This video should be required watching for every American. That's because Sen. Coburn, (R-OK), spent the time to educate people on how foolishly money gets spent by the federal government.
This is spending stupidity on autopilot because the federal budget uses baseline budgeting as opposed to zero-based budgeting. Baseline budgeting assumes that what was spent last year will be spent this year plus an increase. Zero-based budgeting assumes that each department and agency starts with zero, then has to justify every penny of spending each year.
This isn't Sen. Coburn's entire exposition of spending stupidity. It's the lowest of the low-hanging fruit in the federal budget. Think of this as the abridged version of wasteful federal spending. This part of Sen. Coburn's presentation is especially galling:
SEN COBURN: Next one, housing assistance. We have 160 programs, separate programs. Nobody knows if they're working. Nobody in the administration knows all the programs. I'm probably the only person in Congress that does because nobody else has looked at it. Twenty different agencies. We're spending $170 billion. If we're really interested in housing assistance, why would we have 20 sets of overhead, 20 sets of administration? And what would it cost to accomplish the same thing?
All these numbers come from the Government Accountability Office, by the way. They don't come from me.
And the other part of the report is that nobody knows if these programs are working. We have no data to say that we're actually making a difference on housing assistance through this expenditure of money. So we're not even asking the most basic of questions that a prudent person would ask.
That's stunning and appalling. It's one thing to spend $170 billion. It's another to spend $170 billion without having a method to determine whether spending that $170 billion is having a positive impact.
There's no justification for not periodically auditing programs to see if these programs are doing what they're supposed what they're supposed to be doing. There's especially no justification to being disinterested in seeing whether they're efficiently doing their job so the taxpayers' money isn't being spent foolishly.
Sen. Coburn is a patriot. He's the first person to put together a detailed blueprint of how the federal government wastes tens of billions of dollars a year. He's the first person to show how this administration didn't take the time to make sure those tens of billions of dollars were being spent efficiently.
The thing that's infuriating is that President Obama is still pretending that he's interested in solving our deficit crisis. With this mountain of proof that the taxpayers' money is getting spent foolishly, it's impossible to take President Obama seriously.
When Arne Duncan, his education secretary insists that teachers have already gotten pink slips as a direct result of sequestration, people should ridicule him. When Ray Lahood insists that people will experience longer wait times as a direct result of sequestration, people should ridicule him.
When President Obama insinuates that his administration has cut the budget to the bare essentials, people, especially in the White House press corps, should ridicule him.
Based on Sen. Coburn's presentation, this administration hasn't even scratched the surface on getting rid of wasteful government spending.
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