Government Waste Is So Much Worse Than You Ever Imagined
Peter Reagan

From sexy goldfish to AI toilets, federal bureaucrats have spent staggering quantities of our money on truly insane projects. It’s not only misguided and wasteful – it’s a direct drain on our financial security. Here’s how much it’s costing you…

Most Americans hate government waste (even if they disagree about which things that the government should be spending money on).

What would probably surprise many people, though, is how many of the things that they don’t already know about that they will all agree are wasting American taxpayers’ money.

And if you’re one of the people who have been trying to keep track of where all of that government spending is going, I would still bet you a good steak dinner that you really don’t know how bad that it really is.

So, how bad is the government waste?

Let’s just start with one example: In most businesses, employee payroll is one of the biggest expenses (if not the biggest expense) that the company has. Because of that, companies understandably want to make sure that their employees are productive and that the company is receiving more value from having the employee on payroll than the employee costs the company for payroll, benefits, and payroll taxes.

It’s a pretty straightforward cost/benefit evaluation.

Knowing that and knowing that it is our tax money (which we don’t give them by choice, if you’ll remember) being used to pay for the government employees, you would think that government management (as in the bureaucrats) would make sure that they are making good use of our money.

We already know that isn’t the case, though, and the area of government employee payroll isn’t exempt from the massive waste. To give one example, Senator Rand Paul (yes, son of our good friend Ron Paul) was recently interviewed by Laura Ingraham. In a portion of that interview, which Tyler Durden transcribed, Rand Paul said,

One of my favorite examples of federal workers not showing up is from a few years ago. We had an assistant to the head of the EPA, and he told his boss that he also worked for the CIA. He said he would be gone for six months at a time. Finally, during a government shutdown, someone said, "Hey, Mr. Smith, we understand this guy works for you. We haven’t seen him in six months." They replied, "Who?" They had never heard of the guy.

The man completely made up a story about working for the CIA, and for nearly a decade, millions of dollars were paid to him while he didn’t show up. He’d be lounging around saying, "I’m on a secret mission to the Middle East, can’t talk." That kind of stuff runs rampant throughout government.

It’s just unbelievable to me that someone feels justified to get paid on the American taxpayers’ dime (that is, paid for by you and me) for doing nothing.

But some people, including people in the government’s bureaucracy, feel that way.

I’m not saying that all government employees are lazy, freeloading con artists. But any that you and I have to pay for are too many.

And that may not even be the worst of the government waste.

That’s right, there are examples of massive amounts of taxpayer dollars going towards absolutely absurd programs.

And neither you nor I got to vote to fund these things.

Would you like examples? I wouldn’t expect you to believe me without examples, so, I have a few examples provided by Emily Sturge, who writes,

The U.S. National Institutes of Health spent $592,527 at Emory University in Atlanta to explore why chimpanzees throw feces. Another $117,000 was necessary to conclude that most chimps are right-handed, the Washington Examiner reports. 

Their research suggests that throwing feces is a sign of intelligence in chimps.

That’s right, over half a million dollars to understand why chimpanzees throw poop. 

Now, some might argue that with the mud slinging in the last election, we show signs of not having progressed beyond chimpanzee social dynamics, but, still, was this worth that much money that you didn’t vote to pay for?

Or how about this obviously worthwhile research?

The National Science Foundation awarded $3.6 million to a study at Bowdoin College in Maine, where a portion of this funding went to experiments on what makes goldfish feel sexy.

Researchers discovered that when given sex steroids, male goldfish exhibited more social behavior and swam closer to their female counterparts, the Daily Signalreports. 

Now, if you’re wondering what possible national security or other American interest that goldfish… arousal… details might serve, you’re not the only one.

But there’s even more where those came from! Again, from Sturge:

The National Cancer Institute funded nearly $7 million to researchers at Stanford University to build an AI toilet, Real Clear Policy reports. 

The toilet is equipped with cameras that scans the user’s waste and unique “analprint.” 

I didn't even want to know that there was a unique... "print”... of that part of the anatomy, and it's disturbing that they used taxpayer money (and $7 million of it, at that) to study that particular biometric information.  

Maybe they’re looking for some early detection method for cancer of that part of the anatomy.  Or maybe they expect to catch drug dealers at public toilets using this information? Are police officers going to start filing "analprints" along with fingerprints during arrests? 

I don’t know. Either way, though, you and I shouldn’t pay the bill for bone-headed projects like this

But these insane examples may not be the worst part…

No, the worst part is that our Federal government, yes, the government that can’t balance its own budget, that can’t seem to get many of its most expensive departments to be able to pass an audit (meaning that they can’t even tell us where all of the money went)...

… that same Federal government borrows massive amounts of money to pay for this waste.

And what does that mean for you? 

Devaluation of your dollars. In other words: Inflation.

Yes, government spending on ridiculous things shouldn’t be tolerated, but it wouldn’t have such an ugly effect on you and me personally if the government wasn’t borrowing so much of the money that they are, then, wasting. If they weren’t borrowing so much, it would be an irritating annoyance that they wasted the money, but it wouldn’t come back to bite us so hard.

But because they borrow that money and devalue the dollar in the process, it does bite us. To give just one fairly recent example of how that effects you and me, Mickey Butts writes,

In a recent paper in the Review of Economic Dynamics, [Stanford University professor and Hoover Institution economist John] Cochrane argues that higher inflation resulted from the federal government pouring trillions of dollars in stimulus spending into the economy during the pandemic. 

Yes, the ugly inflation that we’ve been dealing with for the last few years is the massive devaluation of the money in your pocket caused by government spending under Bidenomics. Every single one of your dollars is worth more than 20% less than it was just five years ago!

And we’re still feeling the effects of it now, several years after the stimulus spending that they “justified” by the COVID pandemic is over.

Even if Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy are able to massively cut government spending, we’ll still be dealing with the long-term fallout from Bidenomics and decades of government borrowing for wasteful spending along with the shorter-term inflation that Trump’s tariffs will cause.

That’s why, if you want to weather the continuing inflation storm, you absolutely must diversify into stores of value that are independent of inflation, that maintain their actual purchasing power regardless of what happens to the dollar. 

You can start the process of making your personal economy inflation resistant by diversifying into precious metals through Birch Gold.

Peter Reagan is a financial market strategist at Birch Gold Group. As the Precious Metal IRA Specialists, Birch Gold helps Americans protect their retirement savings with physical gold and silver.

 

www.birchgold.com