America limps along after Bush, by the numbers
How much poorer are we going to get before we start getting richer again? Here are some (scary, morbid, gruesome) clues.W. and the damage doneExpected shortfall of gross domestic product below normal growth path in 2009: $900 billion
Decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from its decade high to its value at the close of business, Jan. 7, 2009: 5,394.83, or 38.1 percent
Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78 million
Increase in number of unemployed workers from 2001 to 2008: 4 million, a jump of 2.7 percent in the unemployment rate
Real median household income according to the 2000 census, adjusted for inflation: $51,804
Real median household income as of August 2007: $50,233
Of course, the government didn't sit idly by while our financial future was disappearing down the drain. Instead, the feds have pumped in hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, hoping to juice lending and public spending.
Cost of finance industry bailout: $350 billion, with another $350 pending congressional approval
Cost of auto industry bailout: $17.4 billion, so far
And even though there's widespread agreement among economists that the government needs to be spending a large sum of money on an economic stimulus package, it still won't look pretty on the public balance sheet.
National debt: $10.6 trillion
Amount of that debt owned by China: At least $800 billion
the latest
latest episodes
I'm sure someone will be posting shortly to explain how it's not Dubya's fault.
It's too much to hope that the blatent failure of these free-market ideologues will force folks to realize that deregulation is merely an abdication of responsibility and a gift to the would-be robber barons.
Pure Capitalism doesn't work. Pure Socialism doesn't work. Take the uppercase letters off the front of 'em and apply a rational mix of the two, and while it isn't pretty it *does* work better over a longer time than any of the alternatives.
Made poor in money but
Far worse, the cost to our spirit by torture, black prisons, rendition, Abu G and Gitmo
We all of us became less than when we allowed habeous to be annulled and our constitution destroyed - Fear has made cowards of us all
you can get more money where do you go to reclaim your moral outrage in this decade of Nacht und Nebel
don't worry, when Mike Connell testifies, justice will be done.
people! it is obvious that the only way we can fix this thing is by giving obscene amounts of money to the folks who got us into the mess. after weeks of thinking about it i have come to the conclusion that it is the only thing that makes sense. i mean, what are the odds that it could happen again? so, if 700 trillion doesn't work, make it a fuckin gazillion! eventually, they have to spend it on SOMETHING! that's when it starts to trickle down to us. or trickle down on us. like a golden shower! wait, that came out wrong...
tak, were they able to scrape up enough to get DNA?
I also await the republitrolls and their blame squad. You can appreciate factors that contributed, but you can't excuse the terrible mismanagement that exponentially enhanced the problems we are looking at going into the Obama years.
Dubya inherited a collapsing bubble economy. What we are seeing now is the collapse of a second bubble that he inflated to avoid the consequences of the first, thereby allowing him a second term.
Ironically, Obama in 2009 will be in the same kind of situation that Bush was in 2001. Only worse, because the underlying mistakes have had time to accrue. But the plan is the same. Another bubble built on cheap money in the hope that voters won't realize that they're getting poorer in real terms.
I doubt the plan will stand another iteration though. The cracks are too wide to be papered over with dollar bills.
why does everyone keep calling it mismanagement? They attained exactly what they wanted. They are richer than before, the witnesses are dying,there will be no accounting and the hooks and suckers they set will take years to extract. Mission accomplished. Bush/Cheney etc. WON. The fact everyone else is screwed is irrelevant, even a bonus since your poverty amplifies their wealth. They got away with it. They won. Why do you suppose Lil Shoes is now talking in complete sentences and prepping his retirement?
It's not so much that it's not Dubya's fault as it's not ONLY Dubya's fault, or perhaps not even primarily Dubya's fault. I'm not enough of an expert to assign all the blame, but it's quite obvious that while Bush certainly takes the credit for the War on Terror, there has to be a lot of blame for economic difficulty laid on Congress (as it controls the purse strings by Constitutional necessity) and businessmen and -women themselves. After all, Bush wasn't running any companies at all (except the largest and most larcenous, of course). It's simplistic and annoying the way the Bush administration gets all the blame (or credit, in the case of his supporters). Equally ridiculous is the idea recurrent in the article that Obama can (and is expected to) fix it all by himself. Certainly, I expect such a dumbed-down, fatally one-note type of report from cable news - but from a niche publication like Salon which pretends to cater to an educated readership? Sickening. We're going to continue having problems like this until we start applying complex, discerning analysis to our problems.
