From: seebs@plethora.net (Peter Seebach) Subject: Government Money Wasters Date: 1998/04/01 Message-ID: #1/1 NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 01 Apr 1998 09:07:16 CST Organization: Plethora Internet Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy The Top Ten Government Money Wasters Forget Social Security. Forget the defense budget. These are the top ten money wasters in the Federal Government. They're top, not because they're so much money, but because they're so stupid. If you hadn't seen them on the Internet, you'd never believe them. In no particular order: 1. The Consumer Price Index. Annual cost, $25 billion. Every six months, the federal government buys one of everything; the changes between the cost of this from one six-month period to another are the basis of the Consumer Price Index. Then, they spend another $1 million or so finding the poorest family in the country, and giving them one of everything. What a waste! 2. The Federal Witness Protection Program. Annual wasted money, $36 million. What happens when an NFL star turns state's evidence? The government can't find him similar work elsewhere - so they just pay him his former annual income, until he reaches retirement age. 3. The Treaty With Britain. Annual cost, $N billion. At the end of the Revolutionary War, we made a treaty with the English. They have promised not to attack the U.S. again, and we pay them 1% of our GNP every year. This is silly; they obviously can't attack us now, why are we still paying them this protection money? 4. Unauthorized charges on the Federal American Express Card. Annual cost: $24 billion. The Federal American Express card, used by all federal employees to purchase hotels, has about $2 billion a month in unexplained charges; one of the cards was stolen, but the feds say it would be too expensive to report it stolen and have to replace all of the cards in use. 5. The Romance Section of the Library of Congress. As if it's not bad enough to have them in the Library of Congress at all, under a special act from the 1930's, every romance novel ever printed in the U.S. is also printed in *HARDCOVER* for the Library of Congress. Often, these are *SINGLE BOOK RUNS*, which cost a lot of money. 6. The CIA Attempt To Infiltrate The Freemasons. This would have been better handled by the Department of Redundancy Department. 7. The "Take A Bite Out of Crime" Campaign. What started out as a clever idea turned sour when the Feds were forced to put McGruff the Crime Dog to sleep when he actually bit a criminal! The ad campaign had to be scrapped. 8. The Elimination of Lead This was never about the environment. It was about the fear that children would drink leaded gasoline and get lead poisoning; later, the Navy had to repaint all of their ships with non-lead based paint, because of concerns that children would lick them. 9. Balancing Al Capone's Books The IRS spent $25 million on accountants trying to balance Al Capone's books to figure out exactly how much tax he evaded. 10. Radiation Hardened Guard Dogs Another outgrowth of the fear of nuclear war, the attempts to breed radiation-hardened guard dogs were a dismal failure.