2009 Redux: Spend, Spend, and Spend
December 14, 2009
by: Tom Schatz

Government WasteWatch, Winter 2009

There is little doubt that 2009 will be remembered as the year when the first African-American President was sworn into office.  It is likely that history will also look back on the continuing two-front war in the Middle East and the decision to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, as seminal moments in U.S. foreign policy.

On the home front, future generations will look at 2009 as the beginning of the most explosive growth in federal spending in U.S. history and, possibly, the beginning of the end of U.S. international economic leadership.  Here are just a few of the extraordinarily large numbers:

The budget deficit reached $1.4 trillion for fiscal year (FY) 2009, 2.8 times the $495 billion deficit in FY 2008.  The 2009 figure is equal to 10 percent of GDP, the highest since 1945, at the end of World War II.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) noted the deficit would be $1.6 trillion if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been included in the budget as federal entities.

The monthly deficit was $176 billion in October, a record for the month which marks the beginning of FY 2010, and the second-highest monthly shortfall in history.

The fast-growing national debt reached $12,093,405,875,419.29 on December 9, 2009, meaning the individual share for every man woman and child in the U.S. at that time was $39,336.  The total gross domestic product is $13.3 trillion; the debt will exceed that amount sometime before the end of 2010, and grow to $19 trillion by the end of the next decade. 

Unfunded federal liabilities for Social Security and Medicare were more than $106.5 trillion as of December 9; the individual share on that date was $345,548.

The Obama administration claimed that it had created 640,000 jobs with the initial $159 billion spent from the $787 billion stimulus bill.  This equates to $248,000 per job.  The entire stimulus program was called into question by everyone except administration apologists when it was discovered that reports to the official website, recovery.gov, were replete with errors, exaggerations, and egregious examples of wasteful projects.

There were hundreds of reports that included non-existent congressional districts (proving the reporting individuals and business don’t know or don’t care about where they are located politically), and dozens of reports that claimed jobs had been created although no money had been spent, or money had been spent and no jobs had been created.  At a congressional hearing that followed the postings on the website, the chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board said he could not verify that any of the numbers were correct.

On December 8, Senators Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) released a “Stimulus Checkup” report citing $7 billion in wasteful stimulus spending.  The examples included $5 million for a geothermal energy system for the Oak Ridge City Center shopping mall in Tennessee, which has been losing tenants for years and is mostly empty; $1.57 million for Pennsylvania State University researchers to look for fossils in Argentina; $950,000 for two universities in Arizona to study the division of labor among ants; and, $400,000 to evaluate the drinking and drug habits for residents of Buffalo, N.Y.

On December 10, I spoke at a press conference with Reps. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Tom Price (R-Ga.) to discuss their Top 11 Worst Examples of Wasteful Spending in the 110th Congress.  The list included $1.9 million for the “Water Taxi to Nowhere” in Connecticut, which was in the 2009 Congressional Pig Book.

The press conference was particularly timely since President Obama spoke on December 8 before the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.  He made the remarkable claims that the administration is “taking responsibility for every dollar” it spends, and, “We’ve done what some said was impossible:  preventing wasteful spending on outdated weapons systems that even the Pentagon said it didn’t want.  We’ve combed the budget, cutting waste and excess wherever we could.”

Based on the findings of the Coburn-McCain report, the Kirk-Price list, and good old-fashioned common sense, no one outside of the White House would believe the Obama administration had given its full time and attention to cutting waste and excess.  The words “wherever we could” really mean “we did very little.”

While most of the news was about more spending and waste, CAGW and CCAGW had some significant achievements in 2009.  As Congress debated the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the so-called stimulus bill, CCAGW generated more than 70,000 e-mails to Capitol Hill opposing the spending spree and calling on Congress to instead create more incentives and opportunities for private-sector jobs and growth by cutting government spending and enacting across-the-board tax cuts for individuals and businesses.  Although the bill was approved, some of the most egregious projects were eliminated.

When the President spoke on December 8 about his efforts to cut waste, he was in part referring to his plan to cut $17 billion from his FY 2010 budget, announced on May 17.  The White House plan cited CAGW’s Prime Cuts 2009 as a source and included several recommendations, such as ending funding for Corridor H, a West Virginia pork-barrel highway project championed by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), and eliminating funding for an alternate engine for the Pentagon’s Joint Strike Fighter, a project that the Defense Department has said it does not want or need.

(Speaking of the alternate engine, CAGW’s big summer initiative was the launch of a multimedia ad campaign to educate the public on the issue, including print ads, billboards, and an online video.  The campaign reached millions of taxpayers.)

A few days after CAGW sent out a letter to its members calling for an end to federal funding of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a series of online videos was released showing ACORN staff in several cities giving questionable legal and tax advice to filmmaker James O’Keefe and a friend who acted as a prostitute.  The resulting uproar led both the IRS and the Census Bureau to cut ties with the group.
 
Although the Senate healthcare bill was not finalized by press time, CAGW and CCAGW generated more than 100,000 objections to the Obama/Pelosi/Reid approach to “reform.”  With the debate spilling over into the New Year, there will be more opportunities for taxpayers to express their outrage over this government takeover of one-sixth of the economy.
 
At press time, CAGW staff was beginning to add up the pork in the “mini-bus” appropriations bill for FY 2010, consisting of six of the 12 appropriations bills.  The grand total will appear on www.cagw.org and be incorporated into the 2010 Congressional Pig Book.
 
I wish all CAGW members and their families the best for the holidays and a Happy New Year.  It will be difficult for Congress and the Obama administration to spend more money next year than they did this year.  With your continued help, we can begin to slow down the tidal wave of spending so that our children and grandchildren will not inherit a massive national debt.