Posted by
Bert Chapman on Wednesday, December 09, 2009 6:09:57 PM
Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn have provided an extremely valuable public service on their websites. Both of these Senators have published a heavily documented report detailing the frivolous and wasteful pork expenditures in the Obama Administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) which is popularly known as the economic stimulus law.
The wasteful projects uncovered in this document encompass the geographic span of the country, a variety of federal agencies, and, undoubtedly, the pork barrel proclivities of Representatives and Senators from both parties seeking to maximize their earmarks privileges for local political benefit.
Examples of this fiscal profligacy include $49,918 for 11 students and four faculty from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks to attend the Copenhagen Climate Change conference. The report's comments on this particularly dubious appropriation mentioned that these students and faculty members will emit 53,940 pounds of carbon dioxide from their air travel alone which is the amount of emissions required to heat and light two single family homes in Fairbanks, AL for a year. What would Al Gore say?
One outrageous appropriation in this legislation include $935,000 for an African Heritage dance troupe in Washington, DC to weatherize homes. I didn't know home weatherization was part of the curriculum of American dance programs. Can I get this troupe to perform the Nutcracker while they put insulation in the attic? The National Institutes of Health was awarded $219,000 to study the "hookup" behavior of college students for one year. Is there a line in this grant to document booze, condom, and prophylactic expeditures? Another earmark documented by McCain and Coburn's report is awarding SUNY Buffalo $399,000 to study young adults who drink malt liquor and smoke marijuana? $4.7 million is allocated for exploring the possibilities of corporate supersonic jets. I guess the appropriators of this fund forgot about the example of the Concorde. $1.9 billion was allocated to the Energy Dept. for its failure to cleanup nuclear waste at Washington state's troubled Hanford nuclear site.
My personal favorite is $100,000 to Minneapolis' Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre whose reportoire includes "socially conscious" and anti-capitalist productions. I suppose we can credit Al Franken's arrival in the U.S. Senate for this one. While there are many worthwhile government research projects, you'll find none of them is McCain and Coburn's report. All in all, this report shows that Obama Administration claims of promoting fiscal responsibility are empty rhetoric and that Chicago style pork barrel projects are alive and well in his administration.