I’m not a fan of international bureaucracies.

I’ve criticized the United Nations for wanting global taxes. I’ve condemned the International Monetary Fund for promoting bigger government. I’ve even excoriated the largely unknown Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for misguided regulations that contributed to the financial crisis.

But the worse international bureaucracy, at least when measured on a per-dollar-spent basis, has to be the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

American taxpayers finance nearly one-fourth of the OECD’s budget, at a cost of more than $100 million per year, and in exchange we get a never-ending stream of bad policy recommendations.

This Center for Freedom and Prosperity study has all the gory details. The OECD bureaucrats (who get tax-free salaries, by the way) endorsed Obamacare, supported the failed stimulus, and are big advocates of a value-added tax for America.

What’s especially frustrating is that the OECD initially was designed to be a relatively innocuous bureaucracy that focused on statistics. Indeed, it was even viewed as a free-market counterpart to the Soviet Bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

My, how things change.

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As a Republican Mean Girl, I talk a lot about getting the government out of our day-to-day lives. Let us keep more of our own money to spend and stimulate the economy as we see fit. Don’t tell me what kind of health insurance to buy. Don’t force me to send my kids to a school based on my zip code instead of my choice.

As much as I don’t like the government meddling in my life, I recognize that it is a necessary evil to maintain a civilized society. There are legitimate functions of government, like law enforcement, that keep us from devolving into Lord of the Flies-like chaos.

Criminal justice is an important part of what makes America awesome. Your rights end where someone else’s begin, or, as my friend Jimmie Bise once succinctly put it, “My right to swing my fist through the air ends where your nose begins.” The police are there to (among other things) arrest the bad guys that violate other people’s rights to life, liberty, and property, thus keeping order in our communities.

So what happens when the police stop doing their job? We’re about to find out in Topeka, KS, where the city council has voted to stop prosecuting domestic violence cases because there’s just not enough money.

Seriously? Of all the ways to pinch pennies, we’re supposed to believe that leaving women vulnerable to abusive partners is the best option? There’s not another line in the budget that could be cut so that the police can do their job and protect Americans? This calls for The Google, my friends.

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Someone must have imagined that my hopes for improved economic understanding might be excessively optimistic and thus needed to be curbed to restore my normal emotional balance, because that person undertook to smash any such hopes to dust by e-mailing me a link to a Huffington Post article by Paul Abrams, “Economically, World War II Was Stimulus on Steroids.” This screed turns out to be an ostensible macroeconomics lesson composed in equal measure of economic foolishness, historical ignorance, and ideological tendentiousness — the veritable epitome of a worse-than-worthless contribution to public enlightenment.

The opening paragraphs indicate the direction of Abrams’s argument:

The next time someone argues that the New Deal failed, and only the Second World War ended the Depression, as ‘proof’ that government spending does not work, one can respond with the details of economic growth and unemployment reduction up to 1940, or one can ignore the claim and thank them for making your case for massive government spending in a deep, broad recession.

Right wing politicians are loathe to credit the New Deal with any success in hoisting the United States out of the Great Depression, but credit World War II for that achievement, believing that that somehow disproves Keynesian economic theory.

That claim, however, undermines their entire premise.

Abrams concludes that “massive government spending at a time of severe economic downturn and dislocation can indeed get an economy humming again,” as World War II shows; the New Deal was merely too timid. He seems unaware that his argument merely restates the fallacy-ridden hodge-podge of conventional wisdom about how World War II “got the economy out of the Depression” that has dominated the thinking of economists, historians, and the public ever since the war itself.

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With the real unemployment rate above 16 percent, it is a perfect time to throw a lavish party for high paid federal employees at Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.  At least Eric Holder thinks so.

The Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, the same unit that dismissed the slam dunk voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and forced Dayton (OH) to hire firefighters who flunked employment tests, is throwing an alcohol-fueled bash during work hours for 815 employees.

I have obtained the invitation posted internally to all 815 Civil Rights Division employees.  It reads:

“It’s Time to Get Together, So Save the Date – It’s time to open up and let the sun shine in!”

I’ll wager if a Freedom of Information Act request was sent to DOJ about the costs of the beer bash and lost employee time, there wouldn’t be much sunshine.

The invitation continues:

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Here’s some completely depressing news. CNBC is reporting that President Obama is putting American taxpayers on the chopping block to bail out Greece’s corrupt politicians.

