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The Waste List: 66 Ways The U.S. Government Is Blowing Your Hard-Earned Money
Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,
Why did the U.S. government spend 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly? Why did the U.S. government spend $175,587 "to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior"? Why did the U.S. government spend nearly a million dollars on a new soccer field for detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay? This week when I saw that the IRS was about to pay out 70 million dollars in bonuses to their employees and that the U.S. government was going to be leaving 7 billion dollars worth of military equipment behind in Afghanistan, it caused me to reflect on all of the other crazy ways that the government has been wasting our money in recent years. So I decided to go back through my previous articles and put together a list. I call it "The Waste List".
Even though our politicians insist that there is very little that can still be cut out of the budget, the truth is that the federal budget is absolutely drowning in pork. The following are 66 crazy ways that the U.S. government is wasting your hard-earned money...
#1 The IRS is about to pay out 70 million dollars in bonuses to employees even though discretionary bonuses are supposed to be cancelled due to the sequester.
#2 According to the Washington Post, the U.S. government is going to leave 7 billion dollars worth of military equipment behind in Afghanistan.
#3 It is being projected that the trip that the Obamas will be making to Africa will cost U.S. taxpayers $100,000,000.
#4 The NIH plans to spend $509,840 on a study that "will send text messages in 'gay lingo' to methamphetamine addicts to try to persuade them to use fewer drugs and more condoms."
#5 The National Science Foundation has given $384,949 to Yale University to do a study on “Sexual Conflict, Social Behavior and the Evolution of Waterfowl Genitalia”. Try not to laugh, but much of this research involves examining and measuring the reproductive organs of male ducks.
#6 The IRS spent $60,000 on a film parody of “Star Trek” and a film parody of “Gilligan’s Island”. Internal Revenue Service employees were the actors in the two parodies, so as you can imagine the acting was really bad.
#7 The NIH has given $1.5 million to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts to study why “three-quarters” of lesbians in the United States are overweight and why most gay males are not.
#8 The NIH has also spent $2.7 million to study why lesbians have more “vulnerability to hazardous drinking”.
#9 The U.S. government is giving sixteen F-16s and 200 Abrams tanks to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt even though the new president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi (a member of the Muslim Brotherhood), constantly makes statements such as the following…
“Dear brothers, we must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews, and all those who support them”
#10 During 2012, the salaries of Barack Obama’s three climate change advisers combined came to a grand total of more than $370,000.
#11 Overall, 139 different White House staffers were making at least $100,000 during 2012, and there were 20 staffers that made the maximum of $172,200.
#12 Amazingly, U.S. taxpayers spend more than 1.4 billion dollars a year on the Obamas. Meanwhile, British taxpayers only spend about 58 million dollars on the entire royal family.
#13 During 2012, $25,000 of federal money was spent on a promotional tour for the Alabama Watermelon Queen.
#14 The U.S. government spent $505,000 “to promote specialty hair and beauty products for cats and dogs” in 2012.
#15 NASA spends close to a million dollars a year developing a menu of food for a manned mission to Mars even though it is being projected that a manned mission to Mars is still decades away.
#16 During 2012, the federal government spent 15 million dollars to help the Russians recruit nuclear scientists.
#17 Over the past 15 years, a total of approximately $5.25 million has been spent on hair care services for the U.S. Senate.
#18 The U.S. government spent 27 million dollars to teach Moroccans how to design and make pottery in 2012.
#19 At a time when we have an epidemic of unemployment in the United States, the U.S. Department of Education is spending $1.3 million to “reduce linguistic, academic, and employment barriers for skilled and low-skilled immigrants and refugees, and to integrate them into the U.S. workforce and professions.”
#20 The federal government still sends about 20 million dollars a year to the surviving family members of veterans of World War I, even though World War I ended 94 years ago.
#21 The U.S. government is spending approximately 3.6 million dollars a year to support the lavish lifestyles of former presidents such as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
#22 During fiscal 2012, the National Science Foundation gave researchers at Purdue University $350,000. They used part of that money to help fund a study that discovered that if golfers imagine that a hole is bigger it will help them with their putting.
#23 The U.S. government is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority every single year.
