Bureauweenies Blow $800,000 on Defining Three Words

by Dave Blount | June 15, 2010 1:49 pm

The reason the standard of living invariably goes down as the size of government goes up is that bureaucrats do not spend other people’s money as wisely as we spend our own. For yet another example[1], refer to the moonbat dystopia of the San Francisco area:

Believe it or not, BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] is spending $800,000 to come up with a definition of just what constitutes a “major service change.”

Most of us would simply reach for a dictionary, but BART has to make the feds happy, and that means a three-month process that includes:

— Holding 35 community meetings.

— Hiring a small army of translators to staff the meetings.

— Bringing in a crew of six-figure consultants to manage the meetings and issue the obligatory reports.

Yet the $800,000 is only the beginning of the waste — and it isn’t only locals on the hook for the bill:

It all started a few months back when the Federal Transit Administration nixed $70 million in stimulus money that would have helped BART build a people-mover line from the Coliseum Station to Oakland International Airport.

The feds said BART hadn’t considered what impact possible higher fares and a “major service change” would have on low-income, minority and limited-English-speaking riders.

The $800,000 must be wasted for the sake of jumping through the requisite politically correct hoops, before Bay Area bureauweenies can proceed to wasting $70 million on a project that probably isn’t needed and certainly shouldn’t be coercively financed at the expense of people across the country who will never use it or even know it exists. But according to the liberal faith, flushing mountains of other people’s money down frivolous pork projects that we cannot afford “stimulates” the economy.

On a tip from Anonymous Countermoonbat. Cross-posted at Moonbattery[2].