July 11, 2013

Barack Obama's Depraved Mind

Obamunist math:

• Total size of Sequestration-2013: $85 billion in total automatic budget cuts (Congressional Budget Office)
• "Bogus," fraudulent, and otherwise inappropriate federal payouts in 2012: $107.7 billion (Government Accountability Office; does anybody believe "bogus" payments in 2013 will turn out to be less than in 2012?)
• Yet we "needed" eleven weeks of a 20% pay-cut furlough in the Department of Defense in order to decrease the rate of budgetary increases because... ?

Mind, these bogus payments are not just disputed bills or an occasional overpayment; the federal government exhibits a criminal level of depraved indifference to how much of our money it pays out every year:

Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who runs the Government Accountability Office, said his agency already has uncovered $107.7 billion in inappropriate and excessive payments in 2012, and that total is not yet complete.

Testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Mr. Dodaro also said only 37 percent of federal managers knew if one or more of their programs had been evaluated in the past five years, and 40 percent were uncertain whether any review had been performed.

"Imagine beginning every month not knowing what money you have and not being able to track how much you’ve spent," said committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, California Republican. "Yet year after year, that’s where the federal government operates."

It's actually significantly worse than $107.7 billion; that number does not include wrongful payments by the Department of Defense, which is perhaps the worst offender:

[Dorado] said the problem is particularly acute in the Defense Department: His agency has been unable to audit the Pentagon for 20 years because the military is so decentralized that there is no one source in charge of preparing documents for financial review.

And the GAO believes the Army is so disorganized that it does not know how many people it’s paying or whether soldiers and other personnel are getting the correct salaries....

But the GAO’s $107.7 billion waste estimate doesn’t include the Defense Department, Mr. Dodaro said.

If improper payments by the DoD were included into the total, and if the DoD level of fraudulent and bogus spending was the same as the rest of the government (though it likely is worse), then the real figure would be closer to $125.7 billion. (The DoD accounts for a little more than one sixth of the budget.)

But by golly, we had "no alternative" to reducing spending on the backs of low-level DoD employees! Barack "Deficit Hawk" Obama, who demanded the sequester in the first place, and who made sure the sequester would be as painful as possible on ordinary people (so he could blame the GOP later), assures us that his hands were tied: Look what those Republicans made me do!

Good thing Obama always keeps an eye on the little people; how else could he can find so many new and creative ways to nick even more money out of our pockets?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 11, 2013, at the time of 12:50 PM

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