Preposterous Waste, Pentagon Style

National defense is one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government, but that doesn’t mean the military should get a blank check to spend unlimited amounts of money.

To make sure taxpayers get the best bang for the buck (no pun intended), there should be a sober assessment of threats to national security and a plan to defend against those threats without adding superfluous expenditures.

That being said, America already accounts for close to 50 percent of world military spending, with another 25 percent of the global total coming from nations that are allied to the United States, so I’m fairly confident that we’re not under-spending on the Pentagon.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t worry that much about the sequester, particularly since military spending actually climbs by about $100 billion over the next 10 years.

But I would like the Defense Department to have some flexibility to reallocate funds so that we spend money on national security rather than boondoggles.

And there are some absurd examples of waste at the Pentagon, including “green” jet fuel that costs 15 times as much as regular fuel. Here are some of the mind-boggling details from the Washington Examiner.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently warned that sequestration would cause “suspension of important activities, curtailed training, and could result in furloughs of civilian personnel” but the spending cuts haven’t killed the green fuels program, as the Pentagon has continued purchasing renewable fuel at $59 per gallon. “In March, Gevo entered into a contract with the Defense Logistics Agency to supply the U.S. Army with 3,650 gallons of renewable jet fuel to be delivered by the second quarter of 2013,” Gevo announced this week in its first quarter financial report. “This initial order may be increased by 12,500 gallons.

This is even worse than the bizarre $600,000 frog statue than the Defense Department selected to adorn a new $700 million office building.

I realize that the $700 million office building should be the bigger issue, but I can’t help but be irked by the thought that taxpayers are being raped and pillaged for the frog.

In any event, the $700 million for the office building is pocket change compared to the amount of money we misallocate to subsidize Western Europe to protect against a Warsaw Pact military alliance that no longer exists!

Yes, it’s true that America’s main fiscal problem is entitlement spending. And, yes, domestic discretionary spending is a bigger problem than the defense budget.

But wasting money in those areas is not a reason to also have waste at the Pentagon.

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The United Kingdom Boldly Rejoins the Government Incompetence and Stupidity Contest

I periodically compare the actions of brainless politicians and bureaucrats in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

One of the most bizarre examples I cited was from England. It showed how a local government decided to install the most pointless sign in the history of the world.

Our British friends are famous for their sense of humor (as illustrated by this glossary of financial terms and this guide to terror alerts in selected nations), so perhaps the sign was meant to be a joke.

Nonetheless, taxpayers picked up the tab.

And now we have another example of incomprehensible government stupidity. Taxpayers in one community just paid to have road markings painted in an alleyway.

I’m not kidding. Check out the photo and this excerpt from a BBC report.

Lines have been painted on both sides of the passageway, off Newhall Street in Swindon, leaving a gap of just 13in (33cm). Nathalie Fisher, a local resident, said it was a “bit of a mystery” as “you couldn’t even fit a motorbike down it.” …The council said local residents had asked the authority to “deal with illegal parking in alleyways”.

Gee, I hope the guy in the picture is being careful. He may get a traffic ticket since his left foot is almost on the double yellow line.

To be sure, I’m not sure this story means that U.K. government official are worse than U.S. government officials. Just look at some of these examples of PC-run-amok and you’ll have plenty of evidence of foolishness on this side of the Atlantic.

The moral of the story is that bureaucrats and politicians want to run our lives, but they’re some of the world’s least competent people.

P.S. While it’s amusing to highlight examples of government stupidity, let’s not forget there are real-life victims of bad government policy in the United Kingdom, particularly if you look at the healthcare system and welfare system.

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An Aggravating Reminder of Government Waste on Tax Day

Remember the Spending Quiz from 2010, which asked people to guess whether absurd examples of government waste were true or false?

Well, we have a new video on government waste, though bureaucrats and politicians have become so profligate it doesn’t even bother to trick people with fake examples.

While very well done, I do have two small complaints about the video.

First, it asks whether we should cut spending or raise taxes to deal with the national debt. I think that’s too narrow. We shouldn’t be wasting money even if the budget was balanced and there wasn’t a penny of debt.

In other words, the problem isn’t deficits. Red ink is just a symptom. The real problem is that government is too big.

Second, the video sort of acquiesces to the dishonest Washington terminology by asking whether we should cut spending or raise taxes, implying those are the only two options. I favor genuine spending cuts, of course, but the most accurate way of phrasing the question is to ask whether we should cut spending, restrain spending, or let government grow on auto-pilot.

As I explained earlier this year, we can balance the budget in just 10 years if spending grows “only” 3.4 percent per year. When people understand that detail, there’s almost no support for higher taxes.

But I’m nitpicking. Overall, a very good video.

P.S. If the examples of pork-barrel spending in the video get you angry, you’ll probably have a stroke if you also watch the waste video from the folks at Government Gone Wild.

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Question of the Week: Which Department of the Federal Government Should Be the First to Be Abolished?

I was asked last week which entitlement program is most deserving of reform.

While acknowledging that Social Security and Medicare also are in desperate need of modernization, I wrote that Medicaid reform should be the first priority.

But I’d be happy if we made progress on any type of entitlement reform, so I don’t think there are right or wrong answers to this kind of question.

We have the same type of question this week. A reader sent an email to ask “Which federal department should be abolished first?”

I guess this is what is meant when people talk about a target-rich environment.

We have an abundance of candidates, including the Department of Education, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, Department of Transportation, etc.

But if I have to choose, I think the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be first on the chopping block.

Raze the building and put a layer of salt over the earth to make sure it can never spring back to life

I’ve already argued that there should be no federal government involvement in the housing sector and made the same argument on TV. And I’ve also shared some horror stories about HUD waste and incompetence.

• HUD engages in racism and social engineering.
• Urban renewal projects destroy neighborhoods and foment corruption.
• HUD subsidies are grotesquely wasteful.
• There are epidemic levels of waste, fraud, and abuse at HUD.

Heck, I even made HUD the background image for my video on the bloated and overpaid bureaucracy in Washington.

It’s also worth noting that there’s nothing about housing in Article I, Section VIII, of the Constitution. For those of us who have old-fashioned values about playing by the rules, that means much of what takes place in Washington – including housing handouts – is unconstitutional.

Simply stated, there is no legitimate argument for HUD. And I think there would be the least political resistance.

As with the answer to the question about entitlements, this is a judgment call. I’d be happy to be proven wrong if it meant that politicians were aggressively going after another department. Anything that reduces the burden of government spending is a step in the right direction.

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Attack of the Taxpayer-Eating Zombie Bureaucrats

A regular feature on this blog is the government-stupidity contest between bureaucrats and politicians from the United States and the United Kingdom.

You can click here to peruse some of the most outrageous examples, including a couple of contestants from the private sector.

This has been a nip-and-tuck race for a long time, but the United Kingdom recently jumped into the lead with two jaw-dropping examples of moronic government behavior.

First, British bureaucrats took some kids away from their foster family because the parents didn’t believe in unlimited immigration, and, second, the U.K. government created a subsidy program that was so convoluted that not one single household in the entire country signed up for the goodies.

You know you’ve reached a special level of incompetence when a government is so bloody stupid that it can’t even give away money.

I was beginning to think the United States was doomed to also-ran status in this race.

But I should have known better. When it comes to finding creative ways to piss away other people’s money and make bone-headed choices, American politicians and bureaucrats are ready to meet the challenge.

This isn’t empty patriotism on my part. For proof, check out this Washington Examiner story about the federal government sending bureaucrats to a posh, $1,000-per-person conference, where they learned…I’m not making this up…how to respond to zombie attacks.