But, to show he doesn’t discriminate, he also encouraged the German Chancellor to rape her nation’s taxpayers for the same purpose.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday…pledged U.S. support to help tackle the country’s debt crisis. …After a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he stressed the importance of German “leadership” on the issue – a hint that he expects Berlin to help – while expressing sympathy for the political difficulties European Union countries face in helping a struggling member state.

The story doesn’t have much detail, but it appears that Obama is willing to brutalize American taxpayers directly (which is what he means by “on a bilateral basis”) and indirectly (i.e., the reference to “international and financial institutions like the IMF”).

…”we have pledged to cooperate fully in working through these issues, both on a bilateral basis but also through international and financial institutions like the IMF.”

What makes this development so unpleasant is that this new bailout (Greece already has been bailed out several times, with both direct and indirect handouts) will make things worse. Another bailout will be a case of throwing good money after bad. And it will exacerbate the economic damage by delaying the economic reforms that are needed to put Greece’s economy in better shape.

And to make matters worse, the other insolvent European welfare states will look at what’s happening in Greece and conclude that they also can avoid necessary reforms and wait for handouts from American and German taxpayers.

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The Obama administration has planned a new $500 million early learning initiative, designed to deal with children as young as five who can’t sit still in a kindergarten classroom.

As a clinical psychologist with 20 years of experience evaluating and treating children, I am expert at understanding five-year-olds who can’t sit still. I am also a parent of a Kindergarten student. I am here to inform taxpayers that this program is a colossal waste of money. I can save the government—meaning you, the taxpayer—a half billion dollars by solving this profound problem right here.

Spending $500 million to get five-year-olds to sit still is like getting a Democrat to stop spending other people’s money. In theory it sounds good—really good—but it simply goes against nature. The natural inclination for most five-year-olds is to be extremely active. Normal pre-schoolers spend much of their day practicing their gross and fine-motor skills, with boys being especially active learners. They are not inclined to sit still, shut up, and listen to a teacher for anything but short periods of time.

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I have a crazy idea: let’s save millions of dollars by not spending money to build broadband networks where they already exist. The insanity of so-called “broadband stimulus” projects has been covered quite nicely here at BigGovernment by Seton Motley, but my good friend Dave Williams of the newly-formed Taxpayers’ Protection Alliance wrote about a part of this debate that hasn’t been covered enough: loan guarantees given out by the Rural Utilities Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

With a budget deficit that is as large on its own as the entire federal budget of 1998, the folks in Congress who’d like to avoid a crippling debt crisis (those crazy kids!) are looking for ways to trim the fat. Luckily for legislators there is an area of “USDA prime” waste they can carve out: the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s desperate dash for taxpayer cash in the form of superfluous subsidies for rural broadband efforts.

USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) is an outdated agency whose roots go all the way back to FDR’s New Deal-era Rural Electrification Administration. Originally meant to help bring electricity to farmers in remote areas, its mission was expanded in 1949 to include telephone service and, half a century later, Internet service. Ostensibly, its goal is to subsidize the construction of broadband networks in sparsely-populated areas that do not have them.

But in its ham-fisted attempt to bring high-speed Internet service to areas where there is none, RUS has consistently given money to organizations which build over existing private broadband networks. A 2005 report from the USDA Inspector General found that “RUS has not maintained its focus on rural communities without preexisting service.” The same report determined that “in one of the more highly publicized cases, RUS issued loans to a company providing broadband access to affluent suburban communities a few miles outside of Houston, Texas.”

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In a state where thousands of properties have been threatened and continue to be threatened, California is in desperate need of meaningful eminent domain reform that will respect the rights and property of its residents. The preceding legal overview in California demonstrates just how difficult it is for private property owners to defend themselves against California’s redevelopment machine, which siphons billions and billions of dollars into a closed economic system that benefits private parties and hurts not only property owners, but all taxpayers as well.

From The Wall Street Journal:

A report from the nonpartisan GAO, to be released Tuesday, compiles a list of redundant and potentially ineffective federal programs, and it could serve as a template for lawmakers in both parties as they move to cut federal spending and consolidate programs to reduce the deficit. Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), who pushed for the report, estimated it identifies between $100 billion and $200 billion in duplicative spending. The GAO didn’t put a specific figure on the spending overlap.

The GAO examined numerous federal agencies, including the departments of defense, agriculture and housing and urban development, and pointed to instances where different arms of the government should be coordinating or consolidating efforts to save taxpayers’ money.

