wasteful spending

Chris Knight's avatar

The past three weeks in American life have been extraordinary, to put it mildly.  There hasn’t been this much history made in my lifetime since the collapse of communism.  In some ways there are parallels between the two.  The Soviet Union fell because of Gorbachev’s reforms in the face of that country’s unsustainable bureaucracy.  And what some are calling American Revolution 2.0 is now transpiring as a consequence of even worse bureaucracy in the United States at last being made accountable to its people.

What President Donald Trump and his administration, and especially Elon Musk and his crack team of boffins at DOGE, are accomplishing just might be the second most dramatic “kicking over the tables at the temple” ever recorded.  There will be volumes written in years and decades to come about the winter of 2025 and the shaking up of the American government that has transpired in less
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Chris Knight's avatar

Has the caseload down at the VA ever included any paperwork for Captain Obvious?

So on the left we have one Chad Fleming, a former soldier who served in the Army Rangers.  And as you can see, he has a prosthetic left leg.  He sought aid from the Department of Veterans Affairs because… well, you know, that’s what they do for men and women who have been in the armed forces.

But in order to determine if Chad was eligible for benefits, Veterans Affairs compelled him to get an x-ray taken of his left stump.  This is what the VA required so as to discover if Chad Fleming was truly an amputee.

From the story at TheBlaze…

Chad Fleming, a veteran who served in the 75th Ranger Regiment, says the VA took an X-ray of his artificial leg to prove he was actually an amputee. Though they could

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Chris Knight's avatar

One of the classic signs of imminent collapse of a culture is the brazen decadence that its leaders and elites start to exhibit.  Nero and Commodus magnified lavishness to scales unprecedented even as the Roman Empire was rotting from the inside and slowly collapsing.  The nigh-invincible Babylonians were in a drunken stupor of self-edification until Cyrus invaded and Alexander after him.  Louis XVI wasn’t a “bad” man per se but he was too busy partying and having fun while being horribly negligent about the affairs of the French people… and then he lost his head as bad as anyone could.

There are too many other examples that could be cited from the tale of years.  And you would think that we might have learned something from six millenia’s worth of them…

But here was the scene last night at the White House.  In spite of the “sequester” that is halting ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma has been digging into the details of the federal budget. Among the things our government is spending our money upon: inventing roll-up beef jerky, the study of goldfish swimming patterns and an iPhone app for scheduling coffee breaks.

And then there’s this: $100,000 of taxpayer money to look into the question of whether Jesus Christ died for the Klingon race. Yeah those ridge-headed alien warriors from the Star Trek franchise.

Incidentally, all of the above examples were found in the United States military’s budget.

From the story by Heather Clark at Christian News Network…

An Oklahoma senator has released a report outlining what he believes is some of the Pentagon’s most wasteful spending. Among a number of odd items includes a workshop on how Christianity would be affected if aliens were proven to exist.

Senator Tom Coburn is known to be the “waste-watcher”

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Chris Knight's avatar

Please tell me that isn’t a soybean that Michelle Obama is extolling the virtues of in that photo.

The current First Lady has somehow become the nation’s Food Czar, with a capacity of recommending, implementing and apparently enforcing her own policies on the country. No other First Lady has enjoyed such power. Not even the much-beloved Nancy Reagan, who channeled the massive respect given her toward no less a gesture than encouraging America’s children to steer clear of drug abuse, was granted such authority to wield.

Michelle Obama, however, is hellbent on imposing her own whacked nutritional vision upon the children of those who “just said no”.

Michelle Obama has directed the United States Department of Agriculture to mandate school lunches that can best be described as “skimpy” and “lacking”. Not to mention downright unpalatable. The government is determined to limit elementary kids to 650 calories and high schoolers to ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Y’know, I doubt that even if I were smashed drunk and high on acid that I could have ever come up with a headline like that on my own…

A laundry-folding robot, studying the metabolism of shrimp being exercised on treadmills, and researching wrestling in Jell-O at the South Pole are among the “projects” sponsored by the National Science Foundation which have been funded with THREE BILLION DOLLARS of OUR tax money!

Other stuff that we’ve paid for through the NSF: “a YouTube rap video, a review of event ticket prices on stubhub.com, a ‘robot hoedown and rodeo,'” and “a virtual recreation of the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair”.

I’m just trying to visualize how exactly a shrimp is put on a treadmill…...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It’s fiscal criminal insanity: more than $440,000 to study Vietnamese male prostitutes. How about roughly a million dollars spent to compose poetry for zoos? Then there is more than a hundred grand used to construct a “critter crossing” for salamanders in Vermont. The University of California at Irvine received a grant of $3 million to study the online video game World of Warcraft. And over $600,000 was given to another California university to digitize Grateful Dead concert tickets and T-shirts.

Those are just some of the examples of horrid waste – funded by our tax dollars – by the federal government documented by The Economic Collapse blog. Also on the list of 20 craziest things that the United States government directs expenditure from the public treasury for: studying flatulence from dairy cows and the renovation of a pizzeria’s store front to give it a ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Look folks: I, for one, do want to see the proposed McMichael Civic Center for Wentworth (the county seat of Rockingham County, North Carolina) become a reality. As an active member of the Theatre Guild of Rockingham County and participant in several past productions, I can certainly vouch that a dedicated stage and associated facilities will absolutely be appreciated, for reasons too numerous to list.

But what Brad Miller, our representative in Congress, is doing to “help” make that happen is horribly wrong.

Miller has made a House Appropriations Request for this fiscal year that would allocate more than two and a half million dollars for the McMichael Civic Center. Here’s a link to the PDF file of the request. I also took the liberty of converting it into a JPEG…

Can anyone tell me where in this request has Rep. Miller pointed to the place in the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

That’s what Jake Tapper at ABC News has reckoned. Figuring that the Obama administration is boating of anywhere between 640,000 and 1 million jobs saved or created because of the “stimulus” package, and that $159 billion was allocated by Congress and President Obama for such purpose, then the most conservative estimate has each rescued job worth $160,000.

The White House economists are calling these figures “calculator abuse”. Wish I’d have thought of that one during those many times that I struggled with algebra in eighth grade!

Pssst… hey, President Obama. Wanna really use the government to create jobs and bolster the economy? It’s very very simple:

CUT TAXES
AND
CUT SPENDING!!!

NO country in history has ever spent itself into prosperity. America can not possibly be any different....

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