Next, the Corned Beef on Rye Stimulus!
This story is both silly and sad at the same time. Matt Drudge plumbed the depths of the Stimulus Plan website recently to see what wasteful spending he could find. Lo and behold, he found that the Department of Agriculture has spent almost $1.2 on “2 POUND FROZEN HAM SLICED”.
Now, common sense would tell you that there’s very little chance that HUD bought a single two-pound ham for 1.2 million dollars. But common sense does not live in Washington nowadays, so it was necessary for Secretary Tom Vilsack to issue a press release to assure us that he had not ridiculously wasted our money on the World’s Most Expensive Ham.
No, he only wasted our money in the same old way — by paying twice as much for ham as you or I would have spent in a grocery store. According to Vilsack, his agency bought 760,000 pounds of ham for various state food programs, which boils down to about $1.50 per pound. That’s some pricey sliced ham. I’m pretty sure I can head to my local grocery store and pick up a few pounds of sliced ham for a lot less than the government paid for it. And I don’t charge overhead to donate that ham to my local food bank or soup kitchen.
And that’s the real issue here. It makes no good sense for the Department of Agriculture to have a program that sends money to the states to buy food for hungry people. That sort of Rube Goldberg bureaucracy can’t help but waste money, even if it is operating at peak efficiency. But if what you’re really after is the ability to pump your ego by sending our press releases about all the ham you provide to hungry people, well then, the system is perfect. In fact, let me propose a new motto for the Stimulus Plan:
President Obama: Stimulating the Economy One Deli At A Time!
UPDATE: Obi’s Sister goes all Seussian on Vilsack.
Other Posts of Interest:
- Joe Biden’s Wacky, Mixed-Up Economic Stimulus Fantasy Land
- The Stimulus Bill Must Die by Morning
- Why the President Won’t Criticize Bad Stimulus Spending
Category: The Economy and Your Money, The Rise of the Nanny State
[...] needed it? Oh wait, that doesn’t fit the agenda of destroying America, even if it is only one Deli at a time. Even the Treasury doesn’t know where all the money has gone. According to the [...]