2009 Year End Review: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly - Bonus Post On Inefficiency

The past three days we have reviewed the goings on of the political class in the second half of 2009. We focused on The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly antics and activities that the government and its presiding politicians have done to the America people and to the country. Today's bonus post is the last official review and award winner for 2009. We will look at four government programs that we have previously analyzed and determine which one is the most inefficient in spending America's tax dollars.

A few things to note first. All of the instances of political activity I will and have reviewed have already been discussed and analyzed in previous posts to this blog. Thus, for more detail on anything listed and discussed in the year end review posts, you can review the specific past posts. Second, everything discussed in the 2009 review posts come from credible news sources, these are not facts and stories I made up or are coming from highly partisan sources. Typical sources include CNN, the Associated Press, the New York Times, The Week Magazine, Reason magazine and other news sources. While I will not identify the sources again in these review posts, you can refer to the original posts to get the date and source referenced for the information.

Thus, without further adieu, looks determine what was the most inefficient government program we covered in 2009, i.e. what program spent the most money and got the least bang:

• As the economic stimulus package was rolled out, the AP did a number of tough love stories on how the money was being misspent. The one glaring example of inefficiency was the use of stimulus money to fix the nation's crumbling bridges. According to the AP report, stimulus money had been used to repair 2476 bridges at the time of the article. However, 1123 of those bridges did not need any repair, they had been diagnosed as safe. Thus, about 45% of the bridge repair stimulus money was wasted since those bridges that had been "fixed" were not broken to begin with. Let's give this government effort an efficiency rating of only 55% since almost half of the allocated money was wasted fixing non-broken bridges.
• According to a blurb in a recent Business Week magazine article, only about 30% of recent stimulus money that was directed to households was actually spent in the market. 70% was either put in the bank or other savings vehicles or was used to pay down debt. Since the purpose of the stimulus money was to quickly get Americans spending and buying goods and services again to stimulate the economy, any other use of the money can be viewed as an inefficiency. Thus, the household spending component of recent stimulus programs gets an efficiency rating of only 30%.
• In a post on September 23, 2009, we reviewed another AP report and did some simple calculations relative to a teenager summer job program that the Federal government ran last summer. There are two ways to measure the efficiency of this program, both yielding less than stellar results. First, 25% of those involved in the program never did get a job for any number of bureaucratic (e.g. later than expected roll out of the program) and other reasons. Thus, on this measure the efficiency could be viewed as 75%, not bad compared to the 55% efficiency of the bridge repair program and the 30% of the stimulus program. However, the program cost the American taxpayer $1.2 billion but generated only an estimated $670 million in wages for the participants. Thus, for about every dollar spent on the program, only about $.56 in wages resulted. This is no way to grow an economy and provide long term employment. Thus, this program gets no better than a 56% efficiency rating.
• Late in the year we reviewed a Treasury Department anti-drug money program that was supposed to prevent drug money from leaving the country and going back to Mexico, where it is laundered and used to extend and improve the drug cartels in that country. At that time, we calculated that for every dollar that the Treasury department intercepted, about $8,300 was getting through. Thus, the efficiency rating for this program is 1/8300 = .01%.

And the winner is .... the Treasury Department's anti-drug money stoppage campaign. While all of these samples illustrate how poorly the political class is running the country and inefficiently spending our tax dollars, the Treasury Department program has to be hands down the most inefficient program going right now. Why even use budget dollars and manpower resources to run this program the way it is currently being run if your success rate is so very, very small? Why has not the ruling Congressional committees either fixed the program or shut it down?

Step 34 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would help prevent some of these inefficiencies. That Step would hold Congressional committee and subcommittee members directly accountable for these types of wasteful spending atrocities and would provide the mechanism to remove those politicians on those committees that allow this waste to continue.

A follow up to our post form two days ago which covered "The Bad" antics and actions of the political class. It has been pointed out to me that I missed a major "bad" when I neglected to include the work of a whole Congressional committee that was proposing legislation to force the NCAA to determine the Division One football champion by a holding a playoff. This was a whole subcommittee worrying about a football game rather than some of the real issues facing the country, many of the issues being of a life and death nature. Special demerits should go out to the U.S. Senator who wants the Justice Department to devote resources to look into the whole matter. Forget about crime, and drug lords, and terrorism, let's take law enforcement resources and investigate a football game. I apologize for the oversight of not including this in the post from two days ago, it certainly deserves recognition for its waste of time and resources.



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