Stashin' Passion

You probably recall an interview from Detroit shortly after President Obama was elected. The woman who was the subject was ecstatic because she believed that the President was going to give her and others some money. When asked where she thought the money would come from, she answered “Obama’s stash.” I’m certain that many of us chuckled at her apparent naiveté. It seems, however, that at some level she was correct. Obama does have a “stash,” but the Detroit lady’s cut will be much smaller than she had expected. On the other hand his big business cronies have been faring well.

The President may have been a lowly community organizer when he ran for the Illinois State Senate, but he learned the politics of the Chicago streets very well. “The Chicago Way” requires an unflinching and unrepentant commitment to rewarding one’s friends and crushing one’s foes. All progressives and most Democrats believe that they have a proprietary interest in public funds….formerly your money. Once the taxes or fees have been coerced or confiscated from citizens, they become the personal bankroll for the leftie politician. The money can be budgeted for programs and policies that favor groups that are safely ensconced in the leftist voting bloc.

While directing advantageous budgetary allocations toward compliant groups is an important element of leftist politics, the recipients must be continually reminded who their benefactors are. It follows, therefore, that massive funds are required to “inform and educate” the masses so that their voting will allow the looting cycle to continue ad infinitum. To effectively reach the people with a message of beneficent government requires massive amounts of funds. Soliciting campaign money from the smaller recipients of government largesse can be an effective strategy, but $25 and $50 donations will not accumulate quickly enough to underwrite a broad based ad campaign.

Entering from “stage left” are the idealistic dedicated leftists who have entered the world of capitalism by becoming innovative entrepreneurs. Like many progressive lefties their ideas of “ought to” are rarely grounded in reality. Their innovative concepts may be intriguing and creative, but the market and consumer demand are not yet favorable for their products or services. Some of their concepts are politically correct, but can never become commercially viable….unless they can secure a “sugar daddy” to underwrite or finance their trip into dreamland. Other development concepts are more feasible, but why invest your own assets when government is available to provide funding? Two glaring examples stand out. The Solyndra fiasco in California and the Petrobras development in the deep water off Brazil are representative of the type of cronyism this administration has employed to reward political friends and contributors.

Given the two examples that have been cited, it should be clear that President Obama has distorted the so-called “stimulus” funding to reward his political allies. As the Federal Reserve Bank cranks out more dollars, the President’s friends are rewarded by raids on public funds, and the citizens of the nation are penalized with increasing debt and decreasing currency values. The Obama “stash” has been found. It is not a vault at Fort Knox. It is not a shoebox under the President’s bed in the Whitehouse. It is not Al Gore’s famous “lockbox.” The Obama stash is a keyboard in Ben Bernanke’s office at the Fed. Those stash-driven keyboard strokes are underwritten by higher prices for consumers, and an increasingly uncertain economic future for Americans. The Obama stash ultimately begins and ends in your pocket, but the lady from Detroit is still waiting for her cut from the stash. I suspect that she’ll vote for him again because she does not yet understand that the “stash” is a myth, and his promises to her were meaningless. Meanwhile, George Soros enjoys the profits from Petrobras, and the Solyndra executives plead the Fifth Amendment. The Obama campaign re-election fund continues to grow in anticipation of another four years for looting the people of the United States and dashing the dreams of the Framers and the Founders.

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U.S. Grant-Time to Retire

Read any Sunday paper and the odds are you’ll find a “help wanted” ad for a grant writer. So who awards those grants? Where does the money come from? Except for a few foundations, most of the grants are given by governments. Grant writers are needed because either the grant process is a competitive one or certain criteria must be met and/or bureaucratic hoops must be jumped before the recipient is deemed to have qualified. So, for the taxpayer it’s a double whammy. Sacrifice some your labor or profits to fund the grant, and forfeit more of your sweat equity to underwrite the grant writer.


My personal view is that grant writers represent B.S. artists who are savvy in the world of bureaucratic minutiae. They appear to be experts at generalized obfuscation, “i-dotting” and “t-crossing.” Although I am certain that someone at one time offered a reasonably valid justification for the entire grant process, I suspect that like every other Big Government function or process, it has morphed into a ludicrous exercise with minimal value that has scant constitutional purpose. The entire grant system is a sham. The feds or the states pretend to acknowledge the priorities set by the local government while, at the same time, the locals can boast about receiving “state” or “federal” funds. In Ohio, for example, Butler County officials could rejoice about their receiving federal money for a new updated recycling center. The County would be responsible for the 70% that the grant would not cover as well as any unanticipated costs, but the people should be happy because the 30% would be coming from the federal government. Maybe we should ask the folks in Warren County or Hamilton County if they wish to pay for some other county’s recycling center. What would the folks in Indiana or Kentucky say if they had been asked? This scenario is one that I have created to illustrate the folly of the grant writing shell game.

The entire process is merely the moving of taxpayer dollars from one community or state to another while providing the illusion that the locality is getting something for nothing. A recent example is the $400 million dollar grant awarded to Ohio for startup and design of a “so-called” high speed rail system. After the November election, Governor-elect Kasich declined to accept the federal funds, and Big Brother (aka Sec’y Ray LaHood) immediately offered the funds to Florida or California. These events suggest that the need for the funds in Ohio was not a burning priority, and that the federal government will continue to irresponsibly spend borrowed money even when facing a fiscal crisis.

If you employ a competent grant writer, then you can locate the moving pea under the shell. A community can take momentary advantage of a system that takes money from others, but eventually all will pay and pay dearly. Oh yes, don’t forget to include the cost of the grant writer. Remember to include salary, benefits, supplies, space, furniture and utilities, and maybe this time, local government, you can find the pea.

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