About half of U.S. households receive a government benefit of some sort, and there is no sign of either entitlements or the government’s “tax a lot and spend even more to bring down the debt” mentality slowing down. After that, simple mathematics takes over and chaos ensues. Just ask Greece:

ATHENS, Greece — The Greek parliament approved on Monday a deeply unpopular austerity bill to secure a second bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund and avoid a messy default.

The vote occurred after 100,000 demonstrators marched to the parliament and buildings were burned down in central Athens. Following the vote, black-masked protesters created a wall of fire with petrol bombs and set fire to cinemas, cafes, shops and banks.

Fifty police officers and at least 55 protesters were hospitalized. Forty-five suspected rioters were arrested; a further 40 were detained.

Following the vote to cut $4.35 billion — which means axing one in five civil service jobs and slashing the minimum wage by more than a fifth — violence spread to other Greek towns and cities, including on the holiday islands of Corfu and Crete.

“I’ve had it! I can’t take it any more. There’s no point in living in this country any more,” said a man walking through his smashed and looted optician store.

Greece, and much of Europe for that matter, provide an unpleasant glimpse into what the future holds for the United States (as Daniel Hannan has warned). Will our government heed that warning? Unless changes are made in November and well beyond, that won’t be the case.

Update: Some video from Greece (h/t Fox Nation):

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

It’s been over a year since I first heard that the government was spending a half million dollars for a study of shrimp on a treadmill. It’s the first research project of its kind since the Surgeon General’s office during the Clinton administration commissioned a study of the effects of an elliptical machine on Robert Reich.

The “Let’s Move” program for crustaceans must be going well, because the total expenditure on the study is now almost $200k over the originally reported half-million. But that’s still fairly cheap for a study being done purportedly to help define the effects of global warming on marine life:

Reports of $500,000 of taxpayer funds to study a project that has shrimp running on a treadmill hit the headlines early in 2011. A recent report now shows that $682,570 in grants has been awarded to the research effort.

According to the National Science Foundation (NSF) website, the money has been granted to the “Taking the Pulse of Marine Life in Stressed Seas” research conducted by biology professors Louis and Karen Burnett at the College of Charleston. The research page describes the professor’s “big question” as “How are human-made marine stresses affecting the marine life that we need?”

The website describes the process of the Burnett’s experiments, “First, a crustacean is infected, by injection, with the same types of disease-causing bacteria that are commonly encountered in the wild. Next, the animal is placed on a specially built, mini underwater treadmill. Then, the organism’s vital signs, such as its heart rate and blood pressure, are measured (as a proxy for fitness) while it walks on the treadmill–similar to the way that a person’s vital signs are measured while he or she& walks on a treadmill during a stress test. Finally, the treadmill performances of infected crustaceans are compared to those of their uninfected counterparts.”

Maybe shrimp, lobster and crabs would be a little less stressed if people weren’t grabbing them and throwing them on treadmills — just a thought. By the way, any shrimp that are unable to make the cut are donated to the White House.

What these reasearchers are not discussing is what is placed just outside the tank to make the shrimp run so fast, and it’s kind of cruel if you ask me. Somebody get PETA on the phone:

**Written by Doug Powers

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The White House, seeking to lean on Republicans to pass a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut, is soliciting stories:

Replies are being sent in:

The White House says it’s been flooded with responses to the question it posed Wednesday: “What does $40 mean to you?”

One day after the White House asked “working” people to “tell us what your family will give up if your (payroll) taxes increase,” the stories are rolling in, including one from a person who worried about not having enough to pay the cable bill — or continue family pizza nights.

“Our cable internet bill is $49 per month. If we lose this payroll tax cut then we will have to give up either (our) internet access or possibly our ‘Friday Family Pizza’ night. Either way, we will lose something that brings us together as a family,” wrote “K.Z” from Frederick, Maryland.

Another person wrote that $40 will “buy lunch from the cafeteria for almost a whole month for my twins.”

Add “treats for my dog” to that list.

I asked the same “What does $40 mean to you” question, except the other way around. The answer from the White House appears to be: “Not much.”

–Forty dollars could have been given to almost 14 million taxpayers for what went up in carbon neutral smoke on Solyndra.

–It took some 2,500 taxpayers unwittingly shelling out $40 each just to pay for the First Lady’s separate flight to Hawaii.

Nobody in government — particularly this administration — should be asking taxpayers what difference $40 makes in their lives. Taxpayers should be asking the administration and Congress what $40 means to them:

The payroll tax issue will be settled, but the much larger, longer term problem isn’t budging.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

“I will finally end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all. The days of sweetheart deals for Halliburton and the like will be over when I’m in the White House.” – Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama, October 2, 2008
*****

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars being given to an experimental project involving high cost, questionable necessity and a major party donor — Why does that sound so familiar?

From the Los Angeles Times:

Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.

Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.

When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.

Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a “sole-source” procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation’s biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government’s specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews.

In addition to being a major party donor, Perelman also coughed up $50,000 to help fund Obama’s inauguration bash. But Perelman also dabbles in Republicans. The prudent billionaire always hedges his bets.

The Times goes on to point out that smallpox was eradicated globally in 1978 but the virus does exist in labs in the US and Russia. Siga’s drug isn’t a vaccine, but a pill that’s supposed to help people who have been exposed to the virus for too long of a period of time to be aided by a vaccine. The pill is on top of the smallpox vaccine stockpile the US already has on hand — and the drug has never been tested on human beings (who wants to be first in line for that one?).

One final note… guess who is on Siga’s Board of Directors? Two hints: He used to wear purple and visits the White House frequently.

Forget about smallpox — we need a vaccine against crony capitalism.

**Written by Doug Powers

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The Obama administration was preparing to toss another very expensive life preserver, but Solyndra had already forever slipped beneath the rolling, green waves.

From the Washington Post:

The Obama administration’s Department of Energy was poised last summer to give Solyndra a second major taxpayer loan of $469 million, even as the company’s financial situation was growing more dire.

The Energy Department was actively pushing to provide the second loan guarantee to the troubled solar-panel manufacturer in April and May 2010, when Solyndra’s auditors warned the company was in danger of closing due to its rapidly mounting debts and expenses, according to complete e-mails just released by a House committee investigating the original loan.

That would of course have been on top of the original $535 million loan.

Emails the WaPo cites show that at least one OMB analyist joked about the situation:

“Possible to close and default on one before closing on a second??? Could be a new record.”

I can’t help but wonder what the existing record is. But it doesn’t matter, because in Washington these days, hindsight is 20/20. Foresight is nonexistent.

**Written by Doug Powers

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Ever wonder why Rangel, Pelosi, et al, never ask what Jesus would do on the issue of abortion? But when it comes to trying to stop them from bankrupting America under the weight of their irresponsible spending addiction, suddenly they turn to the Lord:

Washington (CNN) – Veteran Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel made an impassioned plea to religious leaders Friday, calling on them to lobby members of Congress and the Obama administration to remember the “lesser of my brothers and sisters” during this weekend’s debt negotiations.

“What would Jesus do this weekend? Or Moses. Or Allah. Or anyone else,” the New York congressman said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. “I don’t want this book (debt negotiations) closed without the clergy having an opportunity to forcefully express themselves as well as I know they can do.”

Charlie, Jesus might say two things to you: Stop taking the Father’s name in vain and pay your taxes.

(h/t Instapundit)

**Written by Doug Powers

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As Jeffrey Anderson at the Weekly Standard pointed out, the White House releasing a fiscal report on the Friday before a long holiday weekend can only mean one thing: There’s not much good news in it for the White House, and, ergo, taxpayers.

Such is the case with the White House Council of Economic Advisors’ seventh quarterly report on the impact of the “stimulus”:

The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.

Mind you these are Obama’s own economists, so the report is like an employee’s performance evaluation that was filled out by the employee. The absolute truth is probably much more bleak.

Over ten years, the CBO says the stimulus will raise the federal deficit $830 billion — $43 billion more than originally estimated.

Which brings us to President Obama’s weekly address:

Now, it would be nice if we could keep every tax break, but we can’t afford them. Because if we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or for hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners, or for oil and gas companies pulling in huge profits without our help — then we’ll have to make even deeper cuts somewhere else. We’ve got to say to a student, ‘You don’t get a college scholarship.’ We have to say to a medical researcher, ‘You can’t do that cancer research.’ We might have to tell seniors, ‘You have to pay more for Medicare.’

Or how about we say to the White House, “You don’t get to spend the remaining $164 billion earmarked for a ‘stimulus’ that is clearly a failure.”

To steal a line from a military recruiting campaign years ago, “it’s a great place to start” — but unfortunately the painfully obvious options never seem to be on the table.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBeremember being

Thank goodness the Dodd-Frank bill took care of the problems, eh?

From Reuters:

Mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae (FNMA.OB) on Friday said it would ask for an additional $8.5 billion from taxpayers as it continues to suffer losses on loans made prior to 2009.

The largest U.S. residential mortgage funds provider reported a net loss attributable to common shareholders of $8.7 billion, or $1.52 per diluted share, in the first quarter.

Including the latest request, the firm has taken about $100 billion from the U.S. government since it was seized in 2008, though it has also paid about $12.4 billion to taxpayers in interest.

Did I call it a “bailout” in the title? Sorry, that’s so 2008 — these days it’s a “fresh taxpayer infusion.”

