On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Jerry Barnes <[email protected]> wrote: > "It would be nice to see a non-partisan investigation of all the projects to > see whether the projects were well conceived in the first place and how > their results measure up to > their initial applications. I'm sure that there are a number of dubious > projects that got funded, just like there is with every government budget. > I'd love to see them. " > > Isn't that what the media is for?
Actually, I think that there are supposed to be audit agencies within the government for these things. The help of media working to bring those reports to light would be quite helpful though. A report that no one reads is kind of a waste. > "I don't think that McCain and Coburn are the people that will actually > bring them to light though." > > Even though this is just a political ploy, it doesn't mean all of it is > wrong. Similarly, it's not like anyone else is investigating the spending. > Investigating the partisan investigators, sure, but that's it. Oh, sure, I'd be willing to bet that some of the projects are wasteful. The stimulus act was looking for projects that would pump money into the local economies quickly to help keep the floor steady on consumer demand (which drives 70% of the economy). When you go out looking for and finding 70,000 projects that you want to fund quickly (which was the point of the program) I'd say you're bound to have 100 that probably should not have been funded. Probably more than that I'd guess. The stimulus act was emergency spending. I want fiscal accountability in all projects. I'm more concerned about fiscal accountability in ongoing projects than I am in emergency projects. None the less, we should look at what we did, find the good points, find the bad points and be honest about them and try to learn. Overall, I'm still far more concerned about the several billion dollars in cash that we "lost" while sending it to Iraq in pallets of wrapped bills. I'm more concerned about war profiteering. I'm concerned about the billions of dollars in "aid" that is going to Afghanistan and Pakistan that we can't account for. But those aren't things that Coburn and McCain want to put on a bullet point list. Kind of ruins any belief I have that they are actually interested in fiscal accountability. Get rid of the systemic loss of hundreds of billions of dollars that are going outside our borders to potential enemies of the state and/or defense contractors illicitly and then I'll have more energy to be outraged by a one-time $500,000 appropriation for refinishing a government owned building, inside the United States, done by presumably American local workers. Juda ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology-Michael-Dinowitz/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:324330 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/unsubscribe.cfm
