Defense Spending

There is a lot of wasteful spending.

We can’t close without saying that our hands-down favorite, so to speak, among the Pentagon-funded work targeted by Coburn for downright foolishness was a UCLA anthropologist’s examination of whether men holding pistols are considered taller, stronger, and more masculine than those holding a range of other objects, such as caulking guns, drills, saws and paintbrushes. He found they were.

The study was financed by the Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research under a $681,387 grant, according to Coburn’s report.

A graduate student would find a way to run 2,000 studies of this sort for that much money.