The idea that China as been ripping us off is absurd. I do not think that my computer, printer, cellphone and other Chinese made things I have purchased were overpriced, especially considering that the price I paid for them was almost certainly over double the Chinese factory paid to make them.
\
Doge only wants to fill the coffers of the government so it can give huge tax breaks to the billionaires. If Doge were a serious enterprise, it would consist of people with CPA degrees and experience at auditing and accounting. But, no, Musk hired a bunch of computer geeks. They will find very, very little actual fraud.
[/QUOTE
your AREAL ***** YOU KNOW THAT SERIOUSLY . THE PROBLEM IS RTHE TARIFFS THEY HAVE ON America PRODUCTS dumbass, THEN THE CHINESE GOVERMENT SUBDISES VARIOUS CHINESE COMPANYS ALSO. JUST AS CANADA HAD HUGE TARIFS ON AMERICAN PRODUCTS AS MUCH AS 100 PERCENT . DOGE WANT TO SAVE THE NATIIN FROM ITS SELF AND DEMOCRATS WHO WILL SPEND SPEND SPEND SUCH PROGRAMS AS
) Tax Dollars for…Pickleball?
The Department of the Interior is apparently investing in pickleball. Specifically, it recently provided a $12 million grant for a 30-court pickleball complex in Las Vegas.
Pickleball players in Vegas clearly benefit from this initiative. But is it really fair to force taxpayers in Connecticut to pay for sports complexes in Nevada?
Bastiat’s famous comment comes to mind: “Government is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
2) Ghost Towns on the Government’s Dime
One of the surprisingly large sources of government waste is money spent on maintaining empty or largely-empty government buildings. Senator Paul cites a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that identified nearly $10 billion in federal funds wasted on empty office space.
“Most federal offices are ghost towns, with 17 out of 24 agencies using only 25% or less of their space in 2023,” Paul notes. “Even the busiest offices barely reach 50% capacity…The GAO calculated building capacity based on usable square feet per employee. It found that many of these buildings are just oversized, expensive storage units for empty desks.”
3) Promoting DEI Among Bird Watchers
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently spent close to $300,000 on what seems to be a DEI initiative for bird-watching groups.
“In yet another shining example of wasteful government spending, the National Science Foundation has decided that the world of bird watching needs a dose of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Paul writes. “To that end, they’ve approved a grant of $288,563 to create ‘affinity groups’ within ornithological societies—basically, birdwatching clubs—based on identity characteristics…The goal, they say, is to ensure that birdwatching communities are more ‘inclusive.’”
Regardless of where you stand on DEI, this kind of spending should raise a red flag on fiscal responsibility grounds alone. Surely there are more pressing needs than this? (Do the birds care about the gender identity of the people watching them?)
4) Advancing Fertilizer Use in Foreign Countries
The tragically misnamed United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is spending money on, well, not only the United States. The 2024 Festivus Report highlights that the USDA is spending $20 million on the Fertilize Right initiative “to advance fertilizer use in Pakistan, Vietnam, Colombia, and Brazil.”
This was one of a number of items in the Report that involved American taxpayer dollars going to foreign countries.
5) Money for Circus Performances
The 2024 Festivus Report highlights $365,000 that has been spent by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to promote circuses in city parks. Paul quotes the late David Boaz in his comments on this story: “Government funding of anything means government control. As we should not want an established church, so we should not want established art.”
Concentrated Benefits and Dispersed Costs
Why does such government waste persist year after year? A significant part of the explanation traces back to the concept of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Essentially, the beneficiaries tend to be a small, concentrated group, so they lobby hard for these outlays because they stand to gain a lot from them. Taxpayers, on the other hand, tend to be dispersed and only minimally affected by any single expense, so it’s not usually worth it for them to lobby against the spending, or even learn about it in the first place.
Economist Gordon Tullock famously illustrated this concept with his fictional Tullock Economic Development Plan. The plan “involves placing a dollar of additional tax on each income tax form in the United States and paying the resulting funds to Tullock, whose economy would develop rapidly.”
Think about the incentive Tullock would have to advocate for this plan, compared to the incentive that an ordinary taxpayer would have to look into it and voice their objections. With campaign contributions and votes to be gained from the special interest beneficiaries, is it any wonder politicians often go for these kinds of wealth transfers?
The ubiquity and stubborn persistence—year after year—of all this waste, combined with the economic theory that explains why it happens, suggests that there is a fundamental problem with the process of government as we know it. This is not, as many are itching to believe, a “Democrat” problem or a “Republican” problem. The degree of government waste changes very little with changing administrations. No, this is a problem with the government as such.
To solve this problem, we need to ask not just who should run the government, but what the government should be allowed to spend money on in the first place, given what we know about its entirely predictable and repeatedly demonstrated propensity for waste and dysfunction.
Milei has already started that conversation in Argentina. Let’s hope that with the new Trump administration and DOGE, that’s a conversation we can have here as well.
