Away from the media glare and the debate over the appropriate role of government in the economy, the federal stimulus bill represented a mad scramble among legislators to secure as much federal largesse for their own constituents as they possibly could.
If you look at the legislation in this purely distributive fashion, North Carolina faired poorly. According to the liberal Center for American Progress, we are to see $16.14 billion of the 69 percent of funds from the bill that can be attributed to the states. This accounts for 2-3 percent less than we ought to receive if spending were distributed purely on a per-capita basis.
The data reflect a pattern. North Carolina normally does not get its fair share of the federal pie. It is true that since the mid-1990s we’ve been receiving a few cents over a buck for every dollar we send to Washington, but that’s essentially due to annual federal deficits and the big premiums wealthy Northeastern states pay. When it comes to ranking the states using these data, we’ve been, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, anywhere between 27th and 42nd for each year over the past quarter century.
This might not sound terribly bad. But since much federal spending is directed at poorer states — and on a per-capita income basis, we’re well in the bottom half — the performance is really quite abysmal.
The observation begs the question: Why aren’t we very good at getting stuff from Washington? One reason is that the Senate, with its disregard for population, gives disproportionate influence to small states. Wyoming has two senators, just like California. Given that we are now the 10th most populous state in the union, we lose with this rule.
Research on the president’s role in directing pork also sheds a little light. Strong blue and red states — those where the outcome of the presidential election is usually very one-sided — tend to receive more. We are not really among this group. Political scientists attribute this to “payback” by the president for a state’s support.
I have published a paper that shows states with early primaries tend to get more federal procurement — especially if they support the candidate who eventually goes on to win the White House. The candidate who will become president nearly always wins the North Carolina primary, but that’s only because we go so late in the process that there’s hardly anyone but him to choose from.
Most of the variation in the geographic dispersal of pork is explained by congressional politics, however. Two things are particularly critical. First, it’s helpful to have your state delegation dominated by the majority party.
Since we are no one-party state, we have not flourished recently under either Democratic or Republican rule. During Jesse Helms’ tenure our Senate delegation was often split, as neither party seemed capable of holding on to the other seat. With Richard Burr and Kay Hagan, the parties are sharing spoils again. Our House delegation has been divided in recent decades, too, especially since the big Republican gains of 1994.
The second secret to generating pork is to have members in positions of influence. North Carolina has been particularly unskilled in this regard. You have to go back to 1807 to find North Carolina’s one and only House Speaker, Nathaniel Macon. Claude Kitchin is the state’s only House majority leader, serving during World War I.
To find the last Tar Heel to chair the big tax-writing committee, Ways and Means, you have to reach back to the 1950s for Democrat “Farmer” Bob Doughton. No post-Civil War chair of the spending committee, Appropriations, has been from North Carolina.
The story is the same in the Senate. Since party leaders were first formally selected in the 1920s, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have picked a North Carolinian to head them. As with the House, there has been no North Carolina Appropriations chair. The only Finance, or tax-writing, Committee chair from our state was Furnifold Simmons, who served during World War I.
More recently, only Sam Ervin Jr. and Helms have been around long enough to do much. Ervin’s great legacy is not economic — it is the Senate’s Watergate investigation. Helms was most adroit as a veto player in Washington, not an agenda setter.
It’s not that Tar Heels don’t like pork. After all, we devour barbecue and are second in the nation in hog production. It’s just that the people we send to Washington don’t seem to be able to bring home the bacon. Come to think of it, perhaps we should start a national trend.
Andy Taylor is Chair of Political Science at N.C. State University and a columnist for Carolina Journal.