The timely release of Senator Tom Coburn’s book “Waste 2010”, sheds a bright light on outrageous ways our tax dollars are being wasted. Senator Coburn states he can save 11.5 billion dollars, which shows that he is not serious about eliminating the waste, since there is much, much more waste that he chooses to ignore.
Senator Coburn has identified 100 of these pet projects eating up taxpayer dollars, with thousands more not being listed or talked about. Here are a few examples:
3 million to University of Cal. of Irvine to play video games.
1 million dollars to create poetry for Little Rock, New Orleans, Milwaukee, & Chicago Zoos.
175 million to the U.S. Veterans Affairs to maintain hundreds of buildings they do not use.
1.8 million to Las Vegas, Nevada for a museum for neon signs.
$137,530 to Dartmouth University to create a video game.
$600,000 to Minnesota Zoo to develop an online video game, “Wolf quest”.
$800,000 (stimulus money) to National Institute of Health, to study genital washing program on South African men.
$615,000 to University Calif. at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-Shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.
$239,100 to a Stanford University professor to study how Americans find Love on the internet.
$442,340 to the National Institute of Health to study male prostitutes in Vietnam.
Senator Coburn is not the only politician in Washington, that is fully aware of these pet projects and their cost to the taxpayer. In the past decade, the size of government has doubled while Congress approved more than 90,000 earmarks. Pet projects as these have been a large problem in our government and increase year after year costing massive amounts of taxpayer dollars, increasing tenfold since 1991. The waste is justified by claiming everything from “eliminating waste is a violation of our Constitution“, to “eliminating them won’t matter it is such a small amount compared to the debt“.
Earmarks invites more and more corruption within Congress both on a state and federal level. To Congress earmarks are the staple in their political diet, with the only thing on the menu being how they can advance their political agenda while leaving taxpayers of America paying the bill.
While Congress marches on to cut spending, they target the middle class, poor and the elderly. My suggestion is bring in an expert, a common housewife that balances her family’s budget and give Congress a lesson in fiscal responsibility.
I have to ask if he is able to do this on his own, what is the rest of our great politicians doing up there?
