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Now that most of us have settled up with the federal government by paying our income taxes, let's take a look at how they are misspending our money.
The Heritage Foundation is out with a timely report that contains the top 10 examples of government waste.
For example, did you know that $25 billion is missing from the Treasury Department? What do they care? They only print money. You and I have to earn it.
The Pentagon also bought 270,000 commercial airline tickets worth $100 million. Not only did they not use the tickets, they never asked for a refund, though the tickets are fully refundable.
At the Agriculture Department, which has more employees than America has farmers, employees used government credit cards to pay for Ozzy Osbourne tickets, tattoos, lingerie, bartender school tuition and even make their personal car payments.
And we are told that government can't afford any more tax cuts? We can't afford for them to keep spending like this.
There's plenty more. Medicare overspends and wastes more money than any other government program, but because Medicare is popular, politicians demagogue whenever anyone wants to cut unnecessary costs.
Did you know the Education Department certified student loans to a college that doesn't exist? Congress faked the documents to see what the department would do.
I wonder how many other examples of waste, fraud and abuse exist at the Education Department.
The Army Corps of Engineers manipulates data to get more congressional funding and the government's earned income tax credits squanders about one-third of the program's costs in overpayments.
Then, there are numerous examples of government creating new programs that duplicate existing ones. For example, there are 342 duplicative economic development programs.
Think of this when your government tells you at tax time, or any time, it can't afford to let you keep more of your money. Tell Congress you can't afford to let them waste any more of it.
And that's Column One for this week.
To check out more Column One features, click here.
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