Home : For The People : A Constitutional Republic :Government Waste
Going into space and doing sciency things costs a lot of money. Sometimes these investments are worth their weight in taxpayers' money. Other times? Not so much. Tinfoil pants, industrial-size containers of Tang, and grabby robotic arms don't come cheap. NASA sure spends lot of money, but don't fret — all those billions pay off threefold with startling science-advancing results. Except when they don't. The Space Shuttle Program is intended to make space flight as cheap and routine as running to the deli to buy a soda and a bag of weed, the program hasn't done either. It has averaged just five flights a year (instead of the projected 64), has tragically exploded twice, and to date has cost $174 billion. It's mainly used to fix satellites so your Saved by the Bell marathons come in clear, and to ferry astro-folk to the space station. Which bring us to... The International Space Station. $53 billion has been pumped into this orbiting, constantly falling-apart condo. Reagan signed off on an $8 billion price tag in 1984, with the plan to have it completed by 1992. At the current pace, it will be finished in 2010, with an estimated price tag of $100 billion. With no actual long-term use, once it is finished, the space station will be decommissioned and crashed into the bottom of the ocean. Man, if that litter-hating Indian guy cried when he saw trash on the side of the road, he's absolutely gonna shit himself when that rusty space heap goes kerplunk. In 1996, NASA and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company joined nerdy forces to design a less-deadly means of flying crews to the space station, the X-33 and X-34 space plane projects. Five years and $1 billion later, the project was scrapped due to its insistence on not working. By 2020, NASA plans on zipping astronauts to the lunar surface—something we already did almost 40 years ago — at a cost of $104 billion. So why go back? Among the six reasons given by NASA at a press conference, one is to "use a vibrant exploration programto engage the public..." In otherwords, do something splashy enough to keep the government cheese rolling in. Passing the buck is a well-used Washington tactic. The only thing that brings Republicans and Democrats together is an appetite for your hard-earned tax dollars. Your tax dollar evaporates, one misspent penny at a time. Are your tax dollars being wasted?
In the wake of the recent hurricane calamities, many Americans are wondering how our government can spend $2.5 trillion a year ($6.8 billion a day) and still not have enough for disaster preparedness, such as reinforcing New Orleans’ levees and efficiently evacuating Houston and other cities. One problem is “pork-barrel spending.” Every year, members of Congress try to gain funding for as many projects as possible in his or her district. Some of these “pork” projects actually help people who need it, but many others would seem unnecessary if they were in someone else’s district. Ketchikan, Alaska (pop. 8,200) is a popular stop for cruise ships plying the Alaska Inland Passage. It lies in a borough of 13,500, which includes nearby Gravina Island (pop. 50), site of the Ketchikan airport. To get from the island to the town, passengers take a five-minute ferry ride. At least, they do now. On July 29, Congress approved $223 million to construct a bridge to Gravina that eventually will cost at least $315 million. That’s more than $23,000 for each citizen of Ketchikan. In July, I asked borough assemblyman Dave Kiffer how many people in Ketchikan supported the project. About half, he estimated. “The general feeling here,” he said, “is that if someone else is paying for it, sure, why not?” However, on the streets of Ketchikan, few locals who were passionately in favor of The Bridge. Supporters said that its construction would create jobs. Even if jobs went to outsiders, the workers would be spending their salaries in Ketchikan. Many opponents of The Bridge were more embarrassed than angry. One young man—who requested anonymity, fearing retribution from his pro-bridge boss—told me of his recent visit to the lower 48 states: Every time he drove over a pothole or got stuck in traffic, he said, he thought about The Bridge and figured the money could be better used elsewhere. High school student Claire Ragozzino had just seen a TV news report about people starving in the African nation of Niger. “I wondered,” she said, “how many lives could be saved with the money allocated for The Bridge.” Horse Springs Ranch is a cattle ranch in western New Mexico. Its owner will receive more than $2.5 million not to develop a parcel of his land—part of the government’s Forest Legacy Program, designed to preserve natural areas. This particular project would allow wildlife—such as elk, deer and antelopes—to pass freely on continuous undeveloped land from the Apache National Forest to land owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. I visited the ranch, about a three-hour drive from Albuquerque, with Bob Sivinski, the state’s Forest Legacy program manager. The Forest Service, Sivinski explained, hoped to prevent the ranch’s owner from subdividing a parcel of approximately 4,000 acres into 20- or 40-acre chunks, which people could buy and live on. We were bumping along a trail on the acreage in question when suddenly a magnificent elk darted in front of our jeep and disappeared into the forest. It got me thinking: The ranch owner is being paid millions in taxpayer money to do nothing, yet when I doubt the usefulness of this expenditure, I picture that fantastic elk running in front of me. Outrageous as some pork projects may be, they account for barely 1% of the federal budget—$27.3 billion in 2005. If all pork programs were miraculously suspended, the total would pay for about 18% of Gulf Coast recovery, now estimated at around $150 billion. Of course, it’s next to impossible to nullify pork appropriations—though some have tried. After Katrina, a group of citizens in Bozeman, Mont., made national news when they petitioned the town council not to accept $4 million in pork earmarked for a parking garage. They were turned down, but many editorial writers picked up on the idea, and readers wrote letters of approval. Meanwhile, Representatives and Senators squabbled in Congress over whose pork was expendable. In the end, legislators began to look elsewhere in the budget for the recovery money. In October, House leaders called for cuts in such social programs as Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and other programs for the indigent. Gulf Coast recovery must be paid for—but is it wise to further deprive all of the nation’s 37 million poor to aid the (highly visible) poor in a single region? Unwise government spending comes in different guises: We give $10.3 billion a year to the Internal Revenue Service to collect taxes but only $493 million to the Government Accountability Office, the agency that oversees whether those tax dollars are spent efficiently. One-third of the annual U.S. budget goes to two areas: the military ($527 billion, as much for defense as all other nations combined) and interest on the national debt ($321 billion). Our national debt is $8 trillion, or $26,900 per person. One positive outcome of the storms of late summer may be wiser spending, as Congress takes another look at how it uses its $2.5 trillion.
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