The pork Congress approves is just the tip of the spending iceberg

THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

BY LUKE ROSIAK | JANUARY 30, 2014

Not sure what to buy the millionaire golfer who has everything? For Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio Republican, the answer was a $30,000 gold medal for Jack Nicklaus, at taxpayer expense.

Or what's behind an obscure bill to funnel federal funds to chiropractors?

Perhaps that's answered by the seven contributions from the American Chiropractic Association to the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, in the months before the legislation was introduced. Three more contributions came afterwards.

Congress may be deadlocked and unproductive, but that doesn't mean lawmakers aren’t trying to spend tax dollars. In fact, the dysfunction is what keeps them from spending far more of it.

Most of the public's attention focuses on bills that are are about to become law and that enact significant changes.

CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE.  

 

 

 

Muslim Mortgages Paid with More than $300 Million – Courtesy of US Taxpayers

My head is going to explode, I swear it is!  ~Lynn

Posted By Suzanne Hamner on Jan 5,

The government is not blind to the fact that there are 46 million Americans who are unemployed, with a small percentage of those being homeless and living in poverty. Among those are roughly 1.2 million children, who attend public schools that are homeless. More than likely, they have contributed to the increased numbers of the homeless in the United States. Military retirees were told to “embrace the suck” when their retirement was cut in the budget deal. Nancy Pelosi claimed so many cuts had been made that the “cupboard is bare.” This signals there is no more frivolous money that can be cut. Well that was proven less than accurate. So, where did the more than $300 million dollars in taxpayer money come from to send to Muslims to help pay their mortgages?

Read more!

Coburn’s 2013 ‘Wastebook’ Features Brothels, NASA and Senate ‘Lifestyle Training’

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., wants Congress to stop spending money on things he deems unnecessary — such as “looking for signs of intelligent life in Congress” by giving NASA $3 million to set up a workshop in Washington, D.C., explaining the legislative branch.

Coburn, the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released his annual “Wastebook” Tuesday, and if you like a little sass and a lot of cuts in government spending, this is the book for you. Of course, it does not outline a path to make structural changes on either the tax or spending side, but it does highlight approximately 100 projects that cost the government $30 billion, the purpose of which Coburn questions.

A sample of some of the items Coburn would like to eliminate....

READ MORE!   

http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/coburn-wastebook-brothels-nasa-senate-lifestyle-training/

Agencies Can’t Always Tell Who’s Dead And Who’s Not, So Benefit Checks Keep Coming: Over $700 Million Paid To The Dead

The U.S. government has a problem with dead people. For one thing, it pays them way too much money.

In the past few years, Social Security paid $133 million to beneficiaries who were deceased. The federal employee retirement system paid more than $400 million to retirees who had passed away. And an aid program spent $3.9 million in federal money to pay heating and air-conditioning bills for more than 11,000 of the dead.

These mistakes are part of a surprising glitch at the heart of the federal bureaucracy. Because of a jury-rigged and outdated system meant to track deaths, the government has trouble determining exactly which Americans are deceased.

As a result, Washington is bedeviled by both the living dead and the dead living.

The first group are people who have died but are counted as alive in federal records. Their benefits keep coming. Millions of dollars pile up in unwatched accounts. Millions more are spent by feckless relatives. In one recent rec­ord-breaking case, a son stole his dead father’s federal benefits for 26 years.

CONTINUED:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/agencies-cant-always-tell-whos-dead-and-whos-not-so-benefit-checks-keep-coming/2013/11/03/5e0b89f6-40be-11e3-a751-f032898f2dbc_story.html?hpid=z4

No Wonder America Is Broke

To quote "Dragnet" let me start with "The Facts, just The Facts". But hold on to your hat, chair, lunch...these facts are "chunder-blowing" producing!


"Just The Facts".

1. Federal Spending has MORE THAN TRIPLED since 1965 with LBJ's "Great Society"/"War on Poverty", and NEARLY DOUBLED since 1980 with Jim Wright's & Tip O'Neil's "We just wanna help ya' " DNC Congress.

2. There CURRENTLY are 342 SEPARATE Gov. programs "for" Economic Growth- yeah, I put for in ""...cuz that hasn't worked so good has it?!!

