THE ROYCROFT REPORT

June 19, 2012 – You all know how much I enjoy sharing our governments wasteful projects with you…  How about we look at some of the projects tucked away in that wonderful “Farm Bill” legislation.

First of all – How many of you are aware that about 74% of the $969 BILLION “Farm Bill” is for food stamps?

Check these little items out so neatly tucked away in the bill. Funny how none of these has anything to do with farming.

• $554,763 to the U.S. Forest Service to allow it to replace the windows in a visitors center at Mount St. Helens, Wash., that is currently closed and which the Forest Service has no plans to reopen.
• $1.2 million to convert an abandoned train station in Glassboro, N.J., that has been boarded up and unused for 40 years, into “a museum, public meeting space and welcome center.”
• $1.9 million to allow the California Academy of Sciences to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and east Africa, to capture, photograph, and analyze thousands of exotic ants–with the photographs to be posted on AntWeb, a Web site devoted to organizing and displaying pictures and information on the world’s thousands of ant species.
• $677,462 to researchers at Georgia State University to study why monkeys respond negatively to inequity and unfairness.
• $712,883 to researchers at Northwestern University using stimulus money in an effort utilizing “artificial intelligence” that will mine jokes from the Internet and “use them to create hilarious presentations that mimic real-life comedians.”
• $456,663 to University of California, Berkeley to support their getting a better understanding of the global circulation in the atmosphere and altitude of clouds on the planet Neptune.
• $294,958 so that researchers at Wake Forest University can study whether Integral Yoga “can be an effective method to reduce the frequency and/or severity of hot flashes” in menopausal women.
• $500,000 to pay for blue, 96-gallon, microchip-embedded recycling bins for the city of Dayton, Ohio. “The microchips, which use radio frequency identification technology, are installed in the bin handles, and will be used by the city to track citizen participation in the recycling program.” In addition to paying for at least 8,000 bins and equipping collection trucks to read the microchips, another “$500,000 will pay for a consultant to design a campaign promoting recycling.”
• $25 million to Mt. Snow in West Dover, Vt., “to replace the Summit Local and Sunbrook chairlifts, construct a 120-million-gallon storage pond for snowmaking, and install additional snowmaking fan guns” that take advantage of a provision in the stimulus that make funds available for “ski area capital improvements.”
• $193,956 to researchers at Houston’s Rice University and the University of Texas in Dallas, who are getting money through the National Science Foundation to “estimate the impact of stimulus funds on the perceptions of citizens and the choices of local community decision makers” or, in other words, to do a stimulus-funding study of how people feel about the stimulus.

Farm bill my ass! -JRoycroft

Related articles

• Farm Bill Follies (ConservativeActionAlerts.com)
• Farm bill really a food stamp bill (midwestdemocracy.com)
• Republican farm bill to cut food stamps (timesleader.com)