Just spend it. It’s free!

It’s exactly the carelessness and waste you get with any handout of “free” money: SCHOOLS slated for demolition are being showered with federal funding to spruce up their facilities through the Rudd government’s education stimulus spending. At least 21 schools marked for closure have been handed a slice of the $14.7 billion Building the Education Revolution program. I’ve also been told of one big grant going to upgrade car parking at a school that didn’t know how else to spend the cash. Nice, but that car park is precisely where they will next year build a new classroom.   Andrew Bolt   I think the argument is that you can justify going into debt if it helps to make the economy more productive and thus lay the ground work by which the debt can be repaid as quickly as possible.   Or, you can do what governments too often do - throw money around on half-arsed, lame-arsed and ill-considered schemes so they can appear to be doing something. Anything so the PM and sundry ministers can be seen on the news of an evening wearing a hard hat and a fluro-vest.   Like $43 billion on a fibre network for braodband etc that apparently has no business plan and for which no cost/benefit analysis has been done.   But hey, the original plan was for only $4 billion, so $43 billion has got to better, hasn't it? Hasn't it?

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