waste

There is Nothing Left to Cut

by Ryan Young on October 13, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy

Headline: “Town Spends $1,000 on Rubber Chickens”

And that’s not all:

[Cicero, Illinois] Town President Larry Dominick’s administration has also spent nearly $600,000 on promotional items, including mouse pads and ice cream scoops, from You & Me.

Hanania said he expects proceeds from the Houby Day festival to pay the bill for the chickens.

“It is what it is. We’re not hiding it. We’re trying to be aboveboard,” he said.

His transparency is laudable. But he forgets about opportunity costs. Rubber chickens aren’t exactly revenue magnets. They are unlikely to add more than their cost t0 Cicero, Illinois’s town coffers. Meanwhile, those thousand dollars could have to some better use — schools, police or fire protection, fixing potholes, you name it. Surely those things are more desirable than 250 rubber chickens.

Lots of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in the Stimulus, Which Will Cost $43 Billion More Than Expected

by Hans Bader on May 26, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Stimulus to Nowhere

The Congressional Budget Office says the stimulus package will cost $43 billion more than estimated. The stimulus package is full of waste, fraud, and abuse. As Michelle Malkin notes:

Last week, the Treasury Department inspector general found that the tax police have failed to prevent fraud in the stimulus law’s energy tax credit program. Some $6 billion in stimulus energy credits for homeowners have been claimed — but the inspector general’s audit found that 30 percent of credit-claimers had no record of homeownership. The recipients included prisoners and minors. “I am troubled by the IRS’s continued failure to develop appropriate verification methods for distributing Recovery Act credits,” the Treasury Inspector watchdog said.  Moreover, when the IRS wasn’t falling down on its job policing outside fraud, its own workers were committing their own stimulus fraud — by cheating the system and claiming a first-time homebuyer tax credit included in the 2008 and 2009 economic stimulus packages. At least 128 IRS employees claimed the credit, according to a recent Treasury Department audit, yet weren’t first-time buyers or violated other basic eligibility criteria.

Moreover, the stimulus package has also “redistributed wealth to prison inmates, flaky researchers, social justice boondoggles, infrastructure to nowhere, foreign companies, dead people and ghost congressional districts — not to mention $20 million in chump change to pay for campaign-style stimulus-hyping road signs across the country emblazoned with the shovel-ready logo.”

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There is No More Fat to Trim from Government Budgets, Part 3

by Ryan Young on May 12, 2011

in Health and Illness, Nanny State

The USDA is spending $2 million to take pictures of what San Antonio school children eat for lunch.

There is No More Fat to Trim from Government Budgets

by Ryan Young on April 19, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual

Workforce Central Florida, a government agency, is spending $73,000 to give away 6,000 capes and some cardboard cutouts.

More Stimulus Money Wasted

by Hans Bader on October 21, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

A lot of money was wasted in weatherization projects paid for by the stimulus package, note The New York Times Green Blog and Professor Jonathan Adler.

Eighty percent of homes audited by federal investigators in Illinois “failed final inspection ‘because of substandard workmanship.’ In some cases, technicians who tuned up gas-fired heating systems did so improperly, so that they emitted carbon monoxide ‘at higher than acceptable levels.’”  In two-thirds of the homes audited, “contractors billed for labor charges that had not been incurred and for materials that had not been installed.” Illinois itself “had found a 62 percent error rate when it re-inspected homes weatherized by CEDA,” and that “some of the work created fire hazards.”

Stimulus money also went to prisoners and dead people, wasteful welfare spending, abandoned bridges to nowhere, and unnecessary government buildings.  The stimulus subsidized foreign green jobs and wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.

Liberal newspapers, like the editorial boards of The Washington Post and The New York Times, now parrot false claims by the Obama administration that the stimulus has “saved or created” jobs, and cite a non-existent consensus among economists in support of that claim.  But in reality, many leading economists, including Nobel Prize winners, were skeptical of the stimulus, including but not limited to Alberto Alesina, Robert Barro, Gary Becker, John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Robert Lucas, Greg Mankiw, Kevin Murphy, Thomas Sargent, Harald Uhlig, and Luigi Zingales. The “‘stimulus’ is not the road to economic recovery. It’s the problem, not the solution, writes Nobel laureate economist Vernon L. Smith.” The Cato Institute even ran full-page ads in The New York Times and Washington Post, featuring a statement signed by 200 economists opposing the stimulus package.

The Washington Post itself once admitted that there was no consensus among economists for the stimulus, conceding that “[f]iscal stimulus is far from a sure-fire remedy. Economists disagree about the efficacy of every pump-priming effort from the New Deal to last year’s tax rebates. In general, fiscal policy had fallen out of favor in economics. . .Many economists note Japan’s failed attempt to borrow and spend its way out of a recession during the 1990s” through “repeated stimulus packages. As it is, Japan piled up a massive debt and recovered only modestly, leaving it vulnerable to today’s downturn.” (See Editorial, “Priming the Pump,” Jan. 25, 2009, at p. B6).

The Failed Stimulus Package Reveals What Economy Really Needs

by Ben Lieberman on September 29, 2010

in Economy, Energy, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere

A failure can make for a valuable learning experience, and the stimulus package is no exception. Clearly the stimulus has not worked, and from its inception many economists doubted the wisdom of the federal government trying to spend our way into prosperity. But putting aside questions about the merits of spending as means of sparking an economic recovery, it appears that the feds were not even able to dole out the money in a timely manner. The culprit — regulatory red tape.