“Give…me…your…wallet”

When zombies attack, the Department of Homeland Security will be prepared. …money from the DHS’s Urban Areas Security Initiative went to buy snow cone machines in Michigan. Places like Fargo, N.D., and Keene, N.H., now have armored vehicles at their disposal, as do many other small towns. Keene said the vehicle was needed to protect its annual Pumpkin Festival. Arizona used $90,000 in DHS funding to install a video monitoring system at the Peoria Sports Complex, because apparently it is in the taxpayers’ interest to monitor the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres during spring training. …But if you think that’s waste, you need to know about the extraordinary training that the DHS was able to provide to first responders this year. They made attendance at the HALO Corp.’s 2012 Counter-Terrorism Summit an allowable expense for federal grant money. Yes, the California-based security company’s five-day event was held at a posh island resort and spa just outside of San Diego and cost $1,000 per person to attend, but that’s not even the best part. The showpiece event of the summit made was a live war game of a zombie apocalypse, complete with 40 actors in full zombie makeup as well as “state-of-the-art structure, pyrotechnic battlefield effects, medical special effects, vehicles and blank-firing weapons” according to a promotional video by HALO President Brad Barker. This enabled first responders to participate in a real-life “Dawn of the Dead” scenario and to know precisely what to do when their neighbors start trying to eat their human flesh.

As the Boy Scouts say, it’s best to “be prepared.” And thanks to federal tax dollars, the Department of Homeland Security is ready to defend us from a zombie attack.

I’m basically at a loss for words. Is anybody minding the store back in DC?

“Must…waste…more…money”

Why did this federal contractor think this was a good idea? Why did the Department of Homeland Security think it should be an allowable expense? Why did bureaucrats think it was a worthwhile way of spending their time?

There are no good answers – other than the fact that folks are far more likely to be frivolous and wasteful when they’re spending other people’s money. And that applies to the other examples cited in the excerpt above.

An armored vehicle to protect a pumpkin festival?!? If the taxpayers of Keene, NH, actually think the Canadians are about to sneak over the border and swipe some pumpkins, they should kick in a few bucks and hire an extra cop.

But so long as the kleptomaniacs in Washington are giving away our money, local governments have every reason to dream up ridiculous wish-lists.

No wonder the burden of government spending has reached record levels.

P.S. Don’t forget that the Department of Homeland Security was created during the Bush years. Another black mark on that statist period.

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Another Dismal Assessment of Obamanomics: United States Drops to 7th in WEF’s Global Competitiveness Index

Every year, I look forward to the annual releases of both Economic Freedom of the World and the Index of Economic Freedom. With their comprehensive rankings, these two publications enable interested parties to compare nations and see which countries are moving in the right direction.

As an American, I’m ashamed to say that these publications also show which nations are moving in the wrong direction. And the United States ranks poorly by this metric, having dropped from 3rd place to 10th place since 2000 according to Economic Freedom of the World.

The U.S. also has dropped to 10th place in the Index of Economic Freedom, and is now ranked only as a “mostly free” nation.

Some people dismiss these pieces of data because the two rankings are considered to reflect a pro-free market bias.

But the folks at the World Economic Forum surely can’t be pigeonholed as a bunch of small-government libertarians, and the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report shows the same trend.

The United States took the top spot in the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Index as recently as 2007 and 2008, but then dropped to 2nd place in 2009.

I think Bush bears the full blame for that unfortunate development. But the decline has continued in recent years, and Obama deserves a good part of the blame for the drop to 4th place in 2010.

The U.S. then fell to 5th place last year, in part because of horrible scores for “Wastefulness of Government Spending” (68th place) and “Burden of Government Regulation” (49th place).

Given this dismal trend, I opened the just-released 2012 Report with considerable trepidation. And my fears were justified. The United States has now dropped to 7th place.

Here is some of what was said about America.

The United States continues the decline that began a few years ago, falling two more positions to take 7th place this year. Although many structural features continue to make its economy extremely productive, a number of escalating and unaddressed weaknesses have lowered the US ranking in recent years. …some weaknesses in particular areas have deepened since past assessments. The business community continues to be critical toward public and private institutions (41st). In particular, its trust in politicians is not strong (54th), perhaps not surprising in light of recent political disputes that threaten to push the country back into recession through automatic spending cuts. Business leaders also remain concerned about the government’s ability to maintain arms-length relationships with the private sector (59th), and consider that the government spends its resources relatively wastefully (76th). A lack of macroeconomic stability continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness (111th, down from 90th last year).

For people who like to look at the glass as being 1/10th full, the U.S. does beat Portugal (116ht place) in the score for macroeconomic stability.

Here are a few additional highlights. Or lowlights might be a better word.

• The U.S. scores 42nd in property rights, behind Namibia and Uruguay.
• The U.S. ranks 59th in government favoritism, behind Guinea and Bolivia.
• The U.S. scores 76th in wastefulness in government spending, behind Mali and Nicaragua.
• The U.S. also is 76th in the burden of government regulation, behind Kenya and Thailand.
• The U.S. scores 69th in extent of taxation, behind Gambia and Ethiopia.
• The U.S. ranks 103rd for total tax rate, behind Greece (!) and Philippines.

Now time for some caveats. The WEF report is based on survey results, for better or worse, and it also probably is best characterized as a measure of the attitudes of the business community rather than an estimate of economic freedom.

Regardless of limitations, though, it is a good publication. As such, it is downright embarrassing to see the U.S. fare so poorly in key indices – particularly when third-world nations score better.

We know that small government and free markets are the keys to prosperity. Bush took us in the wrong direction, however, and Obama is repeating his mistakes.

So don’t be surprised to see the American score decline further as additional reports are issued.

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Welcome Instapundit readers. Thanks, Glenn. Since the declining score in the U.S. is partly due to poor fiscal policy, you may want to peruse this video primer on the size of government.

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Somebody Should Tell Politicians that the Military Budget is for National Defense, not Pork and Political Correctness

I agree with George Will that it’s okay to reduce Pentagon spending. After all, the United States accounts for almost one-half of the world’s military outlays, about twice as much as the combined total of possible enemies.

But I also agree that national defense is one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government, so I want to make sure we get the most bang for the buck (no pun intended) from every penny.

That’s why I get especially irritated when I read horror stories about Pentagon waste.

But in many cases, it’s not the fault of the Generals and Admirals. America’s military is forced to waste money because the politicians in Washington are motivated by cronyism, corruption, pork, and political correctness.

For example, let’s look at an excerpt from a column in the Washington Examiner.

Imagine you’re a legislator in a country with a bloated budget of almost $4 trillion and a record level of spending that requires massive deficits and could mean job-killing tax increases. Now imagine you’ve got a weapons program that is billions over budget, a decade behind schedule and unwanted even by those for whom it is intended. What would you do? If you said, “Earmark the program another $380 million,” you’re apparently qualified to serve on the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee. The weapons program is the Medium Extended Air Defense System, a joint venture with Germany and Italy that was zeroed out by three of four relevant congressional funding authorities. But the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense decided the program was worth a $380 million earmark, and the full committee passed the final bill along with a unanimous vote.

I’m not an expert on weapons systems. Heck, I know less about such matters than Obama’s cabinet knows about the economy. But it certainly seems foolish to throw good money after bad on a program that doesn’t work. Especially when the military doesn’t want it!

And here are a couple of sentences from a Forbes column about part of the military budget being diverted to subsidize solar power.

EPA regional headquarters?

The U.S. Army is looking for a few good renewable energy projects. Some $7 billion worth. On Tuesday the Army began accepting bids for green energy installations that will be deployed on military bases and facilities across the U.S. The Army will sign contracts to buy the electricity generated by solar, wind, geothermal and biomass projects for up to 30 years. …The program is part of a Department of Defense initiative to meet at least 25% of energy demand on its bases from renewable sources by 2025. The military is also aiming its bases to become “net zero” consumers of electricity – generating more power than they use by installing solar and other renewable energy systems.