I will admit it's a very grim picture indeed. But before I respond to anyone's comments, I need to call out the statistician for a couple of b******* statistics.
* Their number of employed workers doesn't take into account the number of people who have found jobs again during that time, or who have been fired twice.
* Likewise, the number of manufacturing jobs lost doesn't take into account changes in job description, or losses due to changes in technology.
Now for my response:
#7 is partially right. Dubya did inherit a bubble economy on the verge of bursting. However, his negligent allowing of 9/11 didn't help matters. Likewise, one of the Bush Jr. administration's first actions after inaguration was pushing through Congress the Healthcare Reform Bill, which jacked up the cost of pharmaceuticals very rapidly, among other things.
As much as I'm uncertain that Obama can live up to his hype, I don't think he's going to do anything that destructive in his first year in office, even though he has hired the same Clintonite economic team which helped us get into this mess in the first place. (I know it's not all their fault. Reagan did his share too.)
Another difference between Bush and Obama is that Obama is actually proposing solutions that don't involve throwing money at the problem, such as a green public works plan which actually might make a difference to the economy. This marks a change from just handing money over to CEO's and hoping they might feel generous enough to pay their peasants.
One of the biggest confusions I've always felt regarding Trickle-Down Economics was it's simultaneous cynicism and naivete (ie. We can rely on the generosity of the world's greediest people to sort out the economy). How on Earth did the Republicans ever convince the isolated and ignorant of Middle America that this was ever good for them?
I am not defending the Bush administration. But I would like to point out this last economic crisis was caused by a large swath of our society committing economic malfeasance. Especially troubling though are those at the upper echelons creating exotic financial products (CDOs and CDS) that no one knows how they work.
Also, this failure "was not" a single point in time. Bush is very responsible for sitting on hands (once again) when he should be throwing out everyone at the SEC simply for the mistakes that they made.
The financial bailout is far larger than the official 700 billion that congress voted to approve, after having been threatened by Paulson that there would be "martial law in the streets of America" if they did not.
Don't forget AIG, Fannie, Freddie, and all those injections and investments by the Federal Reserve. Adding it all up the total cost of the bailout is now between 8 and 9 TRILLION (with a f*&cking T!) dollars. That comes up to enough money per American household to buy everyone a decent "starter home" outright.
Of course, the last official act of any government is to loot its treasury, why should our once great nation be any exception?
"How on Earth did the Republicans ever convince the isolated and ignorant of Middle America that this was ever good for them?"
Lee Atwater.
Bush controlled the SEC. They did what he told them.
this is the final beauty of a really good con; the marks would rather take the blame themselves then admit they were your bitches.
The problem with politicizing the economy is that it's simply too easy to blame one guy or one administration as though they could completely control it. The last 8 years have clearly been a dismal failure the likes of which we've never seen but with the cards stacked the way they were, how sure are you that a Democratic administration would have faired much better? Remember, I'm only referring to the economy here - not all the other millions of stupid things Bush did. One only needs to look at Democratic support for the bailout to see that the Democrats aren't THAT much different.
Bush is to blame for most of these, directly or indirectly. More generally, the blame falls on an intrusive government that intrudes on our civil and economic liberties, and starts costly and ineffectual wars with countries that have no capacity to harm us. What's truly unfortunate is that Obama hasn't proposed changing any of this. He voted for telecom spying immunity, he's bellicose on Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan, and he proposes "job creation" (gee, guess who pays the salaries of jobs created outside the concept of market demand?) as well as tax cuts for people who don't may much in taxes to begin with.
#1 "I'm sure someone will be posting shortly to explain how it's not Dubya's fault."
#15 "Bush controlled the SEC. They did what he told them."
In the spirit of full disclosure, I very rarely agree with the political posts that Cory gives us, but I read them all anyway, because it's important to see all sides of an issue. I am a futures trader, and as such I feel that on a long enough time frame, free markets are always right. I am also an Obama supporter, though I do not hate the current administration with the fire of Mr Doctorow.
The problem, inherent in any free market system which is subject to the whims of human emotion, is that there are moments of excitement and enthusiasm (the bubbles) and moments of fear (the recessions). I am still working in this field because I have been able to take advantage of the good times and protect myself in the bad times ... because I have a very good understanding of the investments that I've made.
