(Washington, D.C.) – CAGW’s ghoulish goulash of Washington’s most wasteful projects and the sweet smell of success in saving taxpayers’ money strikes again.  Vampires are the dominant theme in pop culture and officials in Washington have joined the cult, feeding more greedily than ever on our tax dollars.  Unfortunately, the taxpayers won’t get immortality in exchange for being drained of their life’s blood, and the wasteful government programs Congress and the administration are creating will live forever.

Trick:  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), or “stimulus,” was supposed to create millions of jobs.  But the Associated Press reported on October 28 that the figures are bogus, making those jobs as real as Casper the ghost, especially with the unemployment rate above 10 percent.  The stimulus ensures that the spectral national debt and escalating deficit will haunt taxpayers like an incubus for generations to come.

Treat:  For the moment, the House and Senate have stripped $1.8 billion for the F-22 fighter jet from their defense spending bills.  But beware taxpayers!  There are giant porkers lurking in the shadows on Capitol Hill who could raise the program from the dead by adding an earmark during the conference on the defense appropriations bill.

Trick:  The sickening trillion-dollar healthcare reform bills lurching through the halls of Congress surpass the “stimulus” for their potentially ghastly effects on the economy, the national debt, and current health insurance costs.  The bills are being stitched together into a hideous Frankenstein monster, full of bad policy scraps.  The process has sparked outrage from millions of taxpayers and the latest 1,900-page version, ushered ominously into existence by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is perhaps the most dangerous.  Taxpayers; grab your pitchforks and lanterns; it is time to put this monster out of our misery.

Treat:  Like Audrey, the noxious plant from “Little Shop of Horrors,” ACORN has been screaming “Feed Me” for decades and has swallowed billions of taxpayer dollars, even as it has been under scrutiny for allegations of voter registration fraud, embezzlement, and other illegal activities.  Two young filmmakers turned a hidden camera onto their operations in half a dozen cities and caught ACORN employees in the act of giving out advice on how to scam the IRS, among other questionable activities. 

Trick:  Like the HAL 2000 computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) apparently has a few screws loose.  The FCC is likely to decide that, out in the vast, cold reaches of Internet space, mere humans cannot be trusted to manage their affairs, and has launched a Spaced-Out Odyssey to dictate what can and cannot be done online.  Net neutrality, just like the HAL 2000, sounds comforting and innocuous, but as HAL said; “My mind is going ...I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.”  Pull the plug on net neutrality before it takes over everything.

Treat:  Like irrational characters from an Edgar Allan Poe story, Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are being driven stark “raven” mad by their inability to reach a consensus or offset the costs of their trillion-dollar healthcare monstrosity.  They’ve even tried budget gimmicks, such as using use $250 billion in phantom “cuts” to doctors’ fees to help pay for it.  For now, at least, the healthcare reform plan remains moldering under the floorboards in Congress, its wasting heart beating ever louder.

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse in government.