Silly me. I thought the Pentagon was responsible for keeping the nation safe. I guess I missed the memo where it was tasked with being a tool for the green agenda.

These examples doubtlessly are just the tip of the iceberg. Politicians can’t resist turning anything they touch into a vehicle for graft, waste, and foolishness.

To be sure, there are also big picture issues of national security that have to be resolved. Is NATO now an anachronism, as Steve Chapman persuasively argues? Is overseas intervention a pointless exercise, as Mark Steyn explains?

But whatever the mission, the Pentagon’s ability to carry it out is compromised when politicians treat the military budget like a goodie bag.

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Great Moments in Government Waste

Every time some class-warfare Democrat or Charlie Brown Republican says we need higher taxes, I think of all the ways the government wastes money and I get angry because the political elite is ripping off the American people.

Should we send more money to Washington when the federal government is:

• Forcing taxpayers to pay millions of dollars for pro-Obamacare and pro-IRS propaganda.
• Doing interviews about erectile dysfunction for $6,000 each and sticking the tab on us.
• Hiring bureaucrats to monitor school lunches and replace healthy turkey sandwiches with processed chicken nuggets.

And those are just examples of nickel-and-dime programs. The bigger outrage is that politicians have created costly, inefficient, and bankrupt entitlement programs that threaten our fiscal future.

But the small examples have symbolic value, and now I have something new to add to the list. The idiots at the State Department thought it was just fine and dandy to pay 35 times the market price for some Kindles.

“Hey, let’s stimulate the economy by paying 35 times the retail price!”

IPads are too fancy, Nooks aren’t fancy enough, but Kindles are just right for teaching English, the State Department thinks, which is why it bought 2,500 of them from Amazon in a $16.5 million no-bid contract, NextGov’s Dawn Lim reports. That works out to $6,600 per Kindle Touch — a lot more than the $189 retail price. The plan, according to Kim, is to send the e-readers to “designated libraries and U.S.-friendly educational centers around the world.”

Since your paying for this ripoff, you might be a tad bit irritated. But that’s only because you’re an unsophisticated taxpayer. According to PR hacks, we really are getting a good deal because of all the extras in the agreement. Put down your coffee or soda before reading this passage from the report because I don’t want to be responsible for liquid on your computer screen.

Amazon is responsible for shipping the Kindles, providing 24-7 customer service, sharing data on how the Kindles are used to access content and pushing serialized content to the Kindles regularly. Amazon is also responsible for disabling “standard features, as as [sic.] requested by DoS, for the device such as individual purchasing ability.”

Wow, free shipping. That’s worth a lot. And the customer service surely adds a couple of bucks per unit, not to mention the extra pennies it must cost to disable features and provide electronic updates.

But let’s not be too hard on clueless bureaucrats. Maybe they just don’t understand high tech. After all, moronic government officials paid more than $22,000 each for big institutional Internet routers hooked up to just a handful of computers.

It’s almost enough to make you think government spending is the problem rather than the solution.

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Forcing Taxpayers to Pay for Government Propaganda

It’s not easy being a libertarian, especially if your job is to convince the looters and moochers in Washington that they should stop pilfering. The Cato Institute is a great place to work, to be sure, but my job is akin to standing outside an all-you-can-eat buffet and trying to convince the bloated patrons to munch on celery stalks instead of going in for a 3-hour binge.

To add insult to injury, almost all of my personal interactions with government are unpleasant.

• Governments pull me over and give me tickets for trying to efficiently drive from one location to another.
• Governments coerce me into filling out complicated tax forms in order to give politicians money that will be wasted on vote-buying scams.
• Governments make flying a miserable and time-consuming experience.
• Government officials from Amtrak treat people like pests and criminals rather than valued customers.

But even during my off hours, the annoying presence of government seems to follow me around. Driving back and forth to softball games this past weekend, I was irked that the radio was filled with vapid taxpayer-financed ads from fatherhood.gov and letsmove.gov.

The government apparently has so much money to burn that these empty bits of proselytizing were on conservative talk radio programs!

Now we have a new outrage to add to the list. President Obama is using $20 million of our money so a firm of PR hacks can promote Obamacare.

The Health and Human Services Department has signed a $20 million contract with a public-relations firm to highlight part of the Affordable Care Act. The new, multimedia ad campaign is designed to educate the public about how to stay healthy and prevent illnesses, an HHS official said. …The PR firm Porter Novelli won the…$20 million contract… Porter Novelli did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If this sounds familiar, it may be because the thugs at the IRS recently decided to squander $15 million on a contract to show the tax agency’s warm and fuzzy side. Interestingly, the same Porter Novelli firm got that contract, so they must specialize in sucking on the public teat. What a bunch of reprehensible leeches.

I’m sure there are many other examples of taxpayer-funded propaganda, though the only other two episodes that I recall writing about were the Census Bureau’s grotesque $2.5 million ad during the Super Bowl and dishonest television ads by Government Motors.

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Another Magnificent Moment in the World of Government Stimulus

Most of my work on government stimulus focuses on economic theory and evidence.

But every so often it’s a good idea to remind ourselves of the ridiculous ways that government wastes money.

Here are some details from a boondoggle in West Virginia.

Nobody told Hurricane librarian Rebecca Elliot that the $22,600 Internet router in the branch library’s storage closet was powerful enough to serve an entire college campus. Nobody told Elliot how much the router cost or who paid for it. Workers just showed up and installed the device. They left behind no instructions, no user manual. The high-end router serves four public computer terminals at the small library in Putnam County. …The state of West Virginia is using $24 million in federal economic stimulus money to put high-powered Internet computer routers in small libraries, elementary schools and health clinics, even though the pricey equipment is designed to serve major research universities, medical centers and large corporations, a Gazette-Mail investigation has found. …The Cisco 3945 series routers, which cost $22,600 each, are built to serve “tens of thousands” of users or device connections, according to a Cisco sales agent. The routers are designed to serve a minimum of 500 users. Yet state broadband project officials directed the installation of the stimulus-funded Cisco routers in West Virginia schools with fewer than a dozen computers and libraries that have only a single terminal for patrons.

Sounds like the government could have bought every user a laptop and squandered less money.

It’s important to realize that this type of boondoggle is the rule, not the exception. Every so often, we see stories about absurd waste, such as the $423,000 study to find out that men don’t like to wear condoms, the Pentagon spending $900 on a $7 control switch, or a $100,000 library grant to a city without a library.

We should get upset about these examples. But remember that the second cartoon in this post is exactly right. The waste, fraud, and pork that we find out about is dwarfed by what remains hidden.

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Great Moments in Government Waste: Stimulus Spending on…um…Stimulus

Two years ago, I posted a mildly inappropriate photo of an old guy protesting Obama’s faux stimulus.

I should have realized that no amount of satire can match the real-world stupidity of government. Here are some details, courtesy of an NBC station, about some squalid waste.

The NBC Investigative Unit has raised questions about two grants totaling nearly $1.5 million dollars distributed to the University of California San Francisco. The money was part of the federal stimulus program and went to studies into the erectile dysfunction of overweight middle aged men and the accurate reporting of someone’s sexual history. …According to the grant, a good portion of the study will “Improve the accuracy of responses to questions,” specifically questions about a person’s sexual behavior. …The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit discovered that for $1.2 million dollars, taxpayers funded a study that included 200 videotaped interviews at $6000 per interview. …Kovaleski then asked about jobs. “How many jobs did this $1.26 million dollars create?” “Well I can’t really say,” Sheehy said. “There were eleven researchers hired on the job, two consultants. Well I can’t say. This has not been evaluated for job creation.” The number Sheehy quoted during an interview with NBC Bay Area did not match information on recovery.gov, the government’s website for stimulus funds. According to the site, the grant produced 0.85 jobs. “It does make you scratch your head and wonder,” Amey said, “Wait a second taxpayer dollars went to a sex study that barely funded less than one person.”

