Billions Wasted

By Attorney Jonathan Emord
Author of “The Rise of Tyranny” and
“Global Censorship of Health Information” and
“Restore The Republic“
August 19, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

In his book Free to Choose, Milton Friedman describes four degrees of relative conscientiousness exhibited by people when spending money. When they spend their own money on themselves, they are mindful of their needs and endeavor to maximize the value of the dollars spent. When they spend their own money on someone else, they tend to be less mindful of the content of the purchase but quite mindful about the amount being spent. When they spend someone else’s money on themselves, they tend to be less scrupulous and perhaps even extravagant, but when they spend someone else’s money on someone else, they tend not to be concerned with the money at all. Friedman teaches that government spending is in this fourth category (spending someone else’s money, taxpayers, on someone else, special interests). It should come as no surprise, then, that our enormous government, the largest and most expensive in the world, wastes billions of dollars every year. It may come as a surprise, however, that the waste is so obvious, yet no one is acting to stop it.

On July 10, John Spoke, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said that he was “deeply troubled” that the military spent $34 million on building a massive command headquarters in the Southern Helmand Province of Afghanistan for troops who were never deployed there. He wrote the military high command at the Pentagon: “This facility was designed for a military division that was never deployed and, subsequently, a decision was made not to construct the facility, but inexplicably the building construction started and is now complete.”

But lest you think grossly negligent spending is limited to the military, think again. The federal government owns or leases over 55,000 vacant properties in the United States. There is no precise inventory because the federal government is so massive, disorganized, and unaccountable that no single person knows for sure the precise number of vacant properties owned or leased by Uncle Sam. Conservative estimates of the cost of the vacant properties to taxpayers do exist, however. Retention of the properties is estimated to cost between $3 and $8 billion annually with maintenance costs for these buildings running upwards of $25 billion to date after all expenses, including the administrative, are taken into account.

Rather than end the leases and sell the properties, the federal government keeps them all, paying for them year after year, and doing so for decades. 

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