Fiscal Responsibility in the Age of Obama

Picture a giant middle finger from the education establishment!

An interesting bit of news out of the debacle that is the Federal budgetary process. In the midst of spending trillions, the Obama administration is looking for ways to try to appear to have some semblance of fiscal responsibility. Unfortunately, the cuts being made are dwarfed by new spending, and it seems that nearly half the cuts are coming from the defense budget!

But one little nugget caught my eye in the Government Boondoggle known as the Department of Education:

The officials previewed four other programs marked for termination on the grounds that they are not needed or are not effective. Obama officials have previously identified three of them as being out of favor: a $35 million-a-year long-range radio navigation system that officials said has been made obsolete by Global Positioning System devices; a Department of Education attaché based in Paris that costs $632,000 per year; and a $142 million program that officials said continues to pay states to clean up abandoned mines even though that task has been completed.

I always regretted that Reagan did not padlock the doors of the Department of Education. Aside from the demagoguery of the Left that holds that anyone who opposes the Federal Department of Education must be ipso facto an opponent of children's education. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Education is best regulated at the local level, where parents can influence local school boards, where local administrators know local students and local teachers as well.
All of the money sent to fund a federal bureaucracy in Washington would be better spent in the classroom. Now it turns out, that in addition to the piles of money pissed away in Washington, we've been spending over a half a million dollars a year for an education bureaucrat (educrat) to have an office in France???

Other than the sheer chutzpah of a humongous "in your face" reward for some educrat, who in the world would think it's a good idea to pay to have an American educator an ocean away from the children the tax dollars supporting him (or her) were supposed to educate?

How many more programs like this are yet to be uncovered? Government needs to get smaller with more local controls so that spending boondoggles like these can be stopped before they start!

Cross posted at Say Anything