Following the revelation of the GSA conference in Las Vegas, that showed just what kind of slush fund income taxes truly are, MO Senator Claire McCaskill has embarked on a personal quest to derail the gravy train. Deficit Hawk that she is, under her yet-to-be-released bill, any conference costing more than $200,000 will have to receive special approval. Oh, well how prudent of her!
Instead of just putting a (ridiculously high) cap on retreats, how about a rule that says no more publically funded parties?
As incensed as I was upon hearing of an $800,000 excursion, the fact that any stolen money is being spent on wild Vegas resort parties ought to raise the ire of anyone dolling out money to the IRS. We already have to bank roll their wages, the least they could do is pick up the tab with that, and not rub it in by using general funds. Bureaucrats do after all make double on average that of the productive class.
Claire “Tightwad” McCaskill was quoted as saying “I see [this] with contracting all the time. You look at the contracting that went on in Iraq and Afghanistan (sic), and goes on in Homeland Security. It is stunning there has not been more of an outcry. […] It’s almost absurd.”
No, it’s fully absurd. It’s outright scandalous. And the reason for the lack of an outcry with defense contracts is two-fold.
The first reason is that Americans are largely sycophantic to the Military Industrial Complex. They’ve been conditioned never to question the Pentagon and its infinite wisdom when it comes to “protecting” them. Defense spending is the sacred cow of the political establishment, which is why the right would sooner touch Social Security and Medicare before they’d consider reducing military spending. The left too has no intention of cutting the military. They’d rather see income tax rates dramatically increase than quit buying tanks and bombers.
The second, and perhaps more important, reason that people aren’t outraged over defense contracts is that no one knows anything about them. As Thomas Woods documents in his book “Rollback
The showmanship from “outraged” politicians over this is equally off-putting. These clowns in Washington who burn through trillions of dollars each year on ridiculous and destructive expenditures have no place getting in front of a camera and lecturing anyone on fiscal stewardship. If any of them really cared about finances they’d put an end to spending altogether.
