Crotch Bombers, Caulking & Now Healthcare? | Print | E-mail
Written by Ralph R. Reiland
Sunday, 03 January 2010 00:00
So Umar Farouk Abdullmutallab got within an inch of having several hundred airline passengers fall from the sky over Detroit on Christmas Day, thanks to the ongoing holes in government-run security.

The bureaucrats, some eight years after the attacks of 9/11, still can’t seem to come up with a program to connect the obvious dots.

We’ve also recently discovered that the nation’s taxpayers paid $2 million to caulk and tighten up just seven leaky houses in Texas, i.e., $286,000 per house, under the federal government’s go-green weatherization fiasco.

And still we’re supposed to have faith that these amateurish and ofttimes corrupt halfwits in government are up to the task of fixing something as complex and multifaceted as the American healthcare system?

I thought Cash-for-Clunkers was nuts, but Cash-for-Caulkers might well have it topped on the craziness meter.

With the clunkers fiasco, promoted as a way to prop up the U.S. car industry, we ended up borrowing money from China to buy cars from Japan and South Korea.

By the time the cash ran out, we were nearly three billion more dollars in the hole, over half a million trucks and cars had been unnecessarily smashed, and eight of the ten top-selling new vehicles in the program were purchased from foreign manufacturers, thereby directly subsidizing Detroit’s key competitors.

At $286,000 per house, the Cash-for-Caulkers deal looks like it’ll have no trouble managing to rack up even higher levels of irrationality, fraud, and tax waste.

Texas got millions in federal tax dollars via the stimulus package to fix up the caulk-ready houses of the poor. In the initial four months of the program, the state spent $1.8 million and just the aforementioned seven houses had been weather-treated. A tube of the best caulking at Home Depot, enough to caulk approximately 50 feet, sells for about $7.

Rather than paying for caulking or putting jobless caulkers to work, nearly all of the $1.8 million ended up in the pockets of state employees, i.e., the planners, the green team.

Obama, nonetheless, praised the caulking program as a triple delight: “You’re getting a threefer. Not only are you immediately putting people back to work but you’re also saving families on your energy bills and you’re laying the groundwork for long term energy independence.â€