Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) has release his Wastebook 2010, a list of all the ways he believes the government wastes the taxpayers money. Among the items on the list are "Sprucing Up Apartments Before They Are Torn Down - (Shreveport, LA) $1.5 Million", "Studying World of Warcraft and Other Virtual Games - (Irvine, CA) $2.9 Million" and "'Free' Grateful Dead Archive - (Santa Cruz, CA) $615,000."

According to the report:

Grateful Dead chose a public institution to archive the band‘s memorabilia because the whole idea of it being public and free was important to them, yet taxpayers are paying $615,000 to make the band‘s archives free and public. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded the University of California at Santa Cruz the federal funds to digitize Grateful Dead photographs, tickets, backstage passes, flyers, shirts, and other memorabilia. IMLS notes this is one of the first efforts to preserve and share cultural and historical artifacts of the baby boom generation, a group that includes 76 million Americans.

Rolling Stone magazine listed the Grateful Dead in the top 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and
estimates place the net worth of two prominent band members, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, at roughly $40 and $35 million, respectively.

Not that we want to get political here but the U.S. has spent huge amounts of money over the years on everything from studies showing that water is wet to funding of the Lawrence Welk Museum. If you read all of Senator Coburn's report, you'll see that there are many other cases of wasteful spending that are much worse than this example, some which are more than 100 times more expensive. Maybe the Grateful Dead archive should be privately funded, but we're guessing that Senator Coburn spent a good chunk of money himself just researching and printing the page of his report ON the Grateful Dead archive (hasn't he ever heard of pagination?). Maybe someone should release a report on the wasteful spending of printing and distributing wasteful spending reports.