All The Junk Our Government Wasted Our Tax-Payer Dollars On In 2019

Every year, a Senate Republican writes up a “Wastebook”, a report of numerous unnecessary and highly wasteful spending that our government partakes as though we have a limitless supply of money. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has been in charge of making this report for a few years now. Here are some of the things that our government chooses to waste our tax money on:
 
     1) $153,000,000 on the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA). 

Spending money on public transport is expected; spending millions upon millions of dollars on a failing system in the hopes of fixing problems by throwing money at it, however, is wasteful. Yet, this is what the government did in 2019 and will likely continue doing for years to come: throw money at problems and hope they magically get resolved. Money can, indeed, help with this problem, but it has to be spent wisely.
 
    2) $300,000 to fund debates and Model U.N. competitions… in Afghanistan. 

Ignoring how much of a miserable joke the actual U.N. is, why would we fund debates and Model U.N. competitions outside of the country? Wouldn’t it make more sense for, oh, I don’t know, AFGHANISTAN to be funding things that happen in their country?
 
And by the way, this is a point I will make more than once in this article, so brace yourselves.
 
    3) $708,466 to fund research involving making Zebrafish addicted to nicotine. 

Literally why? What purpose does this serve? To discover the effects of nicotine on fish? Who does that help? We already know what it does to humans, what information could we gain from doing this research? And why so much of it? What is the money going towards, giving the fish expensive Cuban cigars? Research to figuring out how to light a cigarette underwater? Figuring out if the fish prefer using pipes while reading the morning newspaper?
 
    4) $84,375 purchasing a statue from American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan to place in the U.S. embassy in Mozambique. 

… I don’t even know what to say about this. Ironically, this was in the middle of the government shutdown back in February, back when Leftists were “worried” about how the government was going to pay government workers and help the poor. I don’t know, maybe not paying for a statue made by Bob Dylan might help there, wasteful Washington Establishment.
 
    5) $4,658,865 to study the connection between drinking alcohol and ending up in the ER. 

Alcohol makes people dumb. Dumb people make bad decisions. Dumb people hurt themselves. Dumb people sometimes end up in the ER. Can I get my government grant now?
 
    6) $16,000,000 to improve the quality of schools… in Egypt. 

Like with the Afghanistan point, why does THE U.S. have to pay for this? Shouldn’t the task of funding education in Egypt go to the Muslim Brotherhood, who control the nation? We have our own problems with the quality of our schools. Kids don’t even know WHY WE FOUGHT WORLD WAR II FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! THEY THINK WE DID IT TO GAIN OUR INDEPENDENCE! RASMUSSEN SAYS THAT 42% OF YOUNG PEOPLE SUPPORT SOCIALISM! Obviously, that last one is because of the Marxist professors and curricula that has deeply poisoned our education system, but still. Young Americans are airheads, for the most part, which is the precise reason Pelosi and Democrats want to lower the voting age to 16.
 
    7) $33,921,175 to buy textbooks for students… in Afghanistan. 

One thing I would like to ask is why it is we are still fighting a war there, 18 years after 9/11, when they get such nice, incredibly undeserved treatment from us. Like I said before, shouldn’t this type of stuff fall on the Afghanistan government to take care of? And if someone wants to argue “they’re too poor, they need help”, then why do We the People need to pay with our tax dollars? There are organizations out there that help with funding for school supplies, textbooks included, which are mostly funded by willing donations from people. Why do we have to foot the bill for the education of people who hate us?
 
    8) $22,000,000 to bring Serbian cheese up to international standards. 

Look, I like cheese as much as the next guy. But why in the world are we spending upwards of $20M to help Serbian farmers improve the standard of their cheese? Shouldn’t that fall on the farmers themselves if they hope to compete in the marketplace? Or, if you wish to go the socialist route, at the very least, shouldn’t the Serbian government be in charge of that if government assistance is so necessary? Why are we wasting $22M on cheese many of us will likely never have? I didn’t even know Serbia made their own particular kind of cheese! For all the money going to them, they better be able to compete with Kraft, or else, that is an even bigger waste of money.
 
In total, these things add up to $230,672,881 in unnecessary and highly wasteful spending. And before any liberals want to cry out to me “but Trump is President now! The spending is on him!” keep in mind that Congress has power of the purse, meaning that they decide what the federal budget would be for a particular year. The Washington Establishment rules in Congress, so they get to decide how much of our money to spend each year. If Trump vetoes those budgets, the government shuts down and we get weeks upon weeks of the media yelling that Trump is starving families and that whistleblowers get left out on the streets.
 
Want to know why our national debt is at $23 trillion? Because we are funding for research regarding making fish addicted to nicotine and trying to figure out why drunk people end up in the hospital so much. Things that either are ridiculous to fund or unnecessary, or both. If the idiots in Congress ever get the bright idea to stop wasting money on vanity projects like these, we would be an unstoppable juggernaut in the world, at least financially.
 
And sure, at the end of the day, $230M plus in a multi-trillion dollar federal budget isn’t much, but this only looks at a FEW things that the government unnecessarily wastes money on. This is far from the dumbest things the government funds, but is a small sample of those things.
 
War with Iran, North Korea, China, or Russia would not destroy us. Trade wars with China and Russia would not destroy us. Foreign interference into our elections wouldn’t destroy us. Wasteful spending like this, and particularly, the ramped up wasteful spending that the Left plans to do when they eventually win elections again, such as Medicare for All and GND, is what will destroy us.
 
We can’t continue spending money we don’t have. That’s simply not sustainable.
 
Proverbs 21:20
“Precious treasure and oil are in a wise man’s dwelling, but a foolish man devours it.”
 
Author: Freddie Marinelli.