I realize government spending is inherently wasteful, but even I’m shocked. Does it really cost $6,000 to interview someone?!?

Heck, I’ll interview overweight middle-aged men about erectile dysfunction and only charge $5,000 a pop. Actually, I don’t think I could do that without throwing up. Not because of the stories from the old guys, which probably wouldn’t be pleasant, but because I don’t believe in using the coercive power of government to steal from fellow Americans.

This may be even more absurd than the Social Security Administration giving disability payments to a 30-year old man because he wanted to wear diapers and live as an “adult baby.”

But I still think the all-time silliest waste of taxpayer money comes from Greece, where the bureaucracy demands stool samples from entrepreneurs who apply to set up online companies.

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Two Very Good GSA Waste Cartoons

One of my first blog posts back in 2009 featured a column about the Social Security Administration squandering $750,000 on a “conference” at a fancy golf resort in Arizona.

This is why I’m not surprised the GSA pissed away a lot of money at a Las Vegas resort. This is what people do when they spend other people’s money. Heck, this cartoon shows it better than I can say it.

Here’s a small sampling of similar outrages.

• A $423,000 study to find out that men don’t like to wear condoms.
• Disability payments to a grown man who wants to wear diapers and live as an “adult baby.”
•  The Pentagon spent $900 on a $7 control switch.
• Harry Reid’s subsidies for cowboy poetry.
• The Census Bureau’s $2.5 million ad at the Super Bowl.
• A $100,000 library grant to a city without a library.
• The IRS squandering $15 million on a P.R. campaign to improve its image.

The bureaucrats involved in all these outrages should be fired, or perhaps even charged with crimes such as malfeasance, but this cartoon reminds us that the real problem is the political class which appropriates the money that is then wasted by bureaucracies.

This cartoon was authored by Michael Ramirez, and you may know he is one of my favorites. To understand why,  see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

And this cartoon reminds us that every dollar of waste that gets publicized is just the tip of the iceberg.

I’m not familiar with Steve Breen, but he does lots of work like this, I’m sure I’ll be featuring more of his cartoons.

Thinking about all this waste, fraud, and abuse is a bit depressing, so let’s try to feel better by thinking about the ways that foreign governments squander taxpayer money, such as the UK government funding sex trips to Amsterdam, the Greek government rewarding pedophiles with disability handouts,  or the European Commission financing penile implants for senior politicians and bureaucrats.

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At Least the Federal Government Is Competent at Waste, Inefficiency, and Duplication

I sometimes get accused of being too libertarian. One leftist blogger even said my views are insane.

So I decided to show my open-mindedness by finding a way to praise big government. It took a bit of head scratching, but I think I discovered something that is impressive, sort of.

As you can see in this chart prepared by the Republican Study Committee, the federal government is remarkably effective at wasting money with duplication and featherbedding.

But I don’t want to be chintzy in my praise of the federal government. If you look at the areas where there is the most duplication and waste, you’ll find programs for energy, housing, and education – all of which are areas where the Constitution does not authorize spending and intervention by the federal government. So let’s also praise the politicians in Washington for their agility in sidestepping the system set up by the Founding Fathers!

And let’s not be shy about crediting the political elite for shoulder-to-the-grindstone diligence. It takes a certain dedication – or something like that – to continue to pour money into these programs when all the evidence suggests federal involvement in education has undermined outcomes, that federal housing programs helped cause the financial crisis, and that federal energy programs have become cesspools for cronyism.

I know I’m guilty of sometime posting absurd examples of government stupidity. I hope today’s post shows that I’m capable of looking at the positive side of government.

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Should the IRS Be Squandering $15 Million on P.R. Flacks to Improve its Image?

The overwhelming fiscal policy challenge for America is entitlement programs, as I explain in this set of videos. To protect America from becoming another Greece, we need personal retirement accounts for Social Security. We need vouchers for Medicare. And we need to block-grant Medicaid back to the states.

Real reform can give people more security and save taxpayers by reducing the burden of government spending by trillions of dollars over the next several decades.

But sometimes it is the comparatively tiny bits of spending that effectively illustrate the waste, stupidity, and venality of big government. Lets talk about how the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is squandering $15 million in a way that should drive taxpayers ballistic with rage.

Here are some disturbing details from the Wall Street Journal report.

The nation’s tax collector wants a “full service communications and marketing company” to help convey its “corporate vision and goals,” according to a 49-page solicitation sent to 12 agencies. The winner’s duties could include market research, educating the public about new tax provisions, and designing national information campaigns. The one-year contract could be extended for four more years, with a total value of as much as $15 million, the IRS solicitation says. PR firm Porter Novelli has had the contract for four years, but it reached the $17.5 million limit, IRS spokesman Terry Lemons said. …The IRS has relied on Porter Novelli to help inform taxpayers about some new laws and programs. Porter Novelli confirmed that the firm works with the IRS, but declined to comment further. Public relations experts said it would be an attractive challenge, given the agency’s unpopularity. …PR types said it’s technically possible to think of tougher marketing challenges — but not many. “Advancing the interests of the North Korean leadership at the moment would be harder than the IRS,” suggested Matthew Harrington.

Isn’t it wonderful that the IRS isn’t as despised as the North Korean dictatorship! I guess that’s because the North Korean government will sometimes kill you or starve you to death. The IRS, by contrast, only steals your money and occasionally gets you tossed in prison.

To show that I’m a public-spirited person, I’m going to save taxpayers $15 million by giving the IRS two good pieces of advice.

1) Obey the Constitution, which means respecting the presumption of innocence and following the Fourth Amendment’s guidelines about illegal search and seizure. I realize that complicates the job of enforcing a terrible tax code, but the Constitution exists precisely because the Founding Fathers thought some things were more important than “efficient” government.

2) Urge your overseers in the U.S. Congress to junk the internal revenue code and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax. The video below provides a simple explanation.

See how simple that was. No need to throw $15 million down the toilet of some politically connected PR firm.

Enjoy the video.

And here’s another video documenting the onerous compliance burden of the current system and explaining how that flat tax would de-fang the IRS.

Seems like such a good idea that only people who benefit from the current system would be opposed. Unfortunately, that describes the political class, upon which we’re relying to get such reforms.

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Thanks to these Horror Stories of Stupidity and Incompetence, Prepare to Downgrade Your Opinion of Big Government

While I’m obviously not a fan of big government, I have mixed feelings about why the public sector is so blindly wasteful.

Is it because politicians and bureaucrats are well-intentioned morons who accidentally do damage (as illustrated by this cartoon), or is it that they are venal vultures looking to grab as much loot as possible before the house of cards comes crashing down (powerfully demonstrated by this example)?

The answer is probably a combination, so the real challenge is figuring out whether specific examples of government stupidity fall into one category or another.

Let’s look at three recent examples.

First, we have a story from the surveillance state known as the United Kingdom.

On a cold, dark night on the mean streets of the UK, an undercover police officer was radioed and informed that a potential suspect was close by. Keen to do the right thing, he set off in hot pursuit. Twenty fraught minutes later, he learned he’d been chasing… himself. The CCTV operator reported to police that someone was ‘acting suspiciously’, according to The Telegraph. Unfortunately, the officer who decided to follow up on the report was actually the shadowy figure in question. …The poor guy doing the chasing reassured the CCTV operator that he was “hot on the heels” of the suspect. Uh, at least until the police officer’s boss turned up in the CCTV control room and recognized him.

