Booze, Mangoes, and Dead
People
It’s over. ‘And in more ways than one,’ remarked
one of the old boys during lunch the other day, referring to the election. He
pretty well summed up all our feelings on the
subject.
I’ll make no bones about it. I was disappointed
in the outcome of the election. I still find it hard to believe that my
conservative values are now in the minority in this
country.
On the other hand, when I look around at the
state of welfare today; the garbled mass of new regulations being put on us, I
don’t guess I should be too surprised.
Thomas Jefferson said it
a lot better than I ever could when he proclaimed that ‘democracy will cease to
exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those
who would not.’
Maybe if it were just
welfare, social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, we could get a handle on it,
but when you add deliberate waste of tax money to the entitlements, then the
country’s asking for trouble.
There’s one guy who
takes the time to point out this waste, Senator Tom Coburn, M.D, from
Oklahoma.
On your 1040 tax return,
have you noticed the little box that asks if you want to give $3.00 to the
Presidential Election Campaign Fund? Your insignificant three bucks morphs into
over thirty-five million by the time all the returns are in.
This year, according to
Senator Coburn, $17.7 million was given to each major political party for its
convention to help pay for the stage construction, confetti, balloons, food, and
booze during the three or four day affair.
That’s $35 million of
our taxes for wild parties. If the high rollers want such a gala, let them dig
into their own pockets, not mine. Why not let the Super PACs pay for the
bacchanalian event? Really, what was the need for them? Was there any question
Obama would not be chosen as the Democratic candidate? Or Romney the
Republican?
That’s the reason I
never check that box. If I have to pay taxes, I want it to go to the general
fund. (where Congress will find other ways to waste it)
According to Senator
Coburn, in 2009, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) undertook
a four-year, $90 million effort to spur hiring and sales among Pakistani
businesses.
You read right.
Pakistani businesses. To hell with U.S. small businesses struggling in the
recession. Let’s help foreign countries, which I might add is simply an
extension of the present administration's intent.
Two years later, the
USAID Inspector General found ‘no measurable increases in sales and employment
in four of five product areas the USAID had targeted, leather, livestock,
textiles and dates’. The agency then abandoned its efforts on those products and
focused on funding the fifth product area, mangoes.
Mangoes! Can you believe
that nonsense?
So, how did the mango
production project go?
It failed.
Why? Good old
bureaucratic planning. It seems like of the thirteen farmers picked for the
mango project, only one had received the promised equipment, but could not
operate it because of a design flaw.
And to add insult to
injury, the bungled project hurt the farmers by forcing them into default on
loans they had taken out against expected sales that now would never take
place.
Ninety million down the
drain.
It gets
worse.
Over the last five
years, the federal government has sent $601 million in retirement and disability
payments to deceased former federal employees.
That’s right.
In a September 2011
report, the Inspector General for the U.S. Office of Personnel reported that
every year for the last five, payments averaging $120 million have been paid to
dead people.
In one example, wrote Senator Coburn, an
annuitant’s son cashed his death father’s checks for thirty-seven years. The
only way the Office of Personnel learned of it was when the son
died.
Now if that doesn’t illustrate just how
cumbersome and ineffective large government is, maybe the next example
will.
What do you think about the government wanting
to spend $398 million on a bridge to nowhere. The Gravina Island Bridge was to
connect Ketchikan, Alaska to Gravina Island, which had 50 residents so they
would not have to use the ferry any longer.
How about almost a million for generators for
Vietnamese villages so the University of Pennsylvania State could research ‘the
causal link between television and family formation and reproductive
health?’
I don’t even know what they’re talking about,
but they got over $700 thousand to do it.
There are hundreds of more examples of
government waste, spending our taxes for frivolous
nonsense.
Yep, the election’s over, but not our
troubles.
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