March Madness: U.S. Gov't Spent More Than Eight Times Its Monthly Revenue

Read the headline, the government spent 8 times more than it took in, and that is just in March. These people have gone crazy, with our money. If this isn't a recipe for disaster I don't know what is. If nothing else, this should be an indication that the federal budget has to be fixed NOW, not later down the road, because later never comes...

By Terence P. Jeffrey - CNSNews

The U.S. Treasury has released a final statement for the month of March that demonstrates that financial madness has gripped the federal government.

During the month, according to the Treasury, the federal government grossed $194 billion in tax revenue and paid out $65.898 billion in tax refunds (including $62.011 to individuals and $3.887 to businesses) thus netting $128.179 billion in tax revenue for March.

At the same, the Treasury paid out a total of $1.1187 trillion. When the $65.898 billion in tax refunds is deducted from that, the Treasury paid a net of $1.0528 trillion in federal expenses for March.

That $1.0528 trillion in spending for March equaled 8.2 times the $128.179 in net federal tax revenue for the month.

Read the rest at the link above...

Welfare State: Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages

35% of paychecks come from government handouts. If you figure how many people have run out of unemployment and haven't gone back to work, we are looking at about 50% of the population being either unemployed or on some sort of welfare. So the other 50% of us are paying all the bills for the entire Country, except for the huge deficit. I guess it would be 50% of us and China, are paying the bills. And obama and the democrats keep on spending.

Be sure to read the part below about the ratio to get things back in line. Either wages have to rise by $2.3 TRILLION dollars or welfare benefits need to decrease by $500 billion dollars. Umm, I don't know about you, but I doubt I get a raise at all this year. Those of us that are working are damn proud to get what we get. It would seem to be to our advantage for people to get back to work and reduce the welfare roll...

By: John Melloy - CNBC

Government payouts—including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance—make up more than a third of total wages and salaries of the U.S. population, a record figure that will only increase if action isn’t taken before the majority of Baby Boomers enter retirement.

Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

“The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus,” said Madeline Schnapp, director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs, in a note to clients. “Consumption supported by wages and salaries is a much stronger foundation for economic growth than consumption based on social welfare benefits.”

The economist gives the country two stark choices. In order to get welfare back to its pre-recession ratio of 26 percent of pay, “either wages and salaries would have to increase $2.3 trillion, or 35 percent, to $8.8 trillion, or social welfare benefits would have to decline $500 billion, or 23 percent, to $1.7 trillion,” she said.

Last month, the Republican-led House of Representatives passed a $61 billion federal spending cut, but Senate Democratic leaders and the White House made it clear that had no chance of becoming law. Short-term resolutions passed have averted a government shutdown that could have occurred this month, as Vice President Biden leads negotiations with Republican leaders on some sort of long-term compromise.

Go read the rest at the link above...

Post Office is going belly up...

By September 30th of this year, the post office will be broke. They are scheduled to pay the federal government $5.5 BILLION in advance for medical costs for future retirees and another $1.3 BILLION for workers comp in November. They won't have the money though, they are broke.

And this is the same government that we are supposed to trust with our health care?

Our government does not have a clue about running a business. If you need even further proof than the post office, just look at their inability to manage the budget. I know it is a big ass budget, but damn, we are paying thousands of people to keep an eye on that stuff.

The post office is a symptom of a much larger disease. This is only the beginning. Stock up on ammo folks, it will be the currency of the future...

Government Waste By the Numbers: Report Identifies Dozens of Overlapping Programs

My blog is a little over two years old now, and I have been saying since almost day one, that there is no accountability in washington. There is no system of checks and balances. There is no adult supervision. We send billions and billions of our hard earned dollars to these dumbasses every year in the form of taxes and nobody cares enough about us to pay attention to how it is spent.

And it's not just the overlap of stupid programs, it's the fraud and outright theft that bothers me even more. There are plenty of government employees who know how to manipulate the system. They know how to funnel millions of dollars of these overlapping funds into their own pocket. They are 100% aware that there is no reliable system in place to track their government credit card purchases. The list goes on and on. And even when these thugs are caught they are rarely prosecuted and they usually pay back a very small portion of what they have stolen. And thanks to the unions, many of them even get to keep their jobs! How does that work? If I was caught stealing from my job, not only would I rightly be terminated, I would more than likely wind up in jail. Why do we continue to put up with this?

We trust our elected officials to be good stewards of our money. We trust them to make good hiring decisions, by hiring trustworthy people. We are getting screwed in this deal. Sometimes I doubt their is an honest person in our entire government. I'm sure there are some, somewhere, I think the good guys are outnumbered though.

Go over to FoxNews and read the rest of this story. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Can you begin to imagine all of the programs they haven't discovered yet? The people we trust waste TRILLIONS of our tax dollars every year and then they wonder why the budget and deficit are so far out of whack. If we ran our household budgets like washington manages our tax money, can you imagine the chaos?

From FoxNews

The federal government hosts 47 job-training programs, 44 of which overlap. It runs 80 programs for the "transportation disadvantaged."

Another 82 programs spread across 10 separate agencies endeavor to improve teacher quality -- something hundreds of local school districts are already focused on.

These are just a few of the findings in a blockbuster report on government waste and inefficiencies released by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. The report identifies billions of dollars in potential savings if Congress just had the will to streamline initiatives that target politically popular causes.

Though lawmakers in both parties have long struggled to eliminate the common culprits of waste, fraud and abuse, they seized on the findings Tuesday. House Republican Leader Eric Cantor vowed to "get our fiscal house in order" in light of the report.

"Now again, we have said enough is enough. Our Congress is about delivering results," Cantor said.

"This report confirms what most Americans assume about their government. We are spending trillions of dollars every year and nobody knows what we are doing. The executive branch doesn't know. The congressional branch doesn't know. Nobody knows," Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said in a statement Tuesday morning. "This report also shows we could save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars every year without cutting services."

The well-timed release comes as Republicans and Democrats fight over how much to cut from the rest of this year's budget, not to mention next year's $3.73 trillion spending plan. Democrats have so far balked at GOP plans to cut $61 billion from the 2010 fiscal year budget. But while both parties are squabbling over a relatively small slice of the budget pie -- discretionary spending -- the GAO report suggests Congress could keep cutting and leave the operation of government intact.