Back in 2010, we sponsored the Power Line Prize competition. Its purpose was to draw attention to the peril posed by our rapidly growing national debt, by stimulating the production of artistic endeavors–videos, songs, poems, paintings, games, you name it–that would bring the issue to a wide audience. We offered a $100,000 grand prize to the winner of the contest. We recruited an all-star panel of judges to select the winners out of hundreds of entries, and we enlisted other conservative sites to help us promote the contest and count down to the winner, which we announced on Power Line.

The contest was a great success: the top-rated entries received, collectively, millions and millions of page views. One 30-second video, titled “Doorbell,” garnered well over a million views during and after the contest. The competition was won by an animated video featuring squirrels that was titled “The Spending Is Nuts.” Its creator, Justin Folk, has gone on to a stellar career as a producer and director of conservative documentary films.

So the competition was a great success. But it failed utterly to deflect the disastrous trajectory of federal spending.