Your tax dollars literally up in smoke! - Granite Grok

Your tax dollars literally up in smoke!

Is this in the US?

Nope!

Hookah

Over at CNSNews, I see that our lovely bureaucrats love our money that they are literally letting it go up in smoke – in foreign countries:

U.S. Spends $1 Million Researching Syrians ‘Hooked on Hookahs’

‘Hoookah,’ ‘nargile,’ ‘hubbly-bubbly’ — all names for the waterpipe, a smoking instrument typically found in the Middle East in which tobacco smoke is drawn through water and cooled before the smoke is sucked into the mouth through a tube.

For the last several years, U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $1 million to fund research on waterpipes and waterpipe use in studies being conducted at the Syrian Center for Tobacco Study, in Aleppo, Syria.

“We’ve done some studies in Syria just looking at the prevalence of it in the general population, and in average groups like college students,” researcher Ken Ward of the University of Memphis Department of Health and Sport Sciences, told CNSNews.com.

Ward and his associates in Syria have received a number of grants from the federal National Institutes of Health (NIH) over the years for research on waterpipes – $21,000 for a project that ended in 2007; $326,000 in 2006 to establish the Syrian Center for Tobacco Study; $334,000 for center projects in 2004; and $438,000 in 2005.

“Right now we’re doing an intervention study in Syria, looking at how to help people who are interested in quitting to actually quit permanently,” he said.

Got that?  In Syria – a country that is a laptop of Iran in supporting Hezbullah in trying to destabilize Lebanon and wipe Israel off the map.  Our NIH "experts" believe that hookah smoking here in the US is at such a level that it requires us to give money to a terrorist sponsoring government.

Ain’t that just dandy!

It is no secret that we are in favor of both Jeb Bradley’s (running to unseat Carol Shea-Porter in NH-1) and Grant Bosse’s (running to unseat Paul Hodes in NH-2) lists of government programs that are just wasteful – I humbly submit that this program be joined to both lists.

WHY the heck to do have to pay to spend that kind of money on something like this?  We know smoking is bad.  We know that Syria is bad.  We know that hookahs, in concentrating that smoke and the nicotine that travels via it, is bad.

COMMON SENSE SAYS THIS IS A NO BRAINER!

Look, I’m not anti-science – I have a two degrees in the hard sciences.  My main concern is that why not let the Syrians study their own hookahs and trying to get government to understand that there are more things to do or study than money.  Please start using restraint, consider tax money a constraint, and stop using taxpayers as ATMs for dubious reasons such as this.

CNSNews.com asked Ward, if, given the fact that we know that cigarette smoke is harmful, do we need to study what we know intuitively to be true: that waterpipes likely are as harmful as cigarettes?

“That does make intuitive sense, and the research being done does support that – but that message doesn’t seem to be getting out to young people who are using it,” Ward said. “Some of the comments we hear is that, ‘If it was dangerous, they wouldn’t be selling it.’ Of course, that’s not true for cigarettes and it’s also not true for waterpipes.”

So instead of letting common sense work, instead of letting consequences of making bad decisions teach these folks a lesson that can be seen by others, once again, the Nanny State is going to insert themselves.  If you are that stupid, after listening to years of warnings (back to the ’60s) and you are still going to take up smoking, anintervention by a researcher is probably not going to make you stop.  After all, their parents have, more than likely, said "Don’t do this!" (listen to your Momma, she’s generally right!)

Conservative taxpayer groups like Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) say that even if the research is a good idea, it is not necessarily something that U.S. tax dollars need to fund.

Why is the federal taxpayer always the one who has to pay for this?” said CAGW Vice President David Williams. “We question whether this is a national priority to figure out the problems of other countries. Let’s figure out our problems and solve those.”

Part of the problem, Williams said, is that the NIH has access to many billions of dollars.

“What you have is a bunch of experts that sit around and they shake their heads, and they say, ‘Yeah, this is a good idea, let’s do research on this. Let’s have some blockbuster results,’” he said.

 The problem is that programs like this come about when government has too much money.  Instead of prioritizing correctly, instead of asking themselves the question "What is the proper role of government?" and asking "How does this affect taxpayers?", these researchers over at NIH just say "Hey, we got a budget – what’s interesting to study?"

“Unfortunately, one of the truly blockbuster results (of the budget process) is that we have a huge deficit and national debt that taxpayers are saddled with,” said Williams.

All of these little things add up.  What’s worse is the mentality and philosophy that it engenders that spending like this is nothing out of the ordinary.  In other words, it’s ok to spend for this stuff. 

The Syrian studies have been funded through the NIH’s Fogarty International Center, a branch of the federal health service that has been paying for international scientific research for the last 40 years. In FY 2009, the Fogarty Center is slated to receive $66 million.

So, what’s better – spending money on Hookah research or fixing a bridge somewhere – or better yet, supplying vouchers to poor families to send their kids to good, results-priented schools….
 

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