If you’re dead broke and sinking deeper into debt every minute of every day, then the last thing you need to do is go out and buy a 10 ft. aquarium for your neighbor.
If that sounds like a no brainer, then I’m sad to inform you that our government is doing something far more ridiculous than that and Sen. Rand Paul as all the details on just how ridiculous it is with his 5th annual “Festivus Waste Report.”
Paul, chairman of the Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management (FSO) Subcommittee for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), releases these reports in order to show you exactly all the stupid things our government is spending money on as we continue to accumulate untold amounts of debt.
What Paul found is nothing short of astounding.
This year, our government wasted $50, 463,462,292.35, costing each American around $8,215.48.
To give you an idea of how wasteful that is, Paul explains that this amount of money could have done amazing things, such as create a four-lane highway that wrapped around the Earth four times, or more realistically, funded seven months of medical care for veterans.
What are they spending money on? Well, you’re not gonna like it. Here are just a handful of them.
- The State Department is spending $15,825,000.00 on free college for international students
- The NIH and NSF are spending up to $1,200,000.00 to study online dating user habits
- USAID is spending $20,000,000.00 to teach Lao to Laotians
- The State Department is spending $2,000,000.00 to improve TV programming in Moldova
- The National Science Foundation spent $103,777.00 to teach social scientists how to apply for grants
- DHS and GSA have spent $2,120,040,355.35 trying to turn an abandoned mental hospital into a new DHS headquarters
- State is spending up to $100,000.00 to increase the capacity of the Pakistani film industry
- NSF spent a significant portion of a $466,991.00 grant on studying frog mating calls
- The NIH is spending up to $708,466 on research in London that involves hooking Zebrafish on nicotine
- U.S. Department of State bought an $84,375.00 statue from Bob Dylan for the embassy in Mozambique
- NIH has spent $4,658,865.00 studying the connection between drinking alcohol and winding up in the emergency room
- USAID is spending up to $16,000,000.00 to improve the quality of Egyptian schooling
- USAID has spent $33,921,175.00on a program that has included supplying textbooks, many of which are subpar and/or sitting in warehouses, for Afghan students
- USAID spent part of a $22,000,000.00 project working to bring Serbian cheese up to international standards
If you’re wondering why you and I are paying to get fish hooked on nicotine, improving Serbian cheese, and creating a Pollywood, then your guess is as good as mine. I can tell you that I personally don’t give a damn about putting statues in Mozambique’s embassy, nor do I care what it sounds like when two frogs want to do the dirty.
Also, why do we need nearly $5 million to study the relationship between alcohol and emergency rooms? You’d think that would be a pretty straight forward thing that we’ve been studying for years.
Only the government could do this. If this was a private corporation, then you can bet there’d be firings from top to bottom over this kind of waste.