Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) has released his annual accounting of “blatantly wasteful” government spending. Roll Call notices the brothel break right away. Nevada’s houses of Reid repute got $17.5 million in tax breaks last year.
Red Alert Politics found 7 more, including a $1 million bus stop and NASA’s idiotic “Green Ninja.” NASA also tried to develop a 3D pizza printer, which is silly for government to spend money on, but which I would personally like to own. Because printing your own pizza would be awesome.
The Army spent $300 million on a blimp to fly over battlefields in Afghanistan but it never flew outside the US.
The most ridiculous waste of taxpayer dollars in 2013 was…drum roll…Healthcare.gov. $684 million and counting, of your money, to force you to buy a product at a price driven skyward by government mandate.
To compile the wastebook, Coburn’s staff did what President Obama promised to do the first time he ran for president — go line by line through federal spending ledgers to see what money is going where. Obama promised to do that, but he never has. It was one of those promises that he didn’t really mean.
The wastebook won’t end up changing very much. It found $30 billion in wasted money, some of which will get ridiculed away, but the deal currently working its way through the Senate jacks up spending by about $45 billion.
Our government is simply too big not to fail at this point.
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