How to Waste Money

Republicans are so sad and disappointed that they're sobbing big wet tears over President Obama and the Recovery and Reinvestment bill, because of all the money it wastes.

These folks are the true experts on that. Want to talk about how to waste money? One word: Iraq. You spend billions on bombs, airplanes, missiles, all the hardware you spend millions shipping over there, then you use them to blow the place up. And then you spend billions supposedly to repair what you just blew up. Perfectly sensible expenditures. Especially since there was no reason to start the war, and no good plan for ending it. Now it's the longest and most expensive in American history. And time and again, these same folks voted to spend billions and billions to do this, and called anybody who asked questions traitors.

Along the way you give no-bid contracts to your favorite crooks, who steal billions, who build stuff that crumbles immediately if they build it at all, whose work is so shoddy that the wiring they install electocutes American troops. The armor doesn't get there for years and doesn't work when it does, so in addition to the billions of federal money, the families of troops have to buy armor for their soldiers. You pay lawless mercenaries several times more than the troops, until there are more expensive contractors than soldiers in Iraq.

Iraq is going to wind up costing about what it will take to turn this economy around, or just about what it will cost to fix the infrastructure here that's been neglected for 25 years. At least some people think it will be about two trillion, in all three cases.

When it comes to an unnecessary war which kills and maims thousands of people and makes millions into refugees, money is no object. But here's what these folks have taken out of the recovery bill so far:

Billion dollar cuts
$40 billion State Fiscal Stabilization
$16 billion School Construction
$7.5 billion of State Incentive Grants
$5.8 billion Health Prevention Activity
$4.5 billion GSA
$3.5 billion Higher Ed Construction (Eliminated)
$3.5 billion Federal Bldgs Greening
$2.25 Neighborhood Stabilization (Eliminate)
$2 billion broadband [for rural areas]
$2 billion HIT Grants
$1.25 billion project based rental
$1 billion Head Start/Early Start
$1.2 billion in Retrofiting Project 8 Housing
$1 billion Energy Loan Guarantees

and a selection from the Million dollar cuts: $300 million for federal hybrid vehicles (from U.S. automakers), $65 million Watershed Rehab,
$98 million School Nutrition, $10 million State and Local Law Enforcement,
$50 million NASA, $100 million Science, $25 million Fish and Wildlife
$55 million Historic Preservation,$20 million working capital fund,
$200 million Superfund,$90 million State & Private Wildlife Fire Management.

So here's the principle: don't pay for building stuff in America, just for blowing stuff up in other countries, and maybe rebuilding that stuff. Don't pay for things that make everybody's life better and invest in a better future for everybody, and certainly don't spend for anything that will help the unemployed, and the fading middle class. Just use that money for tax cuts for the rich. This is Republican and centrist budget management. Didn't we just vote to get rid of these folks?

Here's the deal: a lot of this spending may just be in the nick of time. If the federal government doesn't do it now--for example if it doesn't get that $40 billion to the states right away--we're all going to end up suffering, the economy continues to spiral down, and in the best case scenario, we'll wind up paying more later.

These Republicans and so-called centrists who mangled this bill--they were great entertainment at least some of the time, but we really can't afford them anymore.