If there's one thing that Arizona Senator John McCain and
Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn agree on, it's that large amounts of the
stimulus money are being wasted.
Coburn and McCain this week released a new oversight report:
"Summertime Blues: 100 Stimulus Projects that Give Taxpayers the
Blues." The report, a third in a series, highlights questionable
stimulus projects that are wasteful, mismanaged, and overall
unsuccessful in creating jobs.
The projects, they say, can't be consider as an investment in
long-term priorities to create and sustain economic growth that such
a stimulus was intended to do.
In Washington terms, they are pork of the "ham-iest" variety.
"Eighteen months since the passage of the stimulus bill,
millions of jobs are still gone and the economy is as uncertain as
ever," said McCain this week. "The only thing getting a boost is our
national debt. The stimulus has helped push it 23 percent higher, to
$13.2 trillion, a new record."
Examine, for instance, the $308 million being spent on a clean
energy alternatives projects... with BP (British Petroleum), the
company that just created, through their own massive incompetence,
the single dirtiest energy disaster of all time.
Or take the $554,763 (!) being spent by the Forest Service to
replace windows in a closed visitor center near Mt. St. Helens. That
is being spent while the Forest Service is behind in their goal of
clearing, through Future Forests, LLC, 150,000 acres of the Apache
Sitgreaves, an initiative that creates around 300 permanent jobs in
this area. Worse yet, $762,372 was given out to create an
interactive computer program entitled "Dance Draw."
$62 million to create a tunnel that goes nowhere in Pittsburgh,
a project that even Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell calls "a tragic
mistake." Think how far that money would go toward forest
regeneration.