Government – watching over your money!

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified."

- President Barack Obama, Inauguration, 1/20/09

At issue: $100,000.

OK, I will admit – this is Friday Fare – a small nitpick, a missing state name – and it doesn’t even amount to a rounding error of a rounding error of a rounding error in the largest, most deficit ridden budget the world has ever seen.

Oh yeah, that IS the point! From the Washington Times:

When he earmarked $100,000 in taxpayer spending to go to Jamestown’s library, Rep. James E. Clyburn meant for it to go to the library in Jamestown, S.C., which is in his district.

But in the bustle to write and pass the $1.1 trillion catchall spending bill, Congress ended up designating the money for Jamestown, Calif. – 2,700 miles away and a town that doesn’t even have a library.

"That figures for government, doesn’t it," said Chris Pipkin, who runs the one-room library in Jamestown, S.C., and earlier this year requested $50,000, not the $100,000 that Congress designated, to buy new computers and build shelves to hold the books strewn across the room.

The library is just one of more than 5,000 "earmarks," or pork-barrel spending projects, totaling $3.9 billion, tucked inside the report accompanying the catchall spending bill Congress sent to President Obama this week. Mr. Obama signed the $1.1 trillion bill Wednesday, violating his own pledge to allow the public five days to comment on bills before he signs them.

Nice – borrow the money from China and abroad, continue to put the taxpayers further into debt, and then send that money to somebody else that hasn’t asked for it nor has a place to use it.

When Government gets too big, when lawmakers "don’t read the bill" (heck, when lawmakers don’t even read what they wrote!"), this is what you get.  Rushing pell-mell to simply "pass something" is not the answer.

Again, a minor nit – but there are others that the WT reported on:

• $200,000 to study elderly Irish immigrants in New York
• $1 million to add plumbing to houses in Maryland
• $487,000 to build office space so Winston-Salem, N.C., can try to attract businesses to a blighted area.
• $100,000 to build bus shelters in the wealthy community of Bal Harbour, Fla., but Congress more than doubled that amount to $250,000.
• The bill has $155,000 – $1,000 more than Rep. Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin Democrat, requested – for Diverse and Resilient Inc. The group runs a program "to improve the response to intimate partner violence" between members of lesbian or gay couples.
• Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla is getting $500,000 to expand airplane parking space at the airport.
• The bill spends slightly less than $5 million to fund six separate studies of how climate change will affect different places, from the Chesapeake Bay to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Here’s my problem -

… there are ALWAYS more places that can use money, and many are good reasons to support those reasons.  But in cases like this, why aren’t the local taxpayers footing the bill?

Simple answer – they don’t believe that the cost of any of these projects are worth the cost to THEM.  They, being at Ground Zero for the need, determined that these project were not sufficiently valuable to fund themselves or ask their immediate neighbors to bear that cost.

And this is the pernicious problem with "free money grants" – they distort the real priorities of need.  I see this as part of my local Budget Committee and the fights over grants – "hey, it FREE – what is it that you don’t understand about ‘FREE’, moron!".

What’s wrong is that what is free to one locality is being paid by others.  And what the local grantees will not acknowledge, in their haste to "get it before someone else does" is that we pay for the "free grant" for another locality – that would spoil the narrative.

Until folks decide that we should pay for ourselves, this insanity, this rush to add to the debt, will not stop.  This grant process leads to less self-sufficiency at the local level – and makes us ever more dependent on Big Government to supply our needs.

It’s all about the money, isn’t it?