The following sentence will be your only warning. If you have high blood pressure you should either, double up on your meds, or avoid reading this blog. Most people are aware that the government is confiscating a growing amount of our wages every year. We are also aware the government spends more than it takes in. We are told, repeatedly, by the government that it needs more of our hard earned money. We citizens need to start a different discussion. Instead of allowing D.C. to tell us which taxes must be raised, or what new taxes must be levied, we citizens must begin to say no to all of them. We must demand to know where our tax dollars are currently going. Whether it’s wasteful spending or a lack of interest in fixing expensive mistakes we must know who the culprits are. When we identify a wasteful program, or project, we must make an effort to find out who was responsible for the waste and put them out of work.
It is constructive to understand the enormity of a trillion. Just one quick example. If you spent $40 per second, around the clock, it would take 792.5 years to spend $1 trillion. The U.S. national debt currently stands at a little over $28 trillion. It is, for me, almost unfathomable. There are a couple of ways we could reduce our debt to zero. 1. If every man, woman, and child, in America sent a check to the U.S. Treasury for $90,000 the debt would disappear. How many of us could write a check of that size? 2. Perhaps we could get some assistance from our global brethren. Our national debt could be reduced to zero if we could get a check for $3,500 from every man, woman, and child, on EARTH. Hell, the majority of people on earth have never seen $3,500. Neither #1 or #2 are remotely possible. But this helps us get our arms around the irresponsibility of elected officials. We are in a deep fiscal hole, and they just keep on digging.
D.C.’s claims of a shortage pf money are NOT because of a lack of revenue. It IS because politicians won’t stop spending.. Don’t listen to what our lying politicians tell us. Look at the facts. American tax payers, you and I, sent more of our hard earned wages to D.C. in 49 of the last 55 years than we did the year before. In fact government revenues have more than quadrupled since 1978! And it still isn’t enough. Politicians are never as diligent as they should be when the money isn’t theirs. They don’t care when it is other people’s money (OPM).
What follows are a few examples of the “bets” that members of Congress make with our money. You can be sure they wouldn’t make the same bets with their own. The Inspector General of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management identified $120 million dollars a year in retirement benefits being paid to deceased federal employees. He said it had been happening for at least 5 years. I know how to fix this problem. Simply assign the problem to members of Congress. Tell them they can keep 50% of what they find. We changed just one dynamic. The wasted money would no longer be OPM. Problem fixed. We could save $1 billion a year if we could figure out how to stop sending Energy Efficient Home Improvement Tax Credits to people who don’t own a home. Easy to fix. More recently, the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee identified 2 areas of fraud. It found about $100 billion in fraudulent COVID-19 relief funds, and $3.5 billion in stimulus checks sent to people who didn’t qualify for them. About $72 million of those stimulus checks were returned by conscientious recipients. Good for them. We send tens of millions of dollars in tax returns to prisoners who weren’t employed. Taken individually these items don’t amount to a hill of beans in a multi-trillion dollar budget. But I found page after page of examples of this kind of waste. Together they represent huge sums of money. Money that could make life easier for millions of Americans.
From 2011-14 the Department of Defense (DOD) spent over $42 million to open a compressed natural gas station in Afghanistan. What? Congress mandated a commission to oversee reconstruction spending in Afghanistan. The commission asked the DOD to substantiate this spending. Their response was, “we don’t have the personnel to address these questions.” The civilian translation: SCREW YOU! If Congress cared, had it been their money, they would have demanded answers. Somebody put a lot of our money in their pockets, and the thieves walked away. It won’t make you feel better to know that fewer than 10% of the vehicles in Afghanistan are equipped to use compressed natural gas. Perhaps some of the $80 billion of equipment we surrendered to the Taliban will be able to use it.
That’s all in the past. How is D.C. overseeing our hard earned money today? To answer that let’s take a look at an expenditure being discussed by the Biden administration. Just this past week the Wall Street Journal reported a government plan to pay a specific group of illegal immigrants an estimated $450,000 each. Thus a parent and child would receive $900,000. By definition there must be at least 2 people, for separation to occur. This is a group of illegals, estimated at around 5,500 people, separated from their children in 2018. They came to our country illegally. They broke our laws. They have already cost us tens of thousands of dollars each. It cost law enforcers to capture, process, and detain, them. Then they had to be housed, fed, and clothed. If they needed medical care, they received it. When it came time to release them we picked up the tab for their transportation. These discussions about reparations can be had only when politicians regard the payments as Monopoly money, or OPM. To close this paragraph I want you to think about the reality of the proposed payments. An American citizen, earning $20 an hour, and working 40 hours a week, would have to work over 22 YEARS to earn $900,000. This is the height of fiscal irresponsibility.
As I am writing this blog Democrats in D.C. are proposing 2 new programs that have a total of 3 to 6 trillion dollar price tags. The details of those plans change from day to day. Therefore, it’s foolhardy to research either of them. When bills containing thousands of pages are put forth for debate it is axiomatic they will be replete with waste. It is not a question of whether there will be hundreds of billions of wasted tax payer dollars. The only question is: how many billions will be wasted? But does it really matter? Our dementia addled President thinks so little of we citizen’s intelligence that he tells us, with a straight face, that the two bills will not add a penny to the national debt. He tells us they will be paid for without any American, earning under $400,000, paying one penny in additional taxes. If our cognitively challenged President was the only politician saying such foolishness we might just write it off to confusion. Sadly, many Congressional Democrats, and the Left wing media, are actively aping these comments. We know that this is a lie. We know that legislation of this size cannot be enacted without having serious costs for most working Americans, and for America.
I have, deservedly so, hit Democrats pretty hard in this blog. To be fair, Republicans have been lousy watchdogs of tax payer money too. The only difference is that they choose to waste money on different things. There is no way we could find ourselves in a $28 trillion hole unless both sides had been derelict in their fiduciary responsibilities.
I hope you found this blog interesting and informative. If you did please tell your friends about it. Thank you, Bob