At least $247 billion of taxpayer money was wasted
in 2022.
There's no real accountability from the
government to the customers, the American
people. And so no one should be surprised that the
government has horrible customer service, that it
wastes resources, that it steals your resources, that
it does stupid and wasteful things from them.
Meanwhile, 54% of Americans today believe their federal
income taxes are too high.
Yet the United States is one of the least taxed among
the developed nations.
Tax revenue in America accounts for a little more
than a quarter of the country's GDP, compared to
an average of 34.11% among developed countries.
Particularly compared to other Western European
democracies where people have the same standard of
living as we do, our taxes are really relatively low.
Taxes are a matter of perception.
It's a matter of how people feel about it and the value
that they feel they're getting for the taxes that
they pay.
Only about 20%, really more like 18% or so, of
government spending is actually on what most people
would say they think government does.
In the private sector, if somebody is doing something,
they see what they're trying to do or sell and
then determine how to do it and then how much it will
cost. In the federal government, everything is:
go spend the money.
If that doesn't work, go spend more money.
So why do taxes feel so high in the United States?
And why does so much of it get wasted?
Billions of taxpayer dollars go wasted every
year. Take improper payments, for example, which
cost the US $247 billion in 2022.
These refer to payments that were made incorrectly
by the government.
Over the last two decades, the US government has lost
almost $2.4 trillion in payment errors.
An improper payment can be both an overpayment and an
underpayment. An overpayment may be
fraudulent, going to the wrong person, going to
someone who is ineligible, going literally to someone
who's deceased.
You ask most people, how much money do you lose in a
day, a month, a year or something like that?
And they would say none of it, right?
I know what I'm spending my money on, right?
Maybe on occasion somebody drops a dollar bill.
But the government has just lost, as if you dropped on
the sidewalk, trillions and trillions of dollars over
the last few decades. And that is money that was
stolen from hardworking Americans to just simply get
wasted.
But that's not all.
Oversight reports from nonprofits and senators like
Rand Paul claim that billions of dollars are
being wasted every year, f rom spending $1.7 billion
maintaining empty government buildings to
accidentally investing $28 million on forest camouflage
uniforms to be used in the deserts of Afghanistan.
Duplicated programs are another concern.
The Government Accountability Office every
year issues a report on duplicative and overlapping
programs, and every year they find more of these
programs. For example, everyone should be connected
to broadband, at least everybody who wants to be
connected. Yet in the federal government, the
Government Accountability Office found 133 broadband
programs across 15 federal agencies.
Just one example of the duplication and overlap
among many programs throughout the federal
government. And the federal government spent $42 billion
over a three year period and people are still not
connected.
Experts say the problem mainly stems from the way
our government tries to solve an issue.
In the private sector, if somebody is doing something,
they see what they're trying to do or sell and
then determine how to do it and then how much it will
cost. In the federal government, everything is go
spend the money. If that doesn't work, go spend more
money.
The way that our systems work is that we didn't
thoughtfully do anything.
The way that our programs are done is it's one
Band-Aid thrown on top of another.
Somebody got into office and said, I want to have a
grant program that's named after me.
So none of these are really designed to work with each
other. None of them are designed to respect each
other.
Federal spending has risen over 20% since 2019,
adjusted for inflation.
The federal government reported $1.38 trillion in
federal budget deficit in 2022.
That same year, the national debt hit almost $31
trillion for the first time in history.
As the government spends, as it runs up a deficit, a
debt, that is now America's second mortgage, that is now
a quarter of $1 million per household, what happens is
it's sucking all the oxygen out of the room.
It's destroying investment.
It's mortgaging our futures, it's slowing our
growth. Today, the inflation you're seeing is a
large result of that.
Taxes have also never felt more unfair in the US.
First of all, the top has ballooned.
There's just so many more people who are really,
really, really rich than we ever had.
And secondly, the numbers of ways that they can get
out of paying taxes has also increased.
So it's not so much that their rate is bad, it's that
they don't pay that rate and that really makes people
mad.
I absolutely dismiss those kind of claims that the
wealthy aren't paying their fair share.
I mean, first of all, they're paying the
overwhelming majority of the taxes that are paid in
this country.
According to most recent available data, the top 1%
of earners paid more than 42% of federal personal
income tax in the United States.
That's true. They do pay billions and billions of
dollars in taxes.
That's because they're rich.
