Your tax dollars at work

I just read Senator Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook 2010” and I must say, the people in our government, from the local level all the way up don’t have a clue. Wastebook 2010 is a list of 100 expenditures of federal funds on  what Senator Coburn feels were completely useless and unneeded projects.  According to Coburn, this list adds up to $11.5 Billion dollars, and that there are “examples like these too numerous to count”.  We’ll take a look at some of the things on his list in this edition, and if you’d like to read the report in its entirety, you can find it here:  Wastebook 2010

 Very few of us have been unaffected by the last few years and the economic turmoil that has forced millions of Americans out of jobs.  Many have lost their homes and other possessions, struggle to find health care and even food.  The stimulus package put forth by the Obama administration was supposed to help with all this along with the bailouts to the banks and big industry like car companies and so forth.  The talking heads on the nightly news point to all of this and say it’s the cause of the staggering amount of debt .  All of that has had a great effect on the national debt, no doubt, but I would offer that if there are examples too numerous to count of spending like we are about to take a look at, that this is where we are bleeding to death, and we must gain control of this nonsense before it kills us.  I don’t have a problem with anyone spending their money as they see fit.  I do it, you do it, and that’s just the way it is.  We all buy things we don’t need, and sometimes spend more than we should.  Few of us save money against hard times or for retirement like we should.  You gotta have a little fun once in a while, and as responsible adults, we have earned the right to do as we please.  If we spend the rent money on a party, and wind up homeless, well, maybe we know better next time.  The problem is, Congress is doing this, and if we don’t make them stop, we’ll all be homeless and there won’t be a next time.

Take for instance the very first item on Senator Coburn’s list.  According to this list, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spends $175 million dollars a year maintaining buildings it doesn’t use.  In spite of this tremendous amount of money, many of the buildings are in very poor condition and are infested with vermin. In the report, Coburn says that the VA disputes the figure; saying that it only spent $34 million dollars on these properties and that is has in fact sold off 266 of the unused buildings in the last 3 years.  You got to wonder, if the buildings are virtually abandoned, and have fallen into disrepair, what are they doing with the money supposedly spent to maintain them?

I’m not going through every one of the 100 items on the list, but I can’t resist number 2.  The city of Shreveport, Louisiana  according to this report, spent $1.5 million dollars of stimulus money removing mold from a housing complex. In their stimulus grant application, they said that $100,000 of it would be used for this purpose with the rest going towards improving low income housing projects operated by the city.  The report goes on to state that HUD officials noticed some 10 months after the money was received that none of it had been spent, and that after a year unused funds had to be returned.  A few weeks later, city officials had signed contracts for a million and a half dollars for “mold remediation” at this one apartment complex.  Well, here’s where it gets sticky.  The complex was slated for demolition.  Why would you spend any money on improving a building you were going to tear down?

Number seven on the list is the next thing to talk about.  The Department of Energy’s electric bill is $190 million dollars a year.  It’s energy consumption is second only to the US Postal Service in all government agencies.  Auditors say they could reduce that by more than $2 million dollars a year by turning off unused lighting and switching to more efficient technology.  Imagine that.

Then there are the Armenian criminals that bilked Uncle Sam out of $35 million in fraudulent Medicare payments, but I don’t really count that as something they did willfully.  That was a crime committed against our government that I supposed couldn’t be helped at the time. At least they discovered it and arrested those responsible.

Another crime, this one perpetrated by our government against the people of this nation is the $1 million dollars of tax payer money spent to put up little signs with snippets of poetry in various zoos around the country.  Yes, I said poetry, on signs, in zoos.  Its bad enough that someone would actually have the gall to ask for federal money to do this, but the Senators and Representatives that pushed this through should at best lose their seats, and in reality should see the inside of a prison for a year.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not against the project itself.  Zoos are valuable assets that should be protected and maintained, but that sort of thing should have been funded by bake sales and car washes at a local level, not with federal money.  A drop in the bucket you say?  That’s a matter of perspective.  That drop is pretty valuable when its leaking out of the bucket, and you depend on the contents of that bucket to survive.

The nearly two and a half million dollars spent to subsidize flights between the cities of Macon and Athens, Georgia to Atlanta is another program that should send the people involved to prison.  The payments were made under the federal government program called Essential Air Service, intended to support carriers who will serve rural communities far removed from so-called “hub” airports. The flights take 50 minutes, but it’s less than a 90 minute drive from either of them to Atlanta.  With population of more than  92,000 for Macon and well over 100,000 for Athens, these cities can hardly be described as “far removed rural communities”.  With all the hassles involved in air travel these days, why would go to all that trouble to dodge a 90 minute drive? Little wonder they have to subsidize the flights, very few people are actually doing it.

While we’re talking about Atlanta, did you know that more than $47 million dollars of your stimulus money was given to Atlanta to build a street car project in downtown?  Why is that a problem you ask?  For two reasons…one, after its completion, if you were to ride it from one end to the other, you will have only been transported a little over 2 1/2  miles. Two, the street car track is being built directly over a subway that covers the exact same route. Proponents say that it will help to alleviate traffic and congestion in the downtown area.  Really? For two and a half miles? Come on…you can’t be serious.

Don’t even get me started on the $2.5 million dollars the Census Bureau wasted on the Super Bowl commercial.  Whoever cooked that up should be wearing a striped suit and swinging a hammer to turn big rocks into little rocks.

Here’s one that will twist your shorts.  Number 21 on the Senator’s list says that the National Institute of Health gave the University of Puerto Rico nearly $443,000 to study male prostitutes and their social setting…in Vietnam.  Since 2008, this project has received nearly a half million dollars a year.  Why?

The last one I’ll mention is one that just completely blows me away.  There are all sorts of promotions for wine and tourism and ad campaigns that were in my opinion complete wastes of money.  Money spent to demolish abandoned buildings out in the middle of nowhere and to maintain roads that no one ever uses, but  this one beats all. This is another National Institute of Health boondoggle that wasted $800,000 of stimulus money.  Now, let me digress for a second.  I thought all this stimulus money was to be spent in ways that would stimulate the American economy and help put Americans back to work.  Isn’t that what President Obama got on tv and told everybody?  Well, if that’s the case, why did all this money go to a program to send researchers to Orange Farm, South Africa to teach South African men how to wash their genitals, and to study the “feasibility of improving male genital hygiene as a possible way for men to protect themselves from HIV”.  Yes my gentle readers, nearly a million dollars of “stimulus” money, meant to help keep our economy on its wheels, was spent half a world away to teach men how to wash their tallywhackers after a roll in the hay. I don’t argue that they need to know how to do that, but is it really the responsibility of the American government to make sure they do?

Do you see now why I said at the start of this that the people running our nation don’t have a clue?  If we don’t band together and get these idiots out of office in the very next election, we are doomed to fail as a nation.