3. There CURRENTLY 130 SEPARATE Gov. programs to "help" the disabled- yeah, help in "" for the same reason.

4. There CURRENTLY 130 SEPARATE Gov. programs to "help" at-risk youth...(oh, & noticed that's the 3rd time I said CURRENTLY BECAUSE the way Obama, Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid are going this will QUADRUPLE soon.)

5. Through Gov. Waste, Fraud & Incompotence, the Federal Gov. spent MORE THAN $25,000 PER HOUSEHOLD IN 2008!!! BLIMEY! If the Gov. had just GIVEN US the $25,000 we'd better off!!! Besides IT'S OUR MONEY ANYWAY!!! And that figure is UP $4,000 since 2001 when it was a "paltry" $21,000 PER HOUSEHOLD!


6. The Budget DEFICIT- SO FAR- this year IS $1.8 TRILLION!!! And the year isn't over yet! Just the "stimulus" bill (2009/2010) ALONE dumps $6,700 PER HOUSEHOLD of NEW DEBT into the laps of OUR Children and GRAND CHILDREN!

7. THIS YEAR ALONE in California the Gov. will "spend"/WASTE $200,000 on TATTOO REMOVAL, $870,000 on a Red Wolf Breeding Facility, oh and $1.7 MILLION on a SWINE ODOR "RESEARCH"!!! This is ONE State! ONE year!!!

8. The U.S. Gov. THIS YEAR has spent $4,545,000 for "WOOD UTILIZATION RESEARCH"!! Since 1985 we've WASTED $90 MILLION ON THIS "RESEARCH"!!! Crikey! Who's doing this "research?!! The Amish?!!! I think we KNOW HOW to "utilize WOOD"!!


CONTINUED:  http://resistance.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=2600775%3ATopic%3A5839228&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_topic

GAO Finds Rampant Waste in $18B Federal Job-training Program

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) study, commissioned by Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), is bringing to question whether taxpayers should finance an $18-billion annual “investment” in federal programs that provide training to unemployed Americans. The 2011 analysis, which observed programs in fiscal year 2009, pinpointed a profuse and overlapping mesh of 47 different job-training programs administered by nine agencies.

“The vast majority of money we spend in job training doesn’t go to job training, it goes to employ people in those job training federal programs,” Coburn said in an interview with Fox News. Some programs are brimming with fraud and abuse, with taxpayer-funded dollars being spent on affairs that are in no way associated with professional training. For example, the study reported:

• Some job training participants spent their days sitting on a bus.
• Some were trained for jobs that didn’t exist.
• Others were paid to sit through educational sessions about jobs they already had.
• High school students were knowingly exposed to the cancer-causing agent asbestos as part of a job training program.
• Funds were misspent to pay a contractor for ghost employees and to purchase video games.
• Job training administrators spent federal funds on extravagant meals and bonuses for themselves.
• In one state, workforce agency employees took more than 100 gambling trips to casinos mostly during work hours.

CONTINUED:  http://thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary/item/11443-gao-finds-rampant-waste-in-$18b-federal-job-training-program

AFP POLICY BLOG: They Can’t Even Cut the Obvious Waste

Last week, the Government Accountability Office – an official government watchdog – released its second-annual report on duplication, overlap, and fragmentation in federal programs. This year’s report finds 51 areas in the federal budget where savings can be achieved by merely adopting commonsense measures to run government more efficiently. Cutting waste won’t solve our budget problems but it will show that lawmakers are finally taking the problem serious. Unfortunately, right now they’re not.


Examples that they highlight include:

•Eleven agencies implement 94 different federal government programs to encourage “green building” practices in state and local governments and the private sector. GAO points out that only about a third of these programs actually have clear goals and performance evaluations, so that “the results of most initiatives and their related investments in green building are unknown.”
•Twenty federal entities administer 160 different programs, tax expenditures, and other initiatives to promote homeownership and affordable housing, costing taxpayers over $170 billion in the year 2010 alone. And GAO shows that some of these programs run at counter-purposes to one another. For example, one tax credit encourages owners to preserve the “historic character” of old buildings, but that undermines another tax credit that incentivizes the use of new energy-efficient building technologies.
•The federal government spent $30.7 million in 2010 on at least 15 different “financial literacy” programs administered by 13 different agencies. GAO notes that such “fragmentation increases the risk of inefficiency and redundancy and highlights the need for strong coordination, or potential consolidation, of these efforts.”
•In 2010, 83 percent of the 209 different programs to encourage educational opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) overlapped with at least one other program. As GAO writes: “Over the decades, Congress and the executive branch have continued to create new STEM education programs, even though there is a general lack of assessment of how well the programs are working.”

