Acorn Funding in Perspective

Let’s say you run a business.  Your accounting manager comes to you in a fit, claiming another employee stole $1 from the general budget.  You start to look over the budget, and you notice that there is a forced reconciliation of $10,000 in the budget.  When you ask your account manager where that $10,000 went, he replies “I don’t know, but what are you going to do about this stolen $1?”

That, boys and girls, is what the Republican party is currently pulling in regards to the Acorn fiasco.

Acorn has received $53,000,000 in federal funding since 1994.  That amounts to just over $3,500,000 per year.  That is on a national level, so that money is actually spread out across the county.  The Republicans now are using Acorn as the rally cry to root out waste and fraud in the budget, but let’s be clear.  This has zero to do with the budget and everything to do with attacking Obama. 

For example, if Republicans really want to cut excess spending, they (and to be honest, their Democrat counterparts as well) can stop trying to force the Defense department to order additional F-22 raptor fighter jets to the tune of $351,000,000 EACH.  That is over 6 times the amount of money Acorn has received in over a decade.  Gates has said repeatedly the military doesn’t need any more of these jets, doesn’t WANT any more of these jets, and isn’t asking for any more of these jets.  But members of congress in states that produce these jets keep trying to bury them in bills as earmarks.

In fact, before we start looking to cut funds to specific groups, we should look into the $100,000,000 in UNUSED AIRPLANE TICKETS that went unrefunded between 1997-2003.  These are tickets purchased by the defense department but never used, and then nobody bothered to get the refunds even though the tickets were fully refundable.

Or better yet, let’s look into what happened to that $25,000,000,000 in LOST MONEY from 2003 in the form of unreconciled transactions.

The unreconciled transactions are funds for which auditors cannot account: The government knows that $25 billion was spent by someone, somewhere, on something, but auditors do not know who spent it, where it was spent, or on what it was spent. Blaming these unreconciled transactions on the failure of federal agencies to report their expenditures adequately, the Treasury report con­cludes that locating the money is “a priority.”

The federal government LOST $25 billion dollars in a single year, and the Republicans want to get the populace all riled up about $3,500,000 a year given in grants to, in the grand scheme of the universe, a very, very small organization that only got a “big name” because of its association to a president they don’t like.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t want Acorn or any other organization getting federal funds it might not deserve.  But I’m not going to reward Republicans for pointing the finger at $1 missing from the budget when they lost $10,000 and don’t know where it is.  In fact, I’d probably reprimand the $1 theft with a written warning, and fire the idiot that lost $10,000.  But that’s just me.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/bg1840.cfm