Normally I would say something like "It's nice to know what my money is going to" but in this particular case, I wish they hadn't told us.
A watchdog group, OpenTheBooks.com, has compiled a report on the past two decades of government spending and discovered that in 20 years our government has spent our tax dollars, $3 TRILLION of them, on "improper payments."
That means checks that the government sent out is money that should not have gone out. Either they were defrauded, made an error, or overpaid.
OpenTheBooks.com, a watchdog group, tracked the government's reports dating back to 2004 and tallied up the damage, adjusting for inflation. They found that things grew worse during the pandemic, with massive rates of improper payments in 2021 and 2022, but it's been a persistent problem for years.
Health and Human Services was the worst agency, with Medicaid accounting for $80.5 billion in bogus payments and Medicare tallying another $46.3 billion last year.
Medicare and Medicaid both paid out, last year, more than $126 BILLION in payments they never should have paid.
We already can't afford to pay out what we owe, and we're sending out billions extra every year without a second thought?
And it's not like they're discovering errors and fixing them. Things are only getting worse.
"While President Obama may have spent in huge quantities, he also made a good-faith effort at careful accounting. After signing both an executive order and legislation, our research shows improper payments did in fact trend downward on his watch," Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski said.
"Unfortunately, they rebounded again during the Trump administration and have peaked during President Biden's first year in office," he said.
He added: "The ever-growing tally of mistakes couldn't come at a worse time: The Biden administration is spending vast amounts on the green agenda while agencies forgive themselves for untold COVID relief errors and fraud."
Here's the pandemic abuse:
The Small Business Administration's pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program also sapped $29 billion in wrongful spending last year, while another pandemic program, the COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan, saw $6.9 billion in bogus payments, the report said.
Additionally, during the Covid state of emergency, virtually all bad record keeping was forgiven and no one was held accountable for these major flubs.
It's possible (likely) that BILLIONS more may have been misappropriated and misspent during Covid and we just have no way of knowing.
They want to raise your taxes so that they can give out the wrong money to a bunch of fraudsters and if you disagree with that you're selfish and evil.
And, according to Open the Books, the $3 trillion is a lowball estimate, since record keeping is often atrocious.
Just remember this the next time someone wants to raise your taxes.
