Bonus Post: Eight Days Of Logic and Sanity That Prove No American Should Pay Another Penny In Taxes - Protecting Our Kids and Schools

Over the past eight posts we have gone through an extensive list of why no American, rich or poor, should pay another cent in taxes of the Federal government, given how wasteful, inefficient, and criminally infested most government programs are. Our final post on Friday showed how to reduce our staggering $16 TRILLION national debt by a healthy $9 TRILLION over the next decade or so with minimal pain to most Americans AND no increase in taxes.

Well, we thought that would be our last post in this series, a series that shows how ridiculous, stupid, and divisive President Obama has been in these fiscal cliff negotiations. Yesterday, I came across a website post from the Independent Journal Review that listed out the 22 worst expenditure of taxpayer wealth in 2012 which requires an additional post in this series:

http://www.ijreview.com/2012/12/26278-22-of-the-worst-government-expenditures-of-2012/23/

We have covered many of these atrocious wastes of money in previous posts, based on sound research into other news sources, so I believe that most of these are legitimate, actual wastes of taxpayer wealth from 2012.

I would like to review these 22 instances of waste today with two objectives in mind:

1) Reinforce the proof we laid out over the past week of posts that we need to cut overspending by the Federal government, not raise taxes on any American.

2) Consider what these unneeded expenses could have done to prevent the tragic school shooting in Connecticut.

Thus, the Independent Journal Review’s vote for the worst Federal spending in 2012:

1. Tax loopholes for the National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL) and Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) – professional sports leagues that generate billions of dollars annually in profits pay nothing in Federal income taxes($91 million worth of taxes)
2. Moroccan pottery classes (part of a $27 million grant from U.S. Agency for International Development)
3. Efforts to promote caviar consumption and production ($300,000)
4. The building of a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel”- part of a $325,000 grant from the National Science Foundation
5. Promotion of specialty shampoo and other beauty products for cats and dogs ($505,000)
6. Corporate welfare for the world’s largest snack food producer, PepsiCo Inc. ($1.3 million)
7. Government-funded study on how golfers might benefit from using their imagination, envisioning the hole is bigger than it actually is ($350,000)
8. “Prom Week,” a video game that allows taxpayers to relive prom night ($516,000)
9. Oklahoma’s layover boondoggle, a scarcely used airport in Oklahoma receiving nearly half-a-million in taxpayer dollars only to transfer funds elsewhere in the state ($450,000)
10. The 2012 Alabama Watermelon Queen tour, paid for in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “to promote the consumption of Alabama’s watermelon through appearances of the Alabama Watermelon Queen at various events and locations” ($25,000)
11. Out-of-this-world Martian – $947,000 – NASA is studying what food astronauts could eat on Mars by simulating a Mars outpost at a barren location in Hawaii
12. ObamaPhones’ – $1.5 billion. Enrollment in the Lifeline program has skyrocketed as people sign up to get free cell phone for which they qualify if they are on federal tested programs
13. Speed reading faces – $30,000. NSF funds used to study whether people can determine a person’s sexual orientation with just a glance.
14. Fighting obesity with giant graffiti carrots – $13,000. Anti-obesity funds pay for a giant graffiti mural focused on sustainability.
15. Another bridge to nowhere – $520,000. A covered bridge in Ohio that is not used by cars or tied to any walking or bike trail will be rehabilitated with federal funds
16. Free bus rides for Super Bowl attendees – $142,419. A Department of Transportation grant paid for free bus rides during the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis. Average prices for Super Bowl tickets are around $3,000
17. Movie theater field trip to see “Red Tails” – $57,000. Federal education funds were misused in Texas to send fifth-grade boys to a movie theater to see “Red Tails” (girls were left behind).
18. Self-reflection video game using Henry David Thoreau’s 1845 writings – $40,000. National Endowment for the Humanities funding pays for video game simulating Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond.
19. U.S. Iraqi police State Department training program burns through hundreds of millions, crashes in flames – $400.2 million. State Dept’s Iraq police training program has failed miserably, according the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. No objectives were created, and classes did not help Iraqis at all. The State Department will hand over to the Iraqis several building projects that ended up being unnecessary
20. The streetcar named No Desire – $35.6 million. Federal transportation money will help build a trolley in St. Louis that has been called the “Streetcar Named No Desire” by one local. It duplicates existing light rail and public transportation, some say.
21. Sidewalks to nowhere anger local citizens – $1.1 million. Department of Transportation funds are used for “sidewalks to nowhere” in Florida and Michigan that have local citizens angered. In Florida, the sidewalk was a “safe route to school” that was still unsafe. In Michigan, Federal requirements forced a county to make sidewalk ramps at an intersection without sidewalks.
22. Congressional salaries total almost $100 million. Seems like they should be able to get something done for that much money? Especially since these people will work only 13 Fridays in 2012 and worked less than three weeks in the three months leading up to the November elections.

These 22 wasteful spending expenses total $2,160,420,419. Let’s do some simple math, in light of the Connecticut school shootings:

• According to the Federal government, there 132,183 private and public schools in this country up through high school. (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84)
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average police officer in this country earns about $55,000 a year.
• If we decided to place an armed, trained police officer in every school in America, the annual cost would be about $7.3 billion a year.
• If we could somehow magically redirect the above wasteful spending away from these trivial expenses to funding protection for our kids in school, we would be able to put a trained, armed police officer in 30% of the nation’s schools. ($7.3 billion in police officer costs divided into the $2.16 billion in spending on the 22 projects/program listed above.)
• Thus, if we could find another 50 or so other, similarly wasteful Federal government spending instances (something that would be extremely easy to do), we could annually put a trained, armed police officer in EVERY U.S. school, without raising taxes on any American.
• Another approach would be to magically redirect the $2.16 billion to protecting 30% of our schools and charge every American household just $.85 a month in taxes to cover the other 70% of schools.
• Still another approach is to consider the fact that the U.S. has needlessly deployed over 130,000 troops in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Rather than using taxpayer money to defend Seoul, Tokyo, and Paris, maybe it is time to maybe it is time to use that taxpayer money to defend our kids within the confines of this country.

The bottom line is that, as nation, we have the wealth and ability today to more fully protect our kids in their schools without killing any vital Federal program or project, without going through the fruitless and divisive political debate of gun control, and without raising taxes on any American.

We have the ability… but we probably do not have the politicians with the courage to do so. We could have done the same thing after the Columbine school killings, the same types of wasteful spending were going on that year also but the political class did not redirect wasteful spending then either. Unless we decide to hold our politicians’ feet to the fire, our kids will continue to be under protected, the Federal government will continue to spend our tax wealth on totally inane and unnecessary expenditures, and in the coming years when the next maniac goes wild, we will wring our hands and wonder why nothing was done.

If you do not want history to repeat itself, may I suggest you make a call to your politicians and start insisting that we can actually magically redirect wasteful spending to start protecting our kids and stop worrying about what a computer simulation of prom week might look like.

The useless Oklahoma $450,000 airport:

The $520,000 Ohio bridge to nowhere:

The $1.1 million sidewalks to nowhere:

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www.loathemygovernment.com

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Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w