Oil prices have rapidly climbed to the $100 a barrel mark over the past two years, granting oil companies historically high profits. Unfortunately, these corporate behemoths are still paying royalties as if oil were below $36 per barrel.

The Department of Interior ‘s (DOI) Minerals Management Service is responsible for handling the leasing of public lands to private commercial interests i.e. oil drilling companies. In highly volatile markets such as oil, lease royalty payments are supposed to increase if the price of oil rises above a certain amount. In the case of the contracts at issue, which were negotiated and signed during the last years of the Clinton Administration, if oil rose above $36 per gallon, the lease royalties were to increase by a predetermined percentage. The contingency...

The West Los Angeles Veterans Medical Center is composed of 387 prime real-estate acres in West L.A. Mansions and playgrounds of the city's elite, including the Bel Air Country Club and the Beverly Hills estates of Sylvester Stallone, Barry Bonds and Tim McGraw (among many other celebrities) surround the plot - an area twice the size of the D.C. National Mall.

As the Veteran population in the area falls on the low end of the national averages and huge portions of the facility were unused, the Department of Veteran's Affairs set up a process in 2002 to study its infrastructure to determine if the facility could be downsized. If downsized, extra land not being used by the facility would be sold to developers to raise revenue for veterans' needs.

The study revealed that 200-plus...

The Bush Administration's FY2008 defense budget requested $3.38 billion to procure 20 F-22A fighter jets. For non-mathematicians, that equates to a per-unit cost of $169 million. Seem like a deal to you? Think again.

As it turns out the F-22A was originally designed during the Cold War to replace the F-15 for use against fighters in the Soviet Air Force that have yet to be developed (and will likely never be developed). The F-22A was meant to ensure U.S. air superiority, as it provides better handling, range and fire power than any other fighters in existence. But how much air superiority do we need?

After citing the F-22AA's technical problems and cost growth, the House Appropriations Committee noted: "current threat projections for 2010 indicate that the United States will...

By routinely failing to conduct the required annual reviews that ensure that the payments to farmers via the Farm Bill were properly made, the Department of Agriculture appropriated $1.1 billion dollars to dead people.

In a review of 181 cases from 1999 to 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that officials approved payments without any review 40 percent of the time. The report cited a soybean and corn farm in Illinois that collected $400,000 on behalf of an owner who died in Florida in 1995. The company never informed the government the owner had died (shocker), and assured the USDA each year that the dead shareholder was "actively engaged" in farm management.

The GAO determined that the Agriculture Department depends on heirs and businesses to alert the Agency to...

It may come as a shock to learn your tax dollars subsidize food service on Amtrak trains throughout the country. That's why a beer cost $3 on a train, but $5 on an airplane or in a bar. Congress has elected to use tax revenue to make sure Amtrak riders have cheap beer. How nice of them.

Over the past three years, $250 million has been spent on subsidies to Amtrak's food service alone. Justifications for the subsidies stem from a fear that diabetics and the elderly wouldn't otherwise have access to cheap food on the trains (unless they managed the impossible by bringing food with them or buying it in the train stations). But if subsidies were stripped and prices increased by $2 an item, would diabetics pocket the extra money instead of eating? And do they really need their cheap...

Since fiscal year 1998, thanks to 1996 legislation, the Department of Health and Human Services has allocated $50 million annually in federal funding for programs that teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for school-age children. States must match this federal funding at 75 percent, resulting in a total annual expenditure of $87.5 million for Title V, Section 510 abstinence education programs. Unfortunately, these programs, which have been funded for the past nine years, don't work.

A recent study commissioned by HHS found that children who received abstinence only education were no more likely to abstain from sex than any other children. Put scientifically, "youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have...

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) earmarks $3 million for the First Tee golf program in the fiscal 2008 Department of Defense budget. The golf program's mission is "To impact the lives of young people by providing learning facilities and educational programs that promote character development and life-enhancing values through the game of golf."

Give us a break. How does this improve national security? I suppose it might come in handy if the U.S. engages in an 18-hole golf war for control of middle-eastern oil with the Chinese. I heard they have a seven handicap. We better get our soldiers practicing.

The stress and time commitment required of a presidential campaign can take its toll on the ambitious legislator, often resulting in a drastic drop-off in his/her "day job" attendance. As shown in tables at the end of this article, elected officials campaigning for President missed a drastic number of votes in both the Senate and House.

Let's be clear about one thing; this group is campaigning on company time. They are all getting paid upwards of $165,000 a year from tax dollars and ignoring their jobs while they seek the Oval Office. Were the rest of us non-elected government folk to do this, we'd be canned. OK, we'd be in the employee relations office for a while first. Then we'd be canned. But our private sector counterparts would be done after missing only a few...

This week Alaskan Republicans Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens secured more than $20 million for an "expeditionary craft" built by Lockheed Martin that will connect Anchorage with the windblown rural peninsula of Matanuska-Susitna Borough. The earmark was included in the omnibus spending bill passed this week.

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough ferry will be "like no other and that has stretched the minds of the best naval engineers in the world." As currently envisioned, the ferry will hold about 20 vehicles and 115 passengers. What a wonderful holiday present for the 59,000 people that live in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and can enjoy the marvels of sophisticated naval engineering. Now they don't have to drive the arduous 40 minutes to Anchorage.

The driving route...

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