Don Carrington’s piece at Carolina Journal Online yesterday is a perfect example of how we dribble away billions of tax dollars in small amounts all over this country every day. His story is about alleged corruption in federal grant applications, but my takeaway question after reading it is: Why in the hell are our tax dollars being used to fix up some private individual’s house?

That puts me in the “uncaring” and “heartless” category, I’m sure. So be it. I’ve got some pretty pricey things I need to do to my house, but I don’t expect any level of government to pay for them. The sad part about the pass we’ve come to as a country in the past 50 years is that way too many people DO expect the government to pay for their personal home repairs.

Even as we are spiraling down the toilet, fiscally, the federal government’s bureaucrats (who don’t give a damn because it’s not THEIR money) are giving away money for things that would be wasteful even in a good economy with a balanced federal budget:

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced $40 million in grants, including $3.2 million for scholars, museums and documentary filmmakers in California.

Like its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NEH saw its current-year budget slashed 7.5% in April, down to $155 million, and its future prospects are iffy given the deficit-cutting mood in Washington. For now, there’s still money to go around.

Arguably the most wasteful of all the questionable expenditures is the $400,000 to the University of Massachusetts for a two-day seminar “about the meaning of civility and its role in the functioning of American democracy.” That’s $200,000 a day to hear about how uncivil, hateful, and terroristic the Tea Party folks are. What an investment. You can hear the same thing on MSNBC each night for free.

As Everett Dirksen was once famously misquoted by a reporter: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

P.S.: Had the pleasure to meet Everett Dirksen in June of 1964 during the debate over the Civil Rights Act. I was 16, and my aunt worked for Sen. Richard B. Russell of Georgia, a Democrat. She introduced him and Hubert Humphrey to me in the rotunda of the Capitol. It was Russell and his fellow Democrats (West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, North Carolina’s Sam Ervin, et al.) who were trying to defeat the Civil Rights Bill. It was Dirksen and the Republicans (along with some Democrats such as Humphrey) who were trying to pass it.