President Obama spent $516,000 of taxpayers’ money on “Prom Week” video game
On September 22, 2008, candidate Obama said:
“I am not a Democrat who believes that we can or should defend every government program just because it’s there… We will fire government managers who aren’t getting results, we will cut funding for programs that are wasting your money and we will use technology and lessons from the private sector to improve efficiency across every level of government… The only way we can do all this without leaving our children with an even larger debt is if Washington starts taking responsibility for every dime that it spends.”
However, after he won the election, President Obama spent $516,000 of taxpayers’ money on a video game called “Prom Week.”
I guess this means that based on his own words, he doesn’t consider this spending to be “wasteful.”
This is one of the reasons why he wants to raise taxes?
I “hope” we “change” the person who is President in the upcoming election.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 
Amir replied:
The game was developed at UC Santa Cruz, and was partially funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant began on April 25th 2008, some 9 months before Obama took office. It’s actually quite a fascinating project–one that melds social psychology, artificial intelligence, and design. Read about it here. http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0747522.
First, you need to retract the charge that the game represents Obama directed government waste because, you are factually incorrect that the game was funded during Obama’s presidency.
Second, do you really think the White House governs the allocation of National Science foundation competitive grants to research instituions?
Third, after actually reading about the game, can you make a cogent case for why the game actually represents waste? My counter argument: it provided an excellent hands on educational experience for a team of students. These students were gaining real world programing skills that will be quite useful after graduation (and probably quite lucrative, and are overall engines of economic growth). The game furthers our understanding of social interactions, and of artificial intelligence.
November 9, 2012 at 12:27 am. Permalink.