75-01-A4
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Boondoggles
TranscriptIf you're not familiar with the term Boondoggle, consider the fact our federal government recently underwrote the total cost of a study dealing with Polish, bisexual frogs. If that doesn't give you a hint, stand by. I'll be right back. A while back, the federal government handed out a grant to some researchers to produce a study called the "Demography of Happiness." They surveyed quite a few people to find out why some lead happier lives than others. They found as a rule that younger people were happier than older people, people with money were happier than those without it, and healthy people were happier than those who were sick. The cost for all of this was two hundred forty nine thousand dollars. Two hundred and forty nine thousand dollars to find out that it's better to be young, rich and healthy than old, sick and poor. I mention this case to remind you that, although the economy is sluggish, the federal boondoggle business is booming. A few years ago, a magazine receiving funds from the National Foundation on the Arts published a one-word poem, for which it paid the author five hundred dollars. The word was "Light" spelled with two extra consonants. now that would be hilarious, if it weren't for the fact that some Americans go to bed hungry or without jobs, while the federal arbiters of taste hand out frivolous gifts from the public purse. The Food and Drug Administration paid a Buffalo, New York company to conduct a study of why children fall off tricycles. The research engineers drew a profound conclusion: they fall off tricycles because they lose their balance or collide with an object. They also learn that children get longer legs as they get older, thus complicating the business of riding tricycles. Now the purpose behind this survey was to help the FDA determine if it should issue safety design standards for tricycles. I'm not at all sure the government has any business considering such things, unless someone has proved that a lot of kids are injured riding tricycles, thus constituting a national problem. And no word of such a problem preceded the study. The Smithsonian Institution, which is federally funded, of course, isn't averse to putting in for some exotic boondoggles, too. Not long ago it sent Congress a shopping list of research projects it wanted to sponsor, including reproductive rhythms of catfish in India, or how fishing boat crews caused conflicts in Yugoslavian peasant towns, and a study of Polish bisexual frogs. Now, some of these studies may serve a larger more serious purpose but one can only wonder why private sources and colleges and universities aren't taking these projects on for themselves. The frog study, for example, was intended to test some new methods for distinguishing between one species of animal and another. Now that may be a legitimate scientific research objective but is that what we have a federal government for? In recent years, a new cottage industry has sprung up to take advantage of federal boondoggles in the name of science and culture. A small army of bright wordsmiths and scholars will, for a fee, help prospective grantees dream up serious sounding titles for their projects in order to impress Congress or a federal agency. Grant proposals are chock full of persuasive salesmanship stressing the vital nature of the grantees project that Congress takes such stuff seriously at all, as a measure of how far we've strayed. In recent years, from the original purposes of federal government there are a few Congressmen who battle the boondoggles who say, in effect, "Hey, wait a minute. What business does government have paying for this? What's the benefit to the taxpayers?" What we need is a research program that will tell us how we can get a few hundred more Congressmen just like those others. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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