Previous analyses of “by the numbers” can be accessed by entering the phrase in the search box above.
Keep in mind that millions of Americans are suffering. Many are homeless, hungry, or in need of immediate drug addiction treatment. Think about how many suffering Americans could be better off if the wasteful spending these numbers prove could have been diverted to helping Americans rather than being wasted on useless projects and programs.
The following numbers come from the Real Clear Policy website. The details on the following numbers can be found at:
1) The Washington political class has been overspending and wasting taxpayer wealth for decades. As a result, every year the Federal government has had to borrow money to pay for the difference between the tax revenue it collects and the money it spends. As a result, interest payments on the national debt have gotten larger and larger every year.
In 2021, the American taxpayer paid out a whopping $562.4 billion to just cover the interest payments on the debt the political class has amassed. These are taxpayer dollars that could not be spent on feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless or just reducing taxes and letting Americans keep more of their hard earned dollars.
Another way to view the $562.4 billion is that every American taxpayer on average paid over $5,000 each just to cover the interest on the debt last year. Not reduce the debt, just to cover the interest expense.
As we have proven previously, the skyrocketing national debt that Washington politicians have rung up will eventually crash the economy, our financial system and our freedom. Half a trillion dollars in interest expense a year is a good first step towards that crash.
2) The Federal government spent $112,000 in taxpayer wealth to study if different personalities prefer different types of foods, a totally useless research project. Using national averages, that $112,000 could have provided about 37,000 meals for hungry Americans. So rather than spending the $112,000 to feed the homeless, this money was spent on stupidity like this.
3) But it is just not Washington politicians that waste taxpayer wealth. The San Diego local government recently opened up its new Blue Line Trolley section of track. That's the good news. The bad news is that this new, 11 mile extension cost $2.2 billion, twice the national average for city rail projects. Plus, at $2.2 billion and 11 miles, the cost per mile for the new line was a whopping $200 million per mile. How much political corruption do you think went into $200 million a mile
4) According to a recent $25,000 research grant that was approved, the United States Mission to China will be spending American taxpayer wealth in Guanghou, China to “carry out a program to engage Hanan’s surfing community and local environmentally active social media influencers…” Seriously, we are sending U.S. taxpayer money halfway around the world to be spent on Chinese surfers?!?! Who approves this idiocy?
5) In a tribute to historically bad use of taxpayer money, back in 1978 the Federal government and Washington political class spent money on a research study that concluded, shock and amazement, that obese people ate more food than non-obese people. This study earned the National Institute of Mental Health a Golden Fleece award, an award that long time Senator William Proxmire gave out to stupid Federal spending efforts and projects. Unfortunately, 44 years later those stupid projects continue to waste taxpayer money.
6) Back in 2015, NASA spent grant money to have folks study what might happen and what reactions might be if we ever encountered aliens living elsewhere in the universe. The chance of us encountering alien life is next to zero while homeless Americans are a reality of our current world and yet Washington dollars are wasted on trash studies like this.
7) The State Department is spending half a million dollars to produce Russian TV programs in Moldova. Does anyone even know where Moldova is and why their television viewing deserves U.S. taxpayer dollars?
8) Going even further back on government's wasteful spending, way back in 1975, the government built the Hart Senate Office Building. The original estimate to complete the construction was $48 million which, in our opinion, was an outrageous amount to be spent on an office building either in 1975 or today. Unfortunately, the final cost came in at $137.7 million for ONE building. The final cost was thus, three times the original cost. In today's dollars, that $137.7 million would be $379 million, again, for ONE single building.
9) The National Institutes Of Health (NIH) spent almost half a million dollars of taxpayer wealth to study the gamblng behavior of pigeons. The pigeons were given tokens and then the pigeons could decide whether to spend the tokens, save them or gamble them. Even the people who got the grant confessed the experiment was more of a laboratory test and probably did not have real life applications, e.g. how to prevent people from gambling excessively. Also, what were these tokens made of, solid gold? Pretty sure you can buy some cheap tokens and ordinary pigeons for far less than half a million dollars.
10) Daniel Lee was until recently the California Department of Education “Superintendent of Equity.” His salary was $180,000 a year. While we would question the need for a “superintendent of equity” position that makes three times what the average household makes, the real sin of this expenditure was that Mr. Lee lived not in California, but in Philadelphia, where he operated his own business.
According to reporting by Politico, Mr. Lee’s resume showed no past relationship with anything related to schools or California, and yet he held this high paying job 3,000 miles away. However, according to reports, he was a close friend with the Superintendent of Public Education in the state of California so draw your own conclusions.
11) In 2020 the National Science Foundation spent $75,000 to see how well different types of lizards hang on to trees after being exposed to leaf blowers. The intent was to see how lizards would fare in hurricanes relative to their ability to hang onto trees. You cannot make this nonsense up.
12) Apparently the state government of Connecticut needs to find out how $60 million of Federal covid relief taxpayer money was spent since they currently do not know. They have hired an outside auditing firm to track down the usage of those $60 million. This is especially needed since the FBI has arrested two city employees of West Haven for funneling a whopping $636,000 into a shell company they controlled that apparently had nothing to do with covid relief.
13) The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is probably one of the top Federal agencies when it comes to totally wasting taxpayer dollars. This has resulted in a huge number of Freedom of Information Act requests by people actually trying to find out how taxpayer dollars are spent and wasted. By law, the NIH has to respond to these formal requests in a timely manner. But alas, it has failed miserably and illegally in this matter.
There currently are 768 pending information requests, 633 of them are backlogged, and there are 33 formal lawsuits that have been filed demanding that requests for information be fulfilled. Makes you wonder if they are that inept or that they are that corrupt when it comes to wasting taxpayer wealth.
14) The Federal government has run up the national debt to about $30,000,000,000,000, 30 trillion dollars. But the states are not much better, having run up debt of $1.5 trillion. Not included in these debt numbers are unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare at the Federal level and unfunded pension and benefit liabilities at the state level.
All of which means state pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and other political promises will eventually not be met which will crash the economy and financial viability of the country. As we have shown previously, the current debt and unfunded liabilities of all American government entities is now bigger than the net worth of the entire country, i.e. we owe more than we own, as a result of out of control and wasteful spending of the American political class.
15) The President of the United States earns about $400,000 a year. Members of Congress earn about $180,000 a year. These people make decisions that affect every American. Vito Mustaciulo is the head of New York City’s Housing Authority. He earns over half a million dollars a year, $515,000, and his decisions affect a handful of people relative to the whole country. He earns more than what the NYC mayor and New York state governor earn COMBINED.
Given the horrible record of the Housing Authority, do we really think that NYC is getting their money’s worth by paying half a million dollars to a single Housing Authority employee?
The numbers are not pretty. Taxpayer dollars have been wasted by every level of government and over a long period of time. Taxpayer wealth has been used to fund stupid research projects and has been the target of criminal fraud. Politicians have made so many promises that cannot be kept that the debt burden on the country is reaching astronomical levels which will have serious consequences quite shortly.
While politicians often lie, the numbers do not.
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