Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
The federal government spent $890,000 on maintenance fees for bank accounts with no money in them. Watchdog groups say the government should close the accounts faster. They’re missing the point.
Suppose Congress gives Dog Gone a $500,000 grant to study how assault weapons exacerbate global warming. The government opens an account to hold the funds, Dog Gone receives period draws until the money is spent, and afterwards, the government audits the expenditures to make sure they were proper for grant funds. If not, Dog Gone must repay the money – so naturally, the account must be held open for her to pay the money into. If it takes a few years to complete the audit, the government pays fees to maintain an empty account.
The underlying premise is the government should give grants in the first place. Reject the premise. Don’t give her the grant. Then there would be no account to pay maintenance fee on. We’d save far more than the million in maintenance fees.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Talk about attacking symptoms…
Sounds as if Joe is proposing more crap legislation.
As Mitch said yesterday with the USDA fraud. The $4B in fraud is bad enough, but the root cause is corporate welfare to farmers. The incompentant government would not occur with we didn’t have stupid programs to begin with.
By the way…heard something new about Obamacare. The government is spending large amounts of money (routed through Obamacare) to politically connected allies for Obamacare “outreach programs”. We are becoming a third world country.