Think Americans are angry at Washington today? Just you wait.Even as President Obama yesterday formed a panel of Washington graybeards to find ways to control the national debt, the Government Accountability Office was reporting in eye-popping detail on a $5 billion "stimulus" program to weatherize the homes of some 600,000 low-income families.
The point, purportedly, was to increase energy efficiency and create "green jobs" -- whatever they may be. But GAO found that, as of Dec. 31 (nearly a year into the program), barely 9,000 homes had, in fact, been weatherized.
The problem? The bill contained, among other flaws, a mandate that everybody hired to do work on the homes be paid a "prevailing wage" -- which snarled the program in red tape for months as Energy Department bureaucrats came up with such a figure for every county in the nation.
How many "green jobs" could 9,000 houses have created?
Plenty -- for the aforementioned bureaucrats: ABC News reports that, despite the mere trickle of actual work going on, DOE had burned through a whopping $522 million for the program, or more than 10 percent of its stimulus pot.
Now, not to oversimplify things, but that works out to roughly $57,000 per weatherized home.
Meanwhile, a recent report by Texas Watchdog found that of the $3.7 million that state had spent through the program last year, $3.5 million -- or 95 percent -- went to administrative costs.
All in all, the scheme is functioning . . . about as you'd expect a government program would.
But while this kind of waste is annoying in good times, it's intolerable now -- and goes a long way toward explaining why Americans en masse have stopped believing their government has their best interests at heart.
And who's to say they're wrong?
The notion embodied in Obama's stimulus -- that Americans can't be trusted to spend their own money -- has always been the height of arrogance.
Now the real-world consequences of that mentality -- trillion-dollar deficits and the loss of the nation's global stature -- are being laid bare.
Americans increasingly understand this, which explains their anger.
But there's more of that to come.
Wait until the stories of misspent stimulus funds start making the rounds.
Fifty-seven grand just to weatherize a house? Grotesque.