In the past 30 years, the U.S. Federal Government Seized $51 Trillion from its citizens

The U.S. Federal government has taken in $51 Trillion (or $51,000,000,000,000) from its citizens over the past 30 years, official White House numbers show.

According to "Table 1.1—Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits (-): 1789–2020" on the White House's Office of Budget and Management website, from the years 1985, when Ronald Reagan was president, to 2014, under our current President Obama, the Federal government took in $51,784,162,000,000 -- to be exact.

In other words, five presidents -- President Reagan (Republican), one-term President George H.W. Bush (Republican), two-term President Bill Clinton (Democrat), two-term President George W. Bush (Republican), and two-term President Barack Obama (Democrat) -- presided over the biggest private-to-public wealth transfer in American history.

Nearly every year federal spending went up.

In total, from 1985 to 2014, the U.S. Federal Government outspent more than they took in, spending $62,039,599,000,000 over the 30 year span.

This blog post comes at a time where a constantly resurfacing blog post (true or not) about black Christian churches voluntarily receiving hundreds of billions of dollars over a similar 30 year time span keeps grabbing people's attention on social media.

This blog post attempts to put that in context, if not set it straight altogether.

Despite multiple websites such as AllChristianNews and Urban Intellectuals posting the article, the original source of both posts is a 2009 blog post by HarlemWorldMagazine. The current link is broken. But the original post was archived thanks to the Wayback Machine.

Such blog posts talk about a so-called "return on investment" that black communities are receiving from their churches...

...but one has to wonder what is the real return on "investment" -- because we all know taxes are for investments -- that the black communities are receiving from the U.S. Federal Government.

So black churches have received $420 billion over 30 years (on average $14.3 billion per year) according to the 2009 blog post.  The government took $420 billion over seven times in 2014, or 7.194016 to be more precise.

Over seven times.

Does anyone care?

In fact, the last time the Federal Government took less than $420 billion in a year from its citizens (and remember, this is still by force; non-compliant citizens will go to jail) was 1978.

The HarlemWorldMagazine blog post notes:

“The church has gotten caught up in materialism and greed, a lifestyle. Many ministers today want to live like celebrities and they want to be treated like celebrities. In other words, instead of the church standing with the community, the church has become self-serving. It has strayed away from its mission” according to Dr.Love Henry Whelchel, professor of church history at The Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

Ahh yes, materialism....greed...things the Federal government is not guilty of.

It goes on:

LiveSteez’s investigative series will take a forensic editorial approach to quantifying the return to Black America for the $350 billion in tax-favored donations it has given to the Black Church, examining the arguments on both sides of the pulpit. In this series we will seek answers and advisory to the following questions:

- How often and how much do church leaders take advantage of the faith of poor black people?

-We will investigate and indentify (sic) the churches they are showing a strong return on investment that goes beyond inspiration.

- What does the black community have to show for the $350 billion in tax free dollars?

- Expert analysis on what could potentially be done with such a huge amount of money and how it could improve the state of our communities.

- Why do some church leaders refuse to participate in the Grassley congressional Investigation, which requested the financial records of several mega-churches.

And as a counter investigation, the Goins Report will investigate the return of "investment" to all of the United States for prying $51 trillion out of the hands of its citizenry.

We will ask the following questions:

A) How often and how much do politicians take advantage of the faith of poor black people?

B)We will investigate and identify the communities that are showing a strong return on investment that goes beyond inspiration.

C) What does the black community have to show for the $51 trillion in private wealth stolen from them and their fellow non-black citizens?

D) Expert analysis on what could potentially be done with such a huge amount of money and how it could improve the state of our communities.

E) Why do some political institutions, such as the Department of Defense and the U.S. Federal Reserve, refuse to participate in an audit?

Answer Key:

A) All the time.

B) Washington DC and the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs, according to a 2013 report. According to a 2011 report,  Washington DC was the Richest city in the country. Could that be because there is a buzzing bureaucratic state surrounded by tons of lobbyists and workers in the defense and security industries? 