This definitely falls into the incompetence and stupidity category. Why didn’t the camera operator figure our that there was only one person on the screen. Then again, I once spent a minute or so looking in my bedroom for a cell phone that I was holding in my left hand, so I don’t want to be overly judgmental.

So let’s look at another case of government in action. Indeed, this could become the start of a new TV program: The Fart Police.

Harold Wayne Hadley, Jr., 19, was arrested at a Mississippi junior college after he allegedly wrote a note on a piece of toilet paper on Tuesday, containing the word ‘bomb,’ according to Weirdnews.net. The note prompted 11 emergency agencies to respond to the school, but there was no bomb. Hadley and his family contend that he was only explaining the joy of flatulating in the library. “He was in the restroom doodling on some toilet paper … we are from the country, and he calls passing gas, bombs,” said Hadley’s aunt, who wouldn’t give her name to WDAM. ”[He] put ‘I passed a bomb in the library,’ talking about passing gas, and somebody came in and found it, gave it to a teacher that recognized his hand writing and it blew all out of proportion.” …Hadley was arrested and held on $20,000 bail. If convicted of threatening to blow up the school, he faces 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine,according to WAPT.

Part of me wants to forgive this example of government excess. After all, we live in a post-Columbine world and I suppose schools have to plan for the worst in case they have unstable Anthony-Weiner-type students.

But then I notice two things in the story that set off alarm bells, beginning with the fact that 11 government agencies responded. If that doesn’t tell you right away that we have too many government bureaucracies and too many bureaucrats with nothing to do, then you must be in a coma.

The other thing I noticed is that a teacher recognized the student’s handwriting. So if that was true, why didn’t someone contact the student before going nuclear on the situation?

Last but not least, let’s look at an example of government misbehavior that defies description.

[A] West Hoke Elementary School student was in her More at Four classroom when a state agent who was inspecting lunch boxes decided that her packed lunch — which consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice and potato chips — “did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines,” the Journal reports. The decision was made under consideration of a regulation put in place by the the Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services, which requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs to meet USDA guidelines. “When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones,” the Journal reports. The student’s mother told the Journal she received a note from the school about the incident and was charged $1.25 for the cafeteria tray, from which her daughter only ate three chicken nuggets. …The mother, who was not identified in the report, expressed concern about school officials telling her daughter that she wasn’t “packing her lunch box properly.”

This is downright horrifying, perhaps even more disgusting than any of these stories of government malfeasance and idiocy. Several questions come to mind.

• Is the bureaucracy so bloated that we have food police in schools?
• Why is the Department of Agriculture preparing food guidelines?
• Why is there a Division of Child Development and Early Education
• More important, why is there a Department of Health and Human Services?
• When did the nanny state get the power to overrule parents on what kids eat for lunch?
• And why are pencil-neck bureaucrats in charge of lunch box packing etiquette?

I rarely comment about religion on this blog, but reading this story almost makes me hope there’s no such thing as Heaven. That’s because I would hate to think our Founding Fathers are looking down from above and seeing what has happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

P.S. I’ll re-ask the question I posed last year: Why should we ever agree to more taxes when politicians and bureaucrats do such a rotten job with the money we’re already giving them?

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Penile Moments in Government Waste

It’s not often that I get to use the word “penis” on a public policy blog. But with my juvenile sense of humor, I exploit such opportunities whenever they arise.

• I wrote about an unfortunate guy who had his you-know-what amputated thanks to the incompetence of Sweden’s government-run health care system.
• I commented on the nanny-state mentality behind a campaign to ban circumcisions in San Francisco.
• I posted three wretched examples of welfare state waste, including the fact that Uncle Sam has spent about a quarter-billion dollars on penis pumps in the past decade.

And I also managed to produce a couple of posts with the word “penile.”

• I noted that European taxpayers were paying to provide politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels with coverage for penile implants.
• I expressed amazement that the U.K. government decided it is a human right to have taxpayer-financed sex trips to Amsterdam.

These are such good examples that you may be wondering what I could do for an encore.

Well, when the federal government spends about $4 trillion per year, much of it pissed away (pun intended) on useless and counterproductive programs, it’s just a matter of time before we find another example.

In this instance, we return to the world of taxpayer-financed penis pumps. Here are the relevant parts of an AP report.

An Illinois man was sentenced Friday by a federal judge in Rhode Island to more than three years in prison for shipping unwanted penis enlargers to diabetes patients as part of a larger fraud scheme that prosecutors say bilked $2.2 million from Medicare over four years. …Winner purchased penis enlargers for an average of $26 each from online sex shops and then repackaged and shipped them to patients… Winner targeted Medicare beneficiaries…and persuaded patients to provide their Medicare information by offering free medical equipment and supplies, prosecutors said. …Winner then charged Medicare an average of $284 each for a total of $370,305, authorities said.

I cite this story not because I’m shocked that somebody bilked the government, but rather because it should irritate all taxpayers that it takes so long for the bureaucrats to figure out what’s happening.

My credit card company periodically will block my account, especially when I’m traveling, because of unusual transactions. But the federal government will blindly reimburse fraudsters for years.

The most powerful part of the story, though, is the way that Mr. Winner justified his crimes.

When employees confronted Winner about sending out supplies regardless of need, authorities allege he responded: “It doesn’t cost the client anything as the government is paying for it, and that the government would just print more money, so order more.”

He managed to combine the ills of third-party payer, government dependency, fiscal profligacy, and irresponsible monetary policy in one sentence.

This guy belongs in Washington. Heck, he’s qualified to be a member of the Obama cabinet!

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Can You Identify the Most Egregious Example of Wasteful Spending by the Welfare State?

I’ve commented many times about wasteful government spending, including Social Security bureaucrats spending $700 thousand to party at a luxury resort, HUD bureaucrats giving huge subsidies for welfare recipients to live in upscale neighborhoods, rampant fraud in the unemployment insurance program, and tax dollars being used to subsidize a grown man wearing diapers and living as an “adult baby.”

Those are depressing examples, but here are three additional stories that may be even worse. They all show how entitlement programs squander other people’s money.

1. A local news outlet in Oregon revealed that recipients can use food stamps to buy luxury products:

Oregon Trail Cards — which are part of the state’s food stamp program — can be used to purchase luxury coffee concoctions at Starbucks counters inside grocery stores, investigators from Fox 12 in Oregon have discovered. …According to federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) guidelines, people cannot buy foods that will be eaten in the store or hot foods. However, luxury items that are allowed include soft drinks, candy, cookies, ice cream, even bakery cakes and energy drinks that have a nutrition facts label.

2. Benjamin Domenech of the Heartland Institute reports that hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on penis pumps:

According to data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare has spent more than $240 million of taxpayer money on penis pumps for elderly men over the past decade, and will surpass a quarter of a billion dollars this year for costs since 2001. The cost to taxpayers for the pumps more than quadrupled during that period… And these represent only the costs for external devices, technically classified as “Male Vacuum Erection Systems,” not implantable devices or oral drugs such as Viagra.”

3. A Seattle TV station has an expose about a woman receiving various forms of welfare even though she lives in a million-dollar home.

Search warrant documents unsealed Friday in federal court reveal that she received more than $1,200 a month in public housing vouchers, plus monthly cash from the federal and state government for a disability, as well as food stamps. Property records show the woman lives in a 2,500 square-foot home, with gardens and a boat dock, that is valued at $1.2 million. Records show she has received welfare benefits while living in the plush home since 2003. Records also show she truthfully provided her address when she applied for benefits.