I feel as though companies in America (financial, automotive, manufacturing, etc) made mistakes by operating under the assumption that the status quo would always maintain. Despite what some in this discussion would have us believe, neither the financial service industry nor the Bush administration wanted this to happen.
Can anybody explain why, exactly, a president purposefully destroy the world economy? On a side note, if he's the idiot we assume he is, how did he come up with this plan to destroy the world economy? Is it possible that he made a series of horrific mistakes with well-intentioned strategies (many of which economists support in theory), and got some bad luck which amplified his mistakes?
#1 - I find this a particularly unproductive response. You don't make any comment except to immediately attack future dissenting opinions. Do you have an opinion?
#15 - Bush does not control the SEC. The problem with the SEC is a lack of experience. There are two types of people who work for them: 1) career government employees who simply follow the instructions handed down to them, and 2)fresh faced Law School Grads who work there for 3-4 years, learn the system, and then go work for a financial firm as SEC compliance officer, where they get paid more money to work around the SEC laws that they now know. If you want the SEC to work better, make it a more desirable position.
Bush appointed.
#20 "Bush appointed."
That doesn't really address any other point that I made.
I assume you're talking about SEC Chairman Cox. Yes, he was appointed by Bush and then unanimously confirmed by the Senate. The problem of the inexperience of the people working under him still remains. I'm not trying to be smug, but I don't know that anybody else within the SEC is appointed by the president. There's just no evidence that Cox ruled the SEC with an iron fist specifically to pursue an agenda aimed at taking advantage of America.
Hey don't forget the MSM - they simply refused to criticize Bush after his first election - in contrast to Clinton(who some blame for 'this mess' ) - as if someone threw a switch.
hey maybe even more military expenditures in the Middle and Far East will "help America"?
Some quotes in the original article don't add up, and fail to include a few other interesting points:
Why doesn't Bush also get credit for the decade high - The Decade high was 14164, but that was on October 9, 2007. When George Bush came into office in January, 2001 the Dow Jones Industrial Average was around 10,945.
OK, taken at face value...
How does that jive with the previous number, 4 Million unemployed workers minus 3.78 Million lost manufacturing jobs leaves only 220,000 lost jobs outside manufacturing over the last 8 years - that seems a bit low.
Also, help me to understand how the number of lost jobs is related to the unemployment rate - as I understand it the unemployment rate is an indication of the number of people currently on unemployment rolls and the number of lost jobs considers all lost jobs over 8 years. Also keep in mind that with the two extensions to unemployment benefits that the Bush Administration and Congress have approved, a person can be on unemployment for much longer, artifically increasing the number of unemployed workers when compared with the numbers before the benefits extensions (put another way, unemployment benefits typically run 26 weeks, but with the extensions they now run almost 52 weeks, including more people in the number as it covers 12 months of unemployment applications, not just 6).
I'm willing to blame President Bush for everything that happens while he is/was in office, but will our next president accept blame for everything that happens during his administration? Oh wait, let me guess - Presidents inherit the problems created by the previous adminsitration? Interesting - then I guess that would also apply to the outgoing adminsitration too, wouldn't it?
For the past month now the media have been reporting how Obama will "soon face (inherit) huge deficits, unemployment, 2 wars, etc..."
Does anyone want to stop shifting the blame
already? What happened to "the Buck Stops Here"?
The outgoing Administration's mistake/alibi?
In thinking the Nation was as stupid
as Shrub. And with that, they were right
at least part of the time.
Thank God our system has a built in mechanism
for change.
#22 "hey maybe even more military expenditures in the Middle and Far East will "help America"?"
I agree that we should take anything the media says with a grain of salt (be it FOX News, Bloomberg, MSNBC, CNN, etc.). We should look up the actual information that they tell us. For example:
While the numbers regarding military expenditures are frightening (and they are astronomically large), the actual percentage of GDP that goes into the military is relatively low (in a historical context). I do agree with you that more military spending is not a good idea (though I don't know that anybody has suggested that as an option), but I found this really interesting:
http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative-size.php
I don't know the political leanings of the two gentlemen involved with this site, but one has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, and the other has a PhD in Mathematics, so they're certainly smarter than I am.