C) Twice as much unemployment as whites.

D) The African-American community would be so rich that they could spend their money on their own education, food, healthcare, etc. 

E) The Fed would claim that an audit interferes with their allegedly politically independent nature. But Rand Paul provides a better answer. And I don't know where to start with the Pentagon, but there is trans-partisan support for an "Audit the Pentagon" bill. Rand Paul supports that too.

 In the end, all of the hysteria over churches is about comparatively nothing. Comparatively.

The author still has serious exegetical problems (scriptural interpretations) of the prosperity preaching. But however "fruitful" misguided prosperity preaching is in convincing people to voluntarily give their income to religious institutions, it pales in comparison to the against the sophistry and use of force by the Federal Government to take money from its citizens.

Not a single person went to jail for not paying their tithes.

But try not paying your taxes and watch what happens.

Secondly, look at how much of a stretch the biased anti-Christian blog posts have to take. They have to go back 30 years to make the Black Church try to resemble anything that looks bad.

On a year-by-year basis, the Black Church on average voluntarily received $14.3 billion, or 14,333,333,333.33 per year.

But one only has to look back to last quarter to make the government look monstrous. In fact, the more you look back at how much the government spends, the more you question. The more you put the church numbers in perspective, the less you feel bad about it.

Religion, in this case, is a red herring -- a distraction -- from the larger issue of state power. In fact, if you want to keep religion involved, then I would say it is the false religion of the state that is at issue here; not true religion; not Christianity.

LiveSteez, by the way, is defunct.

Picture: Relic from the Ron Paul 2012 Campaign

Definitely one of the most exciting campaigns in recent history -- a game-changer in terms of shifting public opinion towards a freedom-oriented philosophy. Two years passed and one thing is for sure: the Paulian influence on public policy is here to stay.

Click the picture to see one of the most brilliant economic plans in history for the United States of America from Dr. Ron Paul.

Senator Rand Paul has issued his own budget each year. Click here to see the latest one.

It is inferior to his father's plan on many levels (Ron's plan balances the budget in 3 years. Rand's plan balances the budget in 5 years. Ron eliminates and lowers taxes. Rand's introduces a new tax, the flat tax, a regressive tax that will raise taxes on the poor (bad) and lower taxes for the wealthier (good).

But since Ron's plan is politically irrelevant -- unless Rand will in the unlikely event ditches his own and embraces his father's -- there are many good things to say about the Rand Paul.

According to a FreedomWorks analysis of Rand's 2013 plan and a few others' plans, the public debt will be $12.0 trillion in ten years from the plans implementation, which almost takes us back to the Bush II years-size debt.

Boehner: Sequester Cuts Would be a "Meat-Axe to Our Government"

Washington -- House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the sequester cuts that will indiscriminately cut $109 billion in spending across federal agencies would be a "meat-axe" the the U.S. Federal government and that he's not in favor of it.

"I don't like the sequester. I think its taking a meat-axe to our government. A meat-axe to many programs and will weaken our national defense," Boehner said.

Instead, Boehner says, the sequester "should be replaced with spending cuts and reforms that put us on a path to balance the budget over the next ten years."

When asked if there are no cuts or reforms would he be opposed in a delay in the sequester, Boehner said that he would, meaning that the sequester cuts would take effect.

Speaker Boehner has been trying to pin the sequester on President Obama since at least late last year.

"But the President didn't want to have to deal with the debt limit again before his reelection," Boehner said. 

"It was the president and the Senate democrats who committed to working with us to get an outcome out of the super committee. But if the super committee couldn't get an outcome the sequester were going to go into effect," he continued.

On Tuesday, as CNSNews.com reported, Progressive House Democrats introduced their own legislation - the Balance Act- to reduce the deficit.

