OPINION:
There’s nothing like a heavy dose of government largess to get people moving. Courtesy of “The Pork Report” compiled by Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, we see that bike riders, speed racers and airplane-related programs that never take flight are indeed fueled by federal red ink. Thousands upon thousands of federal projects, like the ones Mr. Coburn describes, certainly do add up to what the now-deceased Sen. Everett Dirksen famously described as “real money.”
Among the more egregious examples is a $300,000 National Science Foundation grant to professors Mont Hubbard and Ron Hess of the University of California at Davis. Mr. Hubbard described his purpose as finding “a precise scientific understanding of how humans control bicycles.” According to the Woodland, Calif., Daily Democrat, the two researchers hope their study can “lead to new insights into how humans interact with control systems, and perhaps new bicycle designs.”
Folk wisdom says you never forget how to ride a bike, so there’s little point in spending taxpayer dollars for research that could be funded by Schwinn, Trek or any number of other firms if it were truly useful. Common sense also says that if you prefer race cars to bicycles - or, more accurately, drawing pictures of race cars - you don’t need a $15,894 federal grant to animate your pursuit. Yet that’s what Victoria, Texas, schools are spending on a program offering instruction in video game animation. “I would like to do this because I like drawing,” fifth-grader Raul Villalobos explained to the Victoria Advocate. “I would probably like an animated movie about race cars because I like race cars.”
But students who prefer bumper cars also enjoy taxpayer support. According to a Government Accountability Office report issued last week, Morgan State University used $80,000 in federal funds to take students to amusement parks and resorts, and an additional $4,578 for an airplane global-positioning system “even though the school did not own an airplane.” It’s no wonder that the federal deficit seems to be jet-propelled.
On Tuesday, the national debt officially broke the $13 trillion barrier. Despite this, Congress is proposing to spend an additional $100 billion in supplemental spending. It doesn’t take a bicycle expert to figure out that the wheels of government are hopelessly out of balance.
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