I think we are going to find out also that the organizations benefitting from what the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concludes is $521,000,000,000 worth of larceny annually in the federal budget have squatters’ rights in the larceny. The theft has gone on for so long and is so institutionalized that the beneficiaries of the fraud regard it as a property right. In effect, those who have been defrauding us now have squatters’ rights in the fraud.
Two articles in the current issue of the City Journal address this serious matter. Steven Malanga brings to our attention that the federal budget funds anti-poverty, community building, social welfare, anti-crime and other such programs that never produce any results but continue to run for decades. Congress funds these programs without even requiring that criteria be established for assessing their success. It seems the money mainly goes for building political machines and the wealth of local politicians primarily for the Democrats who control the inner cities.
Heather Mac Donald exposes the facts of the National Institutes of Health’s funding of medical research. The NIH has been paying the universities where the research is conducted a cover charge equal to 69% of the grant to reimburse the universities for the cost of their infrastructure that supports the research. Universities are each receiving hundreds of million of dollars in “indirect funding” to pay for the university’s infrastructure used in the research.
But what does the cover charge really pay for? It seems it pays for the extraordinary expansion of the size and scope of the administrative bureaucracy. There seem to be endless vice presidents, assistant and vice provosts, and associate deans whose jobs are to police language, thought, speech, political correctness and provide emotional comfort to those in need.