They have money to tax.
The bottom of the income distribution doesn't pay
many taxes at all because they don't have much money
to get taxed on.
A 2021 analysis from the White House revealed that
the wealthiest 400 billionaires pay an average
tax rate of 8.2%, a much lower rate compared to
average working Americans.
Additionally, Americans feel they aren't seeing
enough visible returns for how much they pay.
While the US does enjoy lower taxes compared to
other developed countries, citizens pay extra for many
services. Out-of-pocket health spending per capita
in the US in 2019 was $1,235,
compared to just $687 average for OECD members.
The US pays a higher average tuition fee for a
bachelor's degree compared to most other developing
countries for both public and independent private
institutions.
Most of our taxes go to Social Security and
Medicare. Look at your pay stubs.
That's where your taxes are going.
We finance in part our own retirement and our own old
age medical care throughout our lifetimes, from the time
we get that first teenage job to the time we get our
first job and on.
And other countries don't do that.
They build that into the tax structure.
Other countries just say, you're going to have this
amount of pension, you're going to have this amount of
health care and education, and they pay higher taxes,
but they get more for it.
Covid-19 especially brought the US government's wasteful
spending to attention.
In March of 2020, the United States struggled to respond
to growing threats presented by Covid-19.
With the economy on the brink of collapse, Congress
passed a series of bills intended to both fund the
public health response and keep the economy afloat.
But with massive government spending comes opportunity
for waste, fraud and abuse.
Unfortunately, Democrats conducted little oversight
of the over $2 trillion spent under the CARES Act.
The sad answer is we don't know actually exactly how
much got wasted. The estimates are hundreds and
hundreds of billions of dollars, if not, frankly,
trillions in the three-year period we're talking about.
But a lot of that is there was this rush to get money
out the door.
And so they were using structures that were never
very good. They were designed for much, much
smaller volumes of money going through them.
There was no accountability put in place.
There was no priority to put in systems so that even
retroactively we could figure out where the waste
and the fraud and the abuse was.
It's the job of the Government Accountability
Office, or GAO, to audit and report any wasteful
spending by the federal government.
It will look at a particular agency and it'll say, okay,
this agency seems to be understaffed, not doing a
very good job.
It seems to have a lot of errors.
If it's giving out money, it seems to have a high
error rate. It'll point to management problems in the
government with the hopes, which sometimes happens,
sometimes doesn't, with the hopes that Congress or the
executive branch will then take action to try to fix
the government.
I think they have enough power.
I don't think they have enough manpower or
resources.
One of the few areas where Citizens Against Government
Waste thinks more money should be spent is on the
Government Accountability Office and the Offices of
Inspectors General because they do provide a good
return on the "investment," the amount of money that's
being provided for them, I think in some cases $7 or $8
for every dollar spent in terms of recovering or
preventing wasteful spending.
In general, accountability over spending is severely
lacking in the US government.
There's no real penalty for misspending money or not
looking at how it's being spent, because the answer
is, go create another program.
The real problem here is that Congress doesn't put
its feet down and says in a new piece of legislation, we
demand that there's some real accountability.
Congress doesn't hold their feet to the fire and ensure
that these processes are put in place, that they're
well managed, that they're well resourced.
Some suggest simply shrinking the federal
government's responsibility.
If you want to cut the federal government, there is
a way to do it. Stop doing things, okay?
Just don't do those things anymore.
Give them to the states, privatize them, whatever.
Just don't do them anymore.
Almost everything else that the federal government does
is intended to help someone with a particular problem.
In many cases, that can be done through the private
sector or it can be done a lot more efficiently.
If someone could just figure out how much does it
really cost to help those 500 people that need
somewhere to live, rather than saying we're going to
spend $800,000 to buy them a condo, which has happened,
by the way. So it's not a matter of not trying to get
something done. It's just doing it the wrong way.
Experts say government efficiency is an essential
issue that the Congress must put more effort into
solving.
Congress is the entity that's supposed to be able
to say, I've got this report. We know where the
waste is. We're going to do better.
We owe it to the American people to be better.
And Congress does nothing with it.
And that's really the problem.
There's nothing you can do to make up for Congress not
doing their job. At the end of the day, what's going to
need to happen is Congress to do their job, to take
that good information, to fix systems, to change the
laws, to go after this waste, to make a real
effort, to respect the American people by focusing
on that.