A recent blog entry over at zerohedge has been making its way around the Internet. Since it's short, I will repost it in its entirety right here.

The government spent $175 million investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

It spent $30 million investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The government only authorized $15 million for the 9/11 Commission.

And how much has the government authorized for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? You know, the commission charged with getting to the bottom of what caused the financial crisis?

Just $8 million.

You can tell alot about the questions which the government is truly interested in finding answers to by the amount of money it authorizes for the various investigations.

At first glance this seems like a gross oversight. First of all, we really spent 30 million tax payer dollars on the Monica Lewinsky investigation?

The financial meltdown is the biggest thing since things could be big - and we only spent eight million investigating it. That doesn't seem right, does it? I mean, it caused untold amounts of damage while the shuttle disasters were fairly self contained. The Lewinsky debacle didn't even do much damage at all in the long run. Eight million dollars?

The author than goes on to tell us how the government clearly doesn't care about getting to the bottom of the financial crisis. The implication is that they were involved or "they" are trying to protect those that profited from the fall of the American economy. Nefarious stuff, indeed. They're pulling the wool over our eyes.

Although everyone appears to have taken this hook, line, and sinker as evidence that the government is covering up or simply not caring enough about the financial crisis, there is a problem with the logic and facts that the author uses.
First of all, to imply that a set of completely unrelated investigations is comparable based solely on the cost of those investigations is an appeal to wealth and is completely illogical.
The amount an investigation costs should be the exact amount it takes to find an answer. The cost should not be determined in any way based on what previous, unrelated investigations have costs.

The author seems to argue we should be spending more money on an investigation into the financial crisis simply on the basis that we spent more on some other investigation. Doesn't he know money is tight? Doesn't he know what got us into the financial crisis in the first place?

There are lots of reasons costs might be different between two investigations. For NASA you have engineers, prototyping, hardware, and huge teams of people. With Monica Lewisnky you have DNA testing. There are a lot of things that might vary the cost. Also we're talking about criminal investigations versus non-criminal investigation versus informational inquiries.

There are certainly enough differences to show that you can't really compare the value of these investigations solely on cost.
This isn't to say that eight million dollars is enough, or that the investigation of the financial crisis is being conducted thoroughly enough. But if I was to make those claims, I would support them evidence and facts from which I would draw logical conclusions. I wouldn't frame some very specific piece of the data and draw wild unsupported conclusions from it.

The author of the article links to a New York Times piece where he got his eight million figure. In the same sentence as that figure is a figure of 38 million spent investigating the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Why doesn't he include that in his number?

The fact is that the eight million has nothing to do with ongoing criminal investigations and will most likely result in no prosecutions. The eight million is going towards the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a congressionally appointed commission that is charged with finding what went wrong and how to prevent it. Citing this is the only thing the government is doing to investigate the meltdown is completely false, as there are many investigations.

As of January 2009, for example, the FBI had over 500 ongoing investigations regarding financial fraud and 38 specifically targeting companies involved in the financial crisis. How much money is being spent on those investigations? Many people have already been prosecuted and many more will be. I suspect that if you totaled all investigations you would find that the government is spending more money on investigations regarding the financial meltdown than on everything the author of this article cited combined. Most of these investigations were taking place well before the eight million was granted to the commission.

Lastly, the investigation being conducted by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is ongoing. It's hard to draw conclusions about its effectiveness until it is done. It is expected that they will release their findings at the end of this year.

This article is not interesting, it's sensationalist, false, and irresponsible. It makes broad implications based off of assumptions, incomplete data, and a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. There is nothing about this article that is even remotely useful, worthwhile, or demands further investigation. It is 100% fallacious, meaningless, represents lazy reporting and an absence of fact checking or remotely adequate research. Since the person who wrote this took the time to look up the numbers I can only assume that they were either purposefully misleading or incredibly stupid.

So who is pulling the wool over whose eyes?