And hold on to your Fannie, because I have a feeling that Freddie might also soon be getting in line for seconds at the taxpayer cash buffet:

Sibling firm Freddie Mac (FMCC.OB) said on Wednesday it lost just under a billion dollars in the first three months of the year, though the second-largest provider of mortgage funds did not request any new money from the government.

Here’s a flashback to Barney Frank in 2003, just because:

The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disaster scenarios….

Barney Frank keeps getting re-elected… why exactly?

(h/t Lonely Conservative)

**Written by Doug Powers

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Five hundred million dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (better known to Michelle’s readers as “Porkulus”) went to the US Department of Labor earmarked for “green jobs training programs,” and $490 million of that has already been awarded.

How’s that working out?

According to the most recent data from the BlueGreen Alliance and the Economic Policy Institute, there were 3,586 graduates of Department of Labor-funded green job training programs as of Sept. 30, 2010, but only 466 entered new jobs upon completion of the program.

Over a million bucks per “green” job trainee that was able to find a job as of last fall… not bad by the government’s definition of efficiency.

On the upside, there’s still $10 million unspent stimulus for green jobs training programs, which, if my math is correct, means that there are about nine green jobs remaining. There’s a good possibility that most of those green jobs will somehow revolve around helping the government answer the question, “what the heck is a green job, anyway?”

**Written by Doug Powers

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If you don’t have the time to watch or read Obama’s entire energy speech, here’s the whole thing in a nutshell: “You’re buying a f*#@*!g Volt if you like it or not!”

If you do have a couple of minutes, read on…

Imagine if, in 1961, President Kennedy had said the following: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and then harnessing ingenuity to figure out how to return him safely to the Earth after he gets there.”

That’s what President Obama’s “challenge” of cutting oil imports and replacing it not with domestic drilling, but rather a wildly expensive ‘green’ player to be named later sounds like:

So today, I’m setting a new goal: one that is reasonable, achievable, and necessary. When I was elected to this office, America imported 11 million barrels of oil a day. By a little more than a decade from now, we will have cut that by one-third.

I set this goal knowing that imported oil will remain an important part of our energy portfolio for quite some time. And when it comes to the oil we import from other nations, we can partner with neighbors like Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, which recently discovered significant new oil reserves, and with whom we can share American technology and know-how.

But our best opportunities to enhance our energy security can be found in our own backyard. And we boast one critical, renewable resource the rest of the world cannot match: American ingenuity.

To make ourselves more secure – to control our energy future – we will need to harness that ingenuity. It is a task that won’t be finished by the end of my presidency, or even the next. But if we continue the work that we have already begun over the last two years, we won’t just spark new jobs, industries and innovations; we will leave your generation and future generations a country that is safer, healthier, and more prosperous.

What will the US replace almost four million imported barrels of oil per day with if we’re not going to drill more domestically? Ingenuity. Sounds reasonable, provided anybody can invent a car or jet that runs on ingenuity. Drill for oil domestically in the interim at least? Nah, we’re way too ingenious to have to resort to that.

The promise of creating “green jobs” (which is snipe hunting for the new millennium except far more profitable for those who organize the hunt but will bankrupt the hunter) has caused “ingenuity” itself to become a commodity instead of a byproduct of free people in a free market that leads to tangible advances.

“Ingenuity” is vague and unquantifiable, which makes it the perfect product for greens to peddle — because it isn’t a product at all, just a promise of a product somewhere down the line. Eventually it’s discovered that the only ingenuity involved in any of this was in putting together the scheme itself, but by then we’re faced with a choice of paying $10 a gallon for gas or spending $50,000 on a golf cart electrified by kumquats and burning coal, but mostly burning coal. If that’s ingenuity, we need to find some stupid, and fast.

Changing the subject slightly, President Obama today said that Energy Secretary Chu “actually deserved his Nobel Prize.”

Click the pic to watch:

Note: The caption underneath that says “storms over the Gulf” is purely coincidental, although somewhat fitting given the unwavering stance on the drilling moratorium.

**Written by Doug Powers

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The SAVE Award winner was feted at the White House recently.

From the White House website:

“If you want ideas on how to save money, ask the people who spend it. That’s what President Obama did when he began the SAVE Awards two years ago.” That’s the opening of Joe Davidson’s Washington Post write-up of the SAVE Award, the collaborative process in which all federal employees were invited to submitted their ideas on how to save taxpayer dollars and strwamline government, as well as vote and comment on others’. After a tough-but-fair crack about government acronyms, Trudy Givens gets her due recognition:

Trudy Givens, a Bureau of Prisons employee from Portage, Wis., submitted the winning suggestion. Like many of the other ideas, Givens’s suggestion is so simple, yet so effective, you wonder why [Uncle] Sam didn’t think of it earlier.

Her idea: Send the Federal Register — a daily compendium of government regulations and notices — to federal employees online, rather than by snail mail, with an estimated savings of $16 million through 2015.

