Green Energy Bailout

Click here to view/read about another failed attempt by government to promote "green energy" with taxpayer dollars.

Fat pensions for outgoing lawmakers

While most of us have to work 20+ years to get a pension, members of Congress are eligible for a pension after just five years in office. The pensions that lawmakers get are defined benefit plans, which means they are guaranteed to be paid a certain sum for as long as they're alive and these benefits increase with the cost of living. Both are features that have become rare in private sector retirement plans.

North Carolina's Kay Hagan, for instance, lost her first bid for reelection. For senators and representatives with only six years in office, the annual pension is about 10% of annual pay -- in Hagan's case, that's $17,400 a year based on her annual salary of $174,000. Not bad for six years of wasting taxpayer money.

Members of Congress also have a retirement savings plan similar to a 401(k), which matches up to 5% of what they contribute to it.

Government Paid Leave

Here is an excerpt from an article on the cost of government employees on paid leave:

Take, for example, the 62-page report released last month by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative agency that works for Congress. The GAO found that between 2011 and 2013, the federal government spent more than $775 million to keep tens of thousands of employees on paid leave for weeks, months, or even years. Longstanding government personnel rules, affirmed repeatedly in rulings by the comptroller general, expressly limit paid leave to “rare circumstances” in which an employee’s presence in the workplace is considered a threat to people or property. Nonetheless, GAO tallied more than 57,000 civilian employees who were put on paid “administrative leave” for at least 30 days – hundreds of them for as much as three years.

“While the employees stayed home, they not only collected paychecks but also built their pensions, vacation, and sick days, and moved up the federal pay scale,” reported The Washington Post. And the GAO couldn’t help understating the true cost of paid leave; it had data “for only about three-fifths of the federal workforce since not all government agencies keep track of the practice.”

The reason so many federal workers were paid not to work? Generally because they were being investigated for misconduct or criminal acts, and it was easier to pay them to stay away then to fire them, suspend them without pay, or reassign them to other tasks until their case was resolved. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn describes it as “Paid Vacations for Bureaucrats Gone Wild” in his most recent “Wastebook,” an annual compilation of fiscal dissipation and squandered tax dollars. Coburn’s summary crystallizes the egregiousness of a practice that managers at many government agencies have come to take for granted:

According to the Government Accountability Office, the federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on paid leave for countless civilian employees who are being investigated for misconduct or criminal acts.

“Charging booze and personal trips on the office credit card. Passing out on the job after a late night partying. Wasting most of the work day surfing for smut on office computers.… Any one of these outrageous behaviors would be reason enough for most to be fired … unless, of course, you are on the federal government’s payroll, in which case you might instead get a paid vacation lasting months or even years.” The promiscuous use of paid leave is only one of 100 bizarre, infuriating, or frivolous expenditures detailed in Coburn’s “Wastebook.”

$20 Billion in Secret Purchases

"The federal government has spent at least $20 billion in taxpayer money this year on items and services that it is permitted to keep secret from the public, according to an investigation by the News4 I-Team." Click here for complete article.

Free Cell Phone Abuse

Ever wonder how the government spends that Universal Connectivity Fee on your phone bill...

Click on photo to enlarge

U.S. Debt Clock

With the mid-term elections coming up next week, this seems like a good time to take another look at the U.S. Debt Clock...

A national debt of almost $18 trillion ($153,000+ per taxpayer) is a lot scarier to me than anything I expect to see on Halloween.

Obama/Biden: $295,437 For Week-end Vacation

According to new records obtained by the taxpayer watchdog group Judicial Watch, three separate jaunts taken by President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, and Vice President Joe Biden during last year's Presidents Day weekend cost at least $295,437. Judicial Watch said the expenses are extravagant:  “The Obamas and Vice President Biden are oblivious to the costs to taxpayers for their vacation travel".