I read these articles all the time, but this one in particular caught my attention. Bemoaning government bloat, Michael Goodwin writes about “wasteful” projects included in the stimulus bill passed two years ago, including:
$500,000 for new windows at a closed tourist center in Washington state, $6.9 million for repairs to an 1846 brick fort in the Florida Keys, accessible only by private plane or a four-hour boat ride, $2 million for California researchers to study ants in the Indian Ocean, and $762,000 for “interactive choreography programs” at the University of North Carolina.
His indignance sounds perfectly sensible, right? I mean, people are starving, we’re fighting a war wars, nobody’s driving flying cars yet, etc. And $6.9 million! That’s a lot, particularly for some fort built in 1846: nothing that old could possibly be important, right? And even if it was, a four-hour boat ride is ridiculous. Who owns a private plane?
Of course, things are never quite as simple as Fox News makes them out to be as they seem.
If you’ve never been to Dry Tortugas National Park, well, too bad for you. I won’t regurgitate the Wikipedia article, but it’s worth saying that the park is both a natural and historical wonder (see pictures below), and integral to the tourist industry of Key West. CNN had an article on the renovations earlier in the year that points out that they’ve been ongoing for the past 30 years, and will likely continue for the next 30. The Federal Register also notes that visitation at the park increased 400% from 1996 to 2000, from 23,000 to 95,000 annual visitors. Oh, and the boat ride is only two and a half hours each way.
So, let’s run the numbers again. Assume, conservatively, that they spend the $6.9 million over the next 10 years, and that visits to the park drop off to only 80,000 people a year. With those numbers, it works out to $8.63 per person.
Makes me wonder about those windows.