Sadly, these examples and many more all come on top of the 81 examples of waste and duplication that GAO identified in last year’s report. In a supplemental document, GAO discloses the troubling fact that only 4 of those 81 clear cases of government waste had been satisfactorily addressed over the last year.

In other words, while the President continues to grandstand about the importance of a “balanced approach to deficit reduction” (which is his code for tax hikes), he passes up even these easy opportunities to cut spending and streamline government. Congress is no less blameless: neither the House nor the Senate passed legislation last year that would specifically address the waste that the GAO identified.

CONTINUED:
http://www.americansforprosperity.org/030112-official-government-report-highlights-waste-and-duplication-federal-budget?tr=y&auid=10409839

Why Congress should reject the highway bill

We're expecting debate to start on Monday or Tuesday in both the House and Senate on the infamous Highway bill. The legislation is how Congress plans to inefficiently fund transportation projects all across the country over the next few years, and it's a decidedly inept process.


The Club for Growth has been all over this from the beginning. They have issued Key Vote Alerts against BOTH the House and Senate versions.

Republican leaders in the House are claiming that their bill is a positive step forward because it doesn't include earmarks, but it's still remarkably inefficient. It contains no spending cuts and is paid for by dubious and uncertain offsets. It's also a bailout, paid for by you and me, for all of the poor funding decisions made in the past. The Senate version was written, in part, by Sen. Barbara Boxer, so you know it's not a recipe for limited government. One of the dumbest provisions, thanks to Sen. Max Baucus, would use auto import tariffs to pay for more spending. If that passed into law, the floodgates would open for new tariffs to pay for new highway spending!


Why Congress Should Reject the Highway Bill

Washington Examiner, Andy Roth
February 9, 2012

Everyone knows that if you take the bacon off a greasy cheeseburger, it’s still packed with tons of calories and saturated fat. So why do members of Congress think cutting pork from the 2012 Highway Bill should suddenly make it appetizing to fiscal conservatives?


The Highway Bill — the last one expires at the end of March — traditionally uses gas tax receipts to fund highway construction and maintenance, but it also finances “enhancement projects” like bike paths, transportation museums, and the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” Just over the past seven years, reckless spending on pork projects like these have caused the federal government to bail out the Highway Trust Fund three times to the tune of nearly $30 billion, according to the Heritage Foundation.

GOP leaders are claiming that fiscal conservatives should support the current bill because it does away with these projects. They’re even including expanded oil drilling as a sweetener to the deal, even though it has nothing to do with the Highway Trust Fund. But the bill is still a huge waste of money. It doesn’t cut any spending. It still requires higher-than-market wages that are a sop to labor unions. Worst of all, it perpetuates a system based on central planning from Washington.

CONTINUED:http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2012/02/why-congress-should-reject-highway-bill/253041

MARK LEVY: The Reason for the Tea Party Season

2011 has come and gone, and for at least 47 percent of Americans it will be painless come tax time. For the rest of us who will experience some pain, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn has released his annual "Wastebook" to remind us how excruciatingly wasteful our government is.


Despite Coburn's evidence of government irresponsibility, the tea party continues to be labeled as radical or clueless for wanting to rein in government spending. With that in mind, even the squishiest liberals shouldn't be able to justify the following expenditures, but I'm sure they'll try -- and China loves them for it.


READ MORE ABOUT THE FOLLOWING!
-- $147,000 for the American Magic Museum in Michigan.
-- $48,700 for the 2nd Annual Hawaii Chocolate Festival.
-- $175,000 to the University of Kentucky to study the effects of cocaine on the sex drive of Japanese quail.
-- $50,000 to support the Oregon Cheese Trail.
-- $150,000 to develop a "Rapid Guppy" cellphone game app.
-- $765,000 to study how college students use mobile devices for social networking.
-- $1.35 million for Entrepreneurship training in Barbados.
-- $62,000 to support wine conferences.
-- $55,000 to study Jordanian student hookah smoking.
-- $300,000 to explain the origins of the universe through dance.
-- $606,000 to Columbia University in New York City to study how using the Internet affects sexual behavior.
-- $120 million in benefits checks to deceased former federal employees.

