ABSTRACT
This chapter examines whether pork-barrel spending by Congress reduces income inequality. In studying pork-barrel expenditures, scholars of distributive policy operate on the core assumption that members of Congress are primarily motivated by the prospect of reelection. They engage in pork barreling because they believe that the more discrete benefits they manage to bring home to their districts, the greater their chances for reelection based on their record of constituency service. Pork barreling may be considered a direct variant of the latter strategy, one that circumvents the free-rider problem by targeting a member of Congress directly. In the realm of social spending, health spending increases the level of inequality; this could be related to the structure of the programs and whether citizens or health maintenance organizations gained greater benefit from the spending. One possible interpretation of this is that defense spending is crowding out social spending that could lower inequality.
