wasteful spending

Chris Knight's avatar

Leave it to the federal government to re-define the old saying about “death and taxes”.

THOUSANDS of the dearly departed are receiving “stimulus” checks. It’s been estimated that “between 8,000 and 10,000 checks for millions of dollars” worth of publicly-financed “economic recovery” is being written out to those who are long beyond such temporal concepts as money and spending.

And some of these people, it turns out, never received a Social Security number! Meaning that to the government they weren’t officially alive to begin with.

Sorta brings a whole new meaning to “the undead” when you think about it…...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Politico.com is reporting that GOP governors Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Rick Perry of Texas are attempting to pull off what is being called “Tea Party 2.0”.

But a lot of people are seeing this as an effort by the Republican Party’s leadership and elected officials to “hitch their wagons” to the grassroots “Tea Party” movement that has taken place over the past couple of months in protest of Washington’s runaway taxing and spending.

And I’m inclined to more than slightly agree with that sentiment.

Look at what is happening to the Republicans of late: as a party they aren’t even pretending anymore that their purpose is about anything but regaining political power. And damned few average Americans are taking them seriously as a result.

(And I write this as one who is still currently registered as a Republican, for whatever the hell worth that’s supposed to have…)

So ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Official policy of the United States federal government is now to refer to prostitutes as “female sex workers” (FSW) and to their pimps as “gatekeepers”.

It would almost be funny, except that $2.6 million of our tax money is being spent on teaching Chinese “female sex workers” how to “drink responsibly”.

From CNSNews.com…

U.S. Will Pay $2.6 Million to Train Chinese Prostitutes to Drink Responsibly on the Job
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
By Edwin Mora

(CNSNews.com) — The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will pay $2.6 million in U.S. tax dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job.

Dr. Xiaoming Li, the researcher conducting the program, is director of the Prevention Research Center at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

The grant, made last November, refers to prostitutes as “female sex workers”–or

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Chris Knight's avatar

Remember how Richard Pryor’s character Gus Gorman in Superman III (an “under-rated” film, as the guy in Office Space says) used his hackin’ skillz to embezzle all that money from the company he worked at? Okay well…

A now-retired aerospace engineer discovered forty years ago that he was being overpaid by 2 cents an hour. He suggested a way to fix the discrepancy, but it got lost in bureaucratic bungling.

And now, four full decades later later, the government has lost BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, literally pennies at a time, because it failed to address what is being called a “simple” error that would have only required very minor changes in accounting software.

Read MSNBC’s article “Did Pentagon lose billions, pennies at a time?” for the full story on aeronautical engineer Walter T. Davey… and how the United States government could have saved a buttload of money if it had ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

The words I never, ever thought I’d hear a President of the United States tell the country…

“Your warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it’s ever been, because starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warranty.”

— President Barack Obama

And you thought “womb to the tomb” policies were bad. Now the federal government has got your car covered bumper to bumper.

And Obama’s firing the head of General Motors apparently didn’t take well with the markets today: they were down all over, including the Dow at -254 points.

...

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Chris Knight's avatar

The Federal Reserve is sending $1 trillion more into the flagging economy via “purchasing Treasury bonds and mortgage securities”.

At this point I have lost count of how much money – the evidence for the actual existence of which is about as substantial as that for the Loch Ness Monster – has been “pumped” into the markets over the past six months.

Hyper-inflation, here we come…...

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Chris Knight's avatar

If the United States keeps “spending a bunch of money we don’t have”, it faces a collapse of its economy much like what has happened in Zimbabwe, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford predicts.

In case you haven’t heard, the financial hyper-inflation which has rocked Zimbabwe has led that country to issue a one trillion dollar bill as part of its currency. For one of those legal tender notes, you can currently buy a hamburger or two.

Sanford gets what’s really going on. Too bad there doesn’t seem to be many other elected officials who are likewise calling for fiscal sobriety right now....

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