Running the Ship Aground

You know all those people who suffer incurable guilt about everything? You know 'em; the ones that vote for socialists and advocate taxing the life out of the producer class? Their delusions about wealth redistribution are easy to document and they love to use confiscatory tax policy to fund the long reach and deft touch one can only get from government. Yea . . . those folks brought you this steaming pile of dung:

An audit of a program that provides home insulation and weatherization for low-income people shows that the state did a poor job of record keeping, and that more than $1 million was spent on projects in which the costs exceeded the benefits. The number of homes involved in projects where costs outweighed benefits was not revealed.

Of course not; why should the public know anything about how public money is spent?

"If they're going to invest in a person's home, they're supposed to get savings greater than the investment. We found cases where they didn't," said Brad White, audit manager. "We felt the department needed to do a better job monitoring the program. They're supposed to audit 5 percent of the jobs. There's no evidence they did."

Well, it IS for low-income people, which makes non-low-income people feel better, so that's what really matters; not whether lots of the money was pissed away.

Ed Garvey, deputy commerce commissioner, said his agency added new software last year that failed to match costs and benefits on home-insulation projects. "The data's all there, but the dots are not connected," he said.

Thanks for the reassuring words, Ed. First, I'd like to know what this magical new software cost. Then I'd like to know if the software is junk or if the people who were using it are just idiots without the benefit of oversight.

You can always rest assured that when government is at the helm the ship of society will soon be hard against the reef.