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Chimps Throwing Poop And 29 Other Mind Blowing Ways That The Government Is Wasting Your Money
April 25th, 2012 | 
Author: 
Why do chimpanzees throw poop? The federal government would like to know and is using your tax dollars to investigate the matter. Every single year, we all send huge amounts of our hard-earned money to the federal government. We hope that they will spend that money wisely. Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. You are about to read some examples of how the government is wasting your money that are absolutely mind blowing. Anyone that claims that there is not a lot of waste that can be cut out of the federal budget is lying to you. Our politicians have racked up the biggest pile of debt in the history of the world and they are spending our money on some of the stupidest things imaginable. It is imperative that the American people be educated about all of this outrageous government waste, because right now the political will to change this corrupt system is simply not there among the current crop of politicians in Washington. We are stealing trillions of dollars from future generations and many of the things that our politicians are wasting that money on are almost too bizarre to believe.
The following are 30 mind blowing ways that the government is wasting your money….
#1 In 2011, the National Institutes of Health spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
#2 The National Institutes of Health has spent more than 5 million dollars on a website called Sexpulse that is targeted at “men who use the Internet to seek sex with men”. According to Fox News, the website “includes pornographic images of homosexual sex as well as naked and scantily clad men” and features “a Space Invaders-style interactive game that uses a penis-shaped blaster to shoot down gay epithets.”
#3 The General Services Administration spent $822,751 on a “training conference” for 300 west coast employees at the M Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.
The following is how the Washington Post described some of the wasteful expenses that happened during this “conference”….
Among the “excessive, wasteful and in some cases impermissable” spending the inspector general documented: $5,600 for three semi-private catered in-room parties and $44 per person daily breakfasts; $75,000 for a “team-building” exercise — the goal was to build a bicycle; $146,000 on catered food and drinks; and $6,325 on commemorative coins in velvet boxes to reward all participants for their work on stimulus projects. The $31,208 “networking” reception featured a $19-per-person artisanal cheese display and $7,000 of sushi. At the conference’s closing-night dinner, employees received “yearbooks” with their pictures, at a cost of $8,130.
You can see some stunning pictures of GSA employees living the high life in Las Vegas right here.
#4 Do you remember a few days ago when credit rating agency Egan Jones downgraded U.S. government debt from AA+ to AA? Well, someone in the federal government apparently did not like that at all. According to Zero Hedge, the SEC plans to file charges against Egan Jones for “misstatements” on a regulatory application with the SEC.
Normally, the SEC does not go after anyone. After all, when is the last time a major banker went to prison?
No, the truth is that the SEC is usually just a huge waste of taxpayer money. According to ABC News, one investigation found that 17 senior SEC officials had been regularly viewing pornography while at work. While the American people were paying their salaries, this is what senior SEC officials were busy doing….
One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn, according to the report, which has yet to be released. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.
An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.
Another SEC accountant used his SEC-issued computer to upload his own sexually explicit videos onto porn websites he joined.
And another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.
#5 According to InformationWeek, the federal government is spending “millions of dollars” to train Asian call center workers.
#6 If you can believe it, the federal government has actually spent $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
#7 The U.S. Agency for International Development spent 10 million dollars to create a version of “Sesame Street” for Pakistani television.
#8 The Obama administration has plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars to help students from Indonesia get master’s degrees.
#9 The National Science Foundation spent $198,000 on a University of California-Riverside study that explored “motivations, expectations and goal pursuit in social media.” One of the questions the study sought an answer to was the following: “Do unhappy people spend more time on Twitter or Facebook?”
#10 The federal government actually has spent $175,587 ”to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior”.
#11 In 2011, $147,138 was given to the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan. Their best magic trick is making U.S. taxpayer dollars disappear.
#12 The federal government recently spent $74,000 to help Michigan “increase awareness about the role Michigan plays in the production of trees and poinsettias.”
#13 In 2011, the federal government gave $550,000 toward the making of a documentary about how rock and roll contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.
