This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

The Best Way to Cut Spending: Cut Spending. It Shouldn't Be This Hard

By Matt Purple

Senator Tom Coburn, whose office has long been a scourge of reckless spending, is releasing his latest Wastebook, which documents 100 examples, totaling nearly $30 billion, of egregious government waste. “Had just these 100 been eliminated,” the report notes, “the sequester amount would have been reduced nearly a third without any noticeable disruption.” Coburn’s line items should be low-hanging fruit for shears-wielding appropriators. 

Among the worst examples:

  • In the Middle East, the military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds of equipment, worth $7 billion, rather than selling it or sending it home. This has resulted in a booming scrap market that benefits Afghanistan rather than America.
  • NASA is conducting “bed-rest research” in which test subjects are literally paid to lie around and do nothing all day, at a cost of $360,000 to taxpayers. This inquest into inertia is supposed to shed light on the effects of weightlessness on the human body, which is needed for any manned space program. NASA doesn’t currently have a manned space program.
  • Arlington County, Virginia is littered with federal projects, including a single bus stop that cost taxpayers $1 million. To be fair, this is no concrete slab; it has heated benches and sidewalks, wireless Internet, and can fit a whopping 15 people. As one tourist noted, “Where we’re from, they built a whole highway rest stop for $1.5 million.”

The Wastebook also calls out absurd tax loopholes, including $17.5 million in deductions for brothels in Nevada, and a $295 million tax refund for Facebook despite the fact that the social media giant pays no income taxes. It’s bipartisanship of a fashion, and its author, Coburn, has always been willing to work with Democrats to make government more efficient. One of his reports last year, called “The Department of Everything,” took a close look at the Pentagon budget and found everything from military microbreweries to a Star Trek workshop—total savings: $68 billion.

Read more>>
We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from North Baltimore