These are the stories that I keep in mind every time I hear some politician whining that “spending has been cut to the bone” and higher taxes are needed.

P.S. I’m happy to report that American taxpayers were not victimized by the all-time record for the most absurd example of government waste, which took place when British taxpayers financed sex trips to Amsterdam for welfare recipients.

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Big Spenders Gone Wild

Last month, I shared a video about bloated bureaucracy from a group called Government Gone Wild.

That generated a big response, so here’s another video from the same group, only this one looks at egregious examples of government waste.

If you like videos on wasteful spending, but prefer a more attractive narrator, click here.

And if you want a video that looks at the economic cost of excessive government spending, watch this mini-documentary on the Rahn Curve.

We’ve reached a point where even economists from the welfare state of Sweden are producing studies showing there’s a negative relationship between government spending and economic performance.

One can only hope this message seeps through the thick skulls of the political class before it’s too late.

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The Federal Budget Process and Bureaucratic Incentives, Nicely Captured by a Cartoon

I’ve done a video on excessive compensation for bureaucrats and I’ve written many times about wasteful spending, but here’s a cartoon that manages to effectively combine both concepts.

If your eyes are getting old like mine, you may need to click on the image to read everything.

This cartoon is good, but here’s another that is remarkable because it does capture the mindset that exists inside the government.

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Per Dollar Spent, OECD Subsidies May Be the Most Destructively Wasteful Part of the Federal Budget

I’m not a fan of international bureaucracies.

I’ve criticized the United Nations for wanting global taxes. I’ve condemned the International Monetary Fund for promoting bigger government. I’ve even excoriated the largely unknown Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for misguided regulations that contributed to the financial crisis.

But the worse international bureaucracy, at least when measured on a per-dollar-spent basis, has to be the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

OECD Headquarters: Living the good life at US expense

American taxpayers finance nearly one-fourth of the OECD’s budget, at a cost of more than $100 million per year, and in exchange we get a never-ending stream of bad policy recommendations.

This Center for Freedom and Prosperity study has all the gory details. The OECD bureaucrats (who get tax-free salaries, by the way) endorsed Obamacare, supported the failed stimulus, and are big advocates of a value-added tax for America.

What’s especially frustrating is that the OECD initially was designed to be a relatively innocuous bureaucracy that focused on statistics. Indeed, it was even viewed as a free-market counterpart to the Soviet Bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

My, how things change.

Perhaps the most odious example of bad OECD policy is the campaign against tax competition. Beginning during the 1990s, the OECD has attacked low-tax jurisdiction for the supposed crime of having good tax laws that attract jobs and capital from high-tax nations such as France and Greece.

So why did the OECD launch this project to prop up Europe’s welfare states?  The answer can be found in an excellent new study from Professor Andrew Morriss at the University of Alabama Law School and Lotta Moberg, a Ph.D student in economics at George Mason University.

It’s a publication designed for academic journals, but it avoids jargon and gibberish, so a regular person can read and understand how the OECD has morphed from a harmless (though presumably still wasteful) bureaucracy into a force for global statism. Here are some of the key findings in the study.

…this transition was in part the result of entrepreneurship by a group of OECD staff, who spotted an opportunity to expand their mission, bringing with it a concomitant increase in resources and prestige. They accomplished this by providing a framework for interests within a group of high tax states to create a cartel that would channel competition in tax policy away from areas where those states had a competitive disadvantage and toward areas in which they had a competitive advantage. …These states then sought to restrict tax competition, which in turn required them to create a means of delegitimizing such competition and by preventing each other from defecting from the cartel by lowering tax rates unilaterally. …The French…realized that single-country financial controls were unworkable within a global financial system.

In other words, the bureaucrats at the OECD and governments from decrepit welfare states like France both saw a benefit in creating a tax cartel.

This “OPEC for politicians” is grossly contrary to good tax policy, international comity, and national sovereignty. But those factors didn’t matter.

Unfortunately, it’s quite likely that we will see further schemes from the OECD and other international bureaucracies. The politicians have learned that transnational cartels increase their power.

…the evolution of the OECD from a facilitator of economic competition to a cartel enforcer represents something new in international organization behavior. …The cartelization of tax policy is an important effort to hold off the impact of the forces unleashed by competition on a more level playing field, but it is certainly not the only one. …If the opportunity is provided, it may be better from a politician’s point of view to form a cartel on taxation as a protection. With a cartel, there are fewer constraints on domestic policy, improving the politicians’ welfare by increasing the degrees of freedom available to satisfy domestic constituents and win re-election.

This video has more information on why the OECD is contrary to the interests of American taxpayers.

Needless to say, it is outrageous that the politicians in Washington are sending more than $100 million to Paris every year to subsidize this bureaucracy. For all intents and purposes, we are being coerced into paying for a bunch of European bureaucrats so they can then advocate even bigger government in the United States.

And those bureaucrats get tax-free salaries why pushing for higher taxes for the rest of us!

Can anyone think of a more destructive item in the federal budget, at least when measured on a per-dollar-spent basis? I can’t. That’s why I’ve been fighting the OECD for years, even to the point that the bureaucrats threatened to put me in a Mexican jail for the “crime” of standing in the public lobby of a public hotel.

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More “Success Stories” from the So-Called Stimulus

Wow.

Even by the low standards of government, here are a couple of remarkable stories about government waste from Obama’s failed stimulus scheme.

Let’s start with an example of crony capitalism. The federal government decided to subsidize the wealthy shareholders of company working on an electric car. That’s not too surprising. After all, politicians have been bilking taxpayers for the benefit of well-connected campaign contributors for centuries.

But you would think the Obama White House would at least be smart enough to give money to companies that create jobs in America (such jobs, of course, are offset by jobs destroyed in the private sector). But, as ABC News reports, that was not the case.

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work. Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department’s $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland. …The loan to Fisker is part of a $1 billion bet the Energy Department has made in two politically connected California-based electric carmakers producing sporty — and pricey — cutting-edge autos. Fisker Automotive, backed by a powerhouse venture capital firm whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore, predicts it will eventually be churning out tens of thousands of electric sports sedans at the shuttered GM factory it bought in Delaware. And Tesla Motors, whose prime backers include PayPal mogul Elon Musk and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Amazing.

Let’s now travel to Oregon, where taxpayers were coerced into subsidizing more jobs for foreigners. Here are the sordid details from the DC Examiner.

A Labor Department Inspector General report released this week found that $7,140,782 in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds went to four Oregon forestry services firms who hired no U.S. workers. From the report:

Only two Oregonians were listed on the employer recruitment reports, indicating that workers in Oregon were likely unaware these job opportunities were available. In fact, although 146 U.S. workers were contacted by the three employers regarding possible employment, none were hired. Instead, 254 foreign workers were brought into the country for these jobs.

…Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., who asked the OIG to investigate the program in September 2010, was also displeased: “The goal of the stimulus bill was to put Americans back to work, not foreign nationals. … Oregonians have been logging for over a century, our workforce is one of the best in the world, and these contracts should have been awarded to companies that hire Oregon loggers.”

You’d almost think, after reading stories like this, that government was incompetent at being incompetent. And you’d be right.

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Social Security Administration Sides with “Adult Baby,” Dumps Diaper Contents on Taxpayers

I must not be very bright. Even after decades of experience in Washington, I still have this naive belief that bureaucrats and politicians will occasionally do the right thing – even if for no other reason other than to cover their rear ends after being caught doing something flagrantly wasteful and reprehensible.

So when Senator Coburn of Oklahoma put pressure on the Social Security Administration for giving disability payments to a 30-year old man whose only “disability” is that he wants to live life as a baby, I thought the bureaucrats would feel compelled to stop subsidizing this oddball moocher.