#14 The National Institutes of Health has contributed $55,382 toward a study of “hookah smoking habits” in the country of Jordan.
#15 The federal government gave $606,000 to researchers at Columbia University to study how heterosexuals use the Internet to find love.
#16 A total of $133,277 was recently given to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games for video game preservation. The International Center for the History of Electronic Games says that it “collects, studies, and interprets video games, other electronic games, and related materials and the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography.”
#17 The federal government has given approximately $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their research into video games such as World of Warcraft.
#18 In 2011, the National Science Foundation gave one team of researchers$149,990 to create a video game called “RapidGuppy” for cell phones and other mobile devices.
#19 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once handed researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
#20 In 2011, $936,818 was spent developing an online soap opera entitled “Diary of a Single Mom”. The show “chronicles the lives and challenges of three single mothers and their families trying to get ahead despite obstacles that all single mothers face, such as childcare, healthcare, education, and finances.”
#21 The federal government once shelled out $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.
#22 Last year, the federal government spent $96,000 to buy iPads for kindergarten students in Maine.
#23 The U.S. Postal Service once spent $13,500 for a single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
#24 In 2011, the Air Force Academy completed work on an outdoor worship area for pagans and Wiccans. The worship area consists of “a small Stonehenge-like circle of boulders with [a] propane fire pit” and it cost $51,474 to build. The worship area is “for the handful of current or future cadets whose religions fall under the broad category of ‘Earth-based’, which includes Wiccans, druids and pagans.” At this point, that only includes 3 current students at the Air Force Academy.
#25 The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers $400,000 to study why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.
#26 The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
#27 The National Institutes of Health once spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.
#28 The National Science Foundation recently spent $200,000 on a study that examined how voters react when politicians change their stances on climate change.
#29 The federal government recently spent $484,000 to help build a Mellow Mushroom pizzeria in Arlington, Texas.
#30 At this point, China is holding over a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt. But that didn’t stop the United States from sending 17.8 million dollars in foreign aid to China in 2011.
Do you feel good about paying your federal taxes after reading all of those examples of wasteful government spending?
All over America, middle class families are scratching and clawing in an effort to survive in this economy, and the oppressive levels of taxation imposed on those families certainly does not make things any easier for them.
It is tremendously immoral for the federal government to take money out of the hands of hard working families and spend it on such ridiculous things.
So what do you all think about the list above?
Do you have any things that you would add to that list?
Are you disgusted by how the federal government is mismanaging our money?
Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….
Posted in Corruption, Debt, Deficit Spending, Deficits, Economic Crisis, Economy, Financial System, Government, Money, spending, stupid ideas, Waste | 
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Europe Isn’t Over Folks
Anyone smell the smoke yet?
There’s a definite problem over in Euroland that “suddenly” became apparent this morning. Between the French elections (in which Sarkozy appears to be toast) and the Dutch government collapsing over an austerity fight, we now add the ECB and Bundesbank tiff:
Almost a year into his new job as the head of Germany’s Bundesbank, Weidmann, 44, has matured from ChancellorAngela Merkel’s discreet right-hand man at global economic meetings into one of the few European policy makers warning that governments are failing to do what’s needed to rescue the euro.
How do you “rescue” something when you refuse to have an honest conversation about what’s broken? Nobody over in Euroland — or here in the United States — is doing so.
There’s nothing complicated behind the reason our economies have failed to actually recover: We’re still spending more than we make.
What do we have to fix? This:
Since 1980 your earnings power, in real terms, when accounting for monetary inflation has been strongly negative.
We covered up would have otherwise been an outright revolt (really — a decade of 15-20% of annualized loss of purchasing power would have led to exactly that!) with massive credit extension to individuals and corporations. This is the history of the housing bubble — this chart — and it goes back to 1980!
There are those who will argue that this graph is a “distortion” as it includes the credit created specifically as “financial credits.” Fine, I’ll remove that.
Now how are you going to continue to play asset-price inflation games when there is no price-adjusted income growth so you can pass the bag to the next group of people, eh? There is only one way – fraud – and the refusal to address the truth is why we’re here.