Also, the last year that they have is 2003. I imagine that expenditures have increased since then, but I know that GDP has increased since then.
#23 Master Gracey
In Salon's defense, all of the numbers are actual economic data points that have come out recently. At my office we generally compare the data points to the expected numbers, so I can't speak to the how they all interact with each other. On the other hand, we probably shouldn't get our economic analysis from Salon. For Thursday, January 8th, the four articles on the Salon front page since this economic one:
"Hot amnesia babe meets Mexican Mennonites"
"Since you asked ... I want to be spanked but remain a virgin"
"Model sues over "skank" comment"
"Neoconservatism dies in Gaza" (which is an interesting article, though in the Opinion section, rather than News, as the economic article was)
Ah, that's the deal, is it? As GDP grows, mil spending in absolute terms will also grow forevermore....want to bet mil spending does not drop during the coming contraction of GDP?
After he 1930s it was mil spending that got America working. Any room there, this time around?
Why should blue-state taxes pay for non-productive dead-end red-state military-economic stimulus? Why not better and more health care instead? (and not more-of-the-same "insurance-co.-subsidy-disguised-as-health-care")Why not nationalized health insurance? No $$ left?
#27 Ugly Canuck
You make a fair point, and I agree with you. As I said, I don't think increasing Military Spending is the answer, I was simply pointing out that most people are swayed by the raw numbers. Also, I like the website, and thought I'd give them a quick plug.
I don't think "blue-state taxes pay for non-productive dead-end red-state military-economic stimulus" is a good idea (which is not something I suggested ... in fact I questioned if anybody suggested it at all) but I'll go ahead and defend it. There is no such thing as blue-state taxes and red-state taxes, in much the same way as federal laws do not apply simply to red-states or to blue-states. If somebody in America wants to stop the war, they vote for an anti-war candidate. They write their elected officials to ask them to stop the war. They follow the democratic process to the best of their ability, and try to get people into office who will allocate funds in the way the voter wants.
Again, I think you misinterpreted the spirit of my previous post. I don't want increased military spending, and since you suggested it, more health care would be great. So would better schools, and so would better infrastructure. I simply meant to point out that numbers (while all true), can be used to show different things.
Technogeek (#2): It's too much to hope that the blatent failure of these free-market ideologues will force folks to realize that deregulation is merely an abdication of responsibility and a gift to the would-be robber barons.
Which free market ideologues exactly? Are you implying that the Bush administration is, against all evidence to the contrary, against regulation of economic behavior?
Technogeek (#2): Pure Capitalism doesn't work. Pure Socialism doesn't work. Take the uppercase letters off the front of 'em and apply a rational mix of the two, and while it isn't pretty it *does* work better over a longer time than any of the alternatives.
What exactly is Pure Capitalism and why wouldn't it work? As far as I can tell, the problem with trying a 'rational mix of the two' is the rational bit. How can anyone reasonably expect politicians to be rational from the perspective of non-politician economic agents?
ICKY2000 (#17) & Mark Jaquith (#18): Amen.
Master Gracey (#23): ...I'm willing to blame President Bush for everything that happens while he is/was in office...
Everything?
Gracey - Bush *was* the previous administration. This being his second term and all.
Euphoria is a natural response to a government that keeps the price of money below the rate of inflation. (Below zero, in real terms.) Fear is the natural response to discovering that you're not really as rich as you thought you were.
But what has that got to do with a free market?
In a free market, interest rates would be worked out between savers and borrowers, based on supply and demand, not determined by government decree. If it were the price of milk being set by central committee, we'd all recognize it as Soviet-style communism, but somehow when the central committee is setting the price of money - which affects everything else - the free market still gets the blame.
No Biting, i do not mean to go after you - but all economics is about choices, and I think the past 50 years of huge military spending is a choice that has had more influence on the present situation than many perhaps most Americans realize...the opportunity costs have been even greater, and you've spent literally trillions on 'defense' over just the past five years, never mind the forty-five previous years...maybe it's catching up with you guys, maybe the karma of your Asian land wars will do you in...what is the current milspend in the USA? A couple of billion a day, is it not? (At 1000 billion = 1 trillion/year)
Ernunnos, I too think that interest rates were purposefully kept artificially low, to finance US milspending in the Mid east during Bush II's first term. Don't know why Bush's spending did not cause the $$ boys to up their rates...increased social spending (as opposed to giving it away to the Bankers) would have caused rates to skyrocket, eh?
