My Desultory Blog

“This week in 1861, the first federal income tax was instituted to pay for the Civil War. These days, we don’t worry about that kind of stuff. Our wars are paid for by our grandchildren.” — Jay Leno

I’m not sure if we should laugh or cry when it comes to how government spends millions of our tax dollars … or should I say, spend future tax dollars they are borrowing from our kids and grandkids.

When trying to figure out how millions of dollars are wasted on individual odd ball studies and pet projects, I realized that it is the size of our bureaucracy that makes this a challenge … a pretty good argument for reducing the size of the federal government. Even attention to detail by the most fastidious top level bureaucrat and staffer would probably find it difficult to know where the dollars will  get spent.

Here’s an example from the video above: the grant for $2.6 million from the NIAAA’s share of our tax dollar are used to “help train Chinese prostitutes how to drink responsibly” (as some sources present it). One would be hard pressed to spot the grant project when preparing to vote on H.R.3288.

Nevertheless, the funding was appropriated by our representatives in bill H.R. 3288, and passed by the senate, and agreed to by the President, as part of the $462,346,000 budget for the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) under National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the Department of Health and Human Services. The grant of the $2.6 million to be used by Dr. Xiaoming Li, who is the director of the Prevention Research Center at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. It was doled out by the Director of the NIAAA, Kenneth Warren — although ultimately those in elect in Washington DC are responsible for those they hire and appoint.

Posted via email from RichC’s posterous