1) Let's start with Joe Biden's golf game, as laid out by a NewsMax investigative report on June 4, 2012:
- Every Friday, Biden takes a helicopter from the Vice President’s residence to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland
- He then gets on Air Force Two to fly back to his home in Delaware.
- At the end of the weekend, he returns on Air Force Two.
- If the weather is right, Biden will return to Andrews on the airplane the very next day, Saturday, to play golf with President Obama.
- After the round of golf, he flies back to Delaware Saturday evening and returns to Washington on the same plane on Sunday evening.
- The Secret Service rents 20 condo residences in the Wilmington, Delaware area to accommodate this schedule, keeping a full time contingent of agents in Delaware at all times.
- This is a different Joe Biden from when he was a Senator, according to the article, since Senator Joe Biden bragged that he used Amtrak to get to and from his home state of Delaware. The Amtrak station in Wilmington is even named after him.
- The cost of just this weekend travel comes out to about $1 million a year worth of taxpayer wealth.
- If he knows he is going to play golf on Saturday, why travel to Delaware on Friday just to turn around and come back the next day? Why not get a morning tee time on Saturday, come home after the round and go back to D.C. on Monday? It saves a round trip of gas and expenses without reducing his down time.
- Given the sad state the country is in on so many dimensions, why is he going home EVERY weekend? Maybe a little overtime work is needed, not just by the VP but by everyone in D.C., to find a way to fix what ails the country.
- Do we really need to rent 20 condos year round for Secret Service people in Wilmington, to serve a VP that is only there on weekends? Sounds excessive.
- Washington is only about two and a half hours away by car, is not that a viable alternative, and much cheaper alternative than flying every weekend? By the time the helicopter takes the VP from his D.C. residence to the plane which then flies to Wilmington where he is picked up and then driven to his home, that has to be almost as long as driving up I-95. Not saying he needs to drive every weekend but it would be a nice symbolic act for him to cut back his expenses, incur a little inconvenience, as a good example for the rest of the country.
2) The Miami Herald reported in early July that the Federal government is going to spend $40 million to install a high speed fiberoptic underground cable from the mainland to the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay. This is the same prison that President Obama campaigned against in 2008, claiming that it was a disgrace to American ideals and that if elected, he would shut it down it down in
the first year of his Presidency.
Three and a half years later, we have already reported that it is costing the American taxpayer about $160 million a year to maintain the facility and its 169 detainees. Now, taxpayers are going to invest another $40 million into the facility's infrastructure. Thus, it does not appear that this administration 1) has any short term intent of shuttering the prison even though it was once considered an embarrassment, and 2) we will be paying for it for a long time to come.
This conclusion is supported by the words of the outgoing commander of the base, Navy Capt. Kirk Hibbert, who told the Herald: "It only makes sense to do if we're going to be here for any period of time.” This investment will be the largest single investment made at the detention facility since it was opened.
What a waste of time, energy, money, and resources. But I guess it is necessary as it now appears that the U.S. has its first official, permanent gulag in its history.
3) According to a July 13, 2012 Associated Press (AP) report, an audit of the $51 billion the U.S. has spent on various Iraqi development projects over the past decade concluded that the projects are probably rife with waste and corruption - it is just that the auditors could not even accurately estimate the extent of the waste, that is how bad the situation has been. According to the article, "The precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known."
According to the auditor's report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds, a full range of accounting weaknesses put "billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation." Great, not only did we unnecessarily waste hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting in Iraq, we extended the waste to reconstruction efforts also.
Examples of the fraud include the following:
- One contractor charged $80 for a pipe fitting that its competitor was selling for $1.41 because the company's billing documents were either reviewed sloppily by U.S. contracting officers or were not reviewed at all.
- The auditors came across a case in where the State Department had only one contracting official to validate more than $2.5 billion in spending on a DynCorp contract for Iraqi police training.
- Earlier reviews of DynCorp invoices resulted in the recovery of $60 million so you would have thought that the State Department would have been smart enough to assign more than ONE person to subsequent DynCorp invoice reviews.
- The inspectors found that possibly up to $35 million set aside to renovate the Baghdad airport may have been wasted.
4) We have often discussed the fact that annual Medicare wasteful spending and criminal fraud is estimated to be in the $70-90 billion range. Well, a July 13, 2012 article in the Huffington Post offered some insights as to why that waste is so high.
The first insight is recent news that Medicare has paid out about $188 million over the past few years for penis pumps. Remember, Medicare is supposed to pay for the medical needs of elderly Americans. Penis pumps, at least in my opinion and the opinions of the many protests this news has caused, does not fall into this category. Medicare spent $36 million on this product last year, up from just $7 million that was paid out in 2000.
The article goes on to discuss the fact that not only are some of these expenses "legal" according to Medicare rules but there is also fraud as it relates to Medicare penis pumps. The article cites the case of an Illinois man, Gary Winner, who was criminally sentenced in February for shipping penis pumps to diabetes patients who did not order them. Winner purchased them for $26 each from online sex shops, remarketed them as “erectile pumps,” and then he billed Medicare $284 each for the devices, part of a larger fraud that cost the insurance plan $2.2 million over four years.
Disgraceful. Wouldn't the $188 million be better spent for cancer treatment for elderly Americans? Wouldn't $188 million be better spent to reduce the drug and medicine costs of elderly Americans? Wouldn't the $188 million be better spent researching solution for dementia and Alzheimer's diseases, the scourge of elderly Americans?
But the Huffington Post article goes beyond the Medicare penis pumps scandal. It referred to a law enforcement bust back in May when law enforcement authorities charged 107 doctors, nurses and social workers in seven cities with Medicare fraud that allegedly billed the program of $452 million, the highest dollar amount in a single Medicare bust in U.S. history.
A $452 million bust is certainly good news. But here is the bad news. That is the amount that these criminals have fraudulently collected from Medicare, and the American taxpayer, not the amount that is likely to be recovered. Also, even if the entire $452 million is recovered, it will only be .5-.6% of what Medicare wastes and loses in a single year. It is a very small amount. More work needs to be done to track down these criminals but even more work needs to be done to ensure the fraud and waste does not occur in the first place.
So much waste in so many places. And apparently all our political class worries about is their self enrichment, their reelection, and their golf games.
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