It seems like every day I read about how government wastes money so I thought I would record them. Since I began this blog, I have been stunned by the amount of waste, fraud, and mismanagement I have found. I recognize that some government is necessary for any society to exist but without the "profit incentive" that we have in private enterprise, government continues to grow like a cancer and along with it the potential for abuse. If you ever needed a reason to limit government, just read some of the following posts.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

National Park Service's Wasteful Spending

"Taxpayers shell out $52,000  a year to maintain the home of Black History Month founder Carter Woodson. Yet the tiny, dilapidated row house in northwest Washington D.C., with a "No Trespassing" sign and iron bars blocking the front door and windows hasn’t seen a visitor in the seven years since the National Park Service bought it  for $2.1 million and designated it a National Historic Site." Click here to read Fox News report.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Disaster Plan For Magician's Rabbit

Marty Hahne, a children's magician in Ozark, MO, has a small white rabbit, which he pulls out of a hat in his show. According to the USDA, that makes him an "exhibitor" of animals, and it means he must have a license. Recently, the government added a new condition to his license: Hahne must write a disaster plan for his rabbit. Click here to read The Washington Post article.

"For Hahne, the saga has provided a lesson in one of Washington’s bad old habits — the tendency to pile new rules on top of old ones, with officials using good intentions and vague laws to expand the reach of the federal bureaucracy."

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

$9.7 Billion Loss on General Motors Bailout

The U.S. government has booked a loss of $9.7 billion on the nearly $50 billion bailout of U.S. automaker General Motors, according to a quarterly report to Congress on Tuesday. In 2009, the U.S. Treasury extended $49.5 billion in loans to GM in exchange for $2.1 billion in preferred stock and a 60.8 percent equity stake.

Treasury has since whittled down its stake in GM through a series of stock sales. Those sales have all taken place below the price Treasury needed to break even on its GM investment, resulting in the loss, according to Tuesday's report from the Special Inspector General overseeing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

IRS Wastes Billions

The Internal Revenue Service paid up to $13.6 billion in bogus claims for the Earned Income Tax Credit last year and as much as $132.6 billion over the past decade, according to an internal audit that already has some members of Congress questioning how the agency will be able to administer Obamacare.

IRS problems with the tax credit are not new. In fact, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration said it warned officials about the problems in 2011 — but two years later, the agency still has not solved the situation and remains in violation of one of President Obama’s executive orders. Indeed, the IRS has not established annual targets for reducing the payments, which is required by law, nor is the agency complying with requirements that it report to auditors each quarter on any EITC payments.

The large error rate left some lawmakers questioning whether the agency will be able to administer the tens of billions of dollars in health care tax credits that are part of the Affordable Care Act. “That the IRS can’t figure out how to rein in the improper Earned Income Tax Credit payments does not bode well for the $1.1 trillion in ObamaCare subsidies,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

He said if the error rate in Obamacare subsidies is as big as it is in the EITC, that could mean $250 billion would be wasted in health care payments. The size of the erroneous payments was staggering to lawmakers. At more than $13 billion a year, the bogus tax claims are more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Interior or Labor departments.

“The waste outlined in this report — more than $13 billion a year — equals or exceeds the annual budgets of some federal agencies,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican and Congress‘ chief waste-watcher. “Before we ask taxpayers to send even more of their own money to Washington, we must do more to prevent these egregious examples of waste.”

Saturday, October 19, 2013

U.S. Debt Tops $17 Trillion

U.S. debt jumped a record $328 billion on Thursday, the first day the federal government was able to borrow money under the deal President Obama and Congress sealed this week. The debt now equals $17.075 trillion, according to figures the Treasury Department posted online on Friday.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Senate's Elevator Operators Cost $1.2 Million

Even after Senate said the jobs in the senators-only elevators were nonessential in 2011, the jobs still exist. Over the last five years the cost of those jobs has reached $1.2 million. The longest serving operator has seen a salary increase every year of those five years, earning over $210,000.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

$634 Million For Obamacare Sites

Digital Trends has an informative article on the cost of building the website Healthcare.gov which has been plagued with problems. As with most government programs, the cost has soared from an initial estimate of $93.7 million to $634 million. And in as much as it does not work as advertised, many more dollars will be spent trying to fix it.

