Spending and Representation

January 4: Our first class meeting this morning was with guest speaker Ryan Alexander, the President of Taxpayers for Common Sense. A lawyer by training, she worked for legal services in West Virginia before going into foundation programming and advocacy work.  At Taxpayers for Common Sense they deal mostly with issues of high debt, mandatory spending, and spending versus revenue. Or, Alexander put it, making sure government is what we want and what we pay for.

A big thing she spoke about was earmarking in bills. Taxpayers for Common Sense brought a lot of attention to earmarks such as the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska. Earmarks are often small relative to the bill, but usually do not relate to the actual topic of the bill. While these earmarks may benefit individual constituencies, the do not do anything for the larger national population. Taxpayers for Common Sense sees the need to point out that this may not be the best priority for federal dollars. Since the earmark moratorium in 2010, Taxpayers for Common Sense continues to make an effort to point out wasteful spending, asking the questions: What can we afford? Why are we doing this? Does it work?

After lunch, we met with Roxana Tiron of Bloomberg News. She began covering conflict coverage in Kosovo in college, worked for National Defense magazine, and wrote for the Hill about defense lobbies before working for Bloomberg. In her talk, she gave examples of how defense spending can at times be about the interests of constituencies and Congressmen of influence. Defense spending in many districts has many benefits at the local level. Places where planes, ships, and guns are built have jobs that rely on defense spending. Therefore, locality issues work their way into national politics this way.

Both speakers today pointed out ways that spending can benefit only a small portion of the country or at least benefit certain localities more. Representatives have a responsibility to their districts and also have to get re-elected by them. But, money for national spending comes from all over the country not just the districts of special interests and Congressmen of particular influence. Both speakers mentioned that Congressmen in Congress for a long time are better at controlling the allocation of funds and having influence, which can lead to more spending and benefits to their constituencies. Overall, the day was an interesting look on how money the government has can get allocated.

Until tomorrow,
Allie Thibault ’19
American Politics Seminar