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.

Electric Cars revisited

Let’s take a look at owning a plug-in electric car.  The first thing that comes to mind is your freedom from the gas pump.  You never have to care about the price of gasoline or diesel again!  As the owner of a full size 4WD pickup truck with a very large V8 engine, I can see where that would have a lot of appeal. So how much would a plug in electric actually help this situation?

Standard equipment for the plug-ins currently available includes a cable which you plug in to standard house current. If you’ve depleted your battery, you are looking at as much as 20 hours to recharge it. This would be a situation where you’ve run it down somewhere to the point that it could not be driven and you’ve had it towed home.  Let’s assume you didn’t do that, and the car made it into your garage. To be fair, we’ll say that it is discharged to the point that it takes 16 hours to charge back up. To put that in perspective, if you’ve arrived home at 6 p.m. and plugged in your charger, the battery won’t be fully charged until 10 a.m. the next morning.  If you have to be at work at 7, that could be a problem.  I suppose you could unplug it and drive on a partial charge, but I would imagine that the owner’s manuals do not recommend that practice. I haven’t read any of them, but that’s a pretty standard recommendation on any battery powered device.

There is a way around the 20 hour wait however.  For an additional $700 to $1200, plus the cost of installation, you can have a Level 2 charger installed in your house. Commonly referred to as “charging docks”, these chargers require a dedicated 240 volt 30 amp circuit to operate.  In most places, installation will require the services of a licensed electrician. Be sure to check any local codes and ordinances before you buy one of these.  If you live in an older home or in a rural area, you may need to upgrade your electrical panel to install one of these devices. This will pump up the cost considerably. Once installed however, this charger will top off your electric “tank” in about 8 hours.

Ok, you’ve laid down $30,000 for the car, another $1200 for a charger and $1200 more to have it installed so you’re ready to start saving all that gas money right?  Well, let’s talk about my truck for a minute.  I spend about $40 a week for gas for it, more or less depending on if we do much driving on weekends. Through the summer, it’s considerably less, as my wife is out of school and I work at home. If we use $40 per week for an example, the costs associated with the charger bought gas for me for over a year at current prices.  For people that already have small cars and spend say, $12 a week for gas, that’s 4 years of fuel, just in the charger! But you’re saving gas money, remember?

I mentioned earlier that you were free from the gas pump with one of these.  True enough, but if it’s your only means of transportation, you’re on a pretty short leash with one of them. Published specifications say you can get up to 100 miles per charge. That specification assumes you are driving in perfect weather on flat terrain at 35 mph. I would bet that around where I live, you’d see that drop off sharply. There is very little flat terrain in this part of Arkansas, and if you live around here or have watched the news lately you’ve seen that the weather is far from perfect.  We commonly range from temperatures in the teens in winter to triple digit heat in summer.  My wife has a 34 mile round trip commute to work, and I dare say that factoring in the distance, terrain and weather, it would tax the abilities of most of the electrics out there to make that trip every day.  She certainly couldn’t make it two days in a row without a recharge.  Add trips to the market, pharmacy and all the other things you have to do to make life livable and you are now out of range.  You see, they don’t advertise that you can’t get that 100 miles per charge if you have to spend time on a freeway at 70 mph.  Highway speeds sap your battery very quickly. These things are in-town, residential speed commuter cars.

One of the things you see in any argument online about owning these things is what happens when there’s a disaster that knocks the power out. Neither side of the online battles that I have read has any common sense.  For one, if the power fails, you can’t recharge.  That’s a given. If the disaster happens while you are at home that might not be a big deal, depending on what caused it. But what if you need to evacuate? If it’s a manmade disaster like a chemical spill for instance, your little electric car can probably get you to safety. But what happens if you just made your 40 mile commute, got home, plugged your car in, turned on the tv and discovered that there’s a category 5 hurricane headed your way and the governor has ordered everyone to move inland by 200 miles?  After you wait the 8 hours to recharge, it’s gonna take anywhere from 2 to 5 days to go that far in your electric car.  Bad news if the hurricane is 12 hours away.  But if the power is out you can’t pump gasoline or diesel either, you argue.  True, but you can pump it with a hand cranked pump or pour it from a gas can!  The 5 gallon can you have in the garage for the lawnmower, if full, will get you a good long way down the road in whatever sort of gasoline powered car you happen to have.  Your electric might get you to the refugee center, but you’re going without any of your stuff.

Laying the disaster scenarios aside, these things are good for the environment, right?  Well, depends on how deep you look.  Most people prefer to turn a blind eye to the damage done to Mother Earth to make the batteries for these things. It requires digging gigantic holes in the ground, and consuming monstrous amounts of fossil fuels and electricity to mine, refine, ship and fabricate the minerals required as well as all the waste products generated in the process.  All that happens in other countries so we choose not to see it.   We also choose to ignore the dangers these vehicles create in the event of a crash.  All this high current wiring running through the car bodies poses a hazard to rescue workers and the equipment they use to extract victims from crashes.

Do we need an alternative to fossil fuel powered cars?  Absolutely we do.  Is the plug in electric the answer to that question?  No, I don’t think so. I think they have their uses.  If the purchase price comes down in the under $15,000 range, I could see them serving folk who live within 20 miles of where they work and can drive at residential speeds to get there as a second car just for that purpose. As a solitary means of transportation, they are not going to be practical. They will be fashionable for a while, but I think you’ll see a great many of them on the “pre-owned” market that are less than a year old.  The market for these is going to be a small niche.  In these days of “gotta have it now” and do it as cheap as possible, these cars will never succeed.  We complain if a web-page takes a half second to open, so how will we tolerate waiting 20 hours to recharge the car?  Can you imagine the reaction in the business world if some corporate executive called across town to another branch to have someone come over for a meeting or to repair a critical piece of equipment and he gets told “sorry boss, it will be four more hours before my car is charged enough to drive again.”  That would go over like a lead balloon.  Speaking of corporations, how many companies do you suppose would be willing to put charging docks in the parking lots for the employee’s use?  Not many I’ll wager, unless there was some huge tax incentive to do so.  Even then, it would be more trouble than most companies would be willing to endure.