READ THE ENTIRE COMMENTARY:
http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/2012/01/02/levy-the-reason-for-the-tea-party-season/?subscriber=1

Tad DeHaven: Sen. Coburn's 2011 Gov't Wastebook

The office of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has released the 2011 edition of its annual “Wastebook.”


The document spotlights 100 particularly ridiculous expenditures of taxpayer money from the past year. From an entertainment standpoint, it’s pure gold. But it’s also infuriating, depressing, and a painful reminder of what happens when politicians and bureaucrats spend other people’s money.

CONTINUED:
http://townhall.com/columnists/taddehaven/2011/12/27/sen_coburns_2011_govt_wastebook

SEN.COBURN: Payback? Was funding for GAO cut because of their report on Govt. Waste?

And has the report that came out in March been ignored by our elected officials because they care more about re-election support from special interests than saving the taxpayers money?  I thought so before the interview, now judge for yourself.

Greta Van Susteren interviews Sen. Tom Coburn

http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/video/uncut-sen-tom-coburn-on-the-record/

The 100 Worst Cases of Government Waste in 2010

The 100 Worst Cases of Government Waste in 2010


by Ben Johnson

Although the United States is $13 trillion in debt, mandatory spending alone exceeds tax revenues, and the Congressional Budget Office is warning of a coming U.S. “fiscal crisis,” Congress felt no need to trim spending. The just-adjourned 111th Congress headed by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi added more to the national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, has published his collection of the 100 most wasteful projects his colleagues deemed worthy of your hard-earned tax dollars this year. Among the most offensive, ridiculous, and startling examples of pork in the Year of our Lord 2010, he found:


■Nearly $5,000 of stimulus money to hire goats to graze the weeds at Idaho’s Heyburn State Park;
■$6 billion for ethanol subsidies, which raise food costs;
■$177,000 for Ohio teachers to travel to China to learn about the Chinese “education” system;
■$137,530 for a Dartmouth professor to develop “Layoff,” a video game that encourages its players to fire as many people as quickly as possible;
■$700,000 for New Hampshire researchers to examine “greenhouse gas emission from organic dairies,” which are cause by “cow burps, among other things”;
■$442,340 to study male prostitutes in Vietnam;
■$823,000 to teach South African men how to wash their genitals after sex. (We reported this one earlier this year);
■$55,000 to celebrate HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. Of course, there is no anti-AIDS vaccine, but the “observance is a day to recognize and thank” the professionals “who are working together to find” a cure;
■$571 million — more than half-a-billion dollars — diverted from building roads and infrastructure to plant flowers on the roadsides;
■$2.9 million to study how players of the online game World of Warcraft collaborate;
■$5,000 for the Murfreesboro, Tennessee public library to host video game nights, featuring Rock Band, Wii Bowling, and Mario Kart;
■$609,160 to develop a video game based on the life of a wolf;
■$615,000 for the University of California-Santa Cruz to digitize Grateful Dead memorabilia;
■$10,000 for the Woodstock Film Festival, attended by such elites as Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, and Uma Thurman;
■$150,000 for signs alerting drivers of crossing salamanders in Monkton, Vermont;
■Nearly $1 million to post snippets of poetry at zoos;
■$175 million for unused buildings, including an octagonal monkey house in Dayton, Ohio;
■$239,100 to study how singles use online dating sites while they are lookin’ for love;
■$31,350 for a comic book mouse who teaches children the history of printing;
■$112 million in fraudulent tax refunds for prisoners;
■$1.5 million for a museum in Shelby, North Carolina, to honor bluegrass banjo picker Earl Scruggs;
■$60,000 to renovate a pizzeria in Waterloo, Iowa; and
■$212,735 to study the state of “civility” in U.S. politics in Pullman, Washington. Liberals rediscover the virtues of “civility” every time a conservative criticizes a Democratic president.

These synopses hardly give their projects their proper due. Read about them, and 77 others, in the senator’s report. Download Sen. Coburn’s entire Wastebook 2010: A Guide to Some of the Most Wasteful Government Spending of 2010 here.
http://coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=774a6cca-18fa-4619-987b-a15eb44e7f18