Kap,

Believe it or not, I'm actually not opposed to implementing user fees, in cases where it is plausible and reasonable -- like a toll highway, for example. But those user fees are just to supplement the tax load. And they can never be used for things like local roads, where there's no practical way to enforce it.

Your lamenting about a few bogus examples of funded research is part of the huge problem of fewer tax dollars going to federal research agencies, to fund relevant fundamental research. Business will never fund anything close to what the government funds, in this area. Business doesn't care about saving lives. Only profits for investors.

(10-06-2016 10:20 AM)MplsBison Wrote:  Kap,

Believe it or not, I'm actually not opposed to implementing user fees, in cases where it is plausible and reasonable -- like a toll highway, for example. But those user fees are just to supplement the tax load. And they can never be used for things like local roads, where there's no practical way to enforce it.

Your lamenting about a few bogus examples of funded research is part of the huge problem of fewer tax dollars going to federal research agencies, to fund relevant fundamental research. Business will never fund anything close to what the government funds, in this area. Business doesn't care about saving lives. Only profits for investors.

A few? I was using brevity to avoid boring people. There's much, much more.

Washington spends $25 billion annually maintaining unused or vacant federal properties.

Government auditors spent the past five years examining all federal programs and found that 22 percent of them -- costing taxpayers a total of $123 billion annually -- fail to show any positive impact on the populations they serve.

Washington will spend $2.6 million training Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly on the job.

The refusal of many federal employees to fly coach costs taxpayers $146 million annually in flight upgrades.

The National Institutes of Health spends $1.3 million per month ($15.6 million per year) to rent a lab that it cannot use.


And those are just the egregious examples. There's hundreds of thousands of ways that the federal government wastes your money each and every day that piss away millions of dollars. For instance a good friend of mine works for an agency that was working hand-in-hand with FEMA during the flooding last year. When FEMA shut down their operations last year they left two laptops sitting on the desks they were using. After repeated calls and even offering to bring them to them and FEMA essentially ignoring them his director said to just secure them and when the time ran out they would claim them as abandoned property, get their IT people to open them and utilize the laptops themselves.

Another friend of mine works on a hazmat team that worked hand in hand with Homeland Security and the FBI during the anthrax scare after 9/11. They came to them one day with cases upon cases of Level D gowns. When told that by policy their agency used only Level B or higher personal protective equipment for all hazmat incidents they were told "Well we aren't taking them back." He said that they sat taking up space in their logistics department for several years until they finally sold them on an online surplus equipment auction for pennies on the dollar. The saddest thing about it all is that Class D PPE didn't even meet DHS's protocol for response to an anthrax incident.

There are certainly examples of tax dollars being wasted. I never claimed otherwise.

That does not prove that taxes are false.