"Given the complicated nature of federal contracts, it’s difficult to make a direct comparison between the cost to develop Healthcare.gov and the amount of money spent building private online businesses. But for the sake of putting the monstrous amount of money into perspective, here are a few figures to chew on: Facebook, which received its first investment in June 2004, operated for a full six years before surpassing the $600 million mark in June 2010. Twitter, created in 2006, managed to get by with only $360.17 million in total funding until a $400 million boost in 2011. Instagram ginned up just $57.5 million in funding before Facebook bought it for (a staggering) $1 billion last year. And LinkedIn and Spotify, meanwhile, have only raised, respectively, $200 million and $288 million."

Update (10/11/13): Canadian officials fired IT firm behind troubled Obamacare website.

$5 Million in Crystal as Government Shuts Down

On the eve of the government shutdown, the State Department went on a spending spree, awarding a contract worth up to $5 million for fancy crystal stem and barware for its embassies around the world. A five-year contract was awarded to a man named Simon Pearce for $5 million dollars to create more than 12,000 high-end custom crystals and barware for US embassies.

At the end of the fiscal year, federal departments and agencies rush to finish off their allotted funds. They all operate under a policy known in Washington as “use it or lose it”. When a federal entity does not use part of its budget, it loses it forever. So, they waste away instead of being forced to slim down. That’s what happened in the 2012 fiscal year when government contracts ballooned from $45 billion prior to the last week of September to a whopping $100 billion in the final days of the fiscal year.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Social Security Administration Disability Fraud

A two-year investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has found widespread fraud in the Social Security Administration's Disability Program. The fraud is so rampant, and disability cases have so proliferated in recent years, that the Social Security's Disability Trust Fund may run out of money in only 18 months, says Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., whose office undertook the investigation.

The alleged  fraud highlights an endemic problem in Social Security disability benefit awards. The Coburn report says a random examination of 300 case files by Congressional staff found more than a quarter of  the case files “failed to properly address insufficient, contradictory, or incomplete evidence,” suggesting a high rate of fraud or abuse. Disability payments have skyrocketed across the U.S. in recent years. At the end of August 2013, more than 14 million Americans were receiving disability benefits.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

HealthCare.gov Official Facebook Page

You can follow people's comments on Obamacare at www.facebook.com/Healthcare.gov. In my opinion, the following comment sums up the problem(s) we can expect with the government running our healthcare system:

"How is it that Facebook, which is a non-essential social networking web site, can reliably handle BILLIONS of electronic interactions per second, but the Healthcare.gov site, which is literally the very heart of the Obamacare program wasn't ready for the obvious millions of visitors that you had to know it would be receiving?"

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Civil Forfeiture

For over 30 years, Terry Dehko has successfully run a grocery store in Fraser, Michigan, with his daughter Sandy. On January 22, 2013, Terry and Sandy woke up to find that all of the money in the store’s bank account had been cleaned out (more than $35,000) without warning or explanation. Later, they learned that the federal government had seized the account using a process known as civil forfeiture.

Civil forfeiture is the governmental power to take property suspected of being involved in crime. Unlike criminal forfeiture, in which the ill-gotten gains of criminal activity may be seized after an individual is convicted of a crime, prosecutors can use civil forfeiture to take property without having to convict or even charge a person with any crime. The property taken by the government is then used to pad the budgets of the very agencies that seize it.

In this case, the government claimed that Terry and Sandy violated federal banking laws by making frequent deposits of their store’s cash receipts in amounts less than $10,000. Banks are required to report larger deposits to the IRS. But it’s not illegal merely to deposit lesser amounts when one has a legitimate business purpose for doing so like Terry and Sandy did. Had the government simply bothered to ask, it would have learned that they were not trying to avoid those banking regulations. But it didn’t ask and, eight months later, the family is still waiting for hearing before a judge, which the Constitution requires in order to protect innocent people from wrongful takings like this one.

Unfortunately, when federal agencies seize cash, federal civil forfeiture laws, as currently written, provide no prompt way to get a court to review the seizure. The perverse incentives and lack of due process at the heart of civil forfeiture put innocent people like Terry and Sandy at risk. Click here to view video.