By Osden Coolidge

Congress just cut Federal funding for ACORN.  Great move, but not for reasons most think.  Cutting the funding is a good decision, but not over controversy about ACORN tactics and the recent fiasco where an undercover reporter caught ACORN employees giving tax advice to people posing as an illegal prostitute and pimp.  Cutting funding makes sense because Federal funding of programs doesn’t work.  The problem is, the cut is all smoke and mirrors with little meaning.  More on that in a second, back to the reason Federal funding is broken:

There are four ways to spend money:

Spend your own money on yourself and you are pretty careful, for example when buying your own car.

Spend your own money on someone else and you are pretty careful, nearly as much as if spent on yourself, buy someone a car as a gift, you will likely get a good deal but wont care as much about the color or other details.

Spend someone else’s money on yourself and you might get a little lavish and less efficient.  Your company or government gives you money for a car; you might get extra features even if the cost is more than you would have paid yourself.

Spend someone else money on someone else and you have the least efficient, most wasteful way to spend.  Your company or government lets you buy a fleet of cars for someone as part of a contract.  In this example humans care least about quality, efficiency or value and most about self-interest.

Welcome to the land of government and government-funded programs.

Billions are wasted annually in this type of spending: purchasing authorities will never care for the money as if it were their own and often participate in graft and corruption.  Ever have a car dealer try to bribe you into buying a car?  Offer you kickbacks, favors, donations or a cushy job?  Not likely.  Government purchasers are another story.

The US is among the most generous and charitable of nations.  Our spirit of ingenuity crosses into philanthropy.  Great charitable achievements are initiated and funded privately:  private hospitals of the 40s, the finest universities, Carnegie libraries and foundations who work daily on problems ranging from addiction to illiteracy to endangered species.  Private and private-funded charitable organizations are universally more efficient and effective than government-run or funded ones.

Bye ACORN, score for efficiency!  Don’t get happy, chumps:

Cutting ACORN, like cutting funding for midnight basketball or other tiny programs is chumpifantastic smoke and mirrors.  House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) stated that ACORN received $31 million in funding from 1998-2008.  $31 million?  Seriously?  Sound like a lot of money?  That’s less $3.1 million a year.  This may sound like real money to working Americans but in the happy-go-lucky world of government play-money it’s miniscule.  We spend more money daily in Iraq than 100 years of ACORN funding.  Failed (but well-connected!) financial giant, AIG received enough money in one day to fund ACORN for the next 3000 years.  One single employee at Merrill Lynch last year received a bailout bonus of over $200 million, enough to replace Federal funds for ACORN from now until the year 2070.  This of course was only a piece of the overall $3.6 billion in bonuses taxpayers paid Merrill Lynch employees from the Federal boondoggle in one year.

The entire Wall Street bonus bailout cost taxpayers enough to fund ACORN, the National Endowment for the Arts and virtually every other social and welfare program in all 50 states from now until the end of the century.  Put in those terms, even die-hard conservatives might muse, “Gee, dollar for dollar, ACORN isn’t so bad.  Such a large and well-mobilized organization must do some good.”  At least projects like the NEA manage to offer some semblance of public benefit after the cronies and well-connected take their cut.  Relative to dollars spent compared to Wall Street, big pharma, big insurance and government contractors, ACORN is a bargain.

With bailouts we see no return whatsoever.

Unless you are a Hamptons realtor selling deca-million dollar vacation homes or a Manhattan Ferrari salesman decking out bonus-babies with new wheels, you are left in the back of the bus for benefiting from the bailout bonuses.  However, there is one other category that might benefit… the world’s oldest profession.  Fake-conservatives bashing the bogus ACORN bimbo but who backed Bush’s bailout-bonus boondoggle, just might want to take a look in their backyard.  It’s possible, just possible that all those thousands of testosterone-crazed Wall Street bailout bonus babies who need companionship during Ferrari rides to beach homes reach out to the oldest profession with some of their easy-earned cash.  Out of the tens and tens of billions taxpayers have paid in bonuses, you can bet that more than a dollar or two ended up in places that would make the most extreme ACORN tax advisor (or opponent) blush.  Show me some footage of ACORN driving 1000 Ferraris off a cliff every day for a year and paying salaries on enough hookers to fill the Superdome 100 times over and we’ll have something close to significant in terms of real government dollars.  Problem?  Sure.  But when a city is burning down you don’t worry about a fruit fly.  If less than  .0001% of the bailout money was spent on prostitutes it would surpass the previous decade of nationwide ACORN funding.  As a true conservative I say double ACORN’s budget, the NEA and give every member of Congress a $2 million raise…in exchange for them promising not to mess things up anymore.  We’d save hundreds of billions.  To the Bush / Bernake cheerleaders who despise ACORN but support Wall Street bonus bailouts what say you?  Investigative report anyone?