This was not an accident. It was and remains a public and intentionally-covered up fraud. The coverups came in the form of the housing bubble, massive offshoring of labor and exploitation of both environment arbitrage and effective slave labor overseas along with currency and interest rate manipulation and bank credit fraud of unprecedented size.
The compounded amount of damage done since 1980 truly boggles the mind. Oh sure, a few people have made out like bandits; look at the escalation in certain asset prices! But it has come through making it utterly impossible for anyone in the current generations to follow in the footsteps of those who “enjoyed” these distortions which guarantees the collapse of these asset prices as there is no way for the current holders to “monetize” them by selling them to someone else who is young and coming up, except through attempts to further extend this scheme.
This is the very definition of a ponzi scheme — and yet we have had no honest discussion of what has happened here or in Europe.
There’s no way out of this box without recognition of both what we did and deflation of those bubbles. The acts of our government and those across Europe have all served to further these frauds rather than expose and excise them.
Those who point to temporary recovery of “asset prices” (e.g. the stock market) are missing the forest for the trees. Attempts to further continue this ponzi scheme are doomed to failure, as the only way one can “maintain” these asset prices is for a new group of people to find ways to continue to take the pass of the “bag” at ever-higher prices.
That, in turn, requires continued credit creation and that requires there be someone who is both willing and able to borrow so that credit can be created!
We ran out of suckers in 2007 folks — we’ve done the Wile-E-Coyote thing since, continuing to pretend that we won’t actually fall having stepped off the cliff.
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.
Posted in Banks, Corruption, Debt, Deficit Spending, Deficits, Economic Crisis, Economy, EU, Europe, European Central Bank, European Union, Federal Reserve, Financial System, Fraud, GDP, Government, Gross Domestic Product, Money, Sovereign Debt, Sovereign Risk, spending |
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The Long Debt Emergency Has Arrived
The long debt emergency has arrived – From 1950 to 1980 total US credit market debt to GDP held a ratio of 1.5. Today that figure is above 3.5 with total US credit market debt at $54 trillion.
We are reaching a point of no return with global debt. The US will be running deficits for as far as the indebted eye can see. This isn’t a new or novel trend but the magnitude certainly is. Since we stepped on the deficits do not matter accelerator in the 1980s the US dollar has been losing its purchasing power year after year. This might not be a big deal for you if you have a large share of international currencies and major investments overseas but the results for theworking and middle class are financially disastrous. Most American workers are paid with US dollars and not with foreign currencies. The troubling aspect of our economy is that we are starting to move backwards and for younger Americans and their parents, it is hard to imagine a world where the subsequent generation will be in worse shape but that is the plate we are being served. We need to look at some data very carefully to see how incredibly indebted we are as a nation.
Total debt reaching peak levels
Total US credit market debt is over $54 trillion. To put this in perspective, we went ahead and charted this out with our annual GDP:
One thing is very interesting in the data above. From the 1950s to 1980 the ratio remained around 1.5 but that changed in the 1980s when we suddenly went into “deficits don’t matter” mode and haven’t looked back since. However global debt does have a maximum inflection point. Ask Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Japan, and Greece how good it is to have debt that surpasses annual GDP. Take a look at the total market debt and GDP as a ratio:
Something definitely peaked with this financial crisis. Did we reach a peak debt situation? Keep in mind what is happening right now with all the foreclosures in housing. Say someone bought a home for $500,000. The home now sells for $250,000. What happened to that other $250,000? Did it just disappear? In a sense it did. That is the nature of bubbles. This bubble manifested itself in real estate but is really at its core a debt bubble. It is now migrating to government debt and student debt.
Take a look at some other countries with very high debt to GDP ratios:
You’ll notice the PIIGS (Portugal, Iceland, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) all coupling together. We already know the story with Greece. Spain isn’t exactly looking pretty right now with a 50 percent youth unemployment and headline unemployment of over 23 percent (these are depression like figures for a western industrialized nation). None of the economies on this list are actually booming.
