughly a 6X increase. Some of this is due to inflation, some is due to the much larger population now eligible of SS and Medicare, and the rest of which is due to George W. Bush, who gave us Medicare Part D and advanced the Democratic Party’s agenda better than Carter and Clinton put together.
Non-discretionary spending increased from $300 billion to $1 trillion between 1980 and 2008 (a $700 billion increase), and in the next two years, it increased by another $400 billion. I’m not sure where the economic
2. The United States Constitution, amended
The Fourth Amendment reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Update: Airports don't have to use security services provided by the TSA. Under a provision that Republicans inserted into the original law, airports can use private security services instead. The lawmaker who inserted the language in question, John Mica, "has recently written to the heads of more than 150 airports nationwide suggesting they opt out of TSA screening."
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