The house progressive's plan -- unlike Boehner's which says that the sequester should be replaced with "common sense cuts and reforms" that do no harm to U.S. national defense -- reduces the deficit mainly through closing various tax loopholes and cutting defense department spending.

A Congressional Progressive Caucus memo says that the bill will raise revenue for the federal government by nearly a trillion dollars - $960 billion - and cuts $278 in "wasteful Pentagon spending." It also sends money to infrastructure projects and shores up teacher's jobs and renovates schools.

Boehner rests his case on his argument that Americans have already seen President Obama get revenue through the fiscal cliff deal and that they are ready to see spending cuts.

The sequester cuts are set to take place in fiscal year 2013.

(Editor's Note: Was originally filed on February 6, 2013 but went unpublished for no good reason.)

Taxing Millionaires won't fix the Economy, Budget Expert says

From CBS News:

(CBS News) Federal budget expert Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget, said the "Buffett Rule" is not "going to come anywhere close to fixing the problem" of income inequality or the national debt

"Because...growing income inequality has been so pronounced in the past year, what you can't do is pretend that only taxing millionaires is going to come anywhere close to fixing the problem," MacGuineas said on CBS News' "Face to Face."

Budget expert: Taxing millionaires won't fix the economy || CBS News 

Related: The Decline of the Rich

Ron Paul on GOP House Budget Plan: It “doesn’t go far enough”

(GoinsReport.com) – GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul said Tuesday in response to the release of the House Republican’s budget plan, spearheaded by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), that it doesn’t go far enough to fix America’s fiscal woes.

“Today, the House Republican leadership released a budget meant to be an alternative to President Obama's budget plan, which was filled with more debt, more deficits, and more taxing and spending,” Paul said in a statement Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, the House Republican proposal doesn't go far enough to address the extreme fiscal problems we face as a nation.”

Paul criticized the House GOP plan for not balancing the budget until 2040, adding billions to the U.S. deficit, and he claimed that it does not actually cut spending.

“In fact, this budget doesn't actually 'cut' any spending,” Paul said. “It only reduces assumed increases in spending - essentially playing the same game the Washington establishment has played for years with our hard-earned money.”

Paul contrasted the new Ryan Plan with his own presidential platform that proposes a $1 trillion cut in spending in year one of a Paul presidency and claims to balance the budget by fiscal year 2015.

“This is what a serious budget proposal looks like,” Paul said.

The “Path to Prosperity,” the House GOP budget plan, would cut $5 trillion relative to President Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget, and bring deficits below 3 percent of GDP by 2015.

In contrast to the $1.047 trillion spending cap achieved through the Budget Control Act debt deal last August, the House GOP budget plan proposed $1.028 trillion in discretionary spending.

Building on the progress of the Budget Control Act of 2010, the plan caps spending and scales back funding for certain budget agencies, and proposes to reduce the federal workforce by 10 through attrition and enacts a pay freeze until 2015.

It also repeals the President’s health care law, and among other things, allows consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines, enacts medical liability reform, and expands access to consumer-directed health care options.

How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare

If we want to protect the value of individual human life, particularly in old age, when it is most vulnerable, we must reverse direction and start dismantling Social Security and Medicare, two potentially deadly collectivist institutions. We must restore to the individual the responsibility and the power to determine his own future through forethought and saving. The individual must have his own individual property with the freedom to use it for his own well-being, as he sees fit. Government officials must be barred from the process.

How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare

Ron Paul Values Voter Summit Speech (Audio)

U.S. REPRESENTATIVE RON PAUL (R-TX): Thank you. Thank you. So early in the morning, too. I appreciate that. Thank you very much for coming.

And I appreciate very much this opportunity to visit with you to talk about families. Obviously family values are very, very important. And, as was mentioned in the introduction, I have delivered a few babies. And that does contribute to family, let me tell you. (Laughs.)

But also I’m from a rather large family. I have four brothers. But we have five children and 18 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren as well. (Cheers, applause.)