Read the rest at My Budget 360
Posted in Banks, Debt, Deficit Spending, Deficits, Economic Crisis, Economy, Financial System, Government, middle class, Money, Price Inflation, US Dollar, US Treasury |
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Euro Area: We’re Fooked And We Know It
Three weeks after European leaders unveiled emergency euro-area funding exceeding the symbolic $1 trillion mark, concerns about Spain’s position have ratcheted the nation’s borrowing costs to the highest levels this year. Crisis-fighting resources will dominate talks at the International Monetary Fund’s spring meeting in Washington from April 20-22.
While the U.S. insists that Europe can overcome the crisis using its own financial firepower, euro-area officials say they’ve done enough to trigger additional global assistance. The urgency was underscored last week as Spanish and Italian yields jumped, challenging assumptions among the region’s leaders that the worst of the fallout was behind them.
But I thought there was no crisis? That we all took “decisive” and “effective” actions in 2008 and 2009?
Hmmm… you mean that was a lie?
Spain’s 10 year bond is trading near 6%, and Italy is trading near 5.5%. That’s a problem; Spain is feeling desperate, as one of their economic ministers is now calling for the ECB to buy yet more of it’s trash, er, “debt.”
The real problem that Europe has is the same one we have in the United States – we, and they, are unwilling to fund our government programs with sufficient money in the present tense.
That is we’re all unwilling to come to the public of our respective nations with the open question as to exactly what services we want our governments to provide, and then set tax levels such that they’re paid forin full in the present tense.
But this is exactly what we must do — and what they must do.
This weekend I was at a political event canvassing for Calen Fretts who is running for Congress as a Libertarian. Our current hurdle is getting on the ballot, which requires petitions. In the course of gathering them I spoke with a lot of people, and one of them was very focused on foreign policy, hammering on the Iraq war and generally being hostile to Libertarian ideas.
At one point I pointed out that irrespective of what he, or I, might like the fact remained that $750 billion a year (our defense budget) is roughly 1/3rd of all tax revenues that the Federal Government currently receives. While national defense is certainly one of the Constitutional powers of the Federal Government if you can’t write the check without it bouncing it’s immaterial. I recognize, for example, that we cannot simply walk off into the sunset on foreign policy as we’ve managed to create for ourselves a world where weneed foreign resources, particularly oil, but this is something we can correct over time.
What we can’t do is continue to believe that we can cut taxes further while increasing spending at the same time. If we’re going to have lower taxes (and everyone likes lower taxes) then we must also have lower spending. This isn’t optional — it’s absolutely necessary.
We simply have to have the conversation with the American public in recognition that we either have to cut federal spending by about 50%, double tax receipts or some combination of the two. Either is going to have a significant and inescapable economic impact.
Spain, Italy and the rest of the Euro Zone are in the same box. None of these nations have actually addressed the funding and spending mismatch that led them into this box and none of them have shown any indication of correcting that error. Nor have we.
But if we’re going to ever make a serious effort at resolving our debt problem before we play Thelma and Louise, driving straight off the cliff, we must stop with the rhetoric and deal with the mathematics.
Walker was up on CNBS this morning again saying that the problem is not “today” but “tomorrow.” He’s wrong. In fact, he’s lying as he knows he’s wrong. The problems we have today are real, they are emergent, and health care is not a Medicare or Medicaid problem, it is a structural issue in our medical system.
We simply cannot continue to run $1 trillion+ annual deficits. This has to end now.
In Europe they must also end these imbalances now.
If those problems are resolved then while the short-term economic difficulty will be significant the intermediate and longer-run benefits will be stability and economic prosperity.
If not then the outcome will be ruin.
In that case it is not a matter of if, but when.
Posted in Banks, Debt, Deficit Spending, Deficits, Economic Crisis, Economy, EU, Europe, European Union, Eurozone, Financial System, Government, Money, Sovereign Debt, Sovereign Risk |
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Debt Ceiling Breach: Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
While it is possible that the federal government could play accounting tricks to try to postpone the day of reckoning until after Election Day, things aren’t looking good on that margin of safety for which Obama negotiated last August.
