North Dakota Has Third-Highest Earmarks Per Capita In The Nation

I’m quoted in the Wall Street Journal today talking about Senator Kent Conrad and his duplicitous “deficit hawk” ways. Author Neil King does a good job summing up Conrad’s two-faced spending ways, and laughably enough the best spin for Conrad’s hypocrisy is the suggestion that he has to be a hypocrite in order to keep up with demand for more and more federal spending in North Dakota.
Which speaks my quote in the article:

“The joke here is that we elect conservatives to state office because we don’t want them to spend our money, and liberals to national office because we want them to spend other people’s money,” says Rob Port, a conservative commentator in North Dakota.

It’s an old joke in North Dakota political circles, and a true one though given the last couple of sessions from the Republican-dominated legislature we aren’t exactly electing fiscal conservatives at home any more either. Regardless, as far as Kent Conrad is concerned, he talks the talk on deficits, but then walks the line of big spending.
Which is what a lot of voters do too. If you were to poll every citizen in the state of North Dakota there would be strong majority, if not nearly unanimous, consent for the idea that the national budget should be balanced. And, indeed, Senator Conrad once promised not to run for re-election to his Senate seat if the budget didn’t get balanced (he survived by vacating his Senate seat and…running for the seat vacated by the recently-deceased Quentin Burdick).
But despite that support from both Conrad and North Dakotans in general, the reality is that everyone wants federal pork too. Pork for agriculture. Pork for “green energy” pipe dreams. Pork for “economic development” projects.
We all want less spending. Unless it’s spending that ends up in our pockets. Then we want more.
That hypocrisy, both from people like Senator Conrad and his supporters, needs to end.