March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Defense Budgets Out of Control, Government Real Estate Out of Control and Government Partying Out Of Control

It’s the beginning of the month which means it is time for another dose of political class insanity, idiocy, screw ups, and wasteful spending. Every month we need to take a week or so of posts to cover all of the many inane acts that politicians all over the country impose on ordinary Americans, acts that almost always cost us money or freedom. Previous discussions of political class insanity can be accessed by looking at the early posts of previous months from the list of dates on the right side of this screen.

Unfortunately, when we started doing this feature four years ago, we could usually cover a month’s worth of insanity in a day or so. Over the years, we have needed more and more time each month to get our insanity reviews done, indicating that our political class decision making and actions are getting worse over time. There is little doubt that the trend will continue this month also.

1) We have often discussed the reality that the U.S. continues to needlessly deploy over a hundred thousand troops just in South Korea, Japan, Europe, and other parts of the world, at a cost of billions and billions of dollars a year. These deployments may have served a purpose at one point in our history but now are unnecessary relics from our military past. 

More recently, the current Presidential administration has involved U.S. military resources in an illegal and ill fated military conflict in Libya, has stationed 2,500 U.S. Marines in Australia, and now has placed U.S. troops, or “advisors,” in upwards of a half dozen African nations. In addition, in the past six months, the President has threatened to militarily intervene in Syria and his Secretary of State has floated the idea of having U.S. troops serve as peacekeepers in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.

All of this costs money, as the following chart shows, U.S. military spending vs. major all countries around the world (double click on graph for a larger view):



As you see:

• The U.S. spends almost $600 billion a year on defense, a cost that is equivalent to well over $5,000 a year per U.S. household.
• This is four times more than what China spends on defense despite China having orders of magnitude more people than us.
• This is about eight times what Russia spends on defense.
• In fact, the U.S. probably spends more than most of the nations on this chart COMBINED.

This chart proves that we really need to find a way to rein in the insane defense spending by substantially cutting the deployment of U.S. military resources around the world along with reducing other other excessive and wasteful defense spending. We simply cannot afford the cost of what the political class is spending in this budget item, getting very little in return. 

2) Let’s look at another chart, a chart which partly explains why the military industrial complex in this country spends almost $600 billion dollars a year:

This chart comes from a recent Cato analysis and report which counted up the number of physical buildings that the Federal government currently owns. Cato and the chart point out:

• The top three occupants of Federal buildings are the Army, Air Force, and Navy who in total occupy at least a whopping 180,000 buildings.
• This comes out to an almost incomprehensible 3,600 defense related buildings in every state on average. Another possible reason for an annual defense budget of almost $600 billion a year?
• In total, the Feds own over 300,000 buildings.
• But it gets worse. The government also leases 55,000 buildings, for a total of 361,000 buildings.
• But there is still more insanity. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of buildings that it owns AND leases, the Federal government owns and leases another remarkable 486,00 pieces of real estate such as parking lots. 
• The General Services Administration reports that the annual operating costs for all the buildings and structures is $33 billion. 
• Although the current market value of the buildings is unknown, a government report estimated the replacement value in 2007 at $1.5 trillion.
• The Federal government even admits that at least 77,000 of the assets are under used or unneeded.
• Some of them have been ignored for so long that they are in what Cato calls an “alarming state of deterioration.”

Obviously the Federal government needs to do a good spring cleaning of its real estate holdings. Selling these assets to private investors would 1) put them to better use than the non use they are receiving today, 2) would save American taxpayers billions of dollars a year in annual maintenance, administrative, security, and repair costs, 3) would reduce Federal government energy costs in keeping these facilities with power, and 4) would not contribute to our already outlandish national debt in the long run.

One problem is that the government does not know exactly what it owns, what condition those assets are in, and what real estate assets are excessive or unused. The GAO says that the government has a “lack of accurate and useful data to support decision making” on its vast property holdings. 

How insane is that, the Federal government has gotten so large and unwieldy that it does not even know what it owns? If a private business ran itself like that, not knowing what assets it owned or where those assets were located, it would soon be out of business. When government does it, the problem goes unattended for decades and the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill for the political and bureaucratic incompetence.

Nevertheless, it is time for Washington to clean up this mess that it has been causing for decades, spring clean and bank the savings regardless of how unglamorous the clean up is. Anything else is just plain insane.

3) The political class spends and wastes our money is so many ways, not the least of which is how politicians and government bureaucrats party. Consider some of the party expenditures the Washington political class has treated themselves to over the past few years using our tax money:

• The White House staff currently has five chefs on staff at a cost of over $550,000 a year. Why five chefs, do they all prepare one part of every meal? Too excessive even for the President, especially when over 20 million Americans are unemployed or under employed, almost fifty million Americans receive food assistance, and our national debt is now over $17 TRILLION. Cut it down to two chefs and show at least a little empathy for the rest of America.
• In 2013, Joe Biden went to Europe for just two days where he and his staff rang up two nights of hotel expenses that exceeded $1 million. $1 million just in hotel expenses. I would not expect the Vice President to stay in a Motel 6 but I also do not think that $1 million for just two nights of lodging is respectful of taxpayers either.
• In the past few years the IRS has spent about $50 million on its conferences, often held in very nice surroundings outside of DC. A 2013 conference in Anaheim, California cost the American taxpayer $4 million and included some hotel rooms that went for $1,500 a night. Expenses also included $17,000 just for conference speakers one of which spoke about “Leadership In Art,” a topic that has nothing to do with tax collection and tax law.

Other such nonsense and cases of taxpayer wealth can be seen at:

http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2014/02/22/video-party-time-on-the-taxpayer-dime/

That will do it for today, just day one of this month’s political class insanity. A defense budget out of control, government real estate out of control, and politicians and bureaucrats partying out of control. All paid for by the American taxpayer who gets virtually nothing in return for these expenditures.

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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