Stimulus Spending?

Senators McCain and Coburn have created a document detailing what they feel to be the 100 most wasteful items from the stimulus bill. Regardless of what one thinks about stimulus spending, many of these items will not increase employment, stimulate the economy, or provide any benefit to American taxpayers. Here are some of the highlights:

2. “Dance Draw” - Interactive Dance Software Development (Charlotte, NC) - $762,372
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte received more than $750,000 in stimulus funds to help develop a computerized choreography program that its creators believe could lead to a YouTube-like “Dance Tube” online application. “This will allow choreographers to explore interactive dance without always having a full cast of dancers present,” the grant states.

6. Ants Talk. Taxpayers Listen (San Francisco, CA) - $1.9 million
The California Academy of Sciences is receiving nearly $2 million to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and east Africa, to capture, photograph, and analyze thousands of exotic ants. The photographs of the ants – over 3,000 species’ worth, according to the grant proposal – will be posted on AntWeb, a website devoted to organizing and displaying pictures and information on the world’s thousands of ant species. “Everyone has run into ants . . . now we need to listen to them.”

11. Upgraded Office Space and Indoor Parking for Kansas Politicians (Topeka, Kansas)- $39.7 million plus
“The school finance crisis in Kansas continues with no end in sight,” announced the Lawrence Journal-World, but that has not stopped Kansas lawmakers from directing federal stimulus funds towards the cost of renovating and upgrading their own offices and the statehouse. Statehouse architect Barry Greis says the price tag now will be “$285 million plus,” adding, “I just don’t know what the plus is.” Democrat state Senator Chris Steineger of Kansas City “said taking advantage of the stimulus program will add to the massive federal budget deficit” and “the underlying problem is that the Capitol renovation project is out of control.” Steineger added “this is not creating new jobs."

18. Jamming for Dollars (Atlanta, GA) - $762,372
A Georgia Tech assistant professor of music will receive $762,372 to study improvised music. The project will apparently involve the professor jamming with “world-renowned musicians” to “hopefully also create satisfying works of art.” The project “seek[s] to understand, model, and support improvisation, or real-time collaborative creativity, in the context of jazz, Indian classical, and avantgarde art music,” according to the project description. How will this help pull the United States out of an historic economic slump? “We are putting money into the local economy that is supporting local jobs,” the project’s principal, Parag Chordia, an accomplished classical Indian music performer, told a reporter.“We are creating the intellectual capital to support future growth.”

20. Monkey and Chimpanzee Responses to Inequity (Atlanta, GA) - $677,462
“Seven species of primates will be asked to make decisions about whether or not to accept rewards in a series of studies in which their outcomes vary relative to their social partners. The influence of social factors like group membership and individual factors like personality will also be investigated. Previous research by the investigator on this project had found that “Chimpanzees respond with temper tantrums if they do not get what they desire,” and that “Capuchin monkeys and
chimpanzees both respond negatively to distributional inequity.”

24. Ship Museum Averaging 30 Visitors A Day (Toledo, OH) - $200,000
The museum is only open from April through October, and hosts 6,000 visitors a year, or an average of only 30 visitors a day. It lost its funding from the City of Toledo in 2007. Now the American taxpayer is funding what the boat’s own city will not, and what one visitor described as “ready for the scrapyard.”

25. Weather Predictions for Other Planets (San Antonio, TX) - $298,543
Want to know if it’s going to rain this week ... on Venus? According to scientists at the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Texas, you absolutely do. So the government has given them nearly $300,000 in stimulus funds to satisfy the American taxpayer’s profound need for interplanetary weather info. “The atmospheric forecasting of weather and climate on other planets has great public appeal,” insist the SWRI researchers in their grant summary. Therefore, they will boldly go where few meteorologists have gone before: the lower atmosphere of Venus.

