At a time when the nation’s national debt load is exceeding $17 TRILLION, when the President and other petty Federal politicians are crying about the minimal cuts incurred by the sequester, when these same politicians call for higher and higher taxes, the “Wastebook” serves as an excellent counter balance to out of control government spending. We do not have an under taxation problem in this country, we have an overspending, wasteful spending problem in this country, as witnessed by the stupid spending expenses we will review over the four days.
As you read these examples of stupid spending, consider the following concepts:
- How many of these stupid spending priorities help to find employment for the 23 million unemployed or under employed Americans?
- How many of these stupid spending priorities help to feed or shelter the millions of homeless in this country?
- How many of these stupid spending priorities help to treat the millions of drug addicted Americans in this country?
- Given that no Federal taxpayer money was used to repair the Statue of Liberty several decades ago, why should the same type of Federal taxpayer money be used for these insane expenses today?
- How do these stupid expenses address the major issues of our times such as failing public education, illegal immigration, the lack of a strategic national energy plan, skyrocketing health care costs, etc., issues that affect just about every American?
- The Federal government just reduced the long term benefits it pays out to our veterans but continues to pay for such rubbish as what is documented in the “Wastebook.”
“Times remain tough in America. The number of people working has dropped to the lowest level in decades. More than 23 million of our fellow citizens do not have good jobs, and wages for many others are stagnant and even declining. Families are struggling to do more with less.
But not everyone in America is living on a smaller budget. Washington politicians don’t even bother to give themselves a budget anymore. For the third consecutive year, Congress failed to pass a budget. And, for the fourth straight year, these compulsive spenders charged more than $1 trillion to our national credit card, pushing us to a $16 trillion debt. Some try to rationalize the excessive borrowing and spending as necessary until the economy gets back on track.
But the increased demand for help is precisely why Washington must be more careful how tax dollars are spent to ensure we can care for those who are truly in need. To do this Washington must set priorities, just like every family. The problem is Washington has all the wrong priorities.
Thousands, millions and even billions of dollars in an annual budget in excess of $3.7 trillion may not seem like much to Washington politicians, but these days a dollar can make a big difference for families on fixed budgets. How many of our friends, families and neighbors could be fed with the nearly $1 million the government spent taste testing foods to be served on the planet Mars? How many nutritious school lunches could have been served with the $2 million in financial assistance provided to cupcake specialty shops?
We are not going to review all 100 hundred insane instances of wasteful spending over the next four days for several reasons:
- We may have already reviewed them in prior posts.
- They are similar to ones we are reviewing.
- The explanation of them would take up too much space.
75. Old Fashioned Portraits of Administration Officials – (NASA, DHS, HUD) $300,000
Everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words. Few people may know that taxpayers are paying for bureaucrats’ oil portraits worth tens of thousands of dollars each.
Over the last decade, federal agencies have commissioned dozens of oil paintings to immortalize their upper-level management for the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, enough to raise dozens families over the poverty level. This year alone, federal agencies bought or took delivery of nearly $300,000 in official oil portraits of senior officials, according to government contracting data.
Taxpayer dollars eternalized leaders such as former Energy Secretary Steven Chu ($20,000), and Lori B. Garver, former NASA Deputy Administrator ($23,000). Both resigned their positions earlier this year.
Portraits are not restricted to those sitting in office. Agencies have ordered pieces to commemorate former officials who left years prior. This May, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled a $30,000 portrait of Gov. Tom Ridge, first Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security who left in 2005. A second portrait – of Michael Chertoff, the Department’s second Secretary – has also been painted, though not yet unveiled. That portrait also cost $30,000. Similarly, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) ordered a $20,000 portrait of former Secretary Steve Preston, who served for just seven months.
While the average portrait cost has been about $22,000, several have cost more than some families will earn in years. In 2007, HUD paid $100,000 for a 30” x 40” oil painting and required it to be “framed in gold.”728 The Commerce Department paid $40,000 for a life-size portrait of former Secretary Gutierrez in 2008. In the last decade, the Defense Department has ordered at least six oil paintings that cost between $40,000 and $50,000. Altogether, the Pentagon has ordered more portraits than any other agency – 25 of at least 69 ordered in the last decade.
