Conservatism Unplugged: Where did all the money go?

Politics brings out the worst in us. One is more vile the more there is at stake.

Leveraging a little animus, It turns mere opposition into hate.

The lava bubbling underneath each heart, Inhibited by guilt or love or fear, Comes bursting forth, by scribes with subtle art Stoked vigorously as new elections near.

If ever there has been a president who has failed to give the middle class of America a fair shot, it is Barack Obama. Voters acknowledge that President Obama has mishandled the economic recovery, failed to confront our fiscal problems, embraced unpopular legislation, contravened the law through executive orders, broken numerous pledges on taxes, taking public monies, hiring lobbyists and publishing bills before they are signed, managed to blame his problems on anyone handy and cynically chosen to severely divide the country. And yet, in spite of these monumental shortcomings, Mr. Obama is deemed “likeable” and is running even with Romney.   

With the billions in stimulus dollars that was given to foreign companies, mostly to subsidize their own green energy projects. AFP President Tim Phillips said “The Obama Administration continues to waste our tax dollars trying to pick winners and losers. This leads to overspending, no new job creation, and inevitably creates government cronyism. The President wasted some $530 million on Solyndra, but now we’re finding billions more given to ‘green energy’ companies overseas. The American people deserve to know the disturbing details of how their tax dollars are being wasted in pursuit of an ideological agenda.”

The purpose of this posts is to review what I call "random wasteful spending" that exists throughout most, if not all, of the Federal bureaucracy. This is different from what I call "systemic wasteful spending" that is anything but random. Systemic wasteful spending occurs everyday, every month, every year, in the same manner, almost like clockwork. 

After following various reports of jailed convicts and illegal immigrants receiving unemployment checks from U.S. taxpayers, the Obama Administration has admitted that in fiscal year 2011 the government “overpaid” around $14 billion in benefits.

Wishing For A Bonner

Obama's $840 billion stimulus contained more than a million dollars to study erectile dysfunction, and yes, I know, any complaint will be identified as a war on men.

That would be in addition to a Republican war on women as alleged by zanies not liking perfectly sound criticisms of Obama's health insurance mindlessness.

That’s a chunk of change for a nation suffering through a painful debt crisis that’s topped $15 trillion. Like most bloated government programs, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) unemployment benefits— paid by state treasuries and the federal government—is rife with fraud and corruption. 



Estimates of stimulus benefits cannot possibly calculate the pluses of leaving more money in the private economy, and the Congressional Budget Office is among those worrying about long-term harm offsetting current advantages.
Thanks not just to the stimulus, but to fervor for more spending generally when revenues are down, the debt has grown by $5 trillion under Obama. That renders us vulnerable to immediate danger on top of saddling our grandchildren with impoverishing repayments.

The president has ignored corrective recommendations of his own debt commission, and this year offered a $3.8 trillion budget defeated 99-0 in a Senate vote that left Democrats making flimsy excuses for what was really a rejection of ruin.

Ours is a president of spectacular negligence. A prime example has been his refusal to propose changes in Social Security, Medicare (beyond cuts that were not overall budget deductions) and Medicaid, even though those three entitlements and debt interest will consume all federal tax revenues as soon as 2025 if not restructured.

Obama himself has even acknowledged that something has to be done, but instead of doing it, created a new health care entitlement worsening the jam we are in by more than a trillion dollars over the next decade. If you want an idea of how absurd Obama's $3.8 trillion budget request for 2013 is, consider the fact that he actually wants to increase funding for the U.S. Department of Energy.

CBS News reported this year that it found 12 "green" companies that got billions from Washington "then declared bankruptcy or are suffering other serious financial issues."

Beacon Power, one such company, was deemed by Standard & Poor's credit rating agency to have a 70 percent chance of failing. Yet that didn't stop the administration from giving Beacon tens of millions of dollars -- after which the company went under.

Harry Reid

It was also via the Energy Department that the Obama administration halted the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. Taxpayers had pumped billions of dollars into Yucca Mountain so that it could accommodate spent nuclear fuel from around the country. But to please Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and environmentalists, the administration ended the project, and another huge investment by the Energy Department was lost.

Does that seem like an agency on which the president should want to spend more money for "clean-energy development"?

Not surprisingly, the $4 trillion in deficit reduction supposedly sought in the budget proposal would come "over 10 years." So even if Congress approves the president's plan, a future Congress could readily restore the money, and more.

At any rate, the "reductions" are dubious. The president claims huge savings from winding down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those "savings" largely represent money that was not going to be spent anyway. It's an accounting gimmick.

And private economists are challenging the president's reliance in his budget figures on rosy projections of 3 percent economic growth this year and next, when actual growth is struggling to maintain 1 percent. They say that is far higher than growth is actually likely to be.

Meanwhile, a series of destructive tax increases would be imposed on "the rich," on banks, and on the oil, gas and coal companies that meet most of our nation's energy needs. Do you want to pay more to heat your home and fill your gas tank?

And the president's plan gives scant attention to reforming Medicare and other programs that are the key drivers of rising debt.

Finally, the president wants well over $100 billion in new "stimulus" spending, a big part of it to hire more government workers despite the 2009 stimulus' failure to produce the projected jobs.

The president's chief of staff, Jacob Lew, openly rejected talk of real spending cuts.

"The time for austerity is not today," he said on a Sunday talk show.

Bob Corker

We disagree, and so does U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

"An honest analysis of the president's budget virtually eliminates the White House's claims of deficit reduction when you remove the spending cuts previously enacted in law, alleged savings from money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that was never going to be spent, and nearly $2 trillion in new taxes," Corker stated in a news release.

Noting that our national debt -- $15.3 trillion -- is now as big as our entire economy, he added: "This budget makes a mockery of the American people. If a Republican or Democratic governor of Tennessee proposed a budget like this one, they would be run out of the state."

The president should start anew and offer a budget that relies on slashing wasteful and unconstitutional spending, not on growth-destroying tax increases and "stimulus."