Tag Archives: Waste

News

Obama’s SOTU speech: more spending on Democrat special interests

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From Hans Bader at the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

In his State of the Union address, President Obama will call for even more spending on his cronies – what he euphemistically refers to as “targeted investments” in things like “green jobs.” Such spending benefits companies that donate millions to liberal politicians, like GE, which recently spent $65.7 million on lobbying to extract special favors from the government.

[…]“The new spending” Obama will call for will likely “include initiatives aimed at building the renewable-energy sector—which received billions of dollars in stimulus funding.”

This is a bad sign for the American worker, because such green jobs programs have wiped out thousands of American jobs in the past.  The $800 billion stimulus package used “green-jobs” subsidies to send American jobs overseas.  79 percent of those subsidies went to foreign firms, such as an Australian firm that imported Japanese wind turbines, effectively outsourcing American jobs.

[…]The Wall Street Journal reports that the President will also call for “new government spending” on education. This is also a dubious idea, given that America already spends much more per capita on education than most other wealthy industrialized countries, with worse results.

[…]Dumping more money on the educational system is unlikely to spur economic growth, since so many college students learn little in college, are not interested in learning, and only go to college in order to get paper credentials rather than an education.

[…]Unlike other countries, which focus on educating engineers and other economically-productive occupations, America focuses on superficial, ideologically-fashionable liberal-arts majors.

If I had to summarize Obama’s speech, I would say “the government will give you a unicorn in every stable”.

Let’s put the teleprompter away and review the facts.

Government spending: (i.e. – what Obama calls “investing”)

CBO Projected Federal Budget Deficits
CBO Projected Federal Budget Deficits

Unemployment rate:

Unemployment Rate
Unemployment Rate

The Democrats controlled ALL SPENDING starting in January of 2007, when they gained control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. When spending increases, businesses understand that there are only two ways to pay it off. Higher taxes, or inflation. So they stop hiring here and ship their jobs overseas. That’s Obamanomics.

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s response.

News

Socialist European countries seizing individual retirement accounts

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ECM sent me this terrifying story.

Excerpt:

People’s retirement savings are a convenient source of revenue for governments that don’t want to reduce spending or make privatizations. As most pension schemes in Europe are organised by the state, European ministers of finance have a facilitated access to the savings accumulated there, and it is only logical that they try to get a hold of this money for their own ends. In recent weeks I have noted five such attempts: Three situations concern private personal savings; two others refer to national funds.

The most striking example is Hungary, where last month the government made the citizens an offer they could not refuse. They could either remit their individual retirement savings to the state, or lose the right to the basic state pension (but still have an obligation to pay contributions for it). In this extortionate way, the government wants to gain control over $14bn of individual retirement savings.

The Bulgarian government has come up with a similar idea. $300m of private early retirement savings was supposed to be transferred to the state pension scheme. The government gave way after trade unions protested and finally only about 20% of the original plans were implemented.

The article describes 3 other countries that are grabbing more individual retirement contributions.

This is exactly where the Democrats would take us.

News

Senator Tom Coburn lists some bad examples of government waste

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Here’s the story.

Excerpt:

Coburn, R-Muskogee, whose office regularly churns out reports mocking federal projects and programs, said Monday that “cutting wasteful and low-priority spending from the budget is not only sensible, but essential.”

“In today’s economy, we can’t afford to spend nearly $2 million to showcase neon signs no longer in use at Las Vegas casinos; nor can Congress and federal agencies afford to spend nearly $1 billion a year on unnecessary printing costs.”

The 100 projects cited on Monday tread some familiar ground for Coburn reports — road signs paid for with stimulus funds, research projects that sound like folly — and are mostly domestic. There is no mention of Iraq or Afghanistan, despite government reports documenting millions lost to fraud and waste.

Topping Coburn’s list is the conclusion of a FOX News story that the Department of Veterans Affairs spends $175 million each year to maintain buildings it can’t use, in some cases because they’re in such disrepair.

Other items on the list:

• $217,000 for a University of California and Stanford University study on when and why political candidates are ambiguous.

• $90,000 to fund promotion of the Vidalia onion, including $60,000 for a campaign timed to coincide with the release of a Shrek movie.

•  $2.5 million on the Census Bureau’s television ad that aired during the Super Bowl to promote the head-count but left many viewers scratching their heads in confusion.

• $465,000 for an international AIDS conference in Austria.

• $35 million paid in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims to an alleged Armenian crime ring.

• $48 million for a streetcar system in Atlanta that runs the same route as the city’s subway system.

• $900,000 to settle sexual harassment claims against a former housing director in Philadelphia.

•  And $28 million to print “rarely used” paper copies of the Congressional Record.

Here’s a recent post from the Washington Examiner that compares Democrats and Republicans on pork barrel spending. (H/T Gateway Pundit via Muddling)

Excerpt:

Press coverage of the budget frenzy on Capitol Hill has suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, Republicans and Democrats remain equal-opportunity earmarkers.

It’s not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act.

In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for 2011, and in the House, Republicans have nearly given up earmarking altogether — while Democrats roll on.

The watchdog groups — Taxpayers for Common Sense, WashingtonWatch.com, and Taxpayers Against Earmarks — counted total earmark requests in the 2011 budget. Those requests were made by lawmakers earlier this year, but Democratic leaders, afraid that their party’s spending priorities might cost them at the polls, decided not to pass a budget before the Nov. 2 elections. This week, they distilled those earmark requests — threw some out, combined others — into the omnibus bill that was under consideration in the Senate until Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled it Thursday night. While that bill was loaded with spending, looking back at the original earmark requests tells us a lot about the spending inclinations of both parties.

In the 2011 House budget, the groups found that House Democrats requested 18,189 earmarks, which would cost the taxpayers a total of $51.7 billion, while House Republicans requested just 241 earmarks, for a total of $1 billion.

This is why stimulus spending, which is advocated by Democrats, costs jobs. Democrats waste money. They take money out of the job-creating sector of the economy, and they waste on government spending. If private companies wasted money like government, they would go out of business. Unfortunately, government can waste money like this all the time, and they just borrow more money. When you hear a Democrat say that they want to “invest” money they stole from businesses and workers in order to “stimulate” the economy, what they are talking about is wasting money and/or buying votes from their favored special interest groups.