76. Environmentally Friendly Coffee Drying Study – (USDA) $25,000
According to the National Coffee Association, Americans have been consuming coffee since at least the mid 1600’s. While modern machinery allows for the rapid “drying” of coffee beans, farmers across the world have used the sun to dry coffee for centuries.
In comes the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is funding groundbreaking research into the coffee drying process, giving $25,000 to one Hawaii coffee plantation to study more environmentally friendly means for getting water out of their beans.
The study will include such methods as “passive solar-heated air” (the sun and wind), “photovoltaic-generated electricity” (solar panels powering drying machinery), and “solar-heated water systems” (the sun again).
This critical research into the use of the sun to dry coffee will verify what farmers across the globe have been doing for centuries.
77. Taxpayers Shell Out Half-a-Million for Street Block in Town of 1,150 – (DOT) $532,000
The Kansas town of Rossville received $532,000 from the U.S. Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C. because there “hasn’t been much done to [the] main street in years.”
U.S. taxpayers shelled out over half a million dollars for improvements to one-tenth of a mile on the Main Street of a town with a population of only 1,150. Taxpayers in New York, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California paid to make Rossville’s one-block downtown area “more decorative and colorful.”
78. Yale University Spends Federal Research Grant Studying the Oddity of the Duck Penis – (NSF) $384,989
Yale University launched a project in 2005 with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), to study the oddities of the duck penis. In 2009, the school received an additional $384,989 to continue its work, which will expire in 2013. The project found its way into the limelight when it was discovered the funding came from the 2009 stimulus bill, which among other things was intended, “To provide investments needed to increase economic efficiency by spurring technological advances in science and health.”
79. Thomson Prison Blues – (DOJ) $2 million
In October 2012, the Obama administration circumvented Congress and purchased the Illinois state-owned Thomson Correctional Facility for $165 million. For over a decade, the prison had sat empty under Illinois ownership, and the state did not have the budget to open and operate the prison. The federal government now pays $2 million a year to maintain this now empty Federal prison.
81. Government Pays $500 per gallon in Afghanistan – (USAID) $507,000
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) operates a program to help increase access to healthcare for Afghan citizens through the construction of hospitals and mid-wife training centers throughout Afghanistan.
One particular hospital project that has received specific attention from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is the Gardez Hospital. An organization that funnels money from USAID the recipients in Afghanistan awarded a contract to Sayed Bilal Sadath Construction Company (SBSCC), an Afghan company, for $13.5 million to build the new hospital. This new 100-bed hospital in Gardez, Afghanistan is currently about 23 months behind its original schedule, because it has been seriously hampered by the facility’s remote location and by an active insurgency.
USAID, through the middle man, paid $300,000 to SBSCC for 600 gallons of diesel fuel that made the purchase price $500 per gallon. The market price for diesel fuel in Afghanistan is approximately $5.00 per gallon, making this purchase worth $3,000 and therefore, an overpayment of $297,000
83. It’s A Round-Up…of Taxpayer Money!
Animal activists call it a waste of taxpayer money. The National Academy of Science (NAS) calls it “expensive and unproductive.” Government auditors have been warning of its unsustainability for years.
Yet, the Wild Horse Program, implemented by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), continues to operate at the cost to taxpayers of $76 million a year. The Wild Horse Program began in 1970 to protect the wild horse population from slaughter and to sustain natural resources and vegetation for both wild horses and cattle and other wildlife.
At the expense of $1,000 each, wild horses are rounded up and removed from the wild. Two-thirds of them are corralled in a “holding system” of taxpayer-funded corrals, feed lots, and pastures.
Each year, the BLM rounds up 9,400 horses, and today, the holding population of over 50,000 horses exceeds the wild population of 35,000 horses. The cost of holding these wild horses in long-term corrals is the main expense in the program’s $76 million annual price tag.
85. Fishy grants for cronies – (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services) $30 million
Traveling along the Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, one can find numerous yacht clubs, art museums, and even the John C. Stennis Space Center, one of NASA’s field test facilities. Many of these sites have received funding through federal coastal conservation grants.
According to a June 2013 study by the Department of Interior Office of Inspector General, out of approximately $40 million (of a total $100 million) in Coastal Impact Assistance Program (CIAP) grants throughout Mississippi, investigators concluded that about $30 million were “ineligible” and “unsupported” and could be “put to better use.”
The investigation found numerous examples of grants originally intended for coastal preservation that were being siphoned off for glitzy pet projects to draw in tourists. One such recipient was the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, which received $500,000.