The agency found 82 federal programs to improve teacher quality; 80 to help disadvantaged people with transportation; 47 for job training and employment; and 56 to help people understand finances, according to a draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

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President Obama’s budget hit Capitol Hill with all the enthusiasm a close talker with bad breath receives when getting on an elevator.  Republicans rushed to news cameras with vigor usually only seen from Senator Chuck Schumer to rightly denounce it and Democrats released written statements with tepid “good starting point” type phrases in it. While Republicans have offered varying degrees of good ideas for places to cut the budget, few have dared to touch the Defense Department. This is a fool’s game. National defense is the first priority of the federal government, or should be, but to assume there aren’t cuts and savings that could be found in a department with a nearly $700 billion budget is as crazy as it is dishonest.

Medicare and Social Security should, no, HAVE to be on the table. Reforming those and getting their long-term costs under control are as important to our nation’s future as is winning the War on Terror is. If our elected officials continue to refuse to address the coming crush of these programs Al Qaeda doesn’t have to fire another shot or do anything but wait us out in caves until we collapse under their unsustainable weight to win. Unfortunately “progressives” have, for years, refused to even acknowledge they are facing any problems, let alone that they’re potentially a cancer that can bring this country down.

Every attempt to reform these entitlements in the past has been met with indignation, denial and demonization, and they were successful in blocking them. But times have changed, the old playbook is as useful as the Statue of Liberty play in football – it might work every once in a while, but it’s no longer something for which people are unprepared.  The mood in the country is different. All the old talk of the sky falling if these sacred cows are touched has been drowned out by the fact that these sacred cows are going to crush us long before the sky gets its chance. If we don’t address the crisis with these programs it will be like getting hit by a train and blaming the conductor. We were on the tracks, we saw the light and we knew it wasn’t going to swerve. Not getting off the tracks is our fault, not the train’s.

Republicans know this and will use it to their advantage when it comes time to make the tough choices they were elected to make.  Hopefully…

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All of my life I wanted to be an astronaut. I starting working in the Miami Planetarium at age 13; studied aeronautics and engineering and propulsion systems, and was stopped only by a 20/25 left eye during an exam for the US Air Force Academy. But space exploration has always been my primary passion.

Here is a video called THE FREE FRONTIER. You’re seeing it at Big Government because you will not find a cleaner contrast between what the government spends and wastes and ends up with, versus the almost mind-boggling results the private sector can achieve at a fraction — in some cases 4-5% — of the cost that you and I pay every day in the form of taxes.

My hope is that this video will give you hope.

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Grousing about the GOP’s timidity in the battle against big government will probably become an ongoing theme over the next few months, and  let’s start with two items that don’t bode well for fiscal discipline.

First, it appears that Republicans didn’t really mean it when they promised to cut $100 billion of so-called discretionary spending as part of their pledge. According to the New York Times,

As they prepare to take power on Wednesday, Republican leaders are scaling back that number by as much as half, aides say, because the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, will be nearly half over before spending cuts could become law.

This is hardly good news, particularly since the discretionary portion of the budget contains entire departments, such as Housing and Urban Development, that should be immediately abolished.

That being said, I don’t think this necessarily means the GOP has thrown in the towel. The real key is to reverse the Bush-Obama spending binge and put the government on some sort of diet so that the federal budget grows slower than the private economy. I explain in this video, for instance, that it is simple to balance the budget and maintain tax cuts so long as government spending grows by only 2 percent each year.

It is a good idea to get as many savings as possible for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year, to be sure, but the real key is the long-run trajectory of federal spending.

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Big Labor and politicians across the United States have transferred union costs to taxpayers.  For example, SEIU Local 444 (The Sanitation Officers Association, see related snow  slowdown stories) has six full-time union officials who are paid full-time city benefits and salary, yet work 0.00% of the time for New York City.  These Sanitation Officers are working on everything but New York City business – including political activities and golf outings – all on the taxpayers’ dime.

SEIU sanitation union transfers its costs to NY City taxpayers and provides an excellent place to cut the budget.

This means taxpayers are essentially paying for union bosses’ no-show jobs.

In 2009, SEIU Local 444 local President Joseph Mannion was paid $108,340 plus benefits, including seniority credits, for working fulltime for the union.  According to the union’s 2009 IRS report, Mannion was paid an additional $83,046 by the union. That’s over $190,000 plus benefits.

This type of union cost transfer to taxpayers is commonplace.

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In case you’re filled with too much holiday cheer this Christmas season, the latest edition of Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook”, chronicling wasteful federal spending, is now available. You might just want to put an extra shot in the egg nog and take a look. The dollar amounts aren’t always shocking, but the blatant waste of taxpayers’ money is. The full report is below.

