We need a fiscal conservative in the White House
By Erick Posted in Congress — Comments (15) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
With a hat tip to Lucid Idiocy, one of my favorite blogs by a non-political political reporter, here is the Heritage Foundations' list of the top ten examples of government waste from 2005.
The documentation shows that the number 1 example is the $25 billion in unaccounted for expenditures within the federal government for 2003. Read that again. As Heritage notes:
The government knows that $25 billion was spent by someone, somewhere, on something, but auditors do not know who spent it, where it was spent, or on what it was spent. … The unreconciled $25 billion could have funded the entire Department of Justice for an entire year.
That was for 2003. For 2007 Travis Fain found a reference to $6.7 billion in "unreconciled transactions." There's also this from the GAO report:
For fiscal year 2007, federal agencies’ estimates of improper payments, based on available information, totaled about $55 billion. The increase from the prior year estimate of $41 billion was primarily attributable to a component of the Medicaid program reporting improper payments for the first time totaling about $13 billion for fiscal year 2007, which we view as a positive step to improve transparency over the full magnitude of improper payments.
Now consider the 3,417 page omnibus spending bill that Congress pushed forward on with only 46 hours and 8 minutes of review time.
We need a real fiscal conservative in the White House.
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the bureaucracy as well. Rudy's pledged to do so, I think Romney might be pretty effective at it. McCain? Not so much. Fred? Wake me up when Fred wakes up. Huckabee? He's going to grow it.
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Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.
If last night's interview on Hannity & Colmes doesn't show you just how awake Fred is, then maybe someone should check your pulse.
And if you haven't seen the interview, please go to www.fred08.com and watch it.
Texas Proud and Texas Loud
That's your big sell? I saw the debate live, it was a good line. And yet Romney won the debate overall. I was leaning Fred and even donated money to him back in the summer before he announced, but he's had such a lackluster campaign since. He's done a few good things, but for the most part... YAAAAAAAWN, oh what were we talking about again?
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Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.
Do you always exactly balance your checkbook? Have you ever had a month or a year where you just can't figure out why your records don't match the bank? I have, and if you think orders of magnitude from say a dollar in my personal checking account, it's not hard to see how you get to 6 or even 25 billion when the amount of money in the account is in the trillions
To exact exactitude is to be unrealistic. As long as the auditers tried their best to find out where those transactions were, that's probably the best we can ask. If they noticed it and simply said "eh, not worth the effort" then we have issues.
I *do* balance my checkbook, to the penny, each and every month. If it doesn't come out, *exactly*, I make bloody sure I find out why. There's no reason the US Government can't do the same.
And to put that 25 billion into perspective for you -- That's around $100 in taxpayer money for *every* taxpayer in this country. For just a single year. I think even most of those people who don't balance their checkbook to the penny would be fairly unhappy to find $100 less in their accounts than they should...
Although I think 25 billion dollars is a significant amount that should not simply "disappear," comparing federal expenditures to your checkbook is nothing, if not silly.
For example, why not open your account and checkbook to a dozen other people and let them "help" you balance your checkbook (and spend your money). I suspect the likelihood of an end-of-the-year balanced checkbook would approach zero.
Now, let a couple of your partners act in secret, spend money on "classified" things, shovel it over to no-bid contractors, etc. and suddenly steve962 has no idea why his checkbook doesn't balance.
*I* wasn't the one who brought up the checkbook analogy. I was simply responding to reldim's analogy.
That said, there's still NO reason I can see why such a large amount should have gone missing. Even in the case of secret partners, classified programs, etc, there *should* be a record how much money went to those partners and programs, and it should be possible to account for all of it, even if the specific details of what it was spent on are kept secret.
He gets a gleam in his eye when talking about ripping apart bureaucracies and slamming down vetoes.
Dismantling bureaucracy is one way he built his personal fortune. It was part of saving a doomed Olympics. It was part of how he saved Massachusetts from a huge budget shortfall.
We'll get a fiscal conservative in the White House. His name is Mitt Romney :-)
"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant."-Ann Coulter
Pitbull of the VRWC
Huckabee's surge is more evidence that the GOP needs a social AND fiscal conservative. One without the other takes us into the fall handicapped. Whether you are primarily fiscal or social in your focus doesn't mean you have to be blinded to the reality that unity in the conservative movement is critical for victory. That's why I cannot support any candidate with major flaws in either area.
I'd trust Fred, Romney, John, and Rudy with the budget in that order and with little difference between Fred and Mitt.
Huck? Ha! I wouldn't trust him with a Big Mac.
-J
Taking a jab at a Democratic frontrunner, Thompson said the first thing he would do to reduce the country’s debt would be “to reduce the bills Hillary Clinton introduces to, maybe, one a year.”
Now that's funny, I don't care who you are...
That is unless I get to be the guy spending 25 billion,
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777