As the SAVE Award winner, she got to meet the President and her agency head the Attorney General in the Oval Office

For my own SAVE Award submission, I was going to suggest that the White House lay off their website proofreader in order to save taxpayers some money, but I see they already must have done that.

President Obama is quoted as saying, “A million here, a million there. It adds up.” Yes it does. Unless we’re talking about PBS and NPR, then those millions are insignificant:

President Obama defended public broadcasting from cuts on Friday, emphasizing that defunding networks like NPR and PBS would do little to rein in spending.
[...]
“That’s not where the money is,” he added.

The SAVE Award winner’s idea is said to save $4 million or so per year and she got a party (nobody from the US Postal Service was in attendance, no doubt). Taxpayers subsidize NPR and PBS to the tune of hundreds of millions per year and that’s “insignificant.” Go figure.

Is there a federal employee out there willing to suggest defunding NPR and PBS for next year’s SAVE Awards competition? If you do, please make sure you’ve got enough money put away for a comfortable (and abrupt) retirement before submitting the entry.

**Written by Doug Powers

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Today, a Wilmington, Delaware train station was officially renamed for Joe Biden, the man charged with ensuring that every stimulus project comes in on time and on budget. Naturally this particular station came in $5.3 million over budget. That, however, was a small price to pay to add another piece to the puzzle of cost-effective reliable mass transit, as those in attendance at the ribbon cutting would find out as soon as the Amtrak CEO got there… by car. The train on which he was going to arrive at the ceremony for the Conductor of America’s Train to the Future broke down.

If this story gets injected with any more symbolism and irony it’s going to turn into a Stanley Kubrick film.

Incidentally, today, Biden said he didn’t deserve the honor. Don’t be so hard on yourself, Joe — it’s the taxpayers who don’t deserve it.

**Written by Doug Powers

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This probably will never see the light of day in the Senate, but it’s a nice bit of chin music for those who have been crowding the taxpayer-funded plate for far too long and a reminder of one of many things that could hinge on the 2012 elections.

Fox News:

The House of Representatives on Thursday voted 228-192 on a bill to defund National Public Radio, the vast public radio network whose leadership has been questioned after a series of executive decisions about programming, staffing and reporting bias.

Seven Republicans broke with House leadership and voted against the package. One GOP member, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, voted present.

Republicans voting against defunding:

Sean Duffy — WI
Chris Gibson — NY
Richard Hanna — NY
Steve LaTourette — OH
Patrick Tiberi — OH
Dave Reichert — WA
Rob Woodall — GA

Here’s Dem Rep. Anthony Weiner prematurely eulogizing Click & Clack (if taxpayers don’t fund NPR who will teach us how to fix our cars?) and resorting to joke names like “Heywood Jabuzzoff.” A conservative congressman by the name of Craven Moorecuts disagrees with Weiner:

Meanwhile, a Democrat wants to defund Fox News from getting any federal advertising dollars. I agree that the GOP should call the bluff and address it — except for all media outlets. If they’re going to root out unnecessary, senseless, redundant or just plain stupid expenses wherever they exist, include an examination of the money government spends on advertising.

Update: And the NPR hits keep on comin’: Wobegon lefty Garrison Keillor will retire in 2013. Wait, Garrison Keillor’s still on the air? In any case, Keillor’s departure is expected to save or create many jobs at Sominex.

**Written by Doug Powers

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A Delaware district decided not to name a school after Joe Biden, but this one’s a far better idea. Putting the name of the Conductor of the Train to the Future on something that consistently loses millions is a much more fitting way to honor the veep.

NBC Philly:

Frequent train rider, Vice President Joe Biden will be forever linked with the Wilmington train station.

In honor of the long-time Amtrak rider and strong advocate of passenger rail, the newly renovated station will be dedicated as the Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Railroad Station on Saturday.

As a U.S. Senator from Delaware for 36 years, Biden regularly traveled by train between Wilmington and Washington, D.C.

Wilmington Station underwent a nearly two-year, $37.7-million renovation. Funding for the project included $20 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Moral of the story: When you’re the Sheriff in charge of doling out taxpayer cash, always make sure to save out a few million for something that can be named after you in appreciation for your generosity.

(h/t JWF)

**Written by Doug Powers

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If the same amount of taxpayer dollars were going to Fox News, would it be considered such a meaningless pittance?

President Obama defended public broadcasting from cuts on Friday, emphasizing that defunding networks like NPR and PBS would do little to rein in spending.
[...]
“I think it’s going to be important for us to have a conversation after we get the short-term budget done, about how do we really tackle the problem in a comprehensive way,” Obama said at a press conference on Friday.

“And that means not just going after Head Start or Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That’s not where the money is,” he added.

It could be a moot point. As Doug Ross points out, if James O’Keefe continues at this pace, de-funding NPR won’t be necessary because it won’t have any employees left.

**Written by Doug Powers

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