Yea, wanting to cut spending like this is unforgivable to those on left
If you are a federal worker on furlough this week — or an airline passenger delayed by federal furloughs — you might save your blood pressure, and go read another story.
This one is about all the money the U.S. government spends on . . . nothing.
It is one of the oddest spending habits in Washington: This year, the government will spend at least $890,000 on service fees for bank accounts that are empty. At last count, Uncle Sam has 13,712 such accounts with a balance of zero.
They are supposed to be closed. But nobody has done the paperwork yet.
So even as the sequester budget cuts have begun idling workers and frustrating travelers, the government is required to pay $65 per year, per account to keep them on the books.
In this time of austerity, the accounts are a reminder of something that makes austerity hard: expensive habits, built into the bureaucracy in times of plenty. The Obama administration has spent the past year trying to close these accounts with only some success.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...524_story.html
or this pure waste
Congressional frustration may be warranted. The federal government owns or leases between 55,000 and 77,000 vacant properties. But it's impossible to tell exactly how many. No precise inventory has been kept.
Selling them off, though, could save taxpayers between $3 billion and $8 billion a year, according to various analysts. That's nothing to scoff at as the government grapples with a mounting debt and sequester-tied spending cuts.
"These properties could be used first to consolidate agencies that now are in leased buildings," D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton told Fox News.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...#ixzz2OsmN9yKX
and this
As budget sequestration continues to level strain and uncertainty on the men and women of our nation’s armed forces, and as we draw closer to the ‘devastating’ effects on our military readiness as foreseen by our former Secretary of Defense, Members of Congress have an even more profound responsibility to account for every taxpayer dollar. Every dollar we waste through pork barrel spending today is a dollar not spent to support our troops and preserve our nation’s security.
“With this in mind, Senator Coburn and I last week made a standard request to be able to review for 72 hours the Continuing Resolution legislation coming before the Senate prior to moving forward and considering it on the Senate floor. Instead, we received the 587-page Continuing Resolution – which totals more than $1 trillion – at 9:00 p.m. last night, and the sponsors of the bill attempted to begin Senate consideration just hours later this afternoon – before anyone could have plausibly have read and considered the bill in its entirety.
“After reviewing this legislation for less than 24 hours, it is clear that our suspicions were well justified. The bill contains numerous examples of egregious pork barrel projects as well as hundreds of millions in spending that was never authorized by the appropriate Committee and not requested by the Administration.
“This is a preliminary, partial list of questionable spending that we have identified in the bill so far:
•Provides $65 million for Pacific Coast salmon restoration for states including Nevada, a program that even President Obama mocked in his 2011 State of the Union address.
•Directs the Department of Defense to overpay on contracts by an additional 5 percent (totaling $15 million) to contractors who are Native Hawaiian-owned companies.
•Provides $154 million for Army, Navy and Air Force ‘alternative energy research’ initiatives, the most recent notorious example of which was paying $26 per gallon for 450,000 gallons of alternative fuel.
•Provides $15 million for the Civil Air Patrol above the amount authorized by the FY 2013 National Defense Authorization bill, paid for by cutting the Air Force’s Operations and Maintenance funding. This is just two days after the Air Force announced that it will reduce pilots’ flying hours by 18 percent because of cuts to its Operations and Maintenance budget.
•Prohibits the retirement of the C-23 Sherpa aircraft, which the Army has asked to retire and which both the Army and Air Force no longer want or need. Last year, Congress granted the Army authority to give these aircraft to any state governor who wanted them and no one took them up on it, now we are preventing the Army from retiring them.
•Directly contravenes the FY 2013 National Defense Authorization bill by providing $120 million for civilian infrastructure in Guam, which both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees explicitly prohibited until a sufficient cost analysis of the proposed movement of troops from Okinawa to Guam is completed.
•Provides $14.7 million for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Watershed Rehabilitation Program, which the Administration has suggested eliminating for years.
•Provides $993,000 in grants to dig private wells for private property owners.
•Provides $10 million for the USDA High Energy Cost Grants program that go to subsidize electricity bills in Alaska and Hawaii.
•Provides $5.9 million for USDA ‘Economic Impact Initiative’ grants, which have become slush funds for local governments to do such things as rehab an exercise room and buy kitchen equipment for city government offices.
“The American people deserve better than this. Our men and women in uniform – whose livelihoods are today threatened by sequestration – deserve far better than what they’re getting out of Washington. I look forward to offering amendments and debating these issues on the floor of the Senate this week.”
Why should anyone or any company pay a penny more in taxes when the Feds are spending out tax money of garbage like this?
The NRCC is out with its new "waste list" which totals more than $18 billion. So what exactly is the government spending your money on? How about:
-$1 million on a fruit fly sexual attractiveness study
-$1.3 million for old fashioned x-rays of prisoners. x-rays of prisoners
-$1.5 million on designing a video game controller
-$100,000 on taxpayer funded comedy group tour in India
-$547,430 on a dancing robot that connects to an iPhone
-$25,000 funding a course about "How to be happy"
-$145,000 on a sculpture garden
-$25,000 on an Alabama Watermelon Queen tour
-$697,177 on a climate change musical
-$10,000 on talking urinal cakes (just in case the boys need some company or to prevent drunk driving)
-$35 million on an old fashioned trolly car
-$150,000 for a toy exhibit
-$320,000 for robot squirrels
-$1.4 billion in improper food stamps purchases which included alcohol, condoms, junk food and diapers
You can read the entire list here.
We can pay to study the sexual attractiveness of fruit flies and robot squirrels but by all means please, lets cut the working hours for Border Patrol to save some money.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepa...money-n1551772
