According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal:

An obscure Commerce Department office with a $19 million budget and fewer than 20 grant officers could end up in charge of $7 billion in grants to expand Internet access in rural areas. A Congressional Budget Office report said it could take eight years for those grants to be issued because the amount of money would “far exceed” the agency’s traditional budget and require the deployment of technology that is “not widely available today.”

The $7 billion dollars to expand the internet in rural America is ONE percent of the total appropriation in the Stimulus Bill. And it will take that agency eight years to disburse the money.

The potential for waste, fraud, & abuse is astronomical.

Prediction: We will be reading horror stories about how the funds were mispent starting in about two years and continuing for about ten. And we and our children, and our grand-children will spend the rest of our lives paying for it. See this chart, from the Strategas Group (h/t to Powerline):

Note that NO deficit in the last forty years has exceeded 7.5% of GDP. For the past sixteen years, deficits have been kept to less than 5.0% of GDP. President Obama’s first year deficit is now projected at 15.0%.

Still to come: National healthcare, and imposing accountability and diversity on talk radio.