Yuratuhl wrote:
I, for one, despise maintained roads, inspected bridges, speed limits, highway patrolmen, and federal regulatory agencies.
So does most everyone else, butthead, what a lot of us object to are subsidies for large industries like Florida's sugar producers, dairy, agriculture (let's not pretend there are really any family farms left), petroleum, etc.
There are plenty of laws/regulations that actually increase the cost of government, and in the case of maintained roads and inspected bridges one of those laws is the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires that contractors pay their employees the “prevailing wage” on federal projects costing more than $2,000. The mandate raises the cost of government projects by 15 percent and costs taxpayers $512 million annually. Davis-Bacon has been touted by labor unions and politicians as essential to ensuring fair compensation on government jobs. In reality, the “prevailing wage” tends to correspond to union wages, especially in urban areas. This effect is no accident. Davis-Bacon was passed as part of an effort by high-skilled, high-wage, mostly white workers to keep out lower-paid, non-union, minority competition. In 1931, Rep. Miles Allgood (D-Ala.), arguing for the act’s passage, complained of “that contractor [who] has cheap colored labor which he transports … and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.” Not only is the act an obvious gimme to one party's core constituent groups (unions), its original passage was motivated, at least in part, by racism.
As much as I love traveling by train, a
2009 study found that taxpayers paid $32 in subsidies per Amtrak passenger in 2008. By booking a month in advance, it is possible to buy a round-trip plane ticket from New Orleans to Los Angeles and back for less than the $437.82 that Amtrak loses per passenger on a one-way trip between those same locations. To make matters worse, The New York Times reported in August, 2012, that
Amtrak lost $834 million on food service alone since 2002. Former Amtrak spokesman and rail expert Joseph Vranich asserted that “Amtrak is a massive failure because it’s wedded to a failed paradigm. It runs trains that serve political purposes as opposed to being responsive to the marketplace.
Despite all the maintained roads and inspected bridges, trains aren't the only wasted federal transportation spending. The Essential Air Service was created in the 1970s after airline deregulation in an effort to retain air service in smaller communities. Today, it provides subsidies to 153 rural communities in 35 states and Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, what was intended to be a temporary program has morphed into a funnel for subsidies to support largely empty flights that otherwise would never leave the ground. According to
a September 19, 2009, article in The Los Angeles Times, EAS “spends as much as thousands per passenger in remote areas” and “provides service to areas with fewer than 30 passengers a day.” Among the most absurd recipients of EAS subsidies is an airport in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, tirelessly defended by the late Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), from which just 18 flights leave each week.
Johnstown is only two hours east of Pittsburgh International Airport by car.
A May 2012 investigation by Scripps Media “exposed one flight between Baltimore and Hagerstown, Maryland (Hagerstown is about an hour north of where I live), two cities that are about 75 miles apart (slightly more than an hour by car), [that] was so sparse the captain allowed the only other passenger who wasn’t our producer to sit in the co-pilot’s seat,” and cited two other flights on the same route with just one passenger each. The investigative team found that “A 19-seat plane from Cleveland to Dubois, Pennsylvania, about 180 miles east, had just one passenger as well.”
Because of the EAS, the Oklahoma Aeronautics Commission voted to keep open the rarely used Lake Murray State Park Airport, simply to land more federal funds. It averages one flight per month, bases no planes and
is only 2 miles from other airports. The Federal Aviation Administration makes automatic payments to the airport, which then turns the money around to other projects in-state, making it nothing more than a brief layover for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
From the Environmental Protection Agency awarding a $140,000 grant to study Chinese swine manure to the National Institutes of Health funding studies on the hookah smoking habits of Jordanian students to the Department of Agriculture funding a $20 million reality TV show in India to promote U.S. cotton to a country that is a net exporter of cotton, government waste in the discretionary budget abounds.
I love beer, but I can't understand why Smuttynose Brewing in New Hampshire, which sells more than $5 million worth of craft beers annually in 19 states and the District of Columbia, is being given federal funds to build three new brew tanks at its main brewery and to set up sewage connections for a new brewery outside Portsmouth, N.H., to fuel its expansion. There's a Pentagon project dedicated to testing technology developed by the United States' allies that could 'improve the nation's war-fighting capabilities' by using a French process to develop beef jerky in a form that resembles a fruit roll-up--but we already have a large private sector beef jerky industry that is more than capable of producing all of the jerky of any type the country needs. According to a report developed by Senator Tom Coburn, "The Pentagon could have simply purchased meat snacks from the numerous companies already producing these popular treats rather than creating its own brand of jerky." Coburn's report also cites a Department of Agriculture grant of $283,884 to Sunburst Trout Farms, which produces trout jerky and other fish products, to help fuel its expansion. Sergeant's Pet Care Products, a company with $140 million in revenue, received a Community Development Block Grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for capital improvements, with which the company wanted to buy machinery to make pet toothpaste and shampoo. A lot of these just represent more unnecessary subsidies of already successful businesses, and are just political paybacks in the form of pork spending.
That's not to mention the savings the government could reap by selling off empty buildings/land it has bought up over the years. Even if the federal government didn't make a profit on the sale of these properties, offsetting the cost of upkeep would represent a significant annual savings.
In an era of inexpensive internet meetings, there's also no reason for expensive conferences/conventions in Las Vegas like the one the GSA spent $835,000+ to shame itself with in 2010.
You should remember that as one of last year's big news stories.
So you can cut the smug bullshit about how anyone who thinks the federal government should do at least a little better with a little less is against "maintained roads, inspected bridges, speed limits, highway patrolmen, and federal regulatory agencies." The federal budget is bloated, full of duplicate programs spread across multiple different departments, and our tax dollars are being seriously mismanaged. The savings that consolidating programs, eliminating subsidies, selling unneeded properties, and eliminating waste and fraud could generate might even be enough to offset the current debate about entitlement spending.
Your Pal,
Jubber
