Worst Waste of 2008
Examiner Editorial
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December 15, 2008
For those who wonder why Washington seems utterly incapable of addressing urgent national problems like Social Security and Medicare, Oklahoma’s Republican Sen. Tom Coburn has at least 385 billion reasons why. That’s the estimate of how much is lost every year as a result of the waste, fraud and abuse by profligate federal politicians and bureaucrats. America’s pension and healthcare problems face bankruptcy in the all-too-near-future, but Congress and federal bureaucrats just can’t stop dumping billions of tax dollars down their favorite rat holes.
Coburn, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, issued a report last week that every taxpayer should read because it provides voluminous details and examples of the Incredible Washington Waste Machine in action, including these:
• • $188,000 for the Lobster Institute in Maine, home of the “LobsterCam.”
• • $1 million for bike paths on Louisiana levees while levees await basic repairs.
• • $2.4 million for a retractable shade canopy at a park in West Virginia.
• • $24.6 million for the National Park Service’s 100th year birthday in 2016 - 8 years early.
• • $3.2 million on a blimp the Pentagon does not want.
• • $367,000 wasted by a Texas school board on items like an inflatable alligator and for an under-the-sea waterslide, among other things.
• • $5 million for a bridge to a zoo parking lot in St. Louis.
• • $9,000 for a non-functioning airplane-shaped gas station in Tennessee.
• • $300,000 for specialty potatoes for high-end restaurants.
• $15,000 to provide voice mail for the homeless.
As Coburn observes, things were so bad in 2008 that an alien visitor from outer space like those the government spent more than $9 million searching for this year might well conclude that Washington’s politicians and bureaucrats think the American people actually enjoy paying taxes: “Politicians in Washington outdid themselves in 2008, wasting taxpayer money in ways and amounts once thought unimaginable – all without blushing. So outrageous was the spending, an outside observer would be forced to think that not only do Americans love to pay taxes, but that the federal budget was in a state of perpetual surplus.”
The reality, of course, is the federal budget deficit is zooming to levels not seen since World War II because Washington has the same solution for every conceivable problem – throw more tax dollars at it. How apt remains President Ronald Reagan’s comparison of Washington to a baby with a loud voice at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
