by Frank Holmes, reporter
As the New Year gets underway, many Americans are beginning to wonder how they will pay for last year.
Americans have to spend about $13,000 more a year to buy the same amount of groceries as they did when Joe Biden took office, and prices are higher than ever.
Despite that, Christmas sales rose this year — leaving too many people wondering how they will pay the credit card bill.
Maybe it’s time for them to consider becomes members of Congress: Then they could always pass the bill for their crazy spending schemes off onto taxpayers.
Until DOGE and The Donald lay down the law, the spending will continue to rise and rise — a trend Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky charted in his annual Festivus Report.
The study, based on the made-up Seinfeld holiday that includes “the airing of grievances,” shows that wasteful spending has more than doubled in just two years.
A year later, it was $900 billion, and this year the taxpayers’ price tag for useless and insane federal spending ran up to more than $1 trillion.
The report found the familiar litany of corporate cronyism, waste, and pure insanity.
🚨 BREAKING: Senator Rand Paul releases his yearly report on government waste – the "Festivus Report."
$1 TRILLION. In government waste.
Highlights of INSANE, useless spending:
– $3M for "Girl-Centered Climate Action" in Brazil
– $20M for a new Sesame Street show
– $10K for the… pic.twitter.com/ubQziZ2dc6— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 23, 2024
The federal government handed out $700 million in COVID loans to Yellow trucking, supposedly because the transportation line was absolutely vital to national security.
Then the company went bankrupt last August.
COVID left American taxpayers holding the bag again when it comes to federal office space. “Most federal offices are ghost towns, with 17 out of 24 agencies using only 25% or less of their space in 2023. Even the busiest offices barely reach 50% capacity,” says the report.
Worse yet, “this problem predates the pandemic, but COVID-19’s telework boom made it worse.”
But some COVID-related real estate came out better than others.
Take the new digs of Patrick Parker Walsh, a Florida businessman who ripped off federal COVID-19 relief programs for $8 million. He made 16 fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) applications for $11,950,439, of which he managed to take home $4,996,167. Then he shook down the federal Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDLs) programs for another $2,822,000.
Walsh used $8 million of the haul to buy his own private playland, which he called Sweetheart Island.
It’s a sweet deal for him…but the U.S. taxpayer gets the deed to a money pit. For instance, the State Department made you a partner in the Bath Hotel in the Caribbean paradise of Nevis, but there is one problem: The hotel is a lemon.
It needs electrical wiring, new or repaired plumbing, and a new seal on the roof. In fact, it has since 2011.
The department’s Global Ambassador’s Fund for Preservation (which somehow has the acronym AFCP) plunked down a cool $108,272 of your money to maintain the hotel’s best features and bring it up to safety standards.
You also own your share of a $12 million, 5.43-acre, 30-court pickleball complex in Las Vegas.
The government doesn’t always waste its money on tangible real estate nobody uses; they also throw your money away on studies that leave behind no useful information.
Taxpayers footed the $2 million bill for a study about whether Facebook ads for food affect young people’s snacking habits. “Let’s break down what this really means. We’re talking about taxpayer dollars funding a study to watch teens watch ads. Then, those teens eat snacks. Finally, researchers use fancy eye- tracking technology to see where the teens are looking—because apparently, finding out if they’re staring at the chips, the ‘likes,’ or the model is a matter of national importance,” says the report.
“It’s like Big Brother, but instead of monitoring for national security threats, we’re monitoring for snack attacks,” writes Paul (his emphasis). “In a world brimming with challenges to the safety and health of our children, one must question the necessity of a deeper understanding of Doritos’ Facebook ad strategies.”
The feds are also interested in helping foreigners and the IRS.
They want your money to help promoted the U.S. government and foreign posters online. You paid half-a-million dollars to support the #USInvestsInEthiopia hashtag — not relations with Ethiopia, just the hashtag.
The State Department claimed this new expense would “support the achievement of U.S. foreign policy goals and objectives, advance national interests, and enhance national security.”
To make matters more absurd, the State Department didn’t even hire an American to run the PR campaign. The money went to Addis Ababa University’s College of Humanities, Language Studies, Journalism and Communications program.
The State Department spent another $123,066 to teach kids in Kyrgyzstan how to create a post that will go viral on social media. But considering the views held by extremists in that part of the world, do we really want to turn Islamists into internet influencers?
Not to worry: All this spending is meant to create jobs—for the feds. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included $15 million to study launching a Direct File Pilot program. The IRS would do your taxes, then hold you accountable if they were wrong.
“Only 12% of taxpayers were eligible to use the Direct File Pilot program, which could cost up to $249 million a year,” says the report. “Not only does Direct File create an unholy amalgamation of IRS tax authority, it’s also unconstitutional! The IRA only allowed for a study, but the IRS jumped the gun, developing the system without Congressional approval.” (Paul’s emphasis.)
If you think it’s all a circus, you’re right. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) doled out $365,000 in federal grants for a group called Fern Street Community Arts, Inc., to hold circuses in public parks.
The group got a grant of $20,000 in 2018 and again in 2019, then $25,000 in 2020, just in time for the government to shut down the public parks and other outdoor areas. Then they handed out $215,000 of that not to hold circuses as part of pandemic relief plans (which we heard about above). Last year, the group got another $30,000 to hold the circuses again.
“American households need to spend an additional $1,095 each month or $13,138 per year to maintain the same consumption basket they had in January 2021,” says the report.
The least the federal government can do is let us pay off our own Christmas bills, instead of racking up new ones for us all year ‘round.