#24 Federal agencies have purchased a total of approximately 2 billion rounds of ammunition over the past couple of years. It is claimed that all of this ammunition is needed for “training purposes”.
#25 During 2012, the National Science Foundation spent $516,000 on the creation of a video game called “Prom Week” which apparently simulates “all the social interactions of the event.”
#26 If you can believe it, $10,000 of U.S. taxpayer money was actually used to purchase talking urinal cakes up in Michigan.
#27 When Joe Biden and his staff took a trip to London, the hotel bill cost U.S. taxpayers $459,388.65.
#28 Joe Biden and his staff also stopped in Paris for one night. The hotel bill for that one night came to $585,000.50.
#29 If you can believe it, close to 15,000 retired federal employees are currently collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually. That list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.
#30 The U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent $300,000 to encourage Americans to eat caviar.
#31 The National Institutes of Health recently gave $666,905 to a group of researchers that is conducting a study on the benefits of watching reruns on television.
#32 The National Science Foundation has given 1.2 million dollars to a team of “scientists” that is spending part of that money on a study that is seeking to determine whether elderly Americans would benefit from playing World of Warcraft or not.
#33 The National Institutes of Health recently gave $548,731 to a team of researchers that concluded that those that drink heavily in their thirties also tend to feel more immature.
#34 The National Science Foundation recently spent $30,000 on a study to determine if “gaydar” actually exists. This is the conclusion that the researchers reached at the end of the study….
“Gaydar is indeed real and… its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features”
#35 In 2011, the National Institutes of Health spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
#36 The National Institutes of Health has spent more than 5 million dollars on a website called Sexpulse that is targeted at “men who use the Internet to seek sex with men”. According to Fox News, the website “includes pornographic images of homosexual sex as well as naked and scantily clad men” and features “a Space Invaders-style interactive game that uses a penis-shaped blaster to shoot down gay epithets.”
#37 The General Services Administration spent $822,751 on a “training conference” for 300 west coast employees at the M Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. The following is how the Washington Post described some of the wasteful expenses that happened during this “conference”…
Among the “excessive, wasteful and in some cases impermissable” spending the inspector general documented: $5,600 for three semi-private catered in-room parties and $44 per person daily breakfasts; $75,000 for a “team-building” exercise — the goal was to build a bicycle; $146,000 on catered food and drinks; and $6,325 on commemorative coins in velvet boxes to reward all participants for their work on stimulus projects. The $31,208 “networking” reception featured a $19-per-person artisanal cheese display and $7,000 of sushi. At the conference’s closing-night dinner, employees received “yearbooks” with their pictures, at a cost of $8,130.
You can see some stunning pictures of GSA employees living the high life in Las Vegas right here.
#38 Do you remember when credit rating agency Egan Jones downgraded U.S. government debt from AA+ to AA? Well, someone in the federal government apparently did not like that at all. According to Zero Hedge, the SEC planned to file charges against Egan Jones for “misstatements” on a regulatory application with the SEC.
Normally, the SEC does not go after anyone. After all, when is the last time a major banker went to prison?
No, the truth is that the SEC is usually just a huge waste of taxpayer money. According to ABC News, one investigation found that 17 senior SEC officials had been regularly viewing pornography while at work. While the American people were paying their salaries, this is what senior SEC officials were busy doing…
One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn, according to the report, which has yet to be released. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.
An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.
Another SEC accountant used his SEC-issued computer to upload his own sexually explicit videos onto porn websites he joined.
And another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.
#39 According to InformationWeek, the federal government is spending “millions of dollars” to train Asian call center workers.
#40 If you can believe it, the federal government has actually spent $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
#41 The U.S. Agency for International Development spent 10 million dollars to create a version of “Sesame Street” for Pakistani television.
#42 The Obama administration has plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars to help students from Indonesia get master’s degrees.
#43 The National Science Foundation spent $198,000 on a University of California-Riverside study that explored “motivations, expectations and goal pursuit in social media.” One of the questions the study sought an answer to was the following: “Do unhappy people spend more time on Twitter or Facebook?”
#44 In 2011, $147,138 was given to the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan. Their best magic trick is making U.S. taxpayer dollars disappear.
