$1.3 billion wasted spending

[debby]

WASHINGTON — As the budget deficit soared, infrastructure crumbled and the economy tanked, the federal government this year spent $300,000 for a California skateboarding park, $188,000 to research Maine lobsters and $3.2 million on a spy blimp the military doesn't want, according to a new report by the Senate's self-styled spending scourge.
The report, to be released today by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., lists more than $1.3 billion of what it calls wasteful projects in 2008.
Coburn, who often seeks to force votes and debates on projects inserted by fellow senators, says he wants to work with President-elect Barack Obama, who promised last month to go over the federal budget line by line and "eliminate programs we don't need."

"He has a great opportunity to change things, and my hope is that he will," Coburn said in an interview.
Obama and Coburn joined in 2006 on legislation that created USAspending.gov, which tracks federal spending.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Washington | California | Congress | Barack Obama | United States Senate | Indiana | New York | Idaho | Maine | Air Force | Queens of the Stone Age | Agriculture Department | Nintendo Wii | Small Business Administration | Charles Darwin | Sen. Tom Coburn | Westfield | Galapagos Islands | Beer | R-Okla | Spanky | Pistol Pete | USASpending.gov
Other items in the report:
• Various federal agencies spent $167,290 for portrait paintings of Cabinet officers.
• The federal Institute of Museums and Library Sciences awarded a $3,905 grant to the public library in Westfield, Ind., for the purchase of a Nintendo Wii console, a television, a camcorder and games.
• The Agriculture Department gave $298,068 to an Idaho farmer to help him advertise and market his specialty potatoes sold mainly to high-end restaurants.
• The Small Business Administration guaranteed $82 million in loans for 331 liquor stores, including Spanky's Liquor World and Pistol Pete's Beef N' Beer.
• Five members of Congress spent nearly $22,000 to stay three nights at a luxury hotel on the Galapagos Islands, the South American archipelago where Charles Darwin mulled his theory of evolution. That figure doesn't include the cost of the Air Force jet placed at their disposal.
"This is just an indication of how out of touch Washington is with the real world priorities of people in this country," Coburn said, adding that the report chronicled only a sliver of ill-advised federal spending. "How many bridges could we repair for $1.3 billion? … How many schools could be in better shape?"
According to the report, "Many of these low-priority projects are funded year after year, regardless of whether they achieve their intended effects or not."
That was the case with the Frank M. Charles Memorial Park in Queens, N.Y., the report says. The park received $1 million in 2008 to repair tennis courts and to install artificial turf on a baseball field. The same park got $1 million in 2000 for similar upgrades but failed to maintain the facilities, the report said.
Budget reform is "an imperative," Obama said when he announced his new budget director last month.
"We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist or interest group," he said.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...govwaste_N.htm

Sure hope he can accomplish what no other has even tried.

[Easyrider]

...and I'm sure the list goes on and on. I read the other day that each child born in the United States is born w/ a $170,000 debt attached and that figure goes up each year.

We cannot dismantle our entitlement programs, nor should we break the promises made that people grew to count on for their retirement. But we can face up to the fact that we are bankrupting future generations, and must reform the programs that cannot be sustained in their present form.

And we must turn around the growing tendency of government to bail out those who took a risk and lost, or who have a self-proclaimed need and an organization to lobby for them.

For most of our history, Americans took pride in our self-reliance. Most of us are descended from ancestors who came here with little besides the clothes on their backs; some came in chains. From these humble beginnings Americans created the freest and most prosperous society that ever existed. Yet in recent years the government has increasingly become the nanny and ATM card of the people instead of the protector of our rights and our land. We need to recover our self-reliance and our self-respect.