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LET IT FLOW: Government loves to spend your money. |
Americans are completely used to this. The story of the $150
toilet seat or the $200 hammer no longer shocks the public, but
instead serves as a reminder that government just doesn't care
about how it uses taxpayers' hard-earned cash.
While most of the attention to waste rightly focuses on the
binge-spenders inside the Beltway, Watchdog.org journalists have
their keyboards trained on state capitals across the land. They
find unusual and appalling stories of waste, fraud and abuse
that other media outlets ignore.
So let's take a peek at the top 10 examples of government
waste from across the states in 2013:
10. Paying more for green
Taxpayers are footing the bill to green a federal building in
Minnesota, and the tab isn't cheap. The Whipple project
is costing as much as 40 percent more per
square foot than a new office building, according to some
critics, and we're buying it, wrote Minnesota's Tom Steward
earlier this year.
Read Steward's full story here.
9. Run it
Oregon just can't leave well enough alone. That state
set aside $50,000 to create a pilot project to see
if buying walking desks for public workers would improve health
outcomes.
Read Northwest Watchdog's story about the walking desks here.
8. Home, times two
What would you do with two luxury homes just blocks apart?
That's the pressing questions weighing on the shoulders of the
Nebraska University president because of a little waste in the
Cornhusker State. The university decided to buy its president a
$750,000 mansion, even though he already owns one just blocks
away.
Here's Nebraska Watchdog's story on the purchase.
7.
Netroots ninnies
Netroots Nation is a gathering of liberals from across the
country. So why did two employees from a county in New Mexico
use taxpayer money to attend the shindig?
Read here to find out.
6. Cosmic car sale
Sure, car companies need to advertise, but do they really
need to use taxpayer money to paint the roofs of their
factories? Who are they trying to entice with that ad?
Tennessee Watchdog has that story.
5. Let's get paid
Times are still tight in Oklahoma, but some public employees
don't give a rip. At least 10 well-paid higher education
employees received 5 percent raises this year, adding on to
their six-figure salaries. Straight cash, homey.
Oklahoma Watchdog has the details.
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4. The cleanest bridge around
This is definitely one of the oddball stories on this list. This
city in Nebraska wants to spend at least $600,000 to pigeon-proof a
bridge. Think about that for a second. Officials want to take money
from families and businesses to protect a bridge from bird poop.
Nebraska Watchdog has that story.
3. Crime and public service pay
An ex-mayor gets sent to prison for smuggling guns. He serves his
time and is released. Thanks to his public service, he has a
never-ending income source when he hits the streets his
taxpayer-funded pension.
New Mexico Watchdog has more on that.
2. No, really, crime pays
Room, board and income? Sounds pretty sweet, right? That's
essentially the deal some prisoners received. Wisconsin Reporter
found that prisoners in that state received more than $600,000 in
unemployment benefits while behind bars. Yikes.
Read more here.
1. Common sense is dead
Scrubbing a welfare program's
rolls of the ineligible like a good idea, right? Maybe
in the rest of the country, but Illinois just doesn't play that way.
After spending millions of dollars hiring investigators to audit the
state's Medicaid program and those investigators experiencing wild
success, the state ended the evaluation and stopped purging people
from the program. Because saving millions and millions of dollars
each year just makes too much sense.
Illinois Watchdog has more on that here.
So, in short, here's what governments just love doing with your
money:
___
Contact:
Dustin@Watchdog.org.
[This
article courtesy of
Illinois Watchdog.]
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