#45 The federal government recently spent $74,000 to help Michigan “increase awareness about the role Michigan plays in the production of trees and poinsettias.”
#46 In 2011, the federal government gave $550,000 toward the making of a documentary about how rock and roll contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.
#47 The National Institutes of Health has contributed $55,382 toward a study of “hookah smoking habits” in the country of Jordan.
#48 The federal government gave $606,000 to researchers at Columbia University to study how heterosexuals use the Internet to find love.
#49 A total of $133,277 was recently given to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games for video game preservation. The International Center for the History of Electronic Games says that it “collects, studies, and interprets video games, other electronic games, and related materials and the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography.”
#50 The federal government has given approximately $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their "research" into video games such as World of Warcraft.
#51 In 2011, the National Science Foundation gave one team of researchers $149,990 to create a video game called “RapidGuppy” for cell phones and other mobile devices.
#52 In 2011, $936,818 was spent developing an online soap opera entitled “Diary of a Single Mom”. The show “chronicles the lives and challenges of three single mothers and their families trying to get ahead despite obstacles that all single mothers face, such as childcare, healthcare, education, and finances.”
#53 Last year, the federal government spent $96,000 to buy iPads for kindergarten students in Maine.
#54 The U.S. Postal Service once spent $13,500 for a single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
#55 In 2011, the Air Force Academy completed work on an outdoor worship area for pagans and Wiccans. The worship area consists of “a small Stonehenge-like circle of boulders with [a] propane fire pit” and it cost $51,474 to build. The worship area is “for the handful of current or future cadets whose religions fall under the broad category of ‘Earth-based’, which includes Wiccans, druids and pagans.” At this point, that only includes 3 current students at the Air Force Academy.
#56 The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers $400,000 to study why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.
#57 The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
#58 The National Institutes of Health once spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.
#59 The National Science Foundation recently spent $200,000 on a study that examined how voters react when politicians change their stances on climate change.
#60 The federal government recently spent $484,000 to help build a Mellow Mushroom pizzeria in Arlington, Texas.
#61 At this point, China is holding over a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt. But that didn’t stop the United States from sending 17.8 million dollars in foreign aid to China in 2011.
#62 The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the largest snack food maker in the world (PepsiCo Inc.) a total of 1.3 million dollars in corporate welfare that was used to help build "a Greek yogurt factory in New York."
#63 The National Science Foundation recently gave a whopping $697,177 to a New York City-based theater company to produce a musical about climate change.
#64 The federal government once shelled out $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.
#65 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once handed researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
#66 The federal government has spent $175,587 "to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior".
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The US government has made an art of Blowing money. You could of made that list have 666 ways.
http://schiffblog.blogspot.ca/
Sen. William Proxmire (d) wisconsin [RIP]
Is smiling down from heaven.
The New "Golden Fleece" award list.
While the economy, Middle/Lower Class and Small Business struggle.
Your right it is hard to watch
Economic Picture - http://www.dailyjobcuts.com
-
Trip for the corrupt muslim and the wookie: $100,000,000.
Watching him make an ass of himself: priceless.
"Why did the U.S. government spend nearly a million dollars on a new soccer field for detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay? "
Seems like the least we could do; between water-boarding and indefinite detention without trial or representation.
Though I'm sure they are not allowed near it.
The argument was to close Guantanamo?
If you spend a million dollars on a football pitch I guess it is not going to be closed for a few decades is it?
Why should enemy combatants, caught out of uniform and who deliberately target civilians, be afforded any sort of trial or representation. I believe that by law they really could have been hung or shot on the spot. Skip the waterboarding, the footie, and the false moral whining from people who don't understand war the the price of winning. See, I solved the problem. No Gitmo, soccer field, or torture.
Do you know what the most immoral thing is about war? Losing.
.....today would require multiple fleeces and a staff of 50 to determine winners.....
Perhaps what we really need is a taxpayer revolt. Obviously our elected officials do whatever they fell like doing and we pay the bill.
It's hard to read this and not get pissed off.
Fuck these SEIU bureaucratic pukes!
#64 WTF
Part of the War on Drugs - I didn't believe it, so I did some fact checking, and it checks out as true.
