I just received a “heads up” email from Newt
Gingrich. I present it here and second his recommendation
that you read Wastebook
2013 by Senator
Tom Coburn. You needn’t buy a thing. All you need to do is click on this link
to read it on line or download it as I did for later or repeated reading.
Here’s
what Newt had to say:
Do you remember spending almost a
million dollars in the last few years on a website devoted to romance novels?
How about that $17.5 million you spent on brothels in Nevada? Or the $200,000
treating record industry executives to a world tour?
No? Well, technically you didn’t spend all that money.
Your government did. But it was your money
the government spent.
Romance novels
and record tours are just a few among dozens of outrageous expenditures Senator
Tom Coburn has cataloged in his 2013 “Wastebook,” the latest of his annual reports to remind
us just how out-of-control the federal government has become.
The entire report
is worth reading, if only for the experience of discovering example after
example of scandalous use of taxpayer dollars, each more absurd than the last,
none of which you’ve ever heard of.
For instance,
the State Department recently spent $5 million on custom crystal wine glasses
for its embassies. USAID spent $300,000 on 600 gallons of diesel in
Afghanistan--$500 per gallon, or a hundred times the going rate.
Amtrak lost
$60 million last year alone providing food service on its long distance routes
(some of which include complimentary wine and cheese, and offer gourmet meals
subsidized by taxpayers).
And the USDA
gave a $100,000 grant to a North Carolina distillery to “explore the
feasibility” of the company making vodka out of yams--in a virtually dry
county. The Department also gave nearly $17 million to dozens of businesses to
fund the creation of products such as salsa and Bloody Mary mix.
Senator
Coburn’s Wastebook is more than just a list of wasteful programs, however. It
is a perfect documentation of the advanced breakdown in government we see
throughout the federal bureaucracy.
In my new
book, Breakout, I
describe three kinds of breakdown in government: the breakdown in simple
competence, the breakdown in common sense and defined purpose, and the
breakdown in the rule of law. We see all of them in this report.
Large parts of
the government are simply incompetent at performing the tasks they have taken
on. The Wastebook includes $11 billion worth of improper payments the IRS made
on the Earned Income Tax Credit last year alone. This is as much as 28 percent
of all its Earned Income Tax Credit payments, an unbelievably high error rate
which, as the report points out, causes the IRS to “erroneously dish out more
money in improper payments than the entire budgets of the Environmental
Protection Agency, Department of the Interior, and the Department of Labor.”
Senator Coburn
identifies more than a billion dollars a year in Pell Grant fraud: scammers
posing as students who take the money from the government and run. Evidently
the Department of Education is incapable of stopping it.
The series of
wastebooks may be the clearest description ever published of the breakdown in
common sense and defined purpose of the federal government. This year’s edition
finds that Department of Justice employees spent more than $626,000 last year
to book travel by speaking to a live travel agent rather than booking their
trip online. That’s because the DOJ’s travel agency charges $6.49 to book a
trip over the internet, and a whopping $31 to book one over the phone. In
defiance of common sense, the employees used the phone 40 percent of the time.
A more
expensive example of this collapse in common sense is the National Technical
Information Service. This agency charges other organs of the federal government
to provide reports which are largely available for free online. For instance,
the wastebook notes, the NTIS sells the “Public Health Service Food Code” to
other agencies for $69 a pop. Yet this document is available at no cost over
the internet. In fact, it’s the first result when you search “Public Health
Service Food Code” on Google. Senator Coburn refers to the NTIS as the “Let Me Google That For You” of the federal government.
The agency costs taxpayers $50 million.
Finally, the
report illustrates the breakdown in the rule of law. In one example, it points
to $30 million intended to restore the Mississippi coast which was instead used
for unrelated pet projects. One official allegedly directed millions of grants
to entities associated with his family and friends.
Similar
corruption exists on a grand scale. As of 2011, Senator Coburn notes, there
were 312,000 federal employees or retirees who had failed to pay their income
taxes--$3.5 billion worth of them. More than a third of these people (107,000)
are current civilian employees (bureaucrats) who have not paid their taxes and
yet continue to be paid by the taxpayers. Evidently these “public servants” do
not feel they have to live under the law they administer.
This is the
breakdown we must overcome. Read Senator Coburn’s Wastebook to understand it. Then
demand that your elected officials commit to breaking out.
Your Friend,
Newt
Newt
