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Ways We Should Not Spend Stimulus Cash
by Justin Vencel
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

In uncertain economic times it seems everyone has a way to spend government money.

With the economic stimulus bill a mere 2 weeks old the line to get a hold of these funds is getting crowded indeed, so crowded in fact that quite a few wacky ideas are starting to join the ranks. A post at walletpop.com has put together quite an interesting list of requests for stimulus cash received by the state of Ohio via the Governor Ted Strickland's office. While many of the requests are admirable maybe even down right good ideas, a select few stand out and make you scratch your head and ask why?

Here are a few that caught my eye:

• $8,000 to make "Hand folding Origami decorations by Senior Citizens to sell on Ebay and Amazon to assist in small increases in income for those that can not meet their monthly expenses."
• $200,000 to train the economically challenged as Ultimate Impact Wrestlers. "We would need to obtain a building for training and shows as we have currently been using my garage for training and this [is] unheated."
• $40,000 to teach speed-reading to the Ohio State Highway Patrol which will "result in an on-the-job time saving of at least one hour per day on the average."
• $20 billion to a College Corners man who states "I have a few projects to work on around the Boone household, and as long as Uncle Sugar is passing out money from the paychecks of future generations, I thought why not stick it to those yet unborn suckers, the ones we don't abort first, of course. Oh, you may conclude there might be a couple of planned cost overruns, but you know how those darned government funded projects go."

I suppose they should get points for trying.