Abusing Taxpayer Dollars

Harry Reid to America: this
guy deserves your tax dollars

By now it should be obvious that the Democrats are not actually serious about cutting government spending. In a screed against the GOP's efforts to reduce the deficit, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev) lamented that those heartless Republicans would cut funding for a cowboy poetry festival:

The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1 ... eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts. These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.

Can someone please tell me why the U.S. Federal Government a) thinks it has the right to spend our taxpayer dollars on a cowboy poetry festival and b) how any rational elected representative can possibly justify spending money on cowboy poetry when the nation is trillions of dollars in debt? Oops, I guess I shouldn't have assumed that Harry Reid is rational. That adjective couldn't possibly apply to anyone who thinks cutting government funding for talented cowboys is "mean-spirited" while dumping an unimaginable amount of debt on our posterity is perfectly acceptable. Obviously the reason why the nation is so far in debt is because our elected representatives think it's appropriate to spend taxpayers' money on cowboy poetry festivals! But the amount being used to support cowboy poetry is relatively small compared to the millions of dollars that taxpayers provide to Planned Parenthood.

The legacy of eugenicist Margaret
Sanger deserves your money, too

Planned Parenthood offers a variety of reproductive health services, one of which is abortion. In fact, their organization is the largest provider of abortions in the nation. Although Federal money can't legally be used for that purpose, some argue that it indirectly subsidizes abortion by freeing up their budget. Either way, taxpayers are being forced to support an organization whose practices are deeply offensive to a large number of Americans. And even if you ignore the political/moral issues, it turns out that the organization doesn't really need taxpayer support:

From 2002 to 2007, the national organization and its affiliates took in $388 million more than they spent on programs and services. No doubt the group lost some of that money in the same kinds of investments that disappointed the rest of us, but that has not prevented it from paying its president more than $337,000 in annual salary and tens of thousands more in benefits and allowances.

Of course, cutting government funds to Planned Parenthood will be even more viciously resisted than the elimination of taxpayer-subsidized cowboy poetry since the principle of abortion on-demand is one of the far Left's articles of faith.

I agree with the commentators of National Review: "If a sparkling new Tea Party Congress won’t cut off this bunch, what will it cut?"