But, you know, the one thing that is fascinating to me when we bring new life into the world or a new baby comes into the family has always been the reaction of the siblings – maybe one, two, or three, four years old. I’m always fascinated with the intrigue of the siblings looking at a small baby. And I thought, well, that was natural and good and really symbolizes what the family is all about.

Unfortunately, our families have been under attack. And I have a few ideas about why that has occurred and what we might do about it. But the value of the family was something that was early described in the Bible. And there’s one reference to the family that I thought was very important. That was in Samuel, 1 Samuel, chapter eight. And this is when the people, not the elders, came to Samuel when he was very old and they knew he would be passing on, so the people came and said to Samuel, what we need is a king. We need a king to take care of us. We want to be safe and secure.

And Samuel, although he knew he wasn’t going to be around long, he advised the people of Israel not to accept the king, because the king, he warned, would not be generous. He would undermine their liberties. There would be more wars. There would be more taxes. And besides, accepting the notion of a king would reject the notion that, up until that time, since they had left Egypt, their true king was their God and the guidance from their God.

But the governing body was the family. And they did not have kings, but they had judges. And that’s what Samuel was. But this was the time there was a shift away from the judges and the family into a king. And I think a lot of that has happened to us in this country. We have too often relied on our king in Washington, and we have to change that. (Cheers, applause.)

Samuel warned that the king would want to make servants of the people. And he even talked about taxes going up and he talked about the use of young men being drafted and he talked about the women and young women being used by the king. And the warning was not heeded, as Samuel didn’t expect it to be heeded. But he also said that if you depend on the king, the morality of the people will be rejected, the emphasis on the people themselves; the morality should come from the people and not from the king. And generally it doesn’t work that way.

You know, morality of the people or the lack of morality of the people can be reflected in the law. But the law never can change the morality of the people. And that is very important. (Cheers, applause.)

In the 1960s and the 1970s, there were dramatic changes in our country. During the Vietnam War there was a lot of antiwar sentiment. There were a lot of drugs. This was the decade that abortion was done flagrantly against the law. And, lo and behold, the laws got changed after the morality changed.

But it was also - about the time we had Roe versus Wade, we also had the breakdown of our monetary system, the rejection of the biblical admonition that we have honest weights and measures and honest money. And not to have honest weights and measures meant we were counterfeiting the money and destroying the value of the money, which implies, even in biblical times, they weren’t looking for a central bank that was going to counterfeit our currency. (Cheers, applause.)

But the culture certainly changed. The work ethics changed. The welfare state grew. And it wasn’t only for the poor who were looking to be taken care of, but we finally ended up with a system where the lobbyists were from the rich corporations and the banks that would come to Washington and expect to get their benefits. And the whole idea of a moral society changed.

But, you know, biblically there’s a lot of admonitions about what the family should be in charge of. Certainly the 10th commandment tells us something about honoring our parents and caring for them. It didn’t say work out a system where the government will take care of us from cradle to grave. No, it was an admonition for us to honor our parents and be responsible for them, not put them into a nursing home and say the federal government can take care of them. Besides, sometimes that leads to bankruptcies and the government can’t do it anyway. So that responsibility really falls on us.

In the Bible, in the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, Christ was recognized to be the prince of peace. He was never to be recognized as the promoter of war. And he even said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be the children of God.” He never said blessed are the war makers. It was the peacemakers that we must honor and protect. (Cheers, applause.)

Christ was very, very clear on how we should treat our enemies. And some days I think we quite frequently forget about that. Early in the history of Christianity, they struggled with the issue of war and peace, because Christ taught about peace. Did that mean Christ was advocating pacifism? The early church struggled with this and came to the conclusion, at least in those early years, that Christ was not a pacifist, but he was not a war promoter.

