[Pen-l] The real welfare queens

[raghu <mraghu01@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bloomberg has a detailed article on how private contractors routinely
rip off the government for billions. Ironically, the budget-Nazis are
not wrong about wasteful government spending; they are just being
penny-wise and pound-foolish in obsessing about entitlements and
earmarks:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aYYHKPn4DOe8
---------------------------------------------------------snip
As the federal government's $700 billion bailout of banks sputters,
there's an object lesson for the new administration of President
Barack Obama: Federal departments, including Treasury itself,
routinely squander tens of billions of dollars a year in taxpayer
money as they farm out public business to private corporations.

Obama, like presidents before him, said during his bid for the White
House that he wanted to curtail waste in government. With contracting,
he faces a mismanaged system that accounts for almost 40 cents of
every federal dollar spent outside of mandatory obligations such as
Social Security and Medicare.

Not Earmarks

When compared with all federal contracting, just a fraction of U.S.
spending waste comes from so-called earmarks, which elected officials
often criticize as the unnecessary pet projects of politicians.

The "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska, for example, had a price tag of
$398 million. By contrast, the government spent $368.4 billion on all
contracts in 2008, and Republican Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn
estimates that about $100 billion of that was wasted.

U.S. spending on 3.7 million contracts in 2008 represented an increase
of 76 percent over 2000 levels.

"We have a broken, broken system that rewards incompetence," says
Coburn, 60, who has been examining purchasing breakdowns since his
election to Congress in 2005. "We need to totally change contracting."

Bureaucrats, not elected officials, run the U.S. purchasing system,
well out of public sight. And their bosses keep the spending secret by
not releasing complete contract files to the public.

No Access

Just as taxpayers can't find out how the Treasury and the Federal
Reserve used the first half of the bank bailout, Americans are often
denied access to public records that provide details on how hundreds
of billions of taxpayer dollars are spent in contracts.

Bloomberg News filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the
Treasury Department, the Commerce Department and the Fed asking for
documents on the bailout and routine contracts.

As of Jan. 12, seven months after receiving the first request, the
three agencies had provided incomplete documents with blacked-out
words or nothing at all.




-raghu.

--
Q: What did the apple say to the orange?
A: Nothing, apples don't talk.
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