28. Monkeys Get High for Science (Winston-Salem, NC) - $144,541
The Department of Health and Human Services has sent $71,623 to the Winston-Salem college to see how monkeys react under the influence of cocaine. The project, titled “Effect of Cocaine Self-Administration on Metabotropic Glutamate Systems,” would have the monkeys self-administer the drugs while researchers monitor and study their glutamate levels. When asked how studying drugcrazed primates would improve the national economy, a Wake Forest University Medical School Spokesman said, “It's actually the continuation of a job that might not still be there if it hadn't been for the stimulus funding. And it’s a good job.” He added, “It’s also very worthwhile research.”

30. Two Riders an Hour Get Brand New Buses (Winter Haven, FL) - $2.4 million

31. Studying the Effect of Local Populations on the Environment...in the Himalayas (Ann Arbor, MI) - $529,648
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded researchers at the University of Michigan a grant to study the “reciprocal relationship between population processes (marriage, fertility, and migration) and the environment landusefcover [sic], vegetation abundance, species diversity, and consumption of natural resources) in the foothills of the Nepalese Himalayas.”

36. Scientist Attempts to Create Joke Machine (Evanston, IL) - $712,883

38. Reducing Menopausal Hot Flashes Through Yoga (Winston-Salem, NC) - $294,958
A total of 60 post-menopausal women who experience more than seven hot flashes a day are being recruited to participate.

39. Research: Marketing Video Games to the Elderly (Raleigh, NC and Atlanta, GA) - $1.2 million

44. Ferry Boat Company Serving Island of 600 Gets Terrorism Prevention Grant (Beaver Island,MI) - $30,000

45. Understanding Perceptions of the Economic Stimulus (Dallas, TX & Houston, TX) -$193,956

59. Commerce Department Gets Makeover, Moves Aquarium Door (Washington, DC) - $185 million

68. Museum With 44 Annual Visitors Gets Funding for Bug Storage (Raleigh, NC) -$253,123
The museum boasts being an “internationally recognized resource for the study of insects and mites in North Carolina, the Southeastern United States, and, in several insect groups, the world.” The Museum, which has “virtually no public presence” (it gets about 44 visitors a year), will also use the money for outreach efforts. It also hosts the annual Hexapod Haiku Challenge every March on its blog. "This effort will help raise awareness of how insects contribute to our lives (focusing on positive contributions) and why natural history collections are critical to understanding and documenting biodiversity trends.”

72. Studying Whether a Soda Tax Will Stimulate Health (Chicago, IL) - $521,005

75. The Meteorite Hunters of Antarctica (Cleveland, OH) - $600,001

84. Stimulus Funds Going to the Dogs (Ithaca, NY)505 - $296,385
Researchers believe that there is common understanding of where dogs descended from, but the progression from there to Lassie “is poorly understood.” The new study “will likely to [sic] challenge current theories of dog origins and develop village dogs into a useful system for the study of domestication, speciation, behavior and morphology.”

85. Let’s Polka at the International Accordion Festival! (San Antonio,TX) - $25,000

86. Preserve and Rehabilitate FDR’s Home (Hyde Park, NY) - $4.6 million
[Personal commentary here] It wasn't bad enough that FDR cost this nation millions and billions of dollars in welfare spending. Now we have to continue spending money on his personal effects decades after he died. Will he ever stop costing us money?

87. Study: Does Retirement Help or Hurt Marriage? (Los Angeles, CA) - $174,661

93. National Institute of Health Spends Stimulus Money to Promote the Impact of Its Stimulus Projects (Silver Spring, MD) - $363,760

95. A Better Way to Freeze Rat DNA (Columbia, MO) - $180,935
Calling it an “urgent need,”558 scientists at the University of Missouri received stimulus funds “to develop freezing protocols for epididymal rat sperm which would allow reconstitution of genetics by using standard artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization methods.”

You can read the rest of the list here: http://coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=e1e0624e-d02a-42d4-9dbb-f5b9f21b3572