"Protection & Advocacy of Individual Rights"?!

I enjoy getting my hands on budgets and accounting books and pulling them apart to glean important and revealing information. This evening I went on the Department of Education (ED) website and was browsing the budget file for the State Tables by Program for the U.S. Department of Education compiled and posted by the Budget Service on November 5, 2009.

Most of us may not know that ED has a program titled "Protection and Advocacy of Individual Rights" (check page 38 of the PDF file) which had a federal budget for the various states of $17.1 million in 2009 and has a similar amount allocated for 2010. The existence of such a program is like adding insult to injury -after denying any rights to an individual and taxing him to oblivion, the government chooses to spend this loot money on a program with a name such as that!

Readers will find other interesting and ironical (but not surprising) bits of information in this particular entitlement like the fact that California, the highest recipient in 2009-10 from the "Protection and Advocacy of Individual Rights" program at 1.716 million, not surprisingly is the state that after taxing and chaining with regulations the individuals living there, is bankrupt and in the hole billions of dollars -obviously the program has not helped anyone in that state understand the moral and political concept of individual rights!

Lest anyone think this is a new program just started -no that is not the case and it has actually been around for several years at least. I next plan to figure out what the difference in the budget for the states and the President's budget is. If anyone has any knowledge please leave a comment.