No doubt many of you are aware of the financial crisis in Cyprus, a small country in the Mediterranean located near Turkey. The politicians in Cyprus, in an effort to prevent the country from going into bankruptcy, hatched a plan to seize – No STEAL – up to ten percent of the personal bank accounts […]
GM Bailout Could Get Much Worse
WasteWatcher, January, 2013
No Last-Minute Delivery on Postal Reform
By Leslie Paige WasteWatcher, December, 2012 The United States Postal Service (USPS) announced on November 15, 2012 that in fiscal year (FY) 2012, which ended on September 30, the agency lost a record $15.9 billion. In June, 2012 at a PostalVision 2020 conference in Washington, Postmaster General (PMG) Patrick Donahoe flatly stated that if the […]
Defense Waste: The Final Frontier
Sean Kennedy As the country careens toward the automatic year-end program cuts and expiration of tax breaks labeled “the fiscal cliff,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has been on the offensive, releasing reports in consecutive months highlighting wasteful spending in government. The November Wastewatcher detailed Sen. Coburn’s Wastebook 2012, which targeted 100 projects costing taxpayers more […]
How Congress Should Avert the Fiscal Cliff
As the economy teeters precariously on the edge of the so-called “fiscal cliff,” it is difficult not to imagine what advice Milton Friedman, the brilliant economist and staunch advocate of limited government and fiscal restraint, would have offered our nation’s lawmakers had he lived to celebrate his hundredth birthday. For those not fluent in wonk […]
SSDI Funding at Risk
In fiscal year (FY) 2010, the Social Security Disability Insurance program (SSDI) shelled out approximately $123 billion in benefits to more than 10 million disabled workers and their dependents. Reforms in the SSDI program are long overdue; without them, the fund is expected to be depleted by 2018 according to a June 14, 2011 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. One reason for SSDI’s financial woes is a 63 percent increase in overpayments, from $860 million in FY 2001 to $1.4 billion in FY 2010.