by Jack Lee
You have no doubt heard that if you give government a buck they’ll spend a buck and a half and this is why government has to be constantly weened away from cash. Cash is the drug of choice in D.C. and spending it wildly and foolishly is their ultimate high. Take for instance the “Big Dig. This is Boston’s highway project that reroutes Interstate 93 into a 3.5 mile tunnel beneath the city. Originally estimated to cost $2.5 billion in 1985, the project devolved into the most expensive highway project in U.S. history, costing some $14.6 billion in state and federal tax dollars by 2006.
Countless contractor changes and environmental obstacles later, the Big Dig’s crushing debt had “engulfed the state”, ballooning to $22 billion that will not be paid off in full until 2038 – at the earliest. This assumes no more hurdles for a project whose oversights have already killed a motorist and led a Massachusetts attorney general to demand $100 million in refunds to taxpayers as a result of “shoddy work.”
Here’s another doosy…like so many grand and visionary government projects, “Railhead” – an online terrorist database meant to disseminate information to counter terrorism analysts – was done in by cost overruns and mismanagement. Recalling comments from Representative Brad Miller, chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee’s Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee, CNet.com notes “”Potentially hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted, delivery schedules have slipped, contractor employees have been laid off.” Miller further stated that the net result was a database that “had been crippled by technical flaws”, replaced by “a new system that if actually deployed will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today.” While technical flaws have recieved the brunt of the blame for Railhead’s demise, contractor fraud played no small part. ZD Net, for example, reports that $500 million originally earmarked for Railhead actually went toward rennovating one of Boeing’s own buildings!
Pizza anyone? One all too common consequence of spending other people’s money is failure to think ahead. A telling example can be found in San Jose, whose unified school district approved the purchase of a $725,000 pizza machine it claimed would “churn out 800 pizzas a day to sell on various campuses in the district.” In reality, the machine reportedly produced only 2,000 pizzas in two years due to frequent breakdowns, which works out to roughly $360 per pizza. (Caltax jokes that they hope the kids “got extra cheese and generous toppings.) What’s worse, the San Jose school district eventually took pizza off its menus completely when it realized there weren’t enough trucks to deliver pizza to different campuses, all of which had the same rigidly enforced lunch time. The machine is mostly retired at present, trotted out only on Fridays at various elementary schools for “pizza day.”
And this one is the least explainable of all those I have found. In 2004, the St. Petersburg Times reported that the U.S. Department of Defense “spent an estimated $100-million in six years for airline tickets that were not used and failed to seek refunds” – even though the tickets they had purchased were completely refundable!
Adding insult to injury the Pentagon then happily reimbursed at least $8 million employees who claimed to have purchased these unused tickets. Unsurprisingly, the reason that the unused ticket scandal (which spanned 1997-2003) took so long to be discovered is that the Defense Department relied on its employees to report unused tickets, which, of course, they did not.
In closing, in 2009 we had over $90 billion dollars spent on flawed projects that failed miserably for one reason or another. We must do better, but first we have to get rid of the bums that keep repeating these collosal mistakes and costing us hundreds of billions in waste each year. Most incumbents need to go, but not all and this is why you need to be a smart voter…being here and reading Post Scripts is a great start to being [informed].