Potty Pork: Stimulus Money Flushed Down the Toilet

President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package, intended to jump-start the economy and create jobs, is spending tens of millions of dollars to repair and build toilets. Tax dollars are quite literally being flushed down the drain while unemployment is near 10 percent and the economy shows few signs of improvement.

As the New York Post's Geoff Earle reports, taxpayer money has funded toilet-related projects ranging from humble sylvan outhouses to "historic" restrooms, sprucing up or replacing aging toilets to spending $2.8 million for toilets in national forests in New Mexico.

"You could definitely say this is potty pork," Leslie Paige of Citizens Against Government Waste said. "This puts a whole different swirl on money going down the drain."

The stimulus-package potty projects are being done for the Army, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Veterans Affairs Administration.

Responding to criticism that this is wasteful spending, Vice President Joe Biden wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Sunday that the projects "are being chosen without earmarks or political consideration, and many contracts have come in under budget."

Biden also wrote that taxpayers "should know that we have not hesitated to reject proposals that have failed to meet our merit-based standards."

So, spending millions of government dollars on toilets apparently is worthy of the Obama administration's strict merit-based standards. Maybe the money creates work for Joe the Plumber or generates sales for toilet manufacturers (if any are domestic), but to me it's a lot of poo.