The position being taken by the GOP is that these economic issues were in fact caused by Bill Clinton, and that we're only now seeing the negative effects of Clinton's policies.
So according to that logic, Obama can do whatever he wants right now, and it won't negatively effect the economy until the end of the NEXT presidents term (i.e. around the year 2024).
#31 "In a free market, interest rates would be worked out between savers and borrowers, based on supply and demand, not determined by government decree. If it were the price of milk being set by central committee, we'd all recognize it as Soviet-style communism, but somehow when the central committee is setting the price of money - which affects everything else - the free market still gets the blame."
The interest rates that the Federal Reserve Bank sets are actually the target interest rates. Before "setting" interest rates near zero in December, the effective interest rate was already somewhere between 0 and .25, despite the fact that the officially recognized interest rate paid on Federal Funds was either 1% or .75% (I forget which).
Essentially, the theory is that the government wants to offer an interest rate lower than anywhere else ... because there is less risk involved in investing with the government than there is investing anywhere else. Simply put, it is more likely that Bank of America will go bankrupt and you will lose your investment than the United States of America's central bank going bankrupt.
nly n mr wk lft t gt yr S bshng n ndr th gss f Bsh htng. Bttr pl ths strs p whl y'v gt chnc. thnk thr r fw chn -mls tht y'v stll mssd.
Yes No Biting, the rate is set by auction, is it not? So it is indeed a free-market setting of that rate...but the theory is that as gov borrowing increases, rates will increase, due to "crowding out" the available credit for private-sector borrowing...the more demand, given constant supply, the higher the price...but I guess that changes when the gov borrowing is for milspending. Why did rates not increase with the massive Bush II increases in Milspending? Five or six years ago now...long enough to work its way through the system...
We shall see how long the world (as US citizens have no savings to lend) shall be willing to accept no interest, while lending the US gov money for military operations beyond its borders. I notice though that private interest rates have not been coming down (ostensibly the reason for the attempt to lower interest rates via open-market ops by the Fed), and that the spread (cost of gov borrowing vs. cost of private borrowing) seems too large, and too sticky: if the money is to circulate (and thereby 'get the economy going again'), it would appear that you've got to give it to spenders, not savers, or people adding to reserves: gov must start increasing welfare for poorer individuals and stop giving taxpayers'$$ at super-low rates to "too-big-to-fail banks" (in contrast, it would appear that "small-enough-to-starve-and-die" people are simply unimportant...)
"And even though there's widespread agreement among economists that the government needs to be spending a large sum of money on an economic stimulus package..."
Among Keynesian and Monetarist economists, not among Austrian economists. Seeing as the Austrian school predicted this collapse pretty accurately, I'm still amazed that people line up behind the Keynesian ideas. Look at Obama's economic team... all Keynesian. You can't spend and lend your way out of a problem caused by rampant spending and lending.
Us and them , eh, Astin?
Austrians? Those who learned the ropes under the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, who then fled the collapse of the Empire due to racial concerns? If they had been listened to, the Hapsburgs would still be in their rightful place, huh?
#36 Ugly Canuck
I am having a hard time framing an argument against this right now because not everything comes back to military spending.
First, you are incorrect about interest rates. They were low from January 2002 (1.75%) until June 2004 (1%) because we were trying to stimulate the economy after the burst of the technology bubble. Rates increased steadily from June of 2004 to July of 2006 ... from 1% to about 5.25%.
Second, private interest rates have not been coming down because banks are still wary about giving loans because the world economy very nearly collapsed. A major factor of that was bad private loans.
Third, maybe the mainstream media has been hiding this behind its cloak of secrecy, but I have not heard of recent rash of starvation and death. When Bush gave the economic stimulus package (basically free money for people) this past summer, it didn't really do anything to stimulate the economy. The reason for this is that people didn't spend it ... they saved it.
There's a certain amount of waiting that has to be done now. People need to be confident that there isn't another shoe to drop. By 'people' I mean regular people and financial institutions. If everything goes right back to where it was 8 months ago without properly assessing the risk involved, then we get right back to here in another few months.
I understand that you think most of this has to do with military spending, but I simply don't agree with that.