Several studies conducted by the Department of Energy’s Office of the Inspector General (here , here , and here) have concluded that many of the stimulus-funded projects related to energy were very slow to get off the ground. For example, DOE’s investigation of one program dealing with block grants for energy conservation projects concluded that “as of August 2010, more than one year after the Recovery Act was passed, grant recipients had expended only about 8.4 percent of the $3.2 billion authorized for the Program.” Not exactly the “shovel ready” boost to the economy we were promised.

Regulatory delays were the reason. In its most recent report, DOE’s Inspector General concluded that “various regulatory requirements had slowed spending,” including “the Davis-Bacon Act, National Historic Preservation Act, Buy American provisions of the Recovery Act, and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).”

Granted, the programs funded by the stimulus are a big waste of taxpayer dollars, and it is a good thing that the feds can’t squander our money more quickly. But the point is that even the big government proponents of the stimulus package are finding out what it is like to get tripped up by — big government. Whilst hoisted on their own petard, one can hope that the legislators who supported the stimulus might figure this out.

Perhaps they will learn the critical lesson that can lead to real economic growth. Just as stimulus spending faces a regulatory gauntlet, so does private investment. Efforts by large and small businesses to expand — the real source of an economic recovery and job growth — are hampered by the regulatory state at least as much as are the government projects highlighted in the DOE reports. Streamlining or eliminating these regulatory hurdles would do far more to help the economy than all the stimulus spending in the world.

Stimulus Roundup

by Ryan Young on September 16, 2010

in Economy, Stimulus to Nowhere

Most people doubt Congress’ ability to spend money wisely. The stimulus has given them some proof:

-$800,000 for an African genital-washing program.

-$700,000 to create computer software that can tell jokes.

-$40,000 for ten trash bins.

-$1.6 million to irrigate a golf course inTexas.

-Thousands of dollars to replace – twice – a sidewalk “that doesn’t front any homes or businesses, and leads into a ditch”

-300 truckloads of oyster shells.

Bonus non-stimulus spending: “[T]he Census spent $23,000 on a totem pole in Alaska. Census representative Hector Maldonado says the agency thought it was a great idea. The plan was to increase participation in Alaska, but despite the totem pole, participation dropped in the state by two percent from the last census.”

Obama Proposes $50 Billion More in Wasteful Deficit Spending

by Hans Bader on September 8, 2010 · 1 comment

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, International, Labor, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Zeitgeist

President Obama has proposed $50 billion more in deficit spending after his original $800 billion stimulus package failed.  Federal domestic spending already increased by a record 16 percent this year due to the stimulus package.

By contrast, “Germany has cut government spending and its economy is growing smartly.”  It experienced a healthy 9 percent growth rate in the second quarter of 2010.

The $50 billion Obama proposes is supposedly for infrastructure spending, but his administration defines “infrastructure” so broadly that the money could be used for all sorts of boondoggles that do not improve transportation.  The Obama administration’s real goal seems to be to subsidize wasteful union-controlled construction projects, thanks to Obama’s executive order mandating unionized Project Labor Agreements in construction.

Some commentators claim the original stimulus package had a lot of infrastructure spending in it.  But it didn’t.  To most people, infrastructure means things like roads and bridges.  The stimulus package classified things like $10 billion in spending on housing as “infrastructure.”  It spent only about $48 billion — or 6 percent  of its total spending — on transportation, and that included rail boondoggles that will do little improve transportation.  Money was also wasted on things like an abandoned railroad bridge. More than 79 percent of the stimulus package’s green-jobs funding went to foreign firms.

Economists who drafted Obama’s original stimulus proposal did try to include substantial infrastructure spending in it.  But much of that spending was removed from the stimulus package by the Obama administration after feminist leaders complained that such spending would result in jobs for men, rather than women (they derided transportation spending as a “macho stimulus“).  The stimulus package was then revised by the Obama administration to focus on subsidizing state-government welfare and social-service agencies, whose employees are heavily female, rather than transportation and construction, where employees are mostly male.  (Nearly 80 percent of those who lost their jobs in the recession were male.)  As wasteful as federal transportation spending often is (like the Bridge to Nowhere), it is still far better for the economy than the welfare paid for by the stimulus package.

You Can’t Make This Up

by Ryan Young on August 13, 2010

in Economy, Stimulus to Nowhere

$150,045 of stimulus money is being spent to restore a bridge that doesn’t connect to any roads and ends in an 8-foot drop.

Stimulus backers claim that the project created 1.9 jobs. That’s $78,971.05 per job created. That’s not a very good deal. Especially considering that no jobs were created on net, because that $150,000 was taken away from somewhere else in the economy.

Without the stimulus, that money would have been spent in other ways. Given that most jobs cost less than $78,971 to create, it may well be that the bridge restoration project meant fewer jobs were created than if the government had just left the money where it was originally — your pocket.

Friday Regulation Roundup

by Ryan Young on June 4, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere

-$1.6 million in stimulus money to be used to irrigate a golf course in Texas.

-A new study by Susan Dudley and Melinda Warren finds that regulatory spending grew 31 percent under Bush. Regulatory staffing grew 42 percent.

-Selling shellfish to the Department of Veterans Affairs? There are regulations for that.

-It is illegal to possess pliers in the state of Texas.

-The federal government’s Integrated Nitrogen Committee is having a public teleconference on June 8.

-In Virginia, it is illegal to take a bath without a doctor’s permission.

-Government programs never die. One Cold War relic is the Federal Radiological Preparedness Coordinating Committee.

-The federal government’s Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board is holding a public workshop June 14-15.

-$300,000 of stimulus money to pay for floating toilets.

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