As Debt Explodes, Big Government Arrogantly Wastes

by Dave Blount | December 21, 2010 1:49 pm

Despite Comrade Obama’s clumsy triangulation maneuvers, it’s likely our rulers will soon raise taxes, possibly even by imposing an economy-strangling VAT tax. If they don’t, the exploding debt[1] will cause the entire economy to collapse and the dollar to become worthless. The only other option would be to reduce spending — but that’s out of the question when government spending is so crucial to our well-being. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) lists some of the government spending projects we wouldn’t want to live without, including these[2]:

• The city of Las Vegas has received a $5.2 million federal grant to build the Neon Boneyard Park and Museum, including $1.8 million in 2010. For over the last decade, Museum supporters have gathered and displayed over 150 old Las Vegas neon signs, such as the Golden Nugget and Silver Slipper casinos.

• The National Science Foundation provided more than $200,000 to study why political candidates make vague statements.

• The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spends $175 million every year to maintain hundreds of buildings it does not use, including a pink, octagonal monkey house in Dayton, Ohio.

• In July, nearly half a million taxpayer dollars went to the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna, where wine tasting and castle tours were among the events planned for the conference participants.

• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) took the term “cold case” to a new level in 2010. The agency spent over $20,000 in taxpayer money “to unravel the anonymity of a 2,500-year-old mummy.”

• The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent nearly $442,340 million to study the number of male prostitutes in Vietnam and their social setting.

• The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded over $600,000 to the Minnesota Zoo to create a wolf “avatar” video game called “WolfQuest.”

• A $700,000 federal grant paid for researchers to examine “greenhouse gas emission from organic dairies, which are cause by cow burps, among other things.”

Rather than do without these precious goodies, why don’t we just borrow huge amounts of money from the communist Chinese and hope our children and grandchildren can figure out a way to pay it back?

For more sad laughs, here’s a PDF[3] of Coburn’s report.

On a tip from AC. Cross-posted at Moonbattery[4].

Endnotes:
  1. exploding debt: http://www.usdebtclock.org/
  2. including these: http://coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ContentRecord_id=054487a3-ff6e-4df9-a025-48de764abe55
  3. PDF: http://coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=774a6cca-18fa-4619-987b-a15eb44e7f18
  4. Moonbattery: http://www.moonbattery.com/

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