Halloween History: The Scariest of Figures from Washington, DC
By Marion Edwyn Harrison, Esq.
Oct 30, 2009
In Queen's English All Hallows Eve, in American English Halloween, is almost upon us. Hallow is the older English word for soul. Thus, we have the Eve of All Hallows Day, Americanized and "modernized" into Halloween. The noun hallow is only one letter off the noun hollow, which can mean empty or devoid of substance. Are the stimulus spooks about to scare us upon this occasion? Will future generations be snared as “the hollow men[?]” Read on.
Halloween History: The Scariest of Figures from Washington, DC
The unprecedented spending of taxpayers’ money by the incumbent Administration and 111th Congress is sufficient to spook anybody.
Relatively smaller-dollar stimulus examples to spook, assembled by the Senate Republican Communications Center from NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, [Syracuse] DAILY ORANGE, THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC and lesser known sources:
$ 300,000 mapping radioactive rabbit feces; $ 4,200 - $ 5,500 tax credit for purchasing golf carts; $ 219,000 to study the sex lives of female college freshmen; $ 1 million to renovate the Sunset Strip, aka Sunset Boulevard, in Hollywood; $ 2.3 million for insect research in Connecticut; $ 6 million to make snow in Minnesota; $ 500,000 over three years to study “social networks” as FACEBOOK; $ 380,000 to spay and neuter some 800 pets of poor folk in Kansas; $ 3.4 million for an under-the-highway turtle tunnel in Florida; $ 30 million toward a new spring-training baseball complex on tribal land in Arizona.
Not spooked yet? Let’s turn to larger figures:
The Fiscal Year 2009 (October 1, 2008 - September 30, 2009) Federal (meaning American taxpayers’) deficit is $ 1.417 trillion, highest in history, thrice that of Fiscal Year 2008.
A 10% of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, deficit, the highest since 1945, when we were emerging from World War II.
A national debt of almost $ 12 trillion, including Treasury Securities held by the Feds.
$ 1.325 trillion added to the national debt since the Barack H. Obama Administration and 111th Congress took office.
$ 199 billion spent in 2009 by the Federal Government to pay interest on the national debt.
About 15 million Americans unemployed, not counting persons working part-time while seeking full-time.
Various estimates of jobs lost since Inauguration Day, 2009, some estimates as high as 3.9 million.
A supposed $ 12.104 trillion national-debt ceiling.
Whether the Eve of All Souls Day, the Eve of All Hallows Day or just plain Halloween, are we adequately spooked?
Marion Edwyn Harrison is President of, and Counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation.
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