Yesterday's post discussed a compilation of idiotic government spending programs that was compiled by the Independent Journal Review. It included such lunacy as spending half a million dollars to create a prom week video game program, $27 million dollars to help people in Morroco become better pottery makers, $325 million dollars to create a robotic squirrel and 22 other equally stupid expenses which can be accessed at the following link:
http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/04/april-2013-wasteful-government-spending.html
To that list of 25, let me two more horrific wastes of spending:
1) A recent news report described how the University of Florida received a $712,714 grant under Obama’s economic stimulus program to fund a study to “characterize ethnic differences in experimental pain sensitivity, endogenous pain inhibition, clinical pain and pain-related disability among older African Americans and non-Hispanic whites with knee osteoarthritis.” Huh?
A couple of problems with this type of wasteful spending:
* It was part of the stimulus program, a massive $800+ billion program that was supposed to create jobs and get the economy moving. The stimulus program was jammed with programs like this, short term, small scale, pitiful projects that resulted in no long term economic growth or sustainable job growth, the basic premise of spending $800 billion.
In fact, according to the government's own website that tracked stimulus spending, this program even admits that not a single job was created for this $712,714 expenditure. It makes you wonder how many other hundreds of similar programs within the stimulus spending also created not a single, lasting job but still wasted billions in funding.
* Putting stimulus spending aside, in times of $17 TRILLION debt levels do we really need to spend scarce Federal government resources exploring a SINGLE condition concerning a SINGLE part of the human body, namely the SINGLE condition of osteoarthritis on a SINGLE joint, the knee? If we are going to spend limited funds on health research, let's spend it major problems affecting a major segment of the population like lung and breast cancer, dementia and Alzheimer's, Parkinsons Disease, etc. rather than one affliction of one joint.
2) Staying with the economic stimulus program but moving onto the really absurd area of wasteful spending, it has come to light that $423,000 of taxpayer money was spent on a study about how to properly use a condom. Yes, the Department of Health and Human Services allowed a grant to someone in Bloomington, Indiana to study "Correct Condom Use."
Never mind that condoms have been around forever and most people should know how to use them.
For those that do not know how to use them, instructions are included with every package.
For those that do not read the package, they could access this information on correct usage form the library, the Internet, their partner, or they could ask their friends.
Of all the idiotic uses of taxpayer wealth, this has to be in the top five. Of course, no long lasting jobs were created from this expense, according to the government's own website, how could it?
This puts yet another program in the failed category of Obama's economic stimulus program. I only wish that I could have gotten in on this giveaway several years ago. I would have studied how drinking alcohol impairs my golf game. How lying out in the sun causes sun burn. How buying a new car improves one's self esteem. I could have made a killing if I knew that programs like correct condom use were worth over $400,000 to the Obama administration.
As we have said before, these two program alone would not have solved our $17 TRILLION debt problem. Together they total only abut $1.1 million. But before you can save trillions of dollars you have to save billions of dollars and before you save billions of dollars you have to save millions of dollars. You have to start somewhere and these two expenditures would have been a great start.
Plus, just because you can do something, waste taxpayer wealth, does not mean you should do it, waste taxpayer wealth. And an even sadder part of this disgrace is that there are some people and entities within the Federal government that have done a fine job of identifying waste and insanity spending like this but their voices and recommendations have gone unheeded.
Consider a posting by the fine website, Bankrupting America, that went up on April 2, 2013:
- The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the Federal government’s internal audit and investigation branch.
- It was created in 1921 to help better manage government finances, spending, and expense streams.
- According to Bankrupting America, their sources estimate the GAO saves taxpayers $81 for every dollar the Office spends.
- And the GAO is not the only the Federal government entity that is assigned the responsibility with identifying waste and fraud and offering suggestions for how to reduce it.
- The Offices of the Inspector General (more than 70 Federal agencies have them) also research and highlight areas of government waste in hopes that these mistakes would be corrected.
- For example, it was an inspector general that uncovered the over $800,000 that GSA employees wasted on lavish party for themselves in 2012.
- However, according to a recent report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a majority of inspector general recommendations were ignored.
- The committee found that during 2012, government agencies failed to implement 16,906 IG recommendations that would have saved $67 billion worth of taxpayer wealth.
- Implementing just these changes would have wiped out about 7% of the Federal government deficit in 2012 and relieved pressure on our $17 TRILLION national debt.
- In 2011, the committee found government agencies ignored 15,784 recommendations that could have saved $55 billion.
- Thus, the Federal government and Obama administration knew about at least $120 billion in spending savings over just the past two years and did nothing to avoid those unnecessary expenses.
- A possible reason for the lapse: currently the position of Inspector General is vacant in six different agencies including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security and USAID.
- The House report explained that there was a direct relationship between these vacancies and recommendations being ignored. According to the report, “In 2012, those agencies [State, Homeland Security and USAID] ranked first, second, and fourth among agencies with the most unimplemented recommendations.”
If you add in cleaning up the fraud in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment programs along with finally getting the out of control Defense Department spending, there would be so much extra money laying around that every American could see their taxes go down without any personal significant downside from the reduced level of government spending.
But as always, we are left with the same question: Do politicians not reduce wasteful spending because they are incapable of doing so from a process or intelligence perspective, they do not want to reduce wasteful spending, or they are too lazy to reduce wasteful spending?
Whatever answer you arrive at for that question, the subsequent action is unchanged: ALL current Washington politicians need to be replaced as soon ass possible, either through elections, election process reform, or the best way possible way, the implementation of term limits, as outlined in Step 39 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." These people have blown their chance to make government efficient and effective, they need to leave, the sooner the better, and take their knee studies and condom studies with them.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
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
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