I received an email from a TEA Party friend today that pointed me to an ABC News web source about another flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars.  The Washington Watch Dog segment of ABC News picked up this story from the National Public Radio news.  This in itself is hard to believe; that ABC, much less NPR, would air something negative regarding federal spending.

The story is that in 2005, Congress ordered the US Mint to make presidential dollar coins commemorating every dead US President.  The US Mint in Philadelphia is making 1.8 million coins per day at a cost of 32 cents each.  Folks, this is about $576,000 per day for these dollar coins that apparently no one wants. These coins are going into temporary storage at the Federal Reserve in Baltimore.  A warehouse full of metal shelving 8’ high storing millions of commemorative presidential coins.

The spending doesn’t stop there.  They must have a vault large enough for all these millions of unwanted coins.  So what are they doing about it?  They will spend another $650,000 to build a vault in which to keep the unnecessary and costly waste.  Of course the vault will not be built close to the point of production. No way, that would make way too much sense and cost less.  So, they plan to build the vault in Dallas; Texas that is.  Now they have shipping costs to consider.  Three million dollars of shipping costs to transport these millions of coins to a safe haven far, far away.

The really idiotic thing about this story is they plan to continue making these “fools gold” coins until 2016.  By that time the number of coins will be in the ballpark of 2 billion! For those progressive liberals who are arithmetically challenged, that is equivalent to $2 billion dollars, face value, just sitting in a vault.

And true to form, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), one of the co-sponsors of the 2005 legislation who put this boondoggle before our esteemed and most frugal congress, was asked by the reporter (or what we used to call a reporter) if he (Sen. Reed) had one of these presidential coins in his pocket at the time.  What do you think his answer was?  No! Of course not.  He didn’t want to carry the junk around either!

Then, Diane Sawyer asks this most probing question, “Why isn’t this one of the first cuts made?”  Wow, who would have thought this kind of in-depth investigative reporting would surface from B Hussein Obama’s state media.  Wonders never cease.

It makes one realize there must be thousands of other foolish money wasting laws in place.  There are probably so many that no one person has the foggiest notion of the count or where they are.  Sounds like a lot of other bills were passed “so we can find out what is in it.”  Wait, I am about to go off in another direction which is another story in itself and better left for another time. There is just so much to write about.

Come quickly January 2013.

Harry Thompson