Last month we set the record for insanity since it took us nine days to get through it all. It is a good bet that we will get close to that record setting month total since the insanity has just kept rolling out of Washington and into our lives at an ever quickening pace. So without delay or rhyme or reasoning, let us present this month’s political class lunacy:
1) On August 20, 2013 the Heritage Foundation published 15 of their most stupid examples of government spending, spending that serves almost no Americans while needlessly driving up our tax rates and national debt. Although we have already covered some of them in previously doses of insanity, I will review all of them here in case those readers missed our previously exposures of wasteful government spending:
- The Transportation Security Administration has 5,700 pieces of unused airport security equipment worth $184 million sitting in warehouse in a Dallas, Texas, which costs $3.5 million annually to lease and manage. Taxpayers lost another $23 million in depreciation costs because most of the 472 carry-on baggage screening machines had been housed there for nine months or more.
- The National Science Foundation used part of a half-million dollar grant to develop a video game that simulates a high school prom. That’s right, a video game about proms.
- The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research spent $300,000 on a study that concluded the first bird on Earth probably had black feathers. I do not know how this will sit with the red feather lobby in Washington. Pathetic, useless information paid for with taxpayer wealth.
- Taxpayer-funded Amtrak recovered only 44 cents of every dollar of its food and beverage costs on long-distance routes, which already annually lose money. And these same government people think they can operate the national health care industry more efficiently than anyone else?
- The Office of Naval Research spent $450,000 on a study that determined unintelligent robots do not have the ability to maintain a baby’s attention. But what about intelligent robots you ask? And I ask, who cares?
- The White House is currently undergoing a $376 million renovation. These funds could have kept the White House tours going for over 376 years. Instead, the White House will look great and the citizens who paid the $376 million will never see it.
- The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research spent $681,387 on a study to determine if carrying a firearm makes a man look stronger, manlier, and taller. The answer: he does, for whatever that is worth.
- The Internal Revenue Service spent $4.1 million on a lavish conference in 2010 for 2,609 of its employees in Anaheim, California. Expenses included $50,000 for line-dancing and “Star Trek” parody videos, $135,350 for outside speakers, $64,000 in conference souvenirs for the employees, plus free meals, cocktails, and hotel suite upgrades.
- In 2010, 117,000 people illegally and immorally double-dipped into Social Security’s disability insurance program and the federal unemployment insurance program to the tune of $850 million in cash benefits paid out fraudulently. If the Washington political class was actually doing their jobs as overseers of taxpayer wealth, the criminally lost money could have operated the White House tours for over 850 years or refunded every American household about $8.
- Thanks to the National Science Foundation, Purdue University, and $350,000 in taxpayer money, researchers analyzed whether golfers who imagine that the hole is bigger get a boost to their confidence and accuracy. As a golfer, I could have done the study for half that amount to reach the same conclusion. It makes you wonder what government bureaucrats approved such nonsensical use of taxpayer money.
- In 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $300,000 on activities promoting caviar produced in Idaho. I would bet that $300,000 is about the same size as ENTIRE Idaho caviar market.
- The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave out a $149,992 grant to researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey who are trying to eliminate the infamous “freshman 15” by studying college students’ on-campus dining selections. Here’s a better and cheaper way to eliminate the weight gain: just tell them to eat healthier and exercise. There, about $150,000 saved.
- A $100,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts funded a video game that depicts a female superhero sent to save planet Earth from climate changes allegedly caused by social issues that affect women. Nonsense.
- The USASpending.gov website is supposed to be dedicated to unveiling and tracking government spending. According to the website, the Department of Health and Human Services failed to report $800 billion in spending on time. So much for “government transparency.”
- 1,000 prisoners in U.S. jails and prisons collected weekly unemployment benefits over a recent four-month period, costing taxpayers $7 million. Nice work if you can get it. Taxpayers pay for your room and board AND send you checks for being in prison.
If these were the only 15 wastes of government funding every year, I could live with it. If the Washington politicians had actually solved real, major problems facing most Americans (e.g. high unemployment, skyrocketing national debt, failing public schools, leaky borders, etc.) then I could live with these 15 affronts.
But that is not the case. There are probably tens of thousands of similar wastes of money done every year by the Federal government while the political class never resolves any major issues, losers on all counts.
2) In mid-August, 2013, Arizona law enforcement authorities raided a home in the Phoenix area and ended up breaking up a human smuggling ring. The newsworthy item in this story besides the smashing of a human smuggling ring is that the leader of the smuggling ring is a 35-year-old Mexican citizen named Javier Rito-Martinez.
According to news reports, Mr. Ritz-Martinez has already been caught and deported back to Mexico right times. One of his accomplices had been caught and deported five times and another had been caught and deported four times. So much for securing the border despite taxpayers spending tens of billions of dollars every year to do so.
3) Let’s look at some inane government math. Over the past few years, the Federal Reserve Board has been inflating the money supply with no underlying wealth to support the increased money supply, i.e. “printing money,” in a vain attempt to jumpstart the economy. These various efforts have been called “quantitative easing” and we are currently in phase three of such nonsense.
The obvious question is to see if the first two phases of quantitative easy actually worked and paid off in increasing the size and health of the economy. The San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently complete such an analysis and the results were not pretty.
According to their official analysis of the second phase of quantitative easing, “we estimate that the second LSAP program, known as QE2, added about 0.13 percentage point to real GDP growth in late 2010 and 0.03 percentage point to inflation.” So, this wing of the Fed actually found evidence that the $600 billion that they pumped in to the economy actually added positive economic growth to the overall economy. That is the good news.
However, there was overwhelming bad news if you do a little bit of simple math. Back in the time of the second phase of quantitative easing, the size of the entire U.S. economy was about $15.2 TRILLION. The $600 billion the Fed spent to get their positive meager results, as identified by the San Francisco Fed, was about 3.9% of the economy. However, their analysis indicates that these quantitative easing actions increased the economy only .13% which is about $19.7 billion.
So, the Fed risked/spent/bet $600 billion for a $19.7 billion payback. A pathetic return on investment no matter how you calculate it or cut it. Makes you wonder if anyone in Washington, either at the White House, in Congress, or in the Fed has any economic sense at all, spending $600 billion to get less than $20 billion in return.
And the saddest thing of all? If given these pathetic results and returns, the Fed still went ahead with quantitative easy phase three which is running longer and spending even more money, damaging the long term health of the economy in ways that are probably large and still unknown. Do some simple math, folks, and save the taxpayers a hundreds of billions of dollars.
So what do we have going this month? More idiotic and wasteful government spending on inane projects and programs. Borders that leak so much criminals bounce back multiple times after getting deported. A Federal Reserve that wastes hundreds of billions of dollars for minimal results. And we are just getting started with this month’s insanity, more tomorrow.
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