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Rand Paul's 'Festivus Report' exposes $900B in government squander (www.msn.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I'm fairly irritated at myself to report that I just wasted half an hour of my life looking through Rand Paul's report in detail, because I was curious how he managed to arrive at $900 billion dollars. I spent some time with Google Sheets and trying to de-obfuscate his numbers. I'll cut to the punch line. It's:

$659 billion in interest on the national debt
$236 billion in "improper federal payments" -- basically, money that the federal government erroneously paid out to people it realized it shouldn't have ever given it to in the first place. This number is, apparently, actually real, and I sort of agree with Paul that it sounds big enough to be a problem. I will note that the number went monotonically up all through the Trump years, up to a peak of over $300 billion, and monotonically down through all through the Biden years.
$851 million on all the rest of this culture-war bullshit aside from those two single line items

Or, to put it in visual form:

Everything in any news story, about Egypt or lobster tanks or transgender monkeys or whatever, is part of the orange slice of the chart.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Good post. Thanks for doing that.

this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024

-34 points (13.0% liked)

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