Here's her page, proudly announcing that cocaine and quail really do mix:
I received my Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology in 1994 from the University of Texas, under the supervision of Michael Domjan. My dissertation research was on the conditioned anticipatory responses of male Japanese quail during sexual behavior. From 1994-1996, I continued this line of research as a postdoctoral fellow here at the University of Kentucky. I was hired as faculty after completion of my postdoctoral position, and am currently an Associate Professor.
The overall goal of my research has been to contribute to the understanding of learning mechanisms involved in motivated behaviors, in particular sexual behavior and drug-taking behavior. Both of these behaviors are heavily influenced by specific stimuli in the environment. Therefore, the main focus of my behavioral research has been on how various cues come to control and modify these highly motivated behaviors.[University of KENTUCKY]
And, although I'm pro-science, this is not how you explore the cocaine molecule and/or sexual stimulation of it.
Neurobiologists study lobsters to make undersea robots new and improved, but a few thousand lobsters need be sacrificed by the scientist. Nice work if you can get it granted.
You missed my point.
Neurobiologists are actually studying axons etc and how very crude neural nets can produce complex behaviours. (It also helps that no-one cares if you wire up / dissect lobsters too much, and they're not eating them). It's potentially very useful and lucrative (ask any undersea diver how dangerous pipe repair is, for instance).
Staring at a posh chicken on coke and noting if it's randy is NOT the same thing. She's a psychologist, which basically means: "shitty science". She's certainly not measuring anything like dopamine receptors or anything inside the quail's mind.
p.s. Spoilers: Coke makes you randy, less choosey and prone to more risk taking. I'll take my PHD in the mail.
Sounds like a great way for a researcher to get some free coke.
Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc'-ra-cy)
An American system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, whereby the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
The people receiving paychecks for these programs don't even know they are on welfare; which is what all this bullshit is.
I have a shirt that has ineptocracy and the definition as you posted.
I have a country with hordes living on these principles.
#67 - taxing me
couldn't we buy africa for $100 Million?
China is already well on its way to full ownership - with $US gotten by making all the 'stuff' consumed by Americans.
For some odd reason, the GAO (General Accounting Office) records on the cost of the Bush family’s Africa travels seem to have vanished. The media has contacted the GAO, but no specific numbers have been provided yet. President Clinton’s Africa trip in 1998 cost taxpayers $42.8 million. George W. Bush’s two trips five and ten years later were likely more expensive. .........
..........The reality is that presidential trips are expensive. It would be fair to be opposed to all of them, but the hypocrisy of only being outraged when certain presidents travel is unacceptable. George W. Bush appears to have had himself quite a little African spending spree, but apparently cost only matters when Barack Obama is the president who is doing the traveling.
Link
Just throwing gas on the fire - junk away ...........
OK I'll be nonpartisan. All the presidents' trips are a waste.
Because it's by design,the final chapter.
Much of this is slush fund payoff moneys. They are giving them funny titles to say," We stole it. What are you gonna do about it?"
DC needs an enema.
Ah, some red meat for the resident haterz....
I'll sit this one out....
Haters? What's to like about the federal govt? Seriously, what?
By the way, is does typing z instead of s make you cool, govt humper?
Someone must've spiked his after dinner cocktail with some koolaid.
No I was merely imitating the boetians here...
So, Smegley, why don't you live up to your handle and find some nice quiet place and wank to your heart's content and leave the heavy lifting to those that can....
PS Let me guess that the tidbits that most infuriated you were the ones having to do with climate change. Don't lie to me, come clean...
The climate changes - there, just saved the world a few trillion. 25000 years ago there was a mile of ice where Im sitting. Within the next 100,000 years it'll be back. The .023 of warming since humans have emitted carbon and the incredibly incorrect models that predicted doomday upon us tells me no one getting public money knows jack shit even though they walk around acting like climate Gods. You included.
We have a winner...
Do you just make shit up or simply sop up any bullshit that fits your preconcieved notions? Or is it a combination of both?
From what you wrote, it is very clear that you don't have a clue about what you talking about. Only a buffon trying to parrot some nonsense he heard on Fox News or the like would spout
without even realizing that it one step away from being word salad..
