Up, Up And Away

Let's not talk about health care reform today and get back to one of my favorite topics, government waste of taxpayer money. Today I will review two government projects which literally let our tax dollars float away for no purpose. This post should be viewed in the same genre of a previous post where we discussed how Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania had channeled and wasted close to $200 million in building up the John Murtha county airport in his district. This is an airport that serves only three flights a day, most of which are less than half full, has an $8 million radar facility that has never been used and according to a recent news account, sometimes serves less people a day than there are TSA security workers in the airport.

Not to be outdone is the airport in Ely, Nevada. According to a Business Week article on August 17, 2009, Ely has a population of just over four thousand people and last year their airport received $1.8 million in Federal subsidies. Since only 414 people used the airport last year, the American taxpayer basically subsided each Ely flier to the tune of about $4,500. According to the article, it would have been cheaper to rent a private airplane for EACH of the people that used the Ely airport.

On Earthlink News today, Seth Borenstein of the AP had an article about NASA's plan to return to the moon. Unfortunately, it was not good news. A White House panel has released its review analysis of NASA plans and has determined that NASA cannot get back to the moon without a 16% ($3.0 billion) annual increase in its budget. So just five years after NASA and the Bush administration decided to return to the moon, its budget and plan are already obsolete. Thus, Obama has to decide whether to increase funding, something tough to to in a bad economy with the Federal deficit soaring, or shut down the moon operation. If he shuts it down, NASA would have wasted $7.7 billion it has already spent on a plan that comes up short. Either option will cost us more money.

These are just three examples of government leadership and management failure. These types of failures go on all over the Federal bureaucracy. That is why some of the most important steps (Steps 1,2,3,4,5 just for starters) in "Love My Country, Loathe my Government" involved curtailing government initiatives. No where in the past forty years has the political class been able to deliver anything on time or on budget. By restricting their activities and returning wasted tax dollars to us, they can get focused on a much smaller set of objectives and finally get something right.

The savings could go a long way to paying down the deficits and Obama's health care reform. Damn, that topic shows up everywhere!