The math says September 9th is the current target date when the debt limit will be hit, since the current debt total is $15,618,088,043,505.60 and it has been rising an average of 5.19 billion dollars per day from the $14.294 trillion limit it was at on August 2, 2011, and the new limit is $16.394 trillion.
In the meantime the US Department of Labor is reporting average daily gross earnings of approx. 12.78 billion dollars (i.e. 110.8 million workers * $23.39 per hour * 34.5 hours/week) for all private sector workers in the USA during March. This means that the government is going further in the hole at the rate of 40.6% of our wages on a debt which will eventually have to be paid back in full with compounded interest.
See http://www.bls.gov/data/home.htm and http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np for the detailed data used to make this analysis.
h/t Degaston from the Forum
Discussion (registration required to post)
Posted in Debt, Debt Ceiling, Default Probability, Deficit Spending, Deficits, Economic Crisis, Economy, Financial System, Government, Money |
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The Suffocation Of Unsustainable Global Debt
The suffocation of unsustainable global debt – Total global debt is now over $190 trillion and more than three times global GDP. Contagion with European Union.
The biggest market in the world is the European Union and debt problems are still rippling through the global markets. It is apparent with the financial crisis that the global markets are tied together by large banks and interconnected trade. A problem in the largest market should be unsettling and the unemployment rate in the European Union is now at a 15 year high. The global debt problem was never really solved but papered over with extensions and banking trickery. The US has dealt with much of the debt issues by suspending major accounting rules and stuffing bad loans into the Federal Reserve like a Christmas stocking. The European Union is facing some challenges ahead and all eyes will be watching given the impact of contagion impacts. Greece was only a tiny sliver of the debt issues compared to the major debt restructuring that will be necessary for a large economy like Spain.
Unemployment in the European Union rising to higher levels
The European Union is facing a very problematic recession. The unemployment rate continues to climb:
The unemployment rate now stands at 10.8 percent. Countries like Spain have an astounding 23.6 percent headline unemployment rate. The young in Spain are facing an unemployment rate above 50 percent which is stunning for a developed market economy. These kinds of structural issues cannot be peppered over with more debt. The issues facing the global markets are based on peak debt situations. Central banks like the Fed and the ECB are dealing with the crisis as if it were based on short-term liquidity issues. Like someone asking you for rent in the middle of the month when your paycheck will not come in until the end of the month. In this case, you know the income is forthcoming and will cover the requested payment. That is not what is impacting the global economy today.
Peak debt has been reached in many cases and when it hits markets are forced to deleverage and price discovery unfortunately is a necessary and painful process. To think that the European issues will stay isolated is unrealistic. If we take a look at our biggest trading partners we will find some familiar names:
Three of our top ten trading partners are in Europe. Not only is this the case, China’s two largest markets for selling goods are the US and Europe. If you look above, China is also a major trade partner with the US. If the crisis deepens further in Europe the rippling impact will be felt throughout the world just like when the crisis caught momentum in 2007.
Total global debt continues to grow
In 2002 total global debt was above $80 trillion. In 2010 that figure more than doubled to over $190 trillion. Looking at the below chart is stunning given that GDP is unlikely to support this amount of global debt:
Source: Business Insider
Today the global debt to GDP ratio is over 300 percent. You will notice that as the crisis hit in 2007 GDP actually fell but total debt kept going up. Even as GDP recovered global debt continued to expand. It is hard to moderate the appetite of central banks seeking to transfer toxic assets from banking associates and removing any opportunity for real price discovery. Much of the price discovery is being shouldered by the citizens of each of these countries. The financial sector especially with the too big to fail has been sheltered at all costs.
Read the rest at My Budget 360
Posted in Banks, Debt, Deficit Spending, Deficits, Economic Crisis, Economy, EU, Europe, European Central Bank, European Union, Financial System, GDP, Government, Gross Domestic Product, Money |
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