Debt From Alleged Waste In Stimulus 488 Times Smaller Than That From Bush Tax Cuts

Yesterday, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) released a report that highlights 100 supposedly “questionable stimulus projects that are wasteful, mismanaged, and overall unsuccessful in creating jobs.” “The only thing getting a boost is our national debt,” the report complains. The “American people have awakened to the incompetency of Washington,” said Coburn. “The rest of the federal government is filled with stuff just like this.”

Coburn went on Fox News today to promote the report and criticized White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ claim yesterday that the report is not credible:

COBURN: Mr. Gibbs knows I don’t mess around when it comes to stealing money from our kids and grandkids. And if he wants to defend this kind of stuff — this isn’t political. It’s too serious to be political no guys. We’re $13.4 trillion in debt and growing and this is the kind of waste that people are sick and tired of.

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If Coburn doesn’t “mess around” with “stealing money” from the American youth, then why are he and McCain fierce advocates for extending President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy? The ten-year cost of extending those tax cuts amounts to $830 billion. But how much of this alleged “wasteful” stimulus spending are the senators now concerned about? A mere $1.7 billion:



Moreover, CNN noted that “the report’s use of selected information from hundreds of footnoted sources left it unclear if the brief summaries of each project told the whole story.” For example, the report attacked a grant to replace windows at a vacant Forest Service visitors’ center in Washington, claiming there are “no current plans to use the empty space.” However, as CNN noted, the Forest Service said it “is now reviewing several proposals for how the facility could be used in the future through a variety of public-private partnerships, including a science facility, education camp, or an overnight lodge.”

But maybe Coburn is more concerned about the $1.7 billion in alleged “wasteful” stimulus spending as opposed to $830 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy because the believes the tax cuts are free.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/08/04/coburn-mccain-stimulus/

 

Its really odd to see lefties act like not taking money from tax payers is wasteful.

 

Republicans moving their lips.

 

Yet they call the stimulus a success when we are spending 70k to test the effects of cocaine on monkeys, and 300k to see if yoga prevents hotflashes, and over a million dollars to send a bunch of researchers on vacation to Africa to analyze ants, I wonder how many jobs they will claim were saved or created with these 3 projects.... does paying the monkey with cocaine count as creating a job? What if the monkey sells the cocaine... maybe that will stimulate the economy.....atleast if nothing else it will stimulate a few Obama voters....

How could any honest human being claim this stimulus is anything but a liberal slush fund for their pet projects.



The Obama administration has credited its $862 billion stimulus program with pulling the economy out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. But a new report by two Republican senators argues the stimulus is riddled with wasteful projects that do not create jobs.

The report, released by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and John McCain, R-Ariz., highlights 100 stimulus projects that they say have “questionable goals,” are “being mismanaged or were poorly planned” and are even “costing jobs and hurting small businesses.”

The Coburn-McCain report takes issue with stimulus spending on projects like one that entailed research on how cocaine affects monkeys. The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center was awarded $71,623 to study what the report calls, “Monkeys Getting High for Science.”

Bonnie Davis, a spokeswoman for The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said the “small grant has helped protect very important research that will have significant impact on public health in regards to cocaine addiction and the issue of relapse.”

Go a little further down the list and you’ll find even bigger spending. The California Academy of Sciences is receiving nearly $1 million in stimulus funds to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and East Africa to capture, photograph and analyze thousands of exotic ants.

There’s also funding for yoga and hot flashes. Researchers at Wake Forest University have received nearly $300,000 to study whether integral yoga “can be an effective method to reduce the frequency and/or severity of hot flashes” in breast cancer survivors.

http://patdollard.com/2010/08/obamas-cocaine-monkeys-with-video/