Tax payer funded “shrine” for Ted Kennedy could cost taxpayer $68 MILLION!

lip-on-a-pig-obamaWhat’s another $30-68 million earmark among taxpayers? Afterall, its for the late “liberal lion” Ted Kennedy afterall. Surely, taxpayers should fund a monument to Kennedy. Too bad none of that money would pay for a monument Mary Jo Kopechne too. According to the Boston Herald, the amount of taxpayer money being funneled to a Dorchester shrine to the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has ballooned to $38 million and could rise to at least $68 million this year, infuriating watchdog groups who insist the project should be privately funded.

With $38.3 million in federal earmarks already secured for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, Sen. John F. Kerry and Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Malden) have in recent days tapped the government for $30 million more in the next budget.

The new taxpayer-funded total would cover the full $60 million estimated cost of building the project, adjacent to John F. Kennedy Presidential Library at Columbia Point. And it would put the public on the hook for nearly half the project’s $150 million target.

“If the Kennedy family wants to honor the family they should find a way to fund it themselves,” said David E. Williams of Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington nonprofit group.

“They should be looking for private funding,” he said. “They’re using federal taxpayers as the funder of first resort. We need to be the funder of last resort.”

Williams and other critics called it “ridiculous” and an “egregious waste” that supporters want to siphon $28.9 million of the funding from the Defense Department budget alone. Nearly $19 million of that is already signed into law.

“It’s hard to fathom the defense-related portion of this project,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group.

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April 20, 2010 · Filed Under Democrats


Comments

  • ApplyCS

    Let us all drop our pants and raise a vodka glass to the “Lion of the Senate”/”Mouse of Chappaquiddick”.

    In death as in life, he always got the rules bent to his benefit.

  • Austin Redd

    ted kennedy is dead, were alive and in a recession. worst idea.

  • jerry

    Why don’t we just paint his name on an F-22?