GAO: U.S. Government Gave Away $125 Billion In Questionable Benefits Last Year:

By their own admission the government pissed away $ 125,000,000,000 last year for questionable benefits paid out to people and organizations that should not have received payments.

Who is minding the store?

It has been my opinion for years that working for the government in any capacity gives a person a free ride and a license to be totally unaccountable for what they do. It can be said that is a person is almost bullet proof from getting fired. It has been a rule of thumb if someone screws up enough, they either get promoted or shipped off to some other department where no on knows them.

To be fair, it is not 100% of government employees that are inept but the percentage rate is way up there. The old saying is; when a person lives with a cripple, they start limping. 

Payments were made to people that didn’t qualify tax credits, unnecessary Medicare treatments and unemployment benefits for people who were actually working.

Since the beginning of the year $19 billion in discrepancies were found consisted of fraud, overpayments and underpayments, as well as payments made without proper documentation. Be patient FOLKS, the year is still young and that number is sure to go up dramatically.

If the US government was a private industry there is no possible way that it could stay in business. Private enterprises rely on efficiency and accountability to stay solvent; two things that our government does not have a handle on and never will.

One of the issue that is really disturbing is; the big wigs don’t bat an eye at these numbers or discrepancies.  It is just another day in the office of no accountability!

All they have to do is fire up the printing presses, get more ink and printing paper. They don’t care.

If some spoiled brat kid misbehaves and is never disciplined, they only get worse over time. Who’s fault is it; the parents.

It appears that they started getting a little better with handling the taxpayers money; that is if we would consider, in  2010 only $121 billion was squandered and $106 billion in 2013; then they fell off of the banana wagon again.

Again who is minding the store????

Other programs where improper payments were made: Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor $17.5 billion, Medicare Advantage, which allows older Americans to get their Medicare benefits through private health plans $12.2 billion, Unemployment insurance $5.6 billion, Supplemental Security Income, a disability program for the poor $5 billion and Social Security $3 billion.

We have to bear in mind; if the government is admitting to squandering $125 billion dollars we might as well at least double that figure.

Once again; it is not their money and they do not care.

I am almost inclined to believe that a person may be better off NOT KNOWING what is going on in their government. It would save them a lot of undue aggravation and nothing will change anyway.

Every day before  I start read the news (95% bad by the way) and blogging, I get out my bottle of Brioschi and take a big dose to keep down my mal di stomaco.

Unfortunately the government has a lock on incompetence and inefficiency and are not going to change anytime soon. It is not unique to the Obama administration, this has been going on for decades.

This article was published in 2009 by the Heritage Foundation about government waste. I am sure it is much worse by now.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/10/50-examples-of-government-waste.

Happy St. Paddy’s Day to all of you leprechauns.

Just as a point of information and to break the Irishman’s bubble; St. Paddy was really Italian.

ANSWERS

Yes, Saint Patrick was Italian by heritage. His parents, Calphurnius and Conchessa, were Roman (Italian) citizens living in Britain, most likely Scotland. Calpurnius, Patrick’s father, was a high Roman diplomat living in England, but a Roman citizen. His area was captured at one point by the Irish and he was forced into slavery. At 21 years old, he escaped slavery. He make it back to Rome to find that most of the Roman empire had been lost.