Wastebook 2019 - The Washington Wasteful and Stupid Spending Machine Marches on

For years, various Republican Senators have published an annual report on wasteful spending by the Federal government. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these annual disgraces have done nothing to deter Washington politicians and bureaucrats from continuing to waste our hard earned tax dollars on nonsensical programs and projects.

The 2019 “Wastebook” has recently been published. As you read just a very, very small sample of the wasteful spending outlined below, keep in mind the following realities:

• The country is rapidly heading towards a whopping $23 TRILLION national debt, a lot of which was driven by stupid projects like the ones listed below.
• These program examples below serve very few Americans and in some cases serve no Americans at all.
• Social Security and Medicare are hurtling towards fiscal collapse, wouldn’t the money wasted below be better spent to help fix these programs that affect tens of millions of Americans?
• Millions of Americans are homeless, hungry, drug addicted and facing other crises, wouldn’t the money wasted below be better spent to help these Americans in need?

Keep these points in mind as we review seven incredible wastes of taxpayer money which help no American in need and fix none of the Federal government’s financial crises:

1) Washington sent $708,466 to England to study how zebrafish react once they are addicted to nicotine. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded a five year project “that involves actively addicting its subjects, zebrafish, to nicotine.” The objective of the study was supposed to “identify genes affecting vulnerability to addiction by screening lines of mutagenized zebrafish for core behaviors associated with addiction: sensitivity to drug reward and impulsivity.”

How matter how fancy you write the objective it is still a waste of tax dollars. Plus, even if you were going to waste over $700,000 on stupid research at least the NIH could have done was waste it on American scientists doing stupid research and not pay foreign scientists doing stupid research.

2) The State Department bought a statue created by Bob Dylan for $84,375 that was displayed at the U.S. embassy in Mozambique. Seriously? An $84,000 statue to be displayed thousands and thousands of miles away in a third world country? Who came up with this stupid idea and worse, who approved it? Bob Dylan is an American rock and roll star. He is not a famous sculptor who could justify such a purchase and I would bet that just about every citizen of Mozambique has no idea who Bob Dylan is.

3) But the NIH was not done wasting our money. It wasted a whopping $4,658,865 to study the connection between drinking alcohol and ending up in the local hospital emergency room. Heck, I you could have answered this “research” question for far less money: the more alcohol you drink, the higher the probability you will be ending up in an emergency room.

Back in college, myself and others conducted this experiment many times using our own beer money. And yes, drinking a lot of alcohol leads to stupid decisions which sometimes gets you hurt. But according to the NIH report: “Most recently, the researchers have pursued three goals. The first includes looking at alcohol use in the six hours before an injury, as well as the type of injury that brought patients to the ER, such as “traffic [accidents], falls … near drowning,” etc., in consideration of several factors in different countries, including legal restrictions on alcohol. Second, they are “estimat[ing] relative risk (RR) of injury related to alcohol consumption volume (dose-response relationship) by cause of injury,”. Lastly, they are “estimat[ing] alcohol attributable fraction (AAF) by cause of injury…” 

In layman’s terms: are you more likely to hurt yourself if you drink alcohol? Of course you are. And even more disgusting is that some of that $4 million was spent in foreign lands (“several factors in different countries”) getting foreigners drunk. The least they could have done is keep the drinking domestic.

4) The State Department spent $300,000 on something called the “Debates and Model U.N. Competitions in Afghanistan.” I have no idea what these debates are but come on, who thinks that these debates are necessary? Plus, the grant stated that the debates had to be conducted in English in Afghanistan where far less than 10% of the population speaks English. 

5) Even though some would claim that the D.C. metro subway system is the best in the country, those who ride it everyday, including my relatives, would strongly disagree with that statement. Flooding, service outages, fires, and often massive delays are a regular part of the Metro experience.

And to reward those operating such an inept system the Washington politicians gave the Metro $153 million this past year. If the system is so great, let the riders of the system pay to cover its operating costs. No need to burden taxpayers form Montana, Kansas, or anywhere else to pay for the operations of the local D.C. Metro.

6) The American taxpayer spent $33,921,175 to provide textbooks for Afghanistan students. Education is a great thing but should the American taxpayer be putting out over $33 million in a single year to educate students halfway around the world?

To add insult to injury, many of the textbooks never got out of the warehouse where they sat useless to any kid. Additionally, reports showed that the textbooks, used or sitting idle, were of the poorest quality from an education and physical quality perspective.

7) Not content to waste American taxpayer dollars in a failure to educate Afghani kids, the Washington bureaucracy spent $22 million trying to improve the education system in Egypt. Again, the basic question is WHY? Given the sad state of public education in this country, why didn’t those dollars stay in this country and fix our education system?

There you have it, just seven examples among the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars wasted every year by Washington. Consider a few alternative examples where this money could have actually benefited Americans:

• The above wasted dollars of just these seen examples add up to about $214 million.
• We have previously cited sources that estimated, on average, it costs about $2.80 to feed an American homeless person.
• Thus, the money wasted on the above seven projects could have provided over 73 million meals to American homeless and hungry citizens.
• If we assume that the average salary for an American teacher is $60,000 then the $55 million wasted on failed education efforts in Afghanistan and Egypt could have hired over 900 teachers for a year to help with our failing public schools.
• Since the average annual treatment for an opioid drug addict is about $6,500 a year, that $214 million could have treated about 33,000 Americans struggling with a drug addiction for a year.

You get the idea. So much could have been done for so many needy Americans instead of wasting $214 million on stupid science experiments, failed education programs around the world and other worthless efforts. This happens every year and still the American political class does nothing to stop the waste. They are too concerned with their own careers, their own greed, and their next election to really do the right thing for America and hard working American taxpayers.

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