Go Free Yourself

Who’s the biggest piglet in Illinois?

Citizens Against Government Waste and Illinois Policy Institute have teamed up to introduce the 2008 Illinois Piglet Book. Here’s a taste of the bacon:

• $1 million for the Illinois film office in Chicago
• $550,000 for the conservation of pheasants
• $40,000 for the Springfield Figure Skating Club

All in all, the Piglet Book details more than $686 million in state government waste. Check it out here, and watch our friend John Tillman talk about it on Fox News Chicago.

I am already pissed about the amount of taxes I have to pay. But when I found out today that my hard-earned dollars (and yours) are paying for lingerie, gambling, iPods (you KNOW how I feel about those), Internet dating services, and steak & booze dinners, I nearly burst a blood vessel.

Look, I know this shouldn’t/doesn’t come as a surprise, but it’s no less infuriating.

The Washington Post reports (with the most understated headline ever—”Federal Credit Cards Misused”):

The study, released by Senate lawmakers yesterday, found that nearly half the “purchase card” transactions it examined were improper, either because they were not authorized correctly or because they did not meet requirements for the cards’ use. The overall rate of problems “is unacceptably high,” the audit found.

The GAO also found that agencies could not account for nearly $2 million worth of items identified in the audit — including laptop computers, digital cameras and, at the Army, more than a dozen computer servers worth $100,000 each.

…

The GAO found that 41 percent of the transactions it examined did not follow government purchasing rules. The problem was worse with larger purchases: Forty-eight percent of transactions over $2,500 were in violation of federal rules, the report said.

Read the rest (and more highlights)—if you can stand it.

Today, Citizens Against Government Waste released the 2008 Congressional Pig Book and it’s chock full of important (yet horrifying) information about how your tax dollars were frittered away on pet projects this year—and which politicians were responsible.

The numbers speak for themselves. There were 11,610 pork-barrel projects—costing taxpayers $17.2 billion—in the fiscal 2008 budget, including:

• $4,840,870 for wood utilization research;
• $1,529,220 for the Appalachian Fruit Lab;
• $984,400 for Idaho’s strategic plan for managing noxious weeds; and
• $98,000 for a walking tour of Boydton, Va. (population 474).

Learn more about how the government is wasting your money by visiting CAGW’s website. They’re doing good work to help stop “the politics of pork” by informing Americans about how their hard-earned dollars are being misspent by elected officials. You can get involved, too—help spread the word!

Remember when Cook County Board President Todd Stroger pushed through a 1 percent sales tax increase (giving Chicago the dishonor of being the Most Taxed City in the Nation), pleading with taxpayers and commissioners “to make sacrifices for the good of county government”?

It was BS then, of course, but wait ’til you hear this: evidently the “good of county government” was code for “giving his cousin a ginormous raise.”

Donna Dunnings, Stroger’s cousin and the county’s Chief Financial Officer, is set to receive a 12 percent raise—higher than any other county employee—which brings her salary to $160,000. This is $5k more than the last CFO, even though she claimed when she started last year that she’d save taxpayers money by taking a lower salary than her predecessor.

This is ridiculous.

It turns out Democrats and Republicans CAN work together. That which unites them? Earmarks!

U.S. Representative Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) has pushed through a $1.1 million federal earmark to keep his Republican buddy U.S. Representative Amory Houghton’s part-time (another word for “vacation”?) home from flooding.

Awww. How sweet. But if you think I want to pay for this across-the-aisle show of love, think again.

Read more about this taxpayer-funded “salt water restoration project” (a.k.a. Giant Waste of Money) here.

(Hat Tip: Fark.com)

The city of Chicago is on a budget crunch, and its citizens are already the highest-taxed in the country, but why not get the Chicago Police Department a whole new fleet of SUVs?!

This is the latest brilliant idea from the powers that be. At a Chicago Crime Commission luncheon on Wednesday, Police Superintendent Jody Weis “said he would like to update the department’s ‘horrible’ fleet of squad cars…with Chicago’s rugged winters, a sport-utility vehicle might make more sense than the traditional Ford Crown Victoria.”

Rugged winters? Give me a break. I know it’s cold and we get some snow, but this isn’t exactly Alaska. I don’t know if Weis has bothered to take a quick tour of Chicago’s topography lately, but it’s pretty much a big flat grid. I’m actually not sure if Chicago could be any farther from rugged terrain.

Also on the shopping list? Better flashlights and more uniform guns. Chicagoans, your tax dollars at work.

(To be fair, Weis did note that these changes could be difficult to implement given the city’s financial crunch. He also touched on a variety of other plans to improve the police force. But, seriously. A whole new fleet of taxpayer-funded SUVs? You’ve got to be kidding.)