Wasteful Stimulus Dollars Part Three

Wednesday, August 4, 2010 4:29 PM by Renae Bartusch

This week, Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John McCain (R-AZ) released a report titled “Summertime Blues: 100 Stimulus Projects that Give Taxpayers the Blues.” As the title suggests, it is a laundry list of projects funded by the “stimulus” bill.  This is the third report in the series that highlights stimulus projects that are wasteful, mismanaged, and have been unsuccessful.  The Center for Fiscal Accountability warned Senators that voting for this spending package under the guise of a stimulus was a huge mistake.

These series of reports are only confirming our fears that this “stimulus” bill would be an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars.  $1.9 million for international ant research, $89,298 to replace a new sidewalk that leads to a ditch in Boynton, OK, and $760,000 to Georgia Tech to study improvised music are just a few examples of the projects that the third report drew attention to.  President Obama promised that unemployment would not go above 8% if the “stimulus” bill was passed.  That unemployment continues to hover around 10 percent is hardly surprising, given the ludicrous projects taxpayers are left to pay for a failed attempt to fix the economy and create more jobs.

With this third report surfacing, one can only wonder how many more wasteful projects will be found hidden in the “stimulus” bill.  Taxpayers deserve better than to be burdened with wasteful spending that ultimately they will be responsible for.  In last year’s Cost of Government Day report, we found that the passage of the “stimulus” bill forces taxpayers to work an addition 10 days to shoulder the cost. The residual spending effects of this poorly-conceived policy will undoubtedly push the cost of government higher in years to come, as many of these ridiculous spending programs continue to receive funding a year and half after the passage of the spending boondoggle. We continue to applaud the Senators' work on highlighting the obscene waste embedded in the "stimulus" bill and hope they will serve as a lesson to future lawmakers who entertain the ridiculous notion of government-engineered recovery.

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