$619 Billion Missing From 302 Federal Programs
Posted on August 12, 2014 by Common Constitutionalist Filed under Congress, Constitution, Ethics, Government Spending, Law Enforcement, Politics, Socialism, Taxes
What is the refrain of the left whenever anyone suggests tax cuts? Naturally it is, “How are you going to pay for them?”
And what about cutting government spending? Well, Democrats will cry, in unison, that there is nowhere to cut. By cutting spending, we will be ripping food out of the mouths of needy children, or some such nonsense.
Remember this statement – “There Is Nowhere to Cut.”
And we can’t forget the “Tried and True,” tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires will only hurt the middle class.
As a rather obvious aside, paying for tax cuts bugs the crap out of me. Why should we have to “pay” for a tax cut? It’s our money in the first place. But the government naturally treats our money as theirs first, and if there is anything left over, which they claim there never is, they will consider giving it back to us, the people.
Speaking of whining about tax cuts, there’s this from just a few months ago. A column written by Steve Benen entitled, “The Magical Cost of Tax Cuts.”
In it he describes a Republican plan to make between $156 billion and $310 billion of temporary tax cuts permanent. He writes: “How in the world does the GOP intend to pay for this? As it turns out, Republicans don’t even intend to try to pay for the tax breaks. Republicans want to make permanent hundreds of billions of dollars in business tax breaks, but they don’t want to find offsets to pay for any of the tax cuts.”
He continues with the typical liberal diatribe of why not spend the money on extending unemployment benefits rather than tax breaks for business. The Republican priorities are screwed up – blah-blah-blah.
So it appears to be common knowledge to both the political class and the intelligentsia that the government has no money to spare. So it was a surprise to see McPaper, USA Today, reporting on a not so startling discovery by USASpending.gov that our government actually does “waste” money. The site was set up intending to make federal spending more transparent. That’s a laugh.
Well it sure did that – so transparent, it’s invisible.
What the site disseminated is that the government was “missing at least $619 billion from 302 to federal programs.”
Yep, you read that right – $619 billion! And I’ll bet that number is low – way low. I bet 50% of government spending is either misused, wasted or just goes “missing.”
USA Today continues, saying that the government “data that does exist is wildly inaccurate, according to the Government Accountability Office, which looked at 2012 spending data. Only 2% to 7% of spending data on USASpending.gov is ‘fully consistent with agencies records,’ according to the report.”
Wait… What?! 2 to 7% is accurate?! So in other words, virtually all, about 95% of all government spending data is at the very least “inaccurate.”
Want an example? Health and Human Services (HHS) failed to report $544 billion. How do you just not report a half a trillion dollars? Easy – because the government has become so large that it is literally unaccountable to the people.
Want some more? USA Today writes, “The Department of Interior did not report spending for 163 of its 265 assistance programs… The result: $5.3 billion in spending is missing…,” and for at least 22% of all government contracts awarded, “the spending website literally doesn’t know where the money went.”
Frankly, this is criminal – and I do mean criminal – like jail-time criminal.
I’ve always known that it was bad, but even I didn’t figure on this, and it is probably much worse than even this report portrays.
In the past, I have proposed that every government department could easily cut its budget by 10%, no problem. Now with this information, I’m going to revise it to reflect the Harding/Coolidge model.
Immediately cut the government by 50% – and that’s just a start!
Read more at
http://godfatherpolitics.com/16628/619-billion-missing-302-federal-programs/#Miq2ImUO7cqqyBYE.99
