More Government Waste And Obama's Impotency To Stop It

I promise that this will be the last post for a while regarding government's wasteful spending and the American political class that feeds it. These types of reviews of wasted taxpayer dollars can get very depressing. Today's examples come from the Heritage Foundation's website (http://www.heritage.org/) as they and others comb through the latest budget bills to find truly remarkable wastes of money. After reviewing what they have found, I will close with a few comments about the President's significant shortcomings in this area, as measured by his own promises.

Regarding specific and local funding that the current Federal budget will pay for, the Heritage Foundation found:

• $750,000 for the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa
• $350,000 for the Museum Of Aviation in Warner Robins, Georgia
• $250,000 for a bike path between Lexington and Port Sanilax, Michigan
• $350,000 to widen Bristol Street in Santa Ana, California
• $300,000 to Carnegie Hall in New York City
• $200,000 to renovate the Laredo Little Theater in Laredo, Texas
• $400,000 to renovate the historic Ritz Theater in Newburgh, New York

As stated in in Step 44 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," no Federal taxpayer money should be spent on any project unless it materially impacts a significant amount of citizens in at least five states. If this rule was in effect today, the above $2.6 million in local projects would become the responsibility of the state or towns they resided in. With soaring Federal budget deficits, high unemployment, and other difficult national issues facing the country, time, energy, and money should not be spent on these local projects whose only purpose is to get the incumbents re-elected.

However, the Heritage Foundation analysis goes beyond the above wasteful projects:

• In the three years that the Democrats have controlled Congress, there have been over 10,000 earmarks/pork barrel projects in each of their national budgets. In the past twelve years that the Republicans controlled Congress, only three times did the earmark level exceed 10,000. This proves that both parties are party to wasteful spending and that the trend is accelerating.
• Prior to the finalizing of the defense budget for 2010, the earmarks and wasteful spending in the other budget bills had exceeded $11 billion, according to the Heritage Foundation. With over 1,700 earmarks in the final 2010 defense budget, wasteful spending in 2010 will easily exceed $13 billion a year. Remember from yesterday's post that the estimated deficit reduction expected from the new health care reform bill was $130 billion over ten years or about $13 billion a year. Thus, the political class has already wiped out the hoped for savings that the health care reform bill might provide.
• A very distressing quote from the website is a quote from a Washington Post article that summarized a Taxpayers For Common Sense study that found: 60% of the members of the House Armed Services Committee who arranged earmarks also received campaign contributions from the companies that received the funding." Despicable. The political class is selling our taxpayer dollars for funding of their re-election campaign. Step 6 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," would prohibit any corporation, business, PAC, lobbyist firm, union, etc. frfom contribuing to an election campaign. Only individual citizens would be allowed to contribute, in order to maintain their freedom of speech right. By restricting campaign donations, the political class might actually think more about the real benefits of spending our money than the advantage they can get with spending our money.

I could go on and on but it gets just so darn irritating and depressing. And what has the President done amidst all of this waste. He certainly talks a good fight

• "If Congress sends me a defense bill loaded with a bunch of pork, I will veto it." President Obama, August 17, 2009
• "If my administration evaluates an earmark and determines that it has no legitimate public purpose, then we will seek to eliminate it." President Obama, March 11, 2009
• "Obama and Biden will slash earmarks to no greater than the 1994 levels." http://www.change.gov/, the official website of the Obama/Biden campaign.

Well, the defense budget had over 1,700 wasteful projects and programs, as we have discussed previously including an earmark for the brown tree snake. All of those 1,7000 earmarks were approved, in conflict with his August 17 promise. Over 5,000 earmarks from the general budget bills that the President signed, including the wasteful projects listed above and in earlier posts, were allowed to become a reality. The 1994 level of earmarks was 1,318. This year's level, like the previous two years under a Democratic Congress, will exceed 10,000. Guess the President missed that one also.

The bottom line is that the President has really become just a figurehead and a really, really good speech giver. He was not able to curtail the wasteful spending of Congress on the pork although he stated firmly any number of times he would aggressively cut them back. It has not happened as Congress has ignored his pledges. On many of the big defense spending programs, both he and the Defense Department specifically rejected funding for certain projects but Congress funded them anyway. Think about that: the Pentagon AND the President say something is not needed but both are ignored by Congress. He was a non-factor in the health care reform process (except to give a speech and tell us to stop "bickering" like children), allowing Pelosi and Reid and a small cadre of Democrats to create a massive, behind closed doors bill that no one really knows what it entails. When the political class devolved into name calling (liar, knuckle dragging Neanderthals, smelly tourists, un-Americans, etc.) he said nothing that would break through the anger and ease the tensions in the country.

He has wasted a golden opportunity when his approval rating was in the stratosphere to make hard decisions and take control of the change he promised. Given that there are still over 10,000 earmarks going forward despite his promise to reduce them by over 80%, I believe that he has become a lame duck President before his first year is out and there will be no change as he promised. It has become just the same old Washington wasteland that we have, unfortunately, come to expect from the political class without the change that was promised.



Visit our website at www.loathemygovernment.com to order an autographed copy of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government -Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class" and to sign up for the cause. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes And Noble.

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