U.S. Government: Dumb & Dumber

After the disastrous rollout of the ObamaCare Internet website that cost more than $600 million to create yet crashed before the first customer tried to log on, we know now that politicians, bureaucrats, agents and employees running the United States are totally clueless when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars wisely and using modern technology to manage the business of government.

That’s the primary reason why our nation is over $17 trillion in debt with no end to out of control spending in sight.

Private sector Internet tech experts say that the Obama administration, for example could have contracted a perfectly good website fully capable of handling millions of visitors at a time for a price somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000. At the very least it could have been done right for less than $1million. Hell, Microsoft or Google might even have done it free just for the positive publicity.

So the U.S. government probably overpaid for its admittedly nonfunctional healthcare website by the astronomical sum of at least $600 million. And the taxpayers will have to shell out even more $millions just to fix all the problems.

That’s dumb.

Now we learn that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued $4 billion in fraudulent tax refunds just last year alone to people using stolen identities. Lots of that money was shipped off without questions to addresses in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Ireland the U.S. Treasury Department admits. In fact, the IRS  sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to one address in Shanghai.

That’s really dumb.

"Identity theft continues to be a serious problem with devastating consequences for taxpayers and an enormous impact on tax administration," acknowledged J. Russell George, Treasury's inspector general for tax administration. The fraud "erodes taxpayer confidence in the federal tax system." 

As if the average taxpayer ever had any confidence in the federal tax system, or the entire federal government for that matter, to begin with.

Thieves often steal Social Security numbers from people who don't have to file tax returns, including the young, the old and people who have died, says his report. In other cases, thieves use stolen Social Security numbers to file fraudulent tax returns before the legitimate taxpayer files.

Doesn’t the IRS know or at least have the means to check the status of social security number holders? Don’t they know how old they are; where they live; where they work; how much has been withheld from their paychecks, etc.; or whether they are still alive? 

Apparently not; they either don’t know or don’t check all the information available to them in order to verify refund claims.

Instead the IRS, which wants to issue quick refunds, often processes and sends out refund checks before employers are required to file forms documenting wages. They pay the money without checking any of the facts.

That’s dumb.

Do you think a private business like Amazon.com or Wal-Mart could ever be scammed out of $4billion by identify thieves? Do you think that they would ever issue 655 refund checks to the exact same address in Lithuania? Not a chance. They’re not dumb.

Do you think any private business would ever in a million years blow shareholders cash to answer stupid questions like: “What is the meaning of life?” Of course that kind of spending would be considered unthinkable in the private sector where money must be managed properly or the firm goes out of business.

But that’s exactly the type of spending our federal government engages itself in all the time. It has actually shelled out a federal grant for the purpose of answering the question: “What is the meaning of life?” I’m not making this up.

Right now, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions is trying to find out why $172,445 of taxpayer dollars are being spent by the National Endowment for the Humanities on research projects and grants to study questions like “What is the good life and how do I live it?" ($25,000) The grants are typically given to museums, libraries, and universities as well as individual scholars.

That’s even dumber.

Your government is interested in paying out hard earned taxpayer dollars in government grants to lucky benefactors for the purpose of studying several other ridiculous questions such as: "Why are we interested in the past?" ($24,803); "Why are bad people bad?" ($23,390; "What is belief?" ($24,526); "What is a monster?" ($24,999); and "Why do humans write?" ($24,774)

That’s your U.S. Government at work: Dumb and dumber.