BuckeyeBlog

At a time when many local governments are complaining that they don’t have enough funds (i.e., you need to pay higher taxes), state audits reveal that some local government officials are making some pretty questionable purchases with your tax money:

[Valley Township Auditor Bonnie Turner] voided a township check for $7,645, reissued herself a new check and cashed it; she accepted cash payments totaling $3,700 for the purchase of several township cemetery plots and didn’t deposit the money with a bank; she illegally used $2,353 in township funds to pay her personal home telephone bills for two years; and she owes the township $171 for a cell phone and accessories that she failed to return after she resigned.

The audit found that her husband, Larry Turner, the former township fire department safety officer, must repay $1,237 in township funds that he spent illegally on his personal cell phone in 2006 and 2007 after his position was terminated Jan. 10, 2006.

The audit also found that their son, current township worker Jonathan Turner, owes the township $106 for a cell phone and accessories that he failed to return following a reassignment to other job duties.

The best part?

Mrs. Turner said neither she nor her family did anything wrong, and that it is the trustees’ responsibility to sign off on spending decisions. 

“I never took anything that didn’t belong to me,” she said.

George Will continues to call the GOP on its hypocrisy, this time in his Sunday column explaining the hypocrisy of the McCain/Palin cry of “socialism”:

America can’t have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans — whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; and a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm — and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called “the private sector” has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be “spread around.”

Will goes on to note:

McCain and Palin, plucky foes of spreading the wealth, must have known that such spreading is most of what Washington does. Here, the Constitution is an afterthought; the supreme law of the land is the principle of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Sugar import quotas cost the American people approximately $2 billion a year, but that sum is siphoned from 300 million consumers in small, hidden increments that are not noticed. The few thousand sugar producers on whom billions are thereby conferred do notice and are grateful to the government that bilks the many for the enrichment of the few.

Read the whole thing here and let your anger boil at both parties, which each rush to embrace the chance to give away your tax dollars to a variety of special interest groups.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reported yesterday that the current economic downturn is forcing Hamilton County towards a fiscal emergency. The commissioners have called for several belt-tightening measures, but the explanation of one in particular catches the eye:

[Commissioner David] Pepper has also suggested a lockdown on all county spending through the end of the year, meaning whenever a department wants money, it will have to prove that the expense is necessary.

Shouldn’t county departments always be able to prove that their expenses are necessary, regardless of fiscal emergency?