The Obama Administration Is Proud to Announce That It Won’t Be Spending Quite As Much Taxpayer Money on Payments to Crooks and Dead People

Outgoing OMB director Peter
Orszag gets
serious about fiscal responsibility:

Whether it’s buying in bulk or reducing the number of improper
payments to dead people and crooked contractors, the Administration
is committed to instilling a new sense of responsibility for
taxpayer dollars by eliminating what doesn’t work and cracking down
on waste.

I don’t want to be too snarky here; obviously, efforts
to cut back on
the $110 billion spent on “improper payments”—ie: checks sent
to crooks, fraudsters, corpses, zombies, scarecrows,
department-store dummies, and computer-controlled characters in
World of Warcraft—are necessary. But isn’t it a little bit
embarrassing that Washington cops to blowing this kind of cash on
what basically amounts to incompetence? Over a decade, $110 billion
a year would more than cover the entire official price tag for the
health care overhaul. Yet this kind of waste is business as usual
in Washington, so the administration’s response comes down to,
“Well, we’re trying to cut back.”

Posted using cast2blog.com