Quick Poll

Who will win tonight's GHSA State AAAAA Football Playoff game?

Blogs

Angela McRae

Tea with friends

Lorrie Lynch

Who's News

Alex McRae Columnist

Published Saturday, August 23, 2008

Your tax dollars at work

This is one government health program that ought to make every taxpayer sick.

Actually, it's more than a program. It's a whole government agency. And according to folks who study waste in government agencies, our public servants at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spend tax dollars like Monopoly money. Except in Monopoly, somebody wins. When NIH is spending, taxpayers always lose.

Last year, the NIH had an annual budget of $29.5 billion. So what, you say. That's a lot of money, but if it's going for our national "health," what's the problem?

The problem is, the vast majority of NIH funding doesn't go to create new flu vaccines or find cures for cancer, heart disease or diabetes. Most of the NIH budget goes to fund research grants. Last year the average NIH grantee took over $403,000 out of taxpayers' hides.

What did we get for our money? A few years ago, NIH paid $147,000 to a Northwestern University psychology professor for a "study" that investigated whether or not women were aroused by pornography.

In other words, tax dollars paid some ivory tower idiot to show dirty movies to women and then ask if they were turned on or off.

This information might be valuable to porn movie producers, but I'd rather have kept my tax dollars to help pay for my next tank of gas.

How does NIH get away with this stuff? There seem to be more questions than answers.

"Oftentimes academic researchers will get government grants to do things that you've got to wonder, 'Why are they doing that?'" said Merrill Goozner, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "There's plenty of research out there that doesn't need to be done, and why somebody funds it is one of the great mysteries of life."

Of course it's not like all NIH research is wasteful. The Beijing Olympics are in the news now and jockstrap junkies might be happy that NIH recently shelled out big bucks to study how a massage might benefit an athlete after heavy exercise.

On the other hand, 99.9 percent of the taxpaying population can't see any benefit to the massage study except that derived by sore athletes or the makers of pain relievers.

But then, maybe the athletes don't care, either. They sure don't know anything about the massage study. Why? Because the research wasn't done on humans. "Scientists" did the study on sedated bunny rabbits. Guess the guinea pigs had the day off.

At least one lawmaker isn't happy.

Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona was one of 20 representatives who co-signed a letter to the director of NIH asking why tax money was being wasted like this. The letter termed it, "a bizarre spending decision."

Even Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley wrote a stern letter chiding NIH for its wasteful habits.

But Grassley isn't against all pork. He just objects to pork that isn't spent in Iowa.

In 2004, Grassley was beaming when he announced he had procured $50 million of your tax dollars to build an indoor rainforest -- in Iowa City, Iowa.

The official name for this boondoggle is the Iowa Environmental/Education Project. Locals have dubbed it the "Iowa Pork Forest."

Personally, I'd call it the Iowa BS Farm. But that's just me.

Election day is almost here. So far the two presidential candidates have only talked about how they plan to spend our money. Maybe it's time they talked about how to quit wasting it.

(send your e-mail comments to: alex@newnan.com)