Top 3 Ways the Government is Wasting Your Money

The federal government is projected to spend around $3.9 trillion for 2015. Roughly 80% of those funds comes from tax revenue, which at the end of the 2014 fiscal year broke the record for all-time high... and yet the deficit isn't getting any smaller. What gives? Ironically, it seems that the government is surprisingly bad at handling money. Read on for the top 3 ways the government is wasting your money. We all splurge from time to time. I'm not saying you should, I'm just pointing out that sometimes it happens. It becomes a big problem, though, when over-spending takes places at the federal level and officials decide to party on the taxpayer's dollar. 3. Extravagance [caption id="attachment_33429" align="aligncenter" width="677"] Photo courtesy Phillip Greenspun [/caption] The General Services Administration was under investigation in 2010 for a single "team-building" conference in Las Vegas that ran up a whopping $823,000 . Though one investigator stated that "the Las Vegas conference was not an anomaly," the GSA isn't the only culprit when it comes to lavish over-spending. The Department of Veterans Affairs reportedly spent $6.1 million dollars between two training conferences in Orlando. That's enough money to support over 150 fully disabled veterans on disability pay for an entire year. The Office of Inspector General cites the following violations of protocol and ethics by VA administrators: VA employees improperly accepting gifts including room upgrades, meals, limousine services, golf, spa services, helicopter rides, and tickets for the Rockettes. Contract violations and lack of oversight that led to excessive costs and illegal or wasteful expenditures. $97,906 VA spent on promotional items (including bags, pens, water bottles, and exercise bands) that were determined to be unnecessary and wasteful. The list goes on. A Department of Justice conference in Istanbul cost taxpayers $1.8 million; a Federal Aviation Administration conference cost $5 million, and included meetings that ended with buffet cocktail parties; $5 million was spent in sending federal employees to Harvard for training courses they could (and should) have gotten elsewhere; and $400 million spent on a police training program in Iraq for Iraqi officers. We haven't even begun to scratch the surface, but if we generously assume every year since 2010 only a fraction of the total amount of money outlined above was wasted, that still leaves us with one headache of a check to write. Total Waste: $1,046,807,500+ Sources: Wastebook 2010, Wastebook 2011, Wastebook 2012, Wastebook 2013, Wastebook 2014. www.coburn.senate.gov . 2. Inefficiency " In 2011, the federal government wasted $115.3 billion of taxpayers’ money in improper payments: money paid in the wrong amount, to the wrong person, or for the wrong reason. " - Alison Fraser, Heritage Foundation It's worth mentioning a second time that the government is surprisingly bad at handling money. Democrats blame Republicans and Republicans blame everyone else, but behind all bureaucratic finger-pointing lies the truth: Oops... we lost it . Here's what they lost it to: Snack on These Subsidies In 2011 alone, Amtrak lost $84.5 million on its federally subsidized food and beverage services, according to a detailed report by the Heritage Foundation . Amtrak has never profited from these services. To put those numbers into perspective: Amtrak loses enough of the government's money every year on food alone to feed each one of the roughly 600,000 homeless Americans three meals a day - for two weeks. Dead, or Nearly So The U.S. Office of Personnel Management reports that dead federal employees continue to get benefits checks totaling around $120 Million yearly. I'm not sure what they're supposed to be doing with that money, but... it's the thought that counts, right? Many more government checks are sent out every year to dead Americans, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars more in wasted funds. The More the Merrier...? The Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified 34 areas in which federal agencies or initiatives have overlapping goals or duplicative services, costing taxpayers billions of dollars each year. Hundreds of duplicate government programs run though dozens of departments, clogging the system while taxpayers shoulder the burden of paying for the resulting crossed wires. If Americans were as bad at balancing their checkbooks as the government, it wouldn't have any money to waste... now, there's a thought. Something Fishy In a crowning and truly boggling achievement of unrivaled incompetence, the Bureau of Indian Affairs funded a fish hatchery that didn't see a single a fish hatch for fourteen years. Federal funding continued even after the land had been converted to office space. Taxpayers spent $46.1 million in fiscal year 2012 to operate the national fish hatchery system, and not one of them got any fancy caviar. Total Waste: $471,649,207,500+ Sources: Wastebook 2010, Wastebook 2011, Wastebook 2012, Wastebook 2013, Wastebook 2014 . www.coburn.senate.gov . Though technically stemming from decades of inefficiency, this section of our list is responsible for such a staggering amount of waste that it deserves solo recognition in the #1 spot. 1. Loopholes [caption id="attachment_33576" align="aligncenter" width="677"] Photo courtesy Vít Mádr at Dreamstime.com [/caption] With a 72,000-page tax code reminiscent Swiss cheese and holes so big you could drive a tank through them, it's no surprise (or secret) that money ends up stuck in the system. It's not the government that's losing out, however; it's you. Just not for the reasons you might think. America has relatively low-income tax rates for citizens that average about 25%. On the other hand, it has the highest tax rates for corporations at 36%. The problem? Many of America's global conglomerates, with profits on the magnitude of billions of dollars, pay little, if any, of those taxes. Exxon Mobile Profit: $19 billion Income Tax Paid: $0 --- Bank of America Profit: $4.4 billion Income Tax Paid: $0 --- Chevron Profit: $10 billion Income Tax Paid: $0 --- General Electric Profit: $26 billion Income Tax Paid: $0 --- Verizon Profit: $24 billion Income Tax Paid: $0 --- How do they get away with it? Loopholes. Under current U.S. tax laws there is nothing illegal about corporations moving their funds into foreign investments in a practice called "transfer pricing," thereby thwarting taxation. One questionable symptom of this practice is that despite unemployment rates breaking records in some regions of the United States after the great recession that began in 2007, corporate profits rose to an all-time high. Meanwhile, federally funded programs like Medicaid and Medicare, education assistance, Social Security, veterans', disability, and unemployment assistance, state and federal law enforcement, and countless more continue to see cut after cut to their budgets. U.S. Uncut AlterNet : "Boeing, Ford Motors, Chevron, Citigroup, Verizon, J.P. Morgan, and General Motors pay their CEOs more than they pay in taxes" RT.com : "Despite $1 billion in profits Facebook will get a refund instead of paying taxes" Thousands of lobbyists, whose singular purpose is to influence policy decisions in congress, mill around Washington every day. They work avidly to persuade lawmakers to keep corporate tax rates low, tax cuts high, and keep looking the other way while the economy teeters on the edge of utter implosion. Total Waste: $751,649,207,500+ Source: We're Not Broke If you like pressing buttons and want some practice spending billions you'll never have because those in charge of it are too busy bungling the job, Buildabetterbudget.org provides this nifty tool to see what happens when you play with the Federal Budget. Leave a shout-out in the comment section below an d tell us how you did.

Top 3 Ways the Government is Wasting Your Money

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Michelle Ferrell

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Top 3 Ways the Government is Wasting Your Money

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