At Last – A Shovel-Ready Stimulus Project
Remember that vaunted “economic stimulus” package from several years ago? You know, that one rammed through Congress by the naive DC clown krewe current Administration that was going to lassez les bontemps rouler again, economy-wise? And which hasn’t exactly worked out all that well?
The 2009 economic stimulus program has been widely derided as ineffective. Many of those “shovel-ready” projects you heard about were anything but. Critics called many of the projects funded by the program “make work”, “pork”, or “crap”. And it looks like they were dead on target.
However, in spite of the ineffectiveness of the program those stimulus funds apparently are still around (and we wonder why we’ve been having budget deficits approaching or over $1 trillion annually). And today we have a new stimulus-funded project that’s truly shovel-ready.
It’s a contract issued by the Bureau of Land Management to haul off horse and burro manure.
The contract has one base year and four option years. It will likely be in effect until 2019.
What a load of horsesh!t. Literally.
And we’re the ones paying for it.
Category: "Teh Stoopid", "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Economy
Of all the insane programs there are, this is the one that got to my husband.
Thought he was going to need a clean pair of pants before he got through ranting about it *grin*
My comment was merely, who gets the stinky gold and do they have to pay for it?
Shoveling shit? Did that for years.
Stalls are easier to clean that open land, though, and you don’t generally remove natural fertilizers from open land.
So who’s the looney-tune who came up with this idea? Oh, wait – it’s a secret, right?
Ex-PH2: per the linked article, the contract is to haul off dung from a corral in Burns, OR. The BLM uses the corral as a holding area for wild horses/burros found on BLM range land (presumably in that area) that are awaiting adoption.
Seems to me that a fair number of organic farmers in OR/ID/NoCA might offer to haul that crap away for free (and use it as fertilizer) if the BLM made its existence public and allowed them to do so. But that would be using common sense.
Sadly, they probably can’t if they’re certified organic – certified organic means as much as possible guaranteeing none of those pesky non-certified-organic pesticides etc have been used on the fodder the animals have been eating.
A lot of managed wildlands do use non-organic pesticides, depending on the situation, particularly for trying to cope with invasive plant species. In the US, there’s more use of organic pesticides than in some other places (Australia and New Zealand come to mind) but in some cases, the alternatives boil down to: 1) manual removal, 2) let invasives take over, or 3) use not-certified-organic pesticides. So with that in mind, without a very clear set of records guaranteeing the use of organic pesticides, the organic farmers wouldn’t be able to use it. For the farmers who aren’t going for the organic gold label, it would come down to a whole other list of influencing factors. But the BLM could, and totally should, advertise – even if there’s no out-and-out farmers willing to come haul it off, there’s plenty of larger-scale hobbyist gardeners or even some plant nurseries which would jump at the chance.
I wonder if APL will bid on that project?