I was wrong.

I should have known better. After all, why would bureaucrats care about saving taxpayer money? Here’s a brief blurb from the depressing story in the Washington Times.

The California man who lives part of his life as an “adult baby” and collects Social Security disability payments says the federal agency has cleared him of wrongdoing and will continue sending checks. Stanley Thornton Jr. now wants an apology from Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who called for the benefit review… “We recently reviewed the evidence in your Social Security disability claim and find that your disability is continuing,” the agency said in an August letter that Mr. Thornton posted on the website he maintains to document his adult baby lifestyle.

Stories like this reinforce my deeply held belief that it would be crazy to let the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington get even one penny of additional tax revenue.

We have a corrupt and dysfunctional political class in America, and the last thing we should do is encourage their venal actions by giving them more money to waste.

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Report from World Economic Forum Gives U.S. Poor Grades for Wasteful Spending and Burdensome Regulation

The latest issue of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report contains some rather damning information about government incompetence in the United States.

America ranks only 68th in the “Wastefulness of Government Spending” category (page 373) and 49th in the “Burden of Government Regulation” category (page 374).

Singapore, by contrast, ranks first in both of those categories. So is anyone surprised, then, by this chart showing that Singapore’s economy grew rapidly between 1950 and 2008?

Indeed, the World Bank’s 2010 data shows that Singapore has surpassed the United Stated, with per-capita GDP of $54,700 compared to $47,020 in America.

But the point of this post isn’t to decide whether Singapore is richer than the United States. Instead, the moral of the story is that small government and free markets are a recipe for strong growth and rising levels of prosperity.

By the way, the Global Competitiveness Report relies on survey data to prepare its rankings, so I’m a bit skeptical of the findings. American politicians are experts at wasting money and imposing senseless red tape, to be sure, but is America really worse than Ghana and Azerbaijan?

That being said, perceptions are important. And since the overall burden of government has rapidly climbed during the Bush-Obama  years, low scores of some kind are deserved.

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Is Pentagon Waste Even More Egregious than Welfare-State Waste?

I realize that national defense is one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government, but that doesn’t mean the Pentagon budget isn’t riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse.

Here’s a jaw-dropping example reported by Bloomberg.

A U.S. contractor in Iraq overbilled the Pentagon by at least $4.4 million for spare parts and equipment, including $900 for an electronic control switch valued at $7.05, according to a new audit. Based on the questionable costs identified in a $300 million contract with Dubai-based Anham LLC, the U.S. should review all its contracts with the company in Iraq and Afghanistan, which total about $3.9 billion, said Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen. “The audit found weak oversight in multiple areas that left the government vulnerable to improper overcharges,” Bowen wrote in the forward to his 30th quarterly report, released today. The contract in question was funded with a combination of money earmarked for Iraqi Security Forces and Army operations and maintenance funds. Among the “egregious examples of overbilling” by Anham were $4,500 for a circuit breaker valued at $183.30, $3,000 for a $94.47 circuit breaker and $80 for a small segment of drain pipe valued at $1.41.

Those mark-ups are absurd, but I wonder whether this example from the story is even worse.

In other cases, Anham used subcontractors to purchase items that could have been bought directly from the manufacturer at lower prices, the report said. When Anham was asked to buy a loudspeaker system to alert warehouse employees of any danger, it chose not to buy the system directly from the manufacturer at the retail price of $44,615, the report said. Instead, Anham sought bids from subcontractors and paid a company called Knowlogy $90,908. That price included $20,000 for installation, even though the system setup meant little more than wheeling it into place and plugging it in.

I think I made a mistake becoming a policy wonk. I could have a great career as a loudspeaker installer.

On a more serious note, it would be nice if governments didn’t squander so much money. Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad if some people went to jail for these rip-offs of taxpayer money.

And let’s not forget that the bigger issue is whether the national security of the United States is advanced or undermined by nation building in the Middle East. Or remaining in alliances such as NATO that lost their raison d’être when the Warsaw Pact disappeared 20 years ago.

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Just in Case You Need One More Reason Why the Department of Housing and Urban Development Should Be Abolished…

Welcome Instapundit readers. If you want to get even more upset, here’s a big list of posts about waste, fraud, and abuse, including one about Social Security bureaucrats enjoying a $700,000 junket and another about a lawyer getting $25,000 of “stimulus” money for writing a two-sentence memo.

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While I’ve been somewhat critical of Senator Coburn’s willingness to raise taxes, I’ve never doubted that he is a sincere and tireless fighter for smaller government.

Indeed, his staff periodically share examples of government waste that boggle the mind, though I don’t share many of them on the blog since I’m afraid people will become desensitized to the sleazy boondoggles that are so beloved by lawmakers.

However, the last email from Senator Coburn’s office included a story that shows, in a rather remarkable fashion, how a bloated federal government has a corrupting impact on the rest of society.

According to a Wisconsin newspaper, a local governments is trying to “sell” federal funds, sort of like how I used to scalp football tickets as a student.

River Hills, Milwaukee County’s richest suburb, has found little use for what has become an annual allocation of about $20,000 in federal community development block grant money. So village leaders instead have cut deals with other suburbs to lend or transfer the grant money and have even sought unsuccessfully to sell the River Hills block grant allocation to another community. …Assistant Corporation Counsel John Jorgensen said selling the HUD allocation wouldn’t break any rules or laws, as long as the grant money is used for allowable projects. In a memo to county supervisors, Jorgensen said his opinion matched advice he’d gotten from local HUD officials. But Sullivan said the Milwaukee field office had questioned the practice in the past. Officials from the Milwaukee office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has always been near the top of my list of government entities that should be shut down. This latest scam is merely the cherry on the ice-cream sundae of the argument to eliminate HUD as soon as possible.

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The Transatlantic Government-Incompetence-and-Stupidity Contest: The U.S v. U.K.

Last week, we compared a bone-headed display of incompetence by the German government with a perverse form of harassment by a local government in the United States.

We have another America-v-Europe contest, but the roles are reversed. This time, the buffoons in Washington get dinged for a spectacular screw-up, and it is a local government in England that earns ridicule for a brainless decision.

Let’s start in America, where a Virginia newspaper has the gory details, including this excerpt.

They are the two ships no one wanted, almost constantly embroiled in one dispute or another for the past 25 years. The two Navy behemoths have never gone on a mission, were never even completed, yet they cost taxpayers at least $300 million. Now the vessels, the Benjamin Isherwood and the Henry Eckford, are destined to leave Virginia waters for good and be scrapped at a Texas salvage yard, with no money coming back to the U.S. Treasury.

Isn’t that wonderful. A $600 million disbursement of tax dollars, getting absolutely nothing in exchange. Though I suppose that’s better than some other federal expenditures that have negative rates-of-return.

Now let’s turn to the United Kingdom, where a local government put a keep-off-the-grass sign on a plot of grass so small that it would be a challenge for two people to stand in it. Here are the key passages from a Daily Mail story.

It’s a patch of scruffy grass barely big enough to sit down on – but that hasn’t stopped one town hall making a great deal of fuss about it. The verge measures only 3ft by 2ft but has its own ‘Keep Off The Grass’ sign. The warning has appeared as officials plan £70million of cuts. Resident Tom Beardmore, 29, said he was ‘flabbergasted’ when he saw it in Raynes Park, south-west London. …A council spokeswoman said the matter was being looked into but was unable to confirm how much the sign had cost or why it was placed there.

Maybe I’m just being jingoistic, but I think the Brits win this contest. Yes, the American government flushed a lot more money down the toilet, but there is something truly breathtaking about what happened in London.