And this is when they came up with the just-war principles, saying, yes, war could be necessary, but only under dire circumstances, and it should be done with great caution. All other efforts should be exhausted before we go to war, and always under the proper authority. And today I think the proper authority is not the U.N. or the NATO forces to take us to war. (Cheers, applause.)

We are taught in the New Testament about caring for the poor and caring for our families and our neighbors and friends. But never did Christ say, you know, let’s go and lobby Rome to make sure we’re taken care of. It was a personal responsibility for us. Christ was confronted at one time by a prostitute, but he didn’t call for the centurions. He didn’t call for more laws. But he was very direct and thought that stoning was not the solution to the problem of prostitution.

So do laws take care of these things, or do we need a better understanding of our Christian values and our moral principles?

Life is most precious. I talk about life and liberty. I defend liberty to the nth degree, as long people aren’t hurting and killing each other and stealing and robbing. But you cannot defend liberty unless you have a clear understanding of life. And believe me, as an experienced physician and knowing the responsibility of taking care of life, from the earliest sign of life – I know, legally and morally, I have a responsibility to take care of two lives. And therefore you cannot be a great defender of liberty if you do not defend and understand what life is all about and where it comes from. (Cheers, applause.)

You know, many great religions, and especially both the Old and New Testament, talks about a golden rule. And I think it’s an important rule. We want to treat – we should treat other people the way we want to be treated. And I would like to suggest that possibly we should be thinking about having a foreign policy of the golden rule and not treat other countries any way other than the way we want to be treated. (Cheers, applause.)

There were great dreams by Isaiah in the Old Testament about the time that would come when the swords would be bent into plowshares and spears into pruning forks, the dream of ending the wars and to the point where peace is prosperous. And I have come to a strong conviction that one of the most greatest threats to the family is war. It undermines the family. (Cheers, applause.)

Just in our last decade, an undeclared war that we’re dealing with, we’ve lost over 80,000 – 8,500 men and women in our armed services. We have 40,000 who have returned, many of them with severe amputations. And it’s, in essence, forgotten by the general population of this country. We have literally hundreds of thousands begging and pleading for help.

I talked to a young man the other day and he was telling me about losing all his buddies and his frustration with the war and not having a goal of winning the war and not knowing when it would end. And yet his conclusion was – almost in tears he said to me, he says, I lost my buddies over there, but now I’m losing many of them to suicide.

And when you think of this, of what the consequences of war, the death and destruction, what does it do to the families? What does it do to the husbands and the wives and the mothers and the daughters who have to deal with these problems? So, yes, it is very, very damaging. War costs a lot of money. It causes a lot of poverty. Poverty and the economic crisis in this country is undermining the family. But $4 trillion of debt has been added in the last 10 years to fight a war that seems to have no end.

Wars generally lead to inflation, the destruction of money. We don’t honor the biblical principles of honest money. We invite this idea that we can spend endlessly and we can print the money, and literally it undermines the family and undermines the economic system. When you lose a job, it’s harder to keep the family together.

Divorce rates are very, very high among the military, because these young men are being sent back two and three and four times. And there was one story told me about a little boy, a little boy who was 10 years old, and his dad was getting ready to go back again. He was screaming, I hate you, daddy, I hate you, daddy, because he was leaving him.

So this is why, in the early church, they talk about being very careful about going into war, and also to be thinking about the admonition that peace is far superior to war. That should be our goal. (Cheers, applause.)

The goal of a free society, from my viewpoint, is to seek virtue and excellence. And only we as individuals can do that. When we turn this over to the government, when we seek our king and depend on our king, it can only be done at the sacrifice of liberty. And that means eventually all liberties – our personal liberties, our civil liberties, our religious liberties, our right to teach our children and our responsibility to teach our children, whether it’s home schooling or religious school - it’s always under attack.

The more we turn it over to the government – it was a sad day in this country when we went this full measure about acknowledging the authority of the federal government to educate our children. There was a time when the Republican Party said that we shouldn’t even have a Department of Education. And I believe it should go back to the family, not the federal government. (Cheers, applause.)

