Waste not, want..........MORE???

 

 

"America, where are you now
Don't you care about your sons and daughters
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster"

 

Monster

Steppenwolf

 

 

 

Oh, there is a monster on the loose all right. It has been with us for years and if we don't do something, it will ruin us. Of what do I speak? Government waste. In these days of budget fights, sequesters, freezes, and so on, the monster lives on. How do I know? I see evidence most every week in the papers and in the electronic media.

 

Here is the example from this week. We have poured over $50B into the reconstruction of Iraq after the war. The result from all that spending? The countries infrastructure is still a mess. So where did all those tax dollars go? The big three - waste, fraud and abuse. Even though every major department in the government has an Inspector General (IG), our audit process is weak at best. In the Defense Department, an auditor recently said doing a correct audit was "impossible" because of the way funds are transferred within the department.

 

Our Secretary of State recently met with the Prime Minister of Egypt and gave him another $250M. This is after we already agreed to give him a "sweetheart" deal on "state of the art" F-16 fighters as well as other war fighting material. Many of the times we give "sweetheart" deals to other countries with long term paybacks, those loans are "forgiven" and we, the taxpayers, are stuck with the bill. Proponents of this broken system defend it, as the  State Department "give aways" are small in the vast scheme of things. However, it is still in the billions, and it is money we do not have.

Lets take a look at the Department of Energy (DOE), which in many people's mind is a waste of energy. In GFY 2012, the budget was $30B. For what? If you go on the DOE's
website, you will see this budget going to all kinds of PC silliness. Because there is no P+L accountability in government, people can take flyers like Solyndra. The DOE took 1/2 billion tax dollars and put it into this poorly run company, only to lose everything in a bankruptcy. This kind of crap happens all the time.

Billions of dollars in fraud in the food stamp program, millions wasted in government sponsored conferences at the GSA, huge and costly bad loans made by Frannie and Freddie, billions in Medicare fraud, and lets not forget about what could be the granddaddy of them all - ObamaCare. The government shut down White House tours during spring break to save thousands, but the waste of billions in the rest of the government continues.

The government continues to grow and the waste grows along with it. Nobody has the stomach to face this issue. The monster may scare the politicians, but not the people. Who is going to slay this beast, or at least contain it? Our piggy bank is broken and the shelves are empty. The monster has stole our money and devoured our food. We can't afford the monster any longer....