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The Never-Ending Government Fraud Racket

Here’s a great example of family values, but only if you think it’s noble for a husband, wife, and daughter to conspire together to rip off taxpayers. I guess the family that steals together, stays together.

Here are some of the details from the Daily Caller expose.

A special investigation by The Daily Caller has discovered that a State Department contract specialist participated in awarding more than $52 million in taxpayer-funded contracts to a company owned and operated by her husband and daughter. Kathleen McGrade helped their company, Sterling Royale Group, win 43 federally funded contracts over the last few years. McGrade acted as the Contracting Officer (CO) for awards to Sterling Royale Group. McGrade’s husband, Brian Collinsworth, serves as the company’s Vice President. McGrade’s daughter, J.L. (Jennifer) Herring, is its president and CEO.

What isn’t apparent from the story, but which presumably will add insult to injury (or, perhaps in this case, injury to injury) is how much money was involved and the degree to which the money was spent on purposes that would be illegitimate even if the contracting process was honest. And speaking of government fraud (is that a redundancy?), James O’Keefe of ACORN fame is back with a set of undercover videos on Medicaid fraud. Experts have estimated that there are tens of billions of dollars of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, so O’Keefe isn’t uncovering the tip of the iceberg. He’s looking at one snowflake on top of the tip of the iceberg.

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The Government Fraud Racket

With politicians like Barack Obama demanding higher taxes, this is a good moment to ask what we’re getting in exchange for the buckets of money we send to a federal overlords in Washington.

The answer is disappointing, but not surprising. We get lots of waste, fraud and abuse. Here’s an excerpt from Lurita Doan’s new column.

The dirty little secret that almost no one in Washington is willing to discuss is the rampant fraud that is embedded in the entitlement system.  Democrats, led by Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, never discuss the high percentage of fraudulent payments in entitlement programs.  Instead, they continue the mantra that entitlement spending must be preserved even in the face of exploding national debt, and regardless of disturbing signs of rampant fraud.  Increasingly, we hear jaw dropping stories of abuse and fraud that should force our leaders in Washington to put the issue of fraud and abuse within the entitlement system formally on the table.  Just last week we learned of the case of the “Adult Baby” , the 30-year old guy, that lives in a diaper, is fed by bottle and  thus somehow entitled to taxpayer-supplied, social security disability for his condition.  Strangely, this is the very entitlement system that Obama and Democrats not only insist that we preserve, but are anxious to expand. The case of the “adult baby” is a sad indicator of just how much fraud is already embedded into our rich entitlement system and how easy it has become for hucksters and fakes to gain access to taxpayer provided benefits.   Currently, there are almost 2,000 federal subsidy / entitlement programs, and we know from GAO reports and from anecdotal reporting that fraud is rampant.  Despite two decades of topping government lists (GAO) for waste, fraud and abuse, Medicare, Medicaid, housing assistance, Food Stamps (SNAP) and several other entitlement programs continue to expand even as reports of fraud plague the system.

But waste, fraud, and abuse is just a partial answer. We also get lots of dependency in exchange for our tax dollars. And we get a weaker economy.

Something to deep in mind when you read about how Republicans should be “flexible” and agree to a tax hike.

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More Disgusting Examples of Government Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

It gets my blood boiling that the crowd in Washington is talking about raising our taxes when the budget is so riddled with excess spending. Here are two stories that illustrate the waste, fraud, and abuse that is pervasive in the federal budget.

Our first example is about unemployment benefits fraud. I’ve noted on several occasions (including this very amusing cartoon) that the main problem with unemployment benefits is that they lure people into long-term joblessness and dependency. That gets me angry in my role as an economist. As a taxpayer, though, I get upset that 10 percent of the funds (that’s just what the government admits, so the real figure surely is higher) are squandered because of fraud. Here’s some info from an AP report.

A nationwide crackdown is coming for people fraudulently drawing unemployment payments — those who were never eligible and workers who keep getting checks after they return to work — a $17 billion benefits swindle last year alone, say federal officials. …As much as 30 percent of the wrong payments in 2010 went to people who had returned to the workforce but continued to claim benefits, according to Dale Ziegler, deputy administrator for the Office of Unemployment Insurance at the U.S. Department of Labor.

Our second example comes from a news report in West Virginia, and it deals with the weatherization program (one of the flagship components of Obama’s failed stimulus scheme). You won’t be surprised to learn the program has been a farce.

Federal audits are turning up misspent taxpayer dollars in a $5 billion stimulus program aimed at lowering the utility bills of disabled, poor and older Americans by making their homes more energy-efficient. In West Virginia, which received $38 million in weatherization funds, some of the money went for lobbying, to consultants who did little work and to recipients with connections to state officials who are doling out the funds, the Energy Department’s inspector general found. In one case, West Virginia paid $25,000 to a lawyer for writing two sentences stating that weatherization contracts had been reviewed, reportedly after four hours’ work at a state office, according to a report analyzing how the federal stimulus money was used. A $20,000 consulting fee was paid to the former director of the state’s weatherization program after he left the job in May 2009 even though there were no specific work requirements set for the consulting contract. …more than half of weatherized homes that were re-inspected needed to be redone because of faulty work, the report said. Meanwhile, $2,500 was spent on lobbying in Washington – even though such use is expressly forbidden – to “get the word out” that there wasn’t enough funding to administer stimulus programs, it said.

These stories aren’t even the tip of the iceberg. They are a few tiny crystals in one snowflake sitting on the top of the tip of the iceberg. The politicians want more revenue so they can maintain this corrupt scam.

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Time to Shut Down the Department of Agriculture

I have a confession to make: I have a hard time making up my mind. At times, I am overcome by indecision. To be more specific, I can’t figure out which department of the federal government should be shut down first.

In the past, I’ve written about the squalid waste and corruption at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and argued that HUD should be shuttered.

But I’ve also written about the grotesque inefficiency and bloat at the Department of Transportation and urged that the building be razed to the ground.

Today, I can’t resist turning my attention to the Department of Agriculture. This is another part of the federal behemoth that specializes in taking money from productive taxpayers and dispensing it to well-connected agri-businesses to maintain a system of subsidies and central planning so Byzantine that it would probably make a North Korean Commissar shake his head with bemusement.

If you want to share my anger, read this column by Victor David Hanson. Here’s an excerpt to get your blood boiling.

The Department of Agriculture…is a vast, self-perpetuating postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion — a sum far greater than the nation’s net farm income this year. …This year it will give a record $20 billion in various crop “supports” to the nation’s wealthiest farmers — with the richest 10 percent receiving over 70 percent of all the redistributive payouts. …Then there is the more than $5 billion in ethanol subsidies that goes to the nation’s corn farmers to divert their acreage to produce transportation fuel. That program has somehow managed to cost the nation billions, to send worldwide corn prices sky-high, and to distort global trade in ethanol at the expense of far cheaper sugarcane. …About every 10 years or so, public outrage forces Congress to promise to curtail the subsidy programs. But when the deadline arrives, our elected officials always find a trendy excuse like “green energy” or “national security” to continue welfare to agribusiness. …In a brilliantly conceived devil’s bargain, the Department of Agriculture gives welfare to the wealthy on the one hand, while on the other sending more than $70 billion to the lower income brackets in food stamps. Originally, the food stamp program focused on the noble aim of supplementing the income of only the very poor and the disabled. But now eligibility is such that some members of the middle class find a way to manipulate such grants. In fact, 2011 could be another sort of record year for the Agriculture Department, as it may achieve an all-time high in subsidizing 47 million Americans on food stamps — nearly one-sixth of the country. …The multilayered Department of Agriculture has no real mission, much less a methodology other than to provide cash to congressional pet constituencies.

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