Are Taxpayers Being Screwed? When we think of the government we think of a governing body in charge of our country. We might also think of a governing body which has a hard time getting anything done. But when businesses think of the government many of them think of a pot of gold where they can many times the amount of money for a job that they would get in the market place. What I am about to tell you sound so incredible many of you won’t believe it. The president says the Obamacare website cost 5 billion dollars, the Washing Post says it cost 834 million dollars. Bloomberg says the site cost 2.1 billion dollars. Maybe the figure of 5 billion dollars isn’t so far off. Taking the lowest figure of 834 million dollars this would still be a disgrace. This is only one example of how the government is being taking advantage of and no one cares tax payer money is being stolen legally. If we were to ask the question how much money is wasted by the government the answer we get might be a total of far more than one hundred billion. Contracts are used by some politicians as ways of getting support by lobbies and getting huge political donations for campaigns. One of the biggest amounts of wasted money comes from defense contracts. As I have said many times, we buy ships, planes and weapons among other things for far more money than they are worth and we automatically grant costs for budget overruns. It seems we never hold these big corporations to their bids and they know this so they give us a low bid to win a contract then over the course of the contract they claim they need more money and we grant this request automatically. I have heard it said if we would hold corporations to their original bids, we would have enough extra cash to never have to worry about Social Security and some other programs. One cannot help but think our government representatives are either not too bright or just don’t understand business and the way the real world works when it comes to awarding contracts. I bet if they had to use their money, they would do things different. When we created the Apollo Project it ultimately cost 28 billion between 1960 and 1973. It is said that amount in today’s money would be 288 billion dollars. Elon Musk said a trip around the moon will cost a passenger 35 million the same price as sending them to the International Space Station. How can Musk do this so cheaply? The technology already exists, but still if the government was doing it, it would be a lot more. An example is we pay the Russians 81.7 million a seat to get astronauts to the International Space Station and Musk does it for 2.5 times less. I think this demonstrates what I am talking about. When we talk about government waste it is usually never mentioned the government has secret programs which seem to have no cost oversight. We don’t know what they are or how much they cost. We only see the result of these programs after it is decided to let us know and that is not a large percentage of the time. Even then we may not be able to get the data on what the object or service costs. Secret planes come to mind in this case, but there is far more involved. I have heard there is no limit on spending on secret programs and agencies involved in these programs can take money out of other agency’s budgets without permission. When the congress interferes with government agencies it just proves how inept they are. Take the United States Post Office for example. We hear they can’t make it and they have to keep raising the cost of stamps. But how many know they are handling 47 percent of all the mail in the world? Congress keeps interfering with the Post Office and has caused most of their problems. They forced them to prefund their health program 50 years into the future for one thing, which no other government agency has to do. No tax dollars are used to fund the Post Office. Over regulation by congress is causing the Post Office to lose money. I cite this because besides cost overruns poor management is also costing us money and I haven’t even mentioned corruption. When we talk about corruption some names come to mind. Senator Daniel Brewster was found guilty of accepting gratuities. Representative Mario Biaggi was found guilty of bribery and taking gratuities and there are plenty of others. Congressmen have been convicted in the past on such charges as conspiracy to defraud the government, violation of the RICO act, bribery, misuse of public funds, conflict of interest, selling appointive offices and many other crimes. It does make one wonder if this stuff is still going on. When congressmen make bad decisions on appropriations and then claim they made a mistake voting for a bill, what they are actually saying is they voted to waste a lot of money for some unknown reason and are sorry they got caught. There are a tremendous amount of bad bills being passed in congress. Remember the bridge to nowhere? That was a bridge which would have cost many millions of dollars to connect to an island that had a population of only about 50 people. The contractors would have loved to build it. They could have charged all sorts of cost overruns to the government. I can’t help but remember the pallets of money we were sending to Iraq which disappeared as fast as they could get them off the trucks. In 2003 and 2004 we sent pallets of money in the amount of 12 billion dollars to Iraq. Vanity Fair magazine reported at least 9 billion went missing. It is almost as if no one in government cares about wasting tax payer money. You also have to wonder if this was a setup of some kind and there were people planted at the other end of the money’s trip to rake in some of the loot. The government is either very dumb in the handling of money, doesn’t care, or there is a lot of corruption going on. I just can’t believe any of us would be this careless in handling our own funds. Even the worst of us at handling money realize this was more than just carelessness.
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