Investigators concluded that less than 4 percent of the original amount of grant money intended for conservation could actually have been used for those purposes. The rest was used to invest in new skylights and flooring at the museum.
88. Four Score and Seven Clicks From Now: historical multi-player computer games – (NEH) $300,000
A professor at Hope College has received almost $300,000 from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) for his multi-player computer game that finally brings Civil War reenactors online. The game is “Valley Sim” and it allows students to “take on the identity of one of 25 real-life citizens of two communities that were on opposite sides of the Civil War.”
90. Puppets Take Long Island – (NEH) $150,000
While the Muppets may have taken Manhattan, the federal government spent $150,000 to support the Puppets Take Long Island festival in Sag Harbor, New York. The eight-week long promotion of puppets was the answer for the Long Island Regional Economic Development Council to attract tourism to Long Island.
92. Penny for Your Thoughts and $800,000 in Taxpayer Money for One Idea – (NV) $800,000
In 2012, Las Vegas was economically bouncing back. Gambling and entertainment brought in $15.3 billion in revenues from its record number 39.7 million visitors that year. Home prices had jumped, and jobs grew at a higher rate than the national average.
But to the Administration, Las Vegas is in such great need of a long-term economic vision, that they would give out an $800,000 grant to pay for it. This prize for an idea is funded by Economic Development Administration’s Department of Commerce,
100. Audit Finds United States Marshals Service Spent Big on Swag – (USMS) $6,000
In November 2013, the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (DOJ OIG) released a report which reviewed the United States Marshals Service’s (USMS) use of appropriated funds for promotional items, or “swag.” In total, the DOJ OIG found the USMS Investigative Operations Division (IOD) “spent at least $793,118 on promotional items over a 6 year period and that these expenditures were excessive and, in some instances, in contravention of Department Policies and Government Accountability Office (GAO) decisions and guidance.”
Over a six-year period, the USMS IOD spent almost $800,000 on swag ranging from challenge coins, drinkware, pens as well as “USMS-themed Christmas ornaments, blankets, ties and other non-essential items is poor stewardship of our citizens’ hard-earned tax dollars.”
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Disgusting, wasteful uses of taxpayer wealth. Trivial use of wealth to fund stupid video game concepts, to provide public business funding to private business, to subsidize the living needs of wealthy Americans. Just poor planning skills and outright corruption that waste wealth for no societal benefit.
Disgusting, wasteful uses of taxpayer wealth. Trivial use of wealth to fund stupid video game concepts, to provide public business funding to private business, to subsidize the living needs of wealthy Americans. Just poor planning skills and outright corruption that waste wealth for no societal benefit.
If private citizens and organizations had mishandled funds like this it would most likely be criminal grounds for arrest, prosecution and jail time for fraud. When the government does it, the only ramifications are that the politicians that oversee the waste call for even more wealth to be confiscated by the ruling political class and wasted by the government it over sees and controls, with no one going to jail for the waste or even being fired or reprimanded.
Until the “Wastebook” can no longer be published every year by Senator Coburn, no American, rich or poor, should ever pay another penny in taxes.
Several steps from "Love My country, Loathe My Govenrment," would help rediuce this insulting amount of fraud and waste:
- Step 1 would reduce government spenidng levels by 10% a year for five years. There is certianly enough systemic and one time fraud and waste in govenrment spending to easily reach this goal without a major detriment to the majority of Americans.
- Step 34 suggests a process for replacing Congressional members sitting on committees when those committees to not abolish these types of wasteful spending. For example, whatever committee was responsible for overseeing the spending of taxpayer wealth to study duck penises would be replaced with more resposnbile members of Congress.
- Step 44 would prohibit the use of any federal funds on any project or program that did not benefit a sizable number of citizens from at least five different states. This would eliminate the American taxpayer from paying over half a million dollars to make a street in Kansas look pretty.
- The most important step is Step 39 which would impose term limits on all Federal politicians. It is obvious that the politicians sitting in Washington now do not care about how our wealth is spent because they have overseen these types of outrageous spending wastes. They need to be replaced as soon as possible and term limits is the way to do it.
The whole “Wastebook” publication can be accessed online at:
http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=d204730e-4a24-4711-b1db-99bb6c29d4b6
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:
Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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