– And people wonder why some of us American citizens resent our taxes?
– They collect all these taxes and gift them to the big Wall Street firms that caused the current financial mess and they spend it on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…. And they waste HUGE amounts of it like we have an endless supply.
– But just let the average citizen get behind on his annual Federal Income Taxes and the entire might of the government comes down on that citizen.
– Well I, for one, have small patience with their desire to collect my taxes when I know that the main thing that is going to be done with them is to make the rich richer and to waste them on foreign adventures. While in the American homeland the highways and bridges deteriorate, social programs are being cut, unemployment is growing, wages are shrinking and things are generally going to HELL.
– And they really need my taxes. Yeah, I bet they do.
-dennis
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More than $30 billion — one in every six dollars of U.S. spending in Iraq and Afghanistan — has been wasted, according to a bipartisan commission on wartime contracting.
“Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak interagency coordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees,” the report’s co-authors wrote in a Washington Post editorial on Sunday.
The full findings of the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan will be submitted to Congress on Wednesday. The report was written by Christopher Shays, a former Republican congressman from Connecticut, and Mark Thibault, a former deputy director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.
Examples of wasteful projects abound: the authors note that U.S. taxpayers spent $40 million on a prison that the Iraqi government did not want, and in any case was never finished. Another $300 million was spent on a power plant in Afghanistan that requires technical expertise beyond the Afghan government’s capabilities.
The number of contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq has sometimes exceeded the number of U.S. military forces on the ground, with the ratio usually being held at roughly one to one over the years according to the report.
The report will include 15 recommendations on how to reduce waste, including the recommendation that there be an official that can serve in both the Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council in order to coordinate the many agencies involved in contracts.
– To the original… ➡