It is no secret that the federal government spends millions of dollars on research. Sometimes those funds go to questionable studies, such as the study by Joseph Staton, of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, to determine why “most cooked, exotic meats taste like… the domestic chicken?” According to Smithsonian Magazine, Staton wanted to sample dinosaur, and requested a T. rex bone from Chicago’s Field museum, but wasn’t able to acquire the bone because of “red tape.” Other studies have looked at the mating habits of exotic animals, and one set of researchers even found that the land within the State of Kansas is “flatter than an average pancake.”
It is mildly humorous when funds go to these type of studies. However, your tax dollars are also being spent on research that can have negative consequences on your freedom. Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote, “The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded The Public Health Institute’s Alcohol Research Group almost $650,000 a year for five years to research the effects that alcohol privatization in Washington State has had on prices and alcohol-related harms.” Adding, “The organization that received the grant and its scientists have a long history of producing anti-alcohol-biased research… [Dr. William Kerr, the lead on the project] received funding from the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association, an organization with the sole purpose of defending control state systems, to produce a study warning states of the dangers of privatization.”
The National Taxpayers Union reports that this research by Kerr may be cited by lawmakers in states where changes to existing law is being considered. The Small Business Administration recently funded a study to support the Marketplace Fairness Act. That means the government spent $80,000 of your money to fund a study in support of raising your taxes!
Not only are your tax dollars being used to fund studies that could have negative consequences, but you are paying for federal agents to encourage troubled youth to do things they may not otherwise do. Aside from the myriad of stories of FBI Agents finding, training and giving fake bombs to “home-grown terrorists;” there are now reports of the ATF paying a mentally disabled teenager to get a tattoo of a smoke shop that was established as a front for a sting operation. Similar scenarios played out in at least three other cases, where ATF agents pretended to befriend people with mental problems, duped them into committing crimes, and then proceeding to arrest them. In other cases, agents have posed as students and lured honor students to purchase drugs.
These are the things that people don’t like to think about when they pay taxes. Most people prefer to imagine their money is being taken to pay for roads, parks and keeping criminals off the streets. In reality, governments take your money and then use it against you to influence their own policy and/or to create criminals as justification for needing an increased budget!