If we – if we do not get our moral values from our government, which I think it’s impossible to get it from them, where does it come from? First, it comes from us as individuals. We have the responsibility for dealing with our eternity and salvation. But we have our responsibility to ourselves to do the best we can with our own lives.

But then our next step is our families; you know, our children and our parents, and then our neighbors and our churches. That’s where the moral values should come from. And, quite frankly, that is where I think we have slipped. So you can pass all the laws that you want. You can fight more wars than ever that’s going to bring us peace and prosperity. But if the basic morality of the people does not change, it will not matter. We must change our hearts if we expect to change our family and treat our family values as they should be. (Applause.)

We have been blessed in this country by having the freest and the most prosperous. We’ve had a good Constitution, far from perfect. But today we are living way beyond our means. We are living in debt. And debt is not a biblical principle, whether it’s personal debt or whether it’s a national debt. We owe $3 trillion to people overseas. We are suffering from a mountain of debt because we have accepted this idea that we have this responsibility to mold the world, mold the people and mold the economy.

Government is incapable of doing that. The responsibility of the government is to provide the environment which is proper to allow us to thrive, for us to work hard and have the incentive. If we have our right to – (applause) – if we have a right to our life and liberty, why is it that we don’t fight for the right to keep the fruits of our labor? (Cheers, applause.)

If we accepted that, there would be no demands for the king. The people – the early Israelites demanded the king to be taken care of. But we have too, and we have accepted this notion as a country and as a whole that the king will take care of us.

But I prefer the different king, the original king, the instruction that comes from our creator, not from our government. Our government should be strictly limited to the protection of the liberties that allow us to thrive. (Cheers, applause.) And our liberties and our economy, they are under attack today. There is no doubt about it.

So we will have to meet up and make these decisions. To me, the most important decision that we have to ask, just as they asked, you know, in biblical times, as well as at the time of our founding of this country, what should be government like? What should the role of government be? It isn’t, you know, where do you cut this penny or this penny, and what do we do here and there, and tinker around the edges. It should be what should the role of government be? The founders said the role of government ought to be the protection of liberty. That is what the role of government ought to be. (Cheers, applause.)

But the experiment is about to end unless we reverse this trend. I would say that we have gone downhill nearly for 100 years, especially for the last 10, and especially for the last four, when we think of our economy. But the real challenge is, are we going to transition from the republic to the empire and to dictatorship? And there are so many signs that we are, you know, transforming into empire and dictatorship. And just think of the bearing down on our personal liberties today. Think about what happens when we go to the airports. Think about now you have no privacy whatsoever. Now the government can look into every single thing.

So we are living in an age when government is way too big. And it’s time this government act properly, and that is to protect our freedoms. (Cheers, applause.) The – if you read the Constitution carefully, you will find out that the Constitution is directed at the government. There aren’t restraints placed in the Constitution on you. The restraints are that you don’t hurt and kill people, that you fulfill your promise that you’re honest and you fulfill your moral obligation. The restraints are placed on the federal government.

So as long as we allow the federal government to grow and we don’t obey those restraints, things will get worse. But the good news is there’s a whole generation of Americans right now rising up and saying we were on the right track at the right time. Let’s get back on that track. Let’s restore liberty to this country and prosperity and peace. (Cheers, applause.)

Thank you.

(Music.)

(END)


Source: Time.com

Defaulting on the Fed's Bonds - Robert P. Murphy - Mises Daily

Is it a good idea?

Defaulting on the Fed's Bonds - Robert P. Murphy - Mises Daily

Freshman Rep: Don't pay budget committees if they don't produce a budget - The Hill's Floor Action

This is a good idea.

Freshman Rep: Don't pay budget committees if they don't produce a budget - The Hill's Floor Action

Ron Paul "We Don't Have Democracy In Our Country! The Parties Aren't Different They're ALL The Same"

And the best comment ever below:

Ron Paul doesn't cut taxes. He kills them with his bare hands.