Well that's nice...
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/russiasyria-will-be-armed-with-wea...
Russia:”Syria Will Be Armed With Weapons That Have Never Been Seen Before In the Middle East”Last week, Noble Peace Prize winner President Barrack Obama advised that his administration would be arming the Free Syrian Army with weapons to resist the armies of Syria’s President Bashar Assad. Furthermore, they would look to implement a Libya-style no-fly zone over the country, which like Libya, would likely involve widespread carpet bombing of suspected military strongholds and control centers.
With boots on the ground around Syria’s borders, the United States is without a doubt preparing for widespread engagement across the region yet again, with the aim of the new U.S. supplied weapons being more killing and destruction in a civil war that has left tens of thousands dead in the last year.
It is the assumption of the Obama administration that these weapons will tip the scales of power in favor of the rebels, many of whom have been identified as members of America’s arch enemy, Al Queda.
But Russia’s KGB-hardened President Vladimir Putin has other ideas.
This week, according to a British intelligence report, Putin reportedly passed on a diplomatic communique to the United States and France using British Prime Minister David Cameron as the intermediary.
According to the report from Syrian-based Dam Press and the Dyar Newspaper, the Russians aren’t backing off their Syria policy and they are getting ready to double down by supplying Assad’s military with weapons the have never before been seen in the middle east.
If and when Western forces engage the Syrian army you can be assured that it will be nothing like the 1991 conflict in Iraq when a hundred thousand of Saddam Hussein’s soldiers surrendered without firing a shot. Nor will it be a no-fly zone free-for-all where air forces will be able to target military assets as they did in Libya without being challenged.
No, this time will be different.
This time, Russia and America may well being playing with fire. The kind that leads the people of this planet head first into World War III.
Global Research reports:
The Patriot Missiles will be hit and repealed with S 300 SAM [already installed in Syria]. Putin also threatened to deliver the more advanced S400 anti-aircraft missiles (see image below) far superior to the Patriot missiles and ranked as the World’s most advanced air defense system.
This is gonna be soooooooooooooo fun.
I see also that we have trained some US troops to do riot control in Egypt. How nice that we've so blatantly planted ourselves in their domestic security apparatus. Large sitting ducks.
#6?
Digging up half of New Jersey and Mid West to find a dead guy, i.e., Jim Hoffa. If FBI finds him they will just bury him again.
Jimmy Hoffa: an Inconvenient Truth
How else are they going to spend the money required to borrow to keep the financial industry running, now the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over?
I'd like to be blown 66 ways by the..
nevermind..
Michael, have you taken up any hobbies yet? Anything to cheer you up, even a little?
I worry about you, man..
Enjoy it while it lasts motherfuckers!
This is mostly based on Tom Coburn's work. As such, he definitely has an agenda, and definitely misses out a lot of RHINO / Elephant funded boondoggles, that's 100% for sure. He's also misunderstood a few of the science studies (for instance: his "World of Worldcraft" reference was actually about an educational NASA 'MMORPG' teaching kids science which is no bad thing; paying $150k for salamander culverts is actually a cost effective way of maintaining your waterways / ecology and so forth, no matter how silly it might sound, since it's a one off).
But yes, about 70% of these are pure waste, and I fact checked them to the original sources. Not a bad hit rate at all - we just need the Democratic sided one (that, of course, will only contain the Republican funded pork barrels) to get a decent picture.
You'll also notice none of these touch Military spending (apart from $7bil for Afgan draw-down, but that's largely 100% expected. If you need to know why, ask a military person) and foreign aid isn't touched. That's where the real money starts flowing.
p.s. Bear this in mind:
For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. [Independent]
I'm not saying that some of these aren't OPs, but some of these aren't OPs.
There never has been Foreign Aid. Read Michael Hudson's, Superimperialism, Naomi Klien's, Shock Doctrine and John Perkin's, Confessions of an Economic Hitman to learn that Foreign Aid is bank lending to buy off Third World governments and to steal the assets and natural resources of countries throughout the world. I used to think that Foreign Aid was a government give away until I learned that it was a BS term to hide the reality of what has been happening over the last sixty years.
I'm curious what lead you to the conclusion that I've not read all of those? Or that I couldn't add a far more impressive list to it?
