Instapundit: Obamacare Simply Most Recent in Failed Federal Mega-Projects
Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, writes in USA Today of the long list of federally funded mega-projects that go nowhere slow…. After riffing a bit on that theme, he writes:
The Olmsted Dam and Locks on the Ohio River were authorized by Congress in 1988, but a quarter-century later the project is only half-done. It has also overrun its budget by a factor of four.
Meanwhile, most of the interesting stuff being done in outer space are being done by private companies. (In fact, President Obama's space policy approach, which emphasizes private enterprise, is one of his greatest policy successes.)
As it's gotten bigger the federal government appears to have gotten less competent. Apollo was a success on its own terms, but the big government policies that followed—the War On Poverty, the War On Drugs, the War On Cancer—have all been pretty much failures, sometimes disastrous ones.
Note that the Olmstead Dam and Locks is the very project that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) got funding for in the bill that ended the government shutdown. So it should be back to full waste level very soon…