Ron Paul could lead a horse to the water and convince it to drink, but he doesn't think that's the government's right.

Ron Paul is the leading cause of freedom in the United States according to WHO.

Ron Paul didn't even have to touch the 4000 babies he delivered. He read them the bill of rights and they came out in anticipation of freedom.

Ron Paul is the only man Chuck Norris comes to when he's scared.

Ron Paul is AWESOME.

Committee Investigates Causes of the Federal Spending Binge

Washington (GoinsReport.com) – Government contracts. DOD Weapons Acquisitions. Tax loopholes. Medicare and Medicaid. Corporate subsidies. Unused or underused federal property. Agriculture business subsidies. $700 billion TARP funds. $862 Billion Stimulus Package.

They all have something in common. They all contribute to the massive federal spending binge.

And, with the exception of the stimulus for which most of the money has been spent, the recent panelists at the latest Committee on Oversight and Government Reform meeting have a near-consensus that they all should either be cut, de-funded or reformed.

At the panel, witnesses and committee members rallied on the point that waste, fraud, and abuse in government must be addressed.

Comptroller of the United States Gene L. Dodaro, relying on the GAO’s 2011 High-Risk Series Report, testified that the GAO found over 30 areas where billions of dollars could be saved; and first on his list was Medicare and Medicaid.

“These are complex programs that are highly susceptible to billions of dollars in improper payments” Dodaro said. “When we first put these programs on the high-risk list, there really were no measures of improper payments” he continued.

Because of recent administration initiatives and legislations, such as the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act, there are estimates to improper payments but “there is a long way to go” to bring these costs under control and provide the accountability that the GAO is searching for. For example, for Medicare Part D there is no estimate for improper payments.

Government contracting remained one of the biggest targets for reform as the day went on. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) noted that while some claim that the federal government is shrinking, ultimately those claims are deceptive because work done by federal workers is shrinking but work done by federal contractors is growing.


As problematic as waste, fraud and abuse is, Dr. Veronique de Rugy, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, testified that current congressional spending patterns overshadows those three areas of concern.

“Fraud, waste and abuse are indeed problems worthy of congressional attention. However, the $125 billion in overt waste that comes from improper payment pales in comparison to the waste that exists in current congressional spending patterns and economic damage caused by the misallocation of capital and the creation of perverse incentives” de Rugy said.

De Rugy had her own three of areas of concern: federal spending in place of the private sector (“corporate welfare” to Amtrak, farmers, small businesses and energy companies), federal spending in the place of the state spending (federal grants to state and local governments), and fruitless federal spending (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).

To combat these problems, de Rugy suggested avoiding budgetary gimmicks and having honest accounting that show the real fiscal situation; putting all spending on the table; and immediately putting in place budget rules that “tie Congress’ hand” and restores fiscal discipline.

One of the programs that both Democrats and Republicans on the committee could agree was the Market Access Program managed by the Department of Agriculture. Formerly known as the Market Promotion Program, a name change that suggests that even foreign companies will benefit from the deal, the program sends taxpayer money to well off corporations and agricultural producers such as Sunkist Growers, Inc., Welch Foods, Inc., and the American Forest & Paper Association to promote U.S. products overseas.

The $1.7 billion that goes to the operation of unused federal property and underutilized property also is a costly expenditure that virtually the entire panel agreed remains a problem, -- although the GAO report noted that recent corrective measures failed to address root causes of long-standing problems, such as budget limitations which leads to an increasing reliance on leasing.

Neither the panel nor the GAO report mentioned the war in Afghanistan or Iraq as being part of the federal spending binge, although the wars have collectively cost American taxpayers $1.21 trillion since the 9/11 attacks, according to the September 2010 “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11” report from the Congressional Research Service.

Video: Obama's Budget Doesn't Touch the Sacred Cows