How to waste taxpayer dollars

The greatest way to waste taxpayer money is to call it a stimulus and allow a federal bureaucrat or nanny-state politician to spend it. But then again, you could write an entire book on ways to waste taxpayer money. An appropriate title might just be "The Obama Years."

For starters, you might dole out $650 million to the Department of Health and Human Services to pay for an anti-obesity program. That way you could inundate the public with billboards and television commercials to explain that bad eating habits could well lead to obesity.

Who knew?

It's somewhat difficult to determine just exactly how many jobs were created with this $650 million slush fund. And it's even more difficult to determine if the anti-obesity and anti-smoking campaigns funded with your money are having any positive outcomes.

But as we all know, if you throw enough money at an issue, you'll always get positive results. The war on poverty and the war on drugs are two shining examples.

To spend some of their $31.1 million, New York has produced a new television commercial and installed billboards to highlight the dangers of sugary drinks. These campaigns were conducted by the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Makes you wonder why every community doesn't have a Department of Mental Hygiene.

But, as usual, just when millions of our tax dollars are telling us the importance of exercise and nutrition, some darned conservative group has to throw their two cents into the discussion.

The National Center for Public Policy -- one of those right-wing, fringe groups -- says, "Funding state-sponsored propaganda about our dietary choices only serves to promote the progressive agenda while failing to stimulate jobs or the economy."

Now they could have gone all day without pointing out the obvious. Who needs someone to inject logic and common sense before we know if the posters are truly working.

Darned conservatives!

By now, everyone should have realized how desperately we need the federal government to explain the pitfalls of life. Without the feds' help, we might just naturally assume that four Big Macs a day is a healthy diet. Or a case of Pepsi each day will improve our health.

We need -- no, we deserve -- for our federal government to take our tax dollars to explain to us just how dangerous this world can be. Without those billboards, we might run around making our own choices and assuming we had the right to make those choices -- both good and bad.

And you can only imagine where we would be.