Tag Archives: Big Government

News

Senator Tom Coburn lists some bad examples of government waste

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Here’s the story.

Excerpt:

Coburn, R-Muskogee, whose office regularly churns out reports mocking federal projects and programs, said Monday that “cutting wasteful and low-priority spending from the budget is not only sensible, but essential.”

“In today’s economy, we can’t afford to spend nearly $2 million to showcase neon signs no longer in use at Las Vegas casinos; nor can Congress and federal agencies afford to spend nearly $1 billion a year on unnecessary printing costs.”

The 100 projects cited on Monday tread some familiar ground for Coburn reports — road signs paid for with stimulus funds, research projects that sound like folly — and are mostly domestic. There is no mention of Iraq or Afghanistan, despite government reports documenting millions lost to fraud and waste.

Topping Coburn’s list is the conclusion of a FOX News story that the Department of Veterans Affairs spends $175 million each year to maintain buildings it can’t use, in some cases because they’re in such disrepair.

Other items on the list:

• $217,000 for a University of California and Stanford University study on when and why political candidates are ambiguous.

• $90,000 to fund promotion of the Vidalia onion, including $60,000 for a campaign timed to coincide with the release of a Shrek movie.

•  $2.5 million on the Census Bureau’s television ad that aired during the Super Bowl to promote the head-count but left many viewers scratching their heads in confusion.

• $465,000 for an international AIDS conference in Austria.

• $35 million paid in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims to an alleged Armenian crime ring.

• $48 million for a streetcar system in Atlanta that runs the same route as the city’s subway system.

• $900,000 to settle sexual harassment claims against a former housing director in Philadelphia.

•  And $28 million to print “rarely used” paper copies of the Congressional Record.

Here’s a recent post from the Washington Examiner that compares Democrats and Republicans on pork barrel spending. (H/T Gateway Pundit via Muddling)

Excerpt:

Press coverage of the budget frenzy on Capitol Hill has suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, Republicans and Democrats remain equal-opportunity earmarkers.

It’s not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act.

In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for 2011, and in the House, Republicans have nearly given up earmarking altogether — while Democrats roll on.

The watchdog groups — Taxpayers for Common Sense, WashingtonWatch.com, and Taxpayers Against Earmarks — counted total earmark requests in the 2011 budget. Those requests were made by lawmakers earlier this year, but Democratic leaders, afraid that their party’s spending priorities might cost them at the polls, decided not to pass a budget before the Nov. 2 elections. This week, they distilled those earmark requests — threw some out, combined others — into the omnibus bill that was under consideration in the Senate until Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled it Thursday night. While that bill was loaded with spending, looking back at the original earmark requests tells us a lot about the spending inclinations of both parties.

In the 2011 House budget, the groups found that House Democrats requested 18,189 earmarks, which would cost the taxpayers a total of $51.7 billion, while House Republicans requested just 241 earmarks, for a total of $1 billion.

This is why stimulus spending, which is advocated by Democrats, costs jobs. Democrats waste money. They take money out of the job-creating sector of the economy, and they waste on government spending. If private companies wasted money like government, they would go out of business. Unfortunately, government can waste money like this all the time, and they just borrow more money. When you hear a Democrat say that they want to “invest” money they stole from businesses and workers in order to “stimulate” the economy, what they are talking about is wasting money and/or buying votes from their favored special interest groups.

News

Obama doubles the number of federal workers paid over $150,000

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USA Today reports that the number of federal works earning $150,000 or more has DOUBLED since Obama took office.  (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

The fast-growing pay of federal employees has captured the attention of fiscally conservative Republicans who won control of the U.S. House of Representatives in last week’s elections. Already, some lawmakers are planning to use the lame-duck session that starts Monday to challenge the president’s plan to give a 1.4% across-the-board pay raise to 2.1 million federal workers.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate averaged 9.43% under Obama.

Commentary

The relationship between government spending and immigration

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Political Map of Canada

Mark Steyn is one controversial Canadian. Here is a summary of his concerns about government spending, immigration, multiculturalism and Western civilization, from Canada’s national newspaper – the National Post.

Excerpt:

Rates of public spending growth here in Canada, meanwhile, are only sustainable if we permit mass immigration, given that Canadian birthrate declines are more drastic than even America’s (where they hold, for now at least at roughly replacement levels). These days, that immigration comes from Muslim countries, something that has caused severe social unrest in European countries that have relied on a similar model.

“In the space of about 20 years, the Muslim community went from really nothing to overtake the well-established Jewish community in Toronto. And the idea that that’s simply just one more interesting exotic item in the Canadian salad bar—we would be extremely lucky if that were the case.”

Amsterdam, among the most liberal cities in the world, he points out, is suffering an epidemic of gay bashing from unassimilated Muslims. In Sweden, perhaps Europe’s most tolerant country, half the Jewish population of Malmo has fled after a sharp rise in Islamic anti-Semitic attacks.

“I was in Malmo a couple of weeks ago,” he says. “It’s future is as a Muslim city.”

That he considers Muslim fundamentalists an unwelcome element in liberal society is the kind of thing that gets Mr. Steyn so readily branded as a bigot, particularly in Canada where a worship of his most hated term “multiculturalism” has, he says, utterly shrivelled the limits on public discussion. That may, however, only prove his point.

“It’s a sick fetish,” he says. “The idea that multiculturalism simply on its own terms is a virtue in itself is completely preposterous.”

What the fact that 75% of Canada’s population growth relies on immigration says “in effect, is that tomorrow’s a crapshoot; tomorrow is whoever happens to turn up.”

When Immigration Minister Jason Kenney suggests, as he did this week that Canadians can choose between higher immigration levels, or having more children, he leaves out one option: for Canadians to stop spending at a rate that demands population growth. In any case, Mr. Steyn says, the fact that most immigrants bring behind them older or unproductive family members is just a way to “kick the can 10 years down the line and ensure there’s an even bigger population making demands upon the state for which you’ll have to bring in even more people.” Eventually, the pyramid scheme runs out. We are, he says, engaged in nothing less than “civilizational suicide.”

An interesting story just came to a conclusion in Canada. A Canadian-born Muslim was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan while fighting Canadian soldiers. In Canada, Muslim men can marry four women who will all collect wefare. The article raises questions about whether the women entered the country legally. The same thing happens in the UK, according to the article. (In fact, there is an epidemic of rapes by Muslim gangs in various countries who justify their raping by same that the non-Muslim women are not dressed to proper Islamic standards.) Some work needs to be done to acclimate immigrants to Western standards of conduct.

A policy of preferring skilled immigrants might help prevent the problem of radical immigrants, but that’s not the policy favored by the left – they want unskilled immigrants because unskilled immigrants tend to vote for bigger government, more wealth redistribution, higher taxes and more control of business. These policies are put in place by the left in order to buy votes from those who like to collect government handouts. In fact, the left opposes immigration of skilled workers, since they are more likely to vote for lower taxes and limited government. I think we could be very open about legal immigration – but then we have to make immigrants responsible for paying their own way and following the laws of the land.