Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast for Monday January 8th. I'm Anastasia Glova and today I'm talking with Cato's Director of Budget Studies Stephen Slavinsky about earmark reform in the new Congress and what the World Toilet Summit has to do with it.

Stephen, what is this about Earmarks for a World Toilet Summit?

Well, let me just give you this a broad overview of what Earmarks really are are. Basically these are line items within the

budget that direct money to specific projects, usually by congressional whimsy. They're actually

strings attached to the budget effectively.

Now they only account for about 1% of the overall budget, but what's really going on here is it's

sort of a power play between Congress and the federal agencies.

Congress, instead of just giving a pot of money to an agency,

they want to have some control over where the money is being spent.

Problem is, this opens the door to a whole variety of tricks that Congress can play and specifically in a sense auctioning off the ability of

congressmen to get sorts of pet projects for not just their district but sometimes for special lobbyists for different

constituencies agriculture road builders any sort of lobbying group you can

imagine probably has their fingers in some sort of taxpayer financed pie somewhere in the federal budget.

So these earmarks really are in a sense, not specific programs, but they're carve-outs of specific

programs within the federal budget.

Now, the World Toilet Summit, incidentally, was financed by a group that's based,

believe in Ireland, it was about $13 million, went to this organization, and again, it was a near- near mark project and of course it ended up

finding its way to subsidizing something called the World Toilet Summit.

I'm still not quite sure what the World Toilet Summit is of course but if there ever

was a poster child for fiscal incontinence

perhaps this is it. But the President's Bush for earmark reform is a promising

development. What the President's proposed and what Congress has actually passed as a matter of fact is what they call

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