JJASPER Said:
The numbers span 8 years (two terms, one administration), so the previous administration would be President Clinton's, not President Bush.
Administrations span terms, terms are not equal to adminsitrations. Franklin D. Rosevelt didn't have four adminsitrations, he had one administration that spanned four terms.
@ No Biting
Thanks for well thought out comments. Its a nice vacation from the expected "Bush Sucks" crowd.
I think it would do us all good to at least open mindedly listen to what the other side is saying instead of get in our little "like-minded pow-wow" and stay there.
Well milspending is not that much compared to the entire economy but it is the heart and soul of gov spending...what other parts of gov expenditure ballooned under Bush II, prior to the "bail-out"?
The mil-industrial-media complex is the problem, not 'unaffordability". The "something-for-nothing" crowd, paid to guard useless installations, useless weapons, and big chunks of this spending done in secret...350million $$ for a presidential helicopter?
Will US milspending ever decrease decade-on-decade?
Why did the US never cut back on milspending in absolute terms after WWII?
Sorry to keep hitting the "milspending' note, but I see precisely no one in the US, MSM or Net, who seems to think that 50% of all Fed spending going to the Military for decades on end has had any effect at all on the current ec. situation. Nor do I see even a discussion that maybe just maybe the social surplus generated by this generation of Americans has been wasted bringing war to the poorer parts of the globe.
What got me thinking was how people were comparing now to the 1930s, when milspending going from zero to highs in 1945 played so great a role in US recovery.
I don't see that happening this time around without a coup by the US Military. Although some say a coup occurred in 1963 to keep the $$ flowing to the Mil (cf. Stone's JFK).
There's a gorilla in the room, and it's preventing the gov from helping the poorest Americans...
#43 Ugly Canuck
We've reached an impasse. Though it's been an enjoyable morning debating this with you, I feel like there's nothing more that we can say. We disagree on the importance of Military Spending and funding, and I don't feel as though we will be able to move past that. Truth be told, I don't know what other spending has increased during Bush's presidency, possibly nothing.
At the same time, government spending was less than 20% of the economic structure of America in 2007, with National Defense comprising 4.8% (compared to 3.9% average during the comparably peaceful Clinton era). If you want to talk in pure numbers, then if we took all military spending away, the US GDP would still be over 13.17 trillion dollars.
http://internationalecon.com/Finance/Fch5/F5-4.php
The rate cuts started in January of 2000, were already slashed by half by the time of the election, and had bottomed before 9/11. You can't blame the military. (Other than as a general burden and expense.) This was pure monetary policy in the wake of the dot-com bubble. We'd have had a housing bubble regardless. (And we lost enough in the housing bubble collapse to pay for the Iraq war several times over.)
# SLICKHEAD: You asked for it you got it.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123137220550562585.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
Thanks George Bush!
(Eyes closed tight, fingers in ears) "NA NA NA NA NA NANAAAAAA!!!!. . . if I can't hear it, it can't hurt me!"
Hey Ned there's more:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/02/fannie-and-freddie200902
Go ahead blame FDR...
#47 No biting
4.8% of the 20% of the total that gov spending represents, or 4.8% of the total US ec. activity?
Anyway you slice it, you guys ought to buy less B-2s and armor and bullets and instead drop the money on the ghettos (AFTER legalizing dope, natch).
Sweet! Disemvowled.
Maybe I'll try to say what I was going to say a little more tactfully for whoever managed to take offense before attempting to comprehend the meaning. Too bad that tactfulness lacks impact. My original comment got enough attention for somebody to feel the need to censor it. A tactful version will just be overlooked by most people.
Well here goes, anyway:
A lot of this stuff doesn't have anything to do with Bush. He's just a sympathetic scapegoat at which people can direct their true feelings without fear of others disagreeing.
Some positive, non-economic numbers - only in fairness:
Bush protected more than 300,000 square miles of environment from development, more than any previous President. - SF Chronicle (!) today.
Billions and billions to fight hunger and AIDS in Africa. Yeah, a lot of it for abstinence programs, but so what.
And uh...let's see...hold on...
The good that men would do oft dies with them,
The bad that men do oft lives on whilst their bones do molder in the grave.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/11/AR2009011102301.html?hpid=topnews
http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/broken_government/articles/full_list/