Forget everything politicians say about holding down taxes. The sky's the limit. No amount of tax money is too much to pour into a totally worthless program.

The only requirement for unlimited, useless public spending is that it must give politicians an opportunity to posture publicly about just how rabidly they oppose bogeymen.

The current bogeymen they have selected are those who commit the most loathsome crimes in our society - sexual crimes against children.

You wouldn't think politicians would need to prove to anyone that they are really, really opposed to the sexual molestation of children. All decent human beings oppose such monstrous acts.

But just in case you had any doubts about whether politicians were for or against child molesters, politicians are willing to put hundreds of millions of our tax dollars where their mouths are.

The Legislature's Joint Finance Committee voted last week to spend nearly $500 million over the next two decades to create a global positioning system to track minute-by-minute the movements of everyone convicted of first-degree sexual assault of a child for the rest of their lives.

If there were a way to continue monitoring those bogeymen after their deaths to make sure they didn't rise up out of their graves and start snatching children off the streets, the politicians probably would have voted for that, too.

Actually, the GPS monitoring of the dead would be just about as effective as the program that was approved. That is because the whole idea is based on a complete fallacy about where the danger of sexual assault really lies for children.

Despite the impression you get from the media, very few children are ever grabbed off the streets by convicted child molesters who have been released from prison.

You can spend hundreds of millions of dollars and hire hundreds of state employees to watch screens tracking the movements of every released child molester every minute of the day and never spot a single one.

The truth is that released sexual offenders are already intensely monitored even without a GPS tracking system. They have a lengthy list of restrictions on their lives that make it very easy for the agents supervising their release into the community to send them back to prison for looking cross-eyed.

In fact, many of them do get returned to prison, but not because they have committed another assault. They are returned to prison for some arcane technical violation of their supervised release at the first opportunity.

Very few released sexual offenders are considered dangerous enough to warrant GPS tracking. But there are a few. In fact, 27 released sex offenders are currently being monitored by GPS.

The program approved by the Joint Finance Committee would expand such monitoring to thousands, most of whom are no threat at all, effectively reducing the individual attention given to the few who actually may be considered dangerous.

Children don't really have much to fear from those pathetic bogeymen whose pictures are in all the papers or circulated on crude fliers door-to-door.

Those hysterical community hate fests about sexual predators moving into the neighborhood alert everyone to the location and identity of those who have been publicly branded as monsters living among us. The real danger to our children comes from those we don't know.

And we don't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a GPS monitoring system to tell us where those people are, either.

Overwhelmingly, children who are victims of sexual assault are preyed upon by someone in their own homes.

That horrific violation of the natural love and trust of children can have devastating, lifelong consequences.

But the real problem of childhood sexual assault is barely mentioned as politicians strut and fret, unleashing their sound and fury against mythical bogeymen.

Some politicians are intelligent enough to know how totally worthless a GPS monitoring system would be. Yet the half-a-billion-dollar GPS program was approved in Joint Finance by a vote of 15 to 1.

Most politicians simply lack the courage to be identified as the legislator who voted against tracking sexual predators. The lone vote in opposition came from Democratic state Rep. Mark Pocan of Madison, who noted GPS monitoring could not stop a single act of assault against a child.

Those who are prone to believe paranoid conspiracy theories might even suspect GPS monitoring of individuals has nothing to do with sexual assault.

When politicians want to start intruding on our rights and freedoms, they always start with the most unpopular groups - terrorists, child molesters, et cetera.

Gradually, GPS monitoring could be expanded to include all convicted criminals, then all criminal suspects and, ultimately, all citizens, who would get tracking devices implanted at birth.

It's a good thing we don't believe in paranoid conspiracy theories. Or is it?

Copyright ©2006, Capital Newspapers.

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