‘If
you want to get paid for doing something stupid, just turn to the U.S.
government. The U.S.
government is paying researchers to play video games, it is paying researchers
to study the effects of cocaine on Japanese quail and it has spent millions of
dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly. The amount of
money that the government wastes is absolutely horrifying. Do you
remember all of that political wrangling over the debt ceiling deal last
year? Do you remember how our politicians told us that there were cutting spending as much as they possibly could?
Well, it was all a giant lie. As you will see below, the U.S. government
is spending money on some of the most stupid things imaginable. What
makes all of this even worse is that we are going into enormous amounts of debt
in order to pay for all of this. We are borrowing billions of dollars a
day in order to pay for stupid stuff that no government on earth should ever be
paying for. Trust me, you are going to find it
hard to believe some of the stuff in this list. It is almost
inconceivable what our politicians are doing with our tax dollars.
The
following are 30 incredibly stupid things that the federal government is
spending money on….
#1 The U.S. government is spending $750,000 on a new soccer field for
detainees held at Guantanamo
Bay.
#2 The Obama
administration plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars
helping students from Indonesia
get master’s degrees.
#3 If you can believe it, the U.S. government has spent $175,587 “to determine if cocaine makes
Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior”.
#4 The U.S. government spent $200,000 on “a tattoo removal program” in Mission Hills, California.
#5 The federal government has shelled out $3 million to researchers at the University of California
at Irvine to
fund their research on video games such as World of Warcraft.
Wouldn’t we all love to have a “research job” like that?
#6 The
Department of Health and Human Services plans to spend $500 million on a
program that will, among other things, seek to solve the problem of 5-year-old
children that “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom.
#7 Fannie Mae
is about to ask the federal government for another $4.6 billion bailout, and it
will almost certainly get it.
#8 The federal government once spent 30 million dollars on a program
that was designed to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangos.
#9 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave
researchers at the University
of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions
from dairy cows.
#10 According to USA Today
,
13 different government agencies “fund 209 different science, technology,
engineering and math (STEM) education programs — and 173 of those programs
overlap with at least one other program.”
#11 A total of $615,000 was
given to the University of California at Santa
Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets
belonging to the Grateful Dead.
#12 China
lends us more money than any other foreign nation, but that didn’t stop our
government from spending 17.8 million dollars on social and environmental programs for China.
#13 The U.S. government
once spent 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.
#14 One professor at Stanford
University was
given $239,100 to study
how Americans use the Internet to find love.
#15 The U.S. Postal
Service spent $13,500 on a
single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
#16 The National Science
Foundation once spent $216,000 to study
whether or not politicians “gain or lose support by taking ambiguous
positions”.
#17 A total
of $1.8 million was spent on a “museum of neon signs” in Las Vegas, Nevada.
#18 The
federal government spends 25 billion dollars a year maintaining federal buildings that are either
unused or totally vacant.
#19 U.S. farmers
are given a total of $2 billion each year for not farming their land.
#20 The U.S. government handed one Tennessee library $5,000 for the
purpose of hosting a series of video game parties.
#21 A few years ago the
government spent $123,050 on a
Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton,
West Virginia. It turns out
that Grafton only has a population of a little more than 5,000 people.
#22 One
professor at Dartmouth
University was
given $137,530 to
create a “recession-themed” video game entitled “Layoff”.
#23 According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S.
military spent “$998,798 shipping two 19-cent washers from South
Carolina to Texas and $293,451
sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina
to Florida”.
#24 The U.S. Department
of Agriculture once shelled out $30,000 to a
group of farmers to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host
guests for overnight “haycations”.
#25 The National Institutes of
Health paid researchers $400,000 to find
out why gay men in Argentina
engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.
#26 The National Institutes of
Health also once spent $442,340 to study
the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
#27 The National Institutes of
Health loves to spend our tax money on really bizarre things. The NIH
once spent $800,000in
“stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.
#28 According to the Washington Post, 1,271
different government organizations work on government programs related to
counterterrorism and homeland security.
#29 The U.S. government spent $100,000 on a
“Celebrity Chef Fruit Promotion Road Show in Indonesia”.
#30 The
feds once gave Alaska
Airlines $500,000 “to
paint a Chinook salmon” on the side of a Boeing 737.
How in the world can our government be so foolish?
Anyone that claims that there is not a lot of stuff
that can be cut out of the federal budget is lying to you.
All of this crazy spending is going to get us into a
massive amount of trouble eventually. Already, on a per capita basis the U.S. national debt is worse than the national
debts of Greece, Italy, Ireland,
Portugal and Spain.
We have accumulated the biggest debt in the history
of the world and we are adding to it at a rate of about 150 million dollars an hour.
Our politicians strut around as if they are the smartest
and wisest leaders in the history of the world, but the truth is that someday
people will look back in horror at the decline of our once great society.
The federal government needs to stop spending so much
money on stupid things and needs to stop pushing our national debt to
nightmarish new levels.
Unfortunately, the corruption in Washington D.C.
is so deep and so pervasive that it is going to be almost impossible to turn it
around.