Congress Deserves A Smackdown For This Pork-Barrell Spending

by Helen Sabin

In the late 1700’s, three term Congressman Davy Crockett, riding the county to gather votes for his next term in Congress, received a “sockdolager” (a knockdown blow) from farmer Horatio Bunch about Crockett’s vote to provide “$20,000 of charity” to an admiral’s wife.

Bunch asked:

Where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity? …The Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.  You will very easily perceive what a wide  door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and  for robbing the people on the other.

Here are just a few of the thousands of ways that the president with a complicit Congress robbed the American taxpayer:

•  Training Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly while on the job – $2.6 million wasted;
•  Upgrading federal employees to “business and first class” when traveling while the taxpaying public flies coach  – $146 million wasted;
• Replacing sand that is washing away from the beaches through normal erosion.  Replacing sand over and over does nothing to preserve the shorelines.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) states that this action is a waste of money — $3 billion wasted;
• Video game preservation center in New York –  $113,227 wasted;
• A remake of “Sesame Street” for Pakistan’s children – $10 million wasted;
• A documentary to show how rock music helped contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union –  $550,000 wasted;
• Solyndra.  $535 million wasted; 1,100 jobs lost;
• Stimulus: $800 billion stimulus package – 550,000 jobs lost.  “It contained ill-conceived provisions that ignited trade wars with foreign countries such as Mexico, wiping out jobs in our export sector and aggravating America’s trade deficit.  The stimulus package’s green jobs funding, nearly 80 percent of which went to foreign firms, effectively outsourced thousands of American jobs to foreign countries at taxpayer expense.  Two economists concluded that the stimulus wiped out 550,000 jobs.”
• Green car efforts:  $2.4 billion for the Chevy Volt wasted. The president has set a goal of one million plug-in cars by 2015, but GM only sold 125 Volts in July—with the government buying some of them;
• Spectra Watt – $500,000 wasted when it filed bankruptcy;
• Mountain Plaza Inc. - $424,000 – already in bankruptcy, yet it received additional funding from the government.

According to USA Today, the $15 trillion national debt is now equal to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States.  We owe more than we make or can produce.

Let’s learn from history.  It is time to give a sockdolager to both Congress and the president by voting them all out. Agree?

To contact your Congressional representative, use this link:

https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

 To read more use these citations and links:

From The Life of Colonel David Crockett, by Edward S. Ellis
(Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1884).

 Throw Them All Out,  by Peter Schweizer  Chapter 5.

http://www.cagw.org/.

http://www.globalwarming.org/2011/09/02/obama-promotes-more-failed-green-jobs-schemes-more-job-killing-regulations/

http://nlpc.org/stories/2011/08/02/chevy-volt-sales-slump-gm-clarifies-%E2%80%9Cvirtually-sold-out%E2%80%9D-comments

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/spectrawatt-sequel-after-collapsing-company-declares-bankruptcy/

http://thedaleygator.wordpress.com/tag/mountain-plaza-inc/

This article originally appeared on CoachIsRight.com and is reprinted with permission.