Just wondering.
Oh, and if you want to know a dirty little secret of Klien's, look into her renting record in Canada, and how she got preferred lodgings in a very chique location without planning permits.
Be Seeing You.
great movie - and so under-rated in american cinema. go figure!
"you control the debt, you control everything."
You could easily expand this list to cover 6,666,666 items that they are hiding plus another million that Benny is paying for.
"Why" you ask? The plain and simple answer is moral bankruptcy.
Like the folks who know they're going to declare bankruptcy, they buy almost anything before they turn in their cards.
The federal government has spent $175,587 "to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior".
Neat! I'm going to apply for a $176K grant to determine whether cocaine causes an American goldbug to engage in sexually risky behavior.
give me 176k of cocaine
i'd bugger a 400 oz good delivery bar
twice....
Who was that senator that gave out the Golden Fleece award each year? Sen. William Proxmire (d) wisconsin.
If his comrades in CONgress won't change this wasteful spending, we need a different way of electing Representatives.
That's a problem that comes back in the peeples face real fast!
Here's a whopper...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cFdnUUxxigs
This is what happens when the "people" don't control the money supply...
Here's a beauty for you to add to this list...
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/irs-sent-46-million-in-tax-re...
Ok I think it's an ok article, and a fine issue to explore. But let's take a step back here. I'm pretty sure we're waaaay past the point of caring about "wasteful government spending."
"Iyf ye' don't liyk ut, you can leeve!"
/chewsstraw
jesus christ this country has been fucked for a long time. When are things coming to a head, already?
This, unfortunately, does not EVEN scratch the surface.........
This list really makes one mad at our dear government employees. How do people administering these programs sleep at night?
They stuff their pillows with payroll stubs.
#67 waste:
I’m working on a new Carbon Tax Bill. Each time I shit on the toilet, Michelle Obama will lick my ass and dispose of my bowl movement into a indentured species zone. I don’t want any animals around to disrupt the decaying process. My defecation deserves solitude by reuniting itself with nature.
/Sarc
Why the sarcasm tag?
Sure, $10,000 worth of talking urinal cakes are funny. But lists like these are just an amusing distraction from the truth that (by far) the largest percentages of government spending go to defense and old-age healthcare.
I just can't understand why that should be a bitching point at all
It would be cheap if it was an order of magnitude greater in light of what's being wasted on POTUS and the Veep.
How many $40 screws in there? Spend so much and get so little for it.
You have to admit the banks and gov have done a helleuva a job screwing us.
Um... Helloooo... 700 billion for bankers....
No, actually $23 Trillion. When 11 Trillion would have paid off every mortgage in the US.
Don't forget the $6 Trillion for expeditionary war in service to the Oil Industry, the Military Complex and the Banks. What about the billions of tax payer money to spy on the tax payers.
What about the missing 1.5 Trillion unaccounted for by the Pentagon and announced by Donald Rumsfeld the day before 911 and still not investigated.
spending money to promote cat grooming is the only thing on this list that I can justify.
Off topic, sorta, mostly, but true story. I was chcking my portfolio last night after having to be out all day during market hours. I have a few GS bonds in the portfolio that mature in 2018.
There price was 106.66 and are up in my account $666 and 6.66%....LOL, most fitting!
Is it still "waste" if it's being used to pay back people who contributed to the party?
Every "green" project that went under without anything for the US was a waste.
Why isn't the largest flow of money to the militery-industrial-security complex on the list. Or the war on drugs.
Selective whining, I guess.
If he would just go to africa and STAY it'd be worth it!
Is the trillion$ of dollar$ bailing out private bankster$(and yoking the American citizens to the resulting debts) over the last five years on this list?
How about the probably trillion$ of dollar$ subsidizing the Military, Industrial, 'Security' Complex since 2001?
Thousand$ and million$ on the rest are just chicken scratch compared to the above...
All the spending boondoggles above pale in comparison to paying fifty million people to sit around on their asses all day. Uh welfare.
This is what PSO .... Public Servant Oligarchy .... is all about .... and this is the frivolous spending !
Hey American Citizens. You got GUNS....
Fukin' use them before its too late.