Today will be a quick look at what the Federal government still wastes our money on based on research from a number of sources. Consider this atrocious misuse of taxpayer money in light o the childlike temper tantrum that President Obama has been throwing over the past few weeks, insisting that the budget sequester, that he proposed and agreed to, would devastate government functions and the U.S. economy. His insistence that the sequester spending reduction of only about 2% was catastrophic was the ultimate “the sky is falling” charade in the history of the U.S. government.
Let’s start with a checklist of bad government expenditures from Alan Caruba who wrote the following for CSN news on March 4, 2013. I cannot verify all of his assertions are correct but since some of them have been researched, verified, and covered in past posts to this blog, I am assuming that the rest of them are legitimate:
-The government spends $1.7 billion for maintenance on empty buildings it owns, although some sources put the figure at closer to $25 billion. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that 55,000 properties are underutilized or entirely vacant.
-The federal government owns approximately one-third of all U.S. land. It does not need more land and it could be argued that it should not own 80% of Nevada and Alaska, and more than half of Idaho.
- Nevertheless, the Federal government wants to spend another $2.3 billion to purchase more land and the National park Service currently has a backlog of maintenance tasks totaling $5 billion.
- Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, the Department Of Homeland Security has $9 billion in unspent preparedness funds and thus, there was no need to release thousands of criminal illegal aliens.
- Republican lawmakers in Congress took the sequester fear-mongering as an opportunity to note, as Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) said, “There are pots of money sitting in different departments across the federal government, that have been authorized over either a number of months or years.”
- Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) identified programs to fund a space ship to another solar system, funds for advancements in beef jerky from France, and $6 billion for research to find out what lessons about democracy and decision-making can be learned—from fish!
- The National Science Foundation gave a $350,000 grant to Purdue University researchers on how to improve your golf game.
- The National Institutes of Health gave a $940,000 grant to researchers who found that the production of pheromones in—wait for it—fruit flies, declines over time.
- The NIH also paid researchers to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they’re drunk and spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing” program on men in South Africa.
- Various entities of the government have spent $3 million for research on video games; $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly; $500 million on a program that would try to figure out why five-year-olds “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom; and grants such as $1.8 million on a “museum of neon signs” in Las Vegas, Nevada.
-Sanity does not apply to the $2 billion given annually to U.S. farmers to not farm their land.
But Mr. Caruba is not the only source of flagrant government waste. Recent reports have found that the Department of Homeland Security, a supposed non-police and non-military entity of the federal government has been awfully busy buying billions of dollars worth of police and military gear:
- DHS has recently purchased 2 billion bullets (enough to fight the War in Iraq for 25 years) and 7,000 fully automatic assault rifles
- In February, the DHS spent $2,000,000 buying “no hesitation” targets depicting old folks, pregnant women, and small children holding guns. The purpose behind this type of target it is to train law enforcement officials to overcome their instinctive reluctance to fire on those soft targets.
- In September 2012, the DHS recently retrofitted 2,717 Mine Resistant Protected armored vehicles, which are intended for use on American streets.
The last thing a sane person does in a budget crisis is to go on a clothes shopping spree. However, the Federal government is not a sane entity which explains why it recently spent $50 million on NEW UNIFORMS!
Keep in mind that none of these expenditures were critical to the daily functioning of American families or the U.S. economy. They just wasted taxpayer wealth, making the Obama temper tantrum that much more irresponsible.
His reaction to the sequester? He had his staff shut down school children’s tours of the White House, part of his reported vindictive effort to make these minor budget cuts as painful as possible for ordinary Americans.
Vindictiveness, certainly not a trait one wants in their national leadership. But certainly a trait of our insane, inane, vindictive, wasteful, and incompetent American political class.
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