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In case you’re filled with too much holiday cheer this Christmas season, the latest edition of Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook”, chronicling wasteful federal spending, is now available. You might just want to put an extra shot in the egg nog and take a look. The dollar amounts aren’t always shocking, but the blatant waste of taxpayers’ money is. Number 2 on the list:

The city of Shreveport, Louisiana misspent $1.5 million in stimulus funds on mold remediation for a housing complex it was considering for demolition, according to a federal audit.

To obtain the stimulus money, the city‘s housing authority promised the federal government it would spend the money on improving a number of low-income homes it managed. Those projects included a mere $100,000 for combating mold and mildew at an apartment complex named Wilkinson Terrace.

More than ten months after awarding the grant to Shreveport, officials from the Department of Housing and Urban Development noticed the city had failed to spend most of the money. Under the rules of the stimulus, the money was to have been spent within one year. The agency reminded Shreveport that the funds needed to be put to work, or they would be rescinded.

In the span of a few weeks, Shreveport officials cut contracts worth over $1.5 million for mold remediation at Wilkinson Terrace – fifteen times what they told the feds they would spend, and much more than a site facing possible demolition likely deserved.

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In case you’re filled with too much holiday cheer this Christmas season, the latest edition of Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook”, chronicling wasteful federal spending, is now available. You might just want to spike the egg nog and take a look. The dollar amounts aren’t always shocking, but the blatant waste of taxpayers’ money is. Number 9 on the list:

Our nation currently faces many challenges; a shortage of poetry in our nation‘s zoos, however, is rarely cited as one of them. It is not widely viewed as an example of our nation‘s crumbling infrastructure or a contributor to our national economic crisis. Nor is it a dangerous disease in need of curing.

Nevertheless, a federal grant program has directed a million dollars from the public coffers to infuse zoos around the United States with snippets of poetry.

Hence, the Little Rock (Ark.) Zoo now touts a sign sharing a bit of wisdom from Hans Christian Andersen: ―Just living is not enough, said the butterfly. One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower. Zoos in Chicago, New Orleans, Milwaukee, and Jacksonville, Florida, will also sport bits of poetry, thanks to the U.S. taxpayer.

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In case you’re filled with too much holiday cheer this Christmas season, the latest edition of Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook”, chronicling wasteful federal spending, is now available. You might just want to spike the egg nog and take a look. The dollar amounts aren’t always shocking, but the blatant waste of taxpayers’ money is. Number 12 on the list:

The Government Printing Office (GPO) is using a ―video game space mouse (and nearly $60,000 in taxpayer funds) to teach children the history of printing.

In September, the GPO released its first-ever comic book, ―Squeaks Discovers Type, in which Squeak the Space Mouse explores the history of the printed word, from cuneiform to the Internet age, and explains ―why printing is important.

The opening page features a school boy grumbling about the report he was assigned on the invention of printing, leading the superhero rodent to exclaim, ―He thinks printing is boring! This is a job for Squeaks!

Anticipating high demand, the office printed 5,500 copies of the title.

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In case you’re filled with too much holiday cheer this Christmas season, the latest edition of Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook”, chronicling wasteful federal spending, is now available. You might just want to spike the egg nog and take a look. The dollar amounts aren’t always shocking, but the blatant waste of taxpayers’ money is. Number 18 on the list:

A ranch house in a closed park that has been unused for a decade has received $440,000107 for green energy upgrades.

The 345-acre Gibson Ranch Park, where the ranch house is located, was partially closed due to budget and staff cuts109 in 2009 and is currently closed to the public while county officials develop a long-term plan to keep the park open.

The new funds are from a federal Energy Efficiency Block Grant program and will pay for new windows, HVAC system, lighting and roofing.

Some have called the project a misuse of money, including Lisa Morris of the neighboring Rio Linda and Elverta Recreation and Park District.112 Another local horse owner who uses the park stables called the money ―squandered.

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This week Congressional Republicans cut a deal with the White House to keep the current tax rates for at least two years, cut payroll taxes for one year, and reinstate the death tax. Whatever you think about the merits of this deal, one thing is crystal clear: Congress’ top priority next year must be to cut spending. It is important that conservatives continue to communicate that (1) Washington has a spending problem not a revenue problem and (2) that despite attacks from the left, conservatives do have clear, actionable plans for balancing the budget and reducing the national debt.

Over at The Heritage Foundation, our latest video highlights over $343 billion in specific spending cuts that can be tackled immediately. The cuts are focused on empowering state and local governments, consolidating or privatizing programs, and eliminating programs that have been proven to be ineffective.

But this is just the start.

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