Government Spendthrifting

In private sector America today there are gas stations with convenience stores on just about every commercial district street corner. We have tens of thousands of gas stations. Mom and pop proprietors own gas stations. Oil companies have gas stations. Wal-Mart has gas stations. Costco has gas stations.  

Do you think in your wildest imagination that any of these thousands of proprietors ever paid $43 million dollars for a single gas station? Would Costco pay that much for a gas station? Of course not; that’s ridiculous. Surely there is no single gas station anywhere in America, much less on the entire planet Earth, worth $43 million dollars, right?

Well, not exactly. Sure, there is no one in the private sector who would ever pay that much for one gas station. No private citizen or corporation would ever be that reckless, that irresponsible or that downright stupid with their hard earned cash. But when it comes to the United States government, it’s a vastly different story.

The U.S. government spends taxpayer cash like it is play money. I call it government spendthrifting. No one in charge of any U.S government department is thrifty.  They’re all spendthrifts. Money is simply no object to government politicians, agents, bureaucrats and employees. They’ve been known to spend $800 for a hammer; $10,000 for a toilet seat. It happens all the time.  After all, it’s not their money. It doesn’t come out of their pockets. So why should they care?

They don’t care. The U.S. Department of Defense, for example, has paid $43 million taxpayer dollars for one small gas station in Afghanistan. It doesn’t even come with a convenience store. And now they don’t want to talk about it. Just why it cost so much and where all the money went is still a big mystery. The government is blocking access to the documents and witnesses that could reveal the truth.

Of course, all that money didn’t just disappear down an Afghan rat hole. All of it is tucked neatly away in individual pockets, cookie jars and bank accounts. This kind of thing doesn’t just happen without the presence of criminal activity and corruption. It’s not a simple matter of negligence or even gross negligence.  

It’s a crime. There are criminals involved. There is corruption and graft.  The money was stolen. It’s an outrage. There are unknown Afghan officials who were given much of this money. There are without a doubt U.S. officials and other dodgy individuals with pockets full of stolen money involved.

People connected with this tiny gas station in Afghanistan have become filthy rich overnight. We’ll probably never know who they are. No one will be fired. No one will go to jail. The money won’t ever be returned. All will soon be forgotten until the next outrage; and the next; and the next. It never ends.

This is clearly not an isolated incident by any means. It happens over and over again when the government spends our money. The President, the Congress and the rest of the politicians complain but never do anything about it. It just goes on and on. It will continue to happen until the United States of America is finally bankrupt.

That is the only logical end result with government spendthrifting.