And our President continued to play golf and go on political campaign swings like no other President ever did. Congress narrowly missed becoming the least productive Congress of all time. Billions were spent and wasted on the November elections to elect people that did not deserve the time of day never mind billions of dollars. Racial division spread across the country, a division that was fomented and spread by those in office with something to gain.
And guess what? Over this week you will see nothing has changed except the calendar. The political class is still out of control, the government entities that they rule over are bloated and ineffective, and the quality of life and freedom in this country continues to deteriorate. Hang on, it is going to be a bumpy next seven days or so.
1) Very few government projects end up well, either missing their budgets by a significant amount or never delivering what was promised or failing in both areas. Nowhere was this behavior more evident in the recent announcement from the National Institutes of Health that after ten years of work and the expending of $1.3 BILLION, the National Children’s Study has been cancelled.
The reason for the cancellation was that the study was deemed “flawed” and too expensive to continue: “Based on the working group’s findings and internal deliberation, I am accepting … findings that the NCS is not feasible,” said NIH Director Francis Collins in a December announcement of the program’s termination. “I am disappointed that this study failed to achieve its goals. Yet I am optimistic that other approaches will provide answers to these important research question.” Would have been nice if they had realized this before ten years and $1.3 billion had been wasted for nothing in return.
Are they saying that after ten years they woke one morning and said, “Whoopisie, just realized this project is a bust.” Horrible project management skills. The study was supposed to be a multi-decade tracking research effort to study children’s health over time. But Nigel Paneth, a professor of epidemiology and pediatrics at the University of Michigan, was involved with designing the study from its start had the best summation of the entire effort: “It was mismanaged, from the conceptual idea to actualization in the field.” Mismanaged from start to finish, sounds about right for the Federal government.
How many kids could have received vaccines with that $1.3 billion? How many families could have gotten health insurance for their kids for $1.3 billion? If we have learned anything in this blog over the years, the more complex a government effort is, the more likely that the politicians and bureaucrats are going to screw it up in one or more ways. $1.3 billion is a lot of money to waste for nothing in return.
And I bet no one got fired for wasting $1.3 billion.
2) An article on the website www.cnsnews.com, written by Lauretta Brown, on December 16, 2016 discussed a grant from the Federal government’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The article investigated whether an approved grant of almost $200,000 to pay a video game designer to design a game about “consensually slapping her girlfriend in the face” was actually going to be paid out with taxpayer money.
On April 23, 2013, the National Endowment for the Arts said it was awarding $24,000 to the Polytechnic Institute of New York University for a grant to: “To support the production and exhibition of video games created by the Different Games Fellows. The four fellows are artists/game-designers who will be selected from a group of women, people of color, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ community members groups who find themselves marginalized both as designers and characters in video games.”
Subsequently, in 2014, the Different Games website announced who these federally-funded fellows were. One of those named, was Anna Anthropy, who “is a game creator, writer, artist, teacher, historian and gay witch. She makes games about polyamory, kink, Dan Savage, space adventures, and is currently using government money to make a game about consensually slapping her girlfriend in the face.”
Seriously, we are possibly going to pay a self proclaimed witch to develop a video game about slapping her girl friend? Who approves these types of projects and why are they even considered? And do not call them art, they are self satisfying ego trips.
Again, it is a question of very bad government priorities. Would that taxpayer wealth be better spent feeding the hungry or sheltering the homeless in this country or building a slap the girl friend video game that nobody would ever likely use? Insane and pathetic.
3) Manure and the Federal government seem like a likely pairing and they serve as the basis for the next piece of insanity. Writing in the Washington Free Beacon on December 10, 2014, Elizabeth Harrington told her readers that:
- More than five years after the passage of Obama’s economic stimulus package, taxpayer dollars have finally ended up in an Obama so-called shovel ready project.
- You remember the stimulus package. It was billed as a way to bring America into the “21st century.”
- To do that 21st Century miracle, stimulus money will now be used to remove wild horse manure off of public lands in Oregon at a cost of $60,000.
- According to a recently awarded contract, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will pay $58,650 to load, haul, and dispose of manure from a corral in Burns, Oregon: “Manure shall be wind-rowed, piled if necessary, loaded, and hauled to a site for a beneficial use. If there is no beneficial use for the manure, then it shall be legally disposed of in a landfill or by another approved disposal practice.”
- Shovel ready is an apt description of this wasteful spending in so many ways.
But it gets worse. The BLM contract is good through September 2015, with four option years. This means that economic stimulus funds could be spent on hauling horse manure until 2019, ten years after the recession ended. Shoveling manure with taxpayer money under the guise of economic policy, sounds like a typical government program.
4) One last insult and piece of insanity for today. A recent report from Pew Charitable Trusts estimated what states receive back the most Federal spending support per person. Their research looked at and included such Federal expenditures as retirement benefits nonretirement benefits, grants, government contract purchases, and salaries and wages of Federal employees.
Below is their final list of the top ten states ranked by government spending per capita:
1. Virginia -- $16,710
2. Maryland -- $15,684
3. Alaska -- $14,375
4. Hawaii-- $13,752
5. New Mexico -- $13,213
6. Maine -- $12,104
7. Alabama -- $11,743
8. Connecticut -- $11,527
9. West Virginia -- $11,496
10. Mississippi -- $11,469
No real patterns or insults here. The top recipient states include northern states and southern states, wealthier states and poorer states, eastern states and western states.
The real insult is when you consider the fact that the District of Columbia is tops for Federal spending per person living in the region at an amazing $73,920 per person. Yes, the Washington political class has allowed themselves and their work and living environment to receive four and half times more Federal support than the top state, Virginia, receives. The D.C. area receives more than six times Federal support than what the tenth rated state, Mississippi receives. Imagine what the ratio is of D.C. to the 50th state rated by Pew.
We are certainly living in a disconnected government/citizen world. Washington politicians get high salaries and great benefits for basically working part time job hours but ensuring that taxpayer wealth flows to their physical location in obscene amounts. The nation’s citizens struggle to find decent jobs, feed their families, and live a decent life while they are overburdened by the taxes they pay for the Washington political class’s lifestyles, comforts, and work environment. We are truly living through a “Hunger Games” nightmare today in this country.
That will do it for today, the sixth day of political class insanity for this month…and we are still not done. More insanity tomorrow but it will be difficult to beat today’s nonsense and insults: wasting money on studies that never occur, paying for video game development that involves slapping a girl friend, shoveling horse manure in Oregon with taxpayer dollars under the dubious guise of fixing the national economy, and living the Hunger Games life in D.C. Insane.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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