Americans for Political Change

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Outgoing Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue has some parting shots for Congress, the White House and advocates for seniors. They have all “really walked away from Social Security,” he says, leaving the program “fraying because of inattention to its problems.”

Instead of making the hard choices to fix Social Security’s financial problems, policymakers “use it as a tool of political rhetoric,” Astrue said.

Astrue, 56, has headed the federal government’s largest program since 2006 — he was nominated by former President George W. Bush. By law, Social Security commissioners serve six-year terms, so President Obama will now have the opportunity to choose his own nominee, who must be approved by the Senate. Astrue’s last day on the job was Wednesday.

The trustees who oversee Social Security say the program’s trust funds will run dry in 2033, leaving Social Security with only enough revenue to pay about 75 percent of benefits. Already the program is paying out more in benefits than it collects in payroll taxes.

The bathroom in the private office of the secretary of the Interior Department is 100 square feet and more expensive than many American homes.A $222,000 renovation in 2007 was expensive enough to prompt an internal investigation.

The Cox Washington bureau exclusively obtained the results of the review using the Freedom of Information Act. It includes a work order showing wall panels costing more than $1,500. The posh bathroom also now has a refrigerator, installed for $3,500. It also sports $26,000 worth of custom cabinetry surrounding a $689 faucet and a $65 vintage tissue holder.

via Taxpayers billed for posh government bathroom | www.kirotv.com.

You can bet we will get very little for our money:

The tax man is coming in 2013. And he’s wearing surgical scrubs and has a stethoscope around his neck.

Five new tax increases take effect on Jan. 1 to help pay for the nation’s health care overhaul.

New provisions of the Affordable Care Act require affluent taxpayers to pay more for Medicare and, for the first time, have their investment income subject to Medicare taxes as well. Also, people who use flexible spending accounts for health care expenses will pay higher taxes. And taxpayers who spend a lot out of pocket on their health care will find it harder to deduct those expenses from their taxable income, raising their tax bill.

And that won’t change anytime soon. I would suggest a government that runs $1 trillion deficits does not have a clue on how to solve the problem:

The U.S. health care system squanders $750 billion a year — roughly 30 cents of every medical dollar — through unneeded care, byzantine paperwork, fraud and other waste, the influential Institute of Medicine said Thursday in a report that ties directly into the presidential campaign.

President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney are accusing each other of trying to slash Medicare and put seniors at risk. But the counter-intuitive finding from the report is that deep cuts are possible without rationing, and a leaner system may even produce better quality.

[...]How much is $750 billion? The one-year estimate of health care waste is equal to more than ten years of Medicare cuts in Obama’s health care law. It’s more than the Pentagon budget. It’s more than enough to care for the uninsured.

U.S. Defense Spending Per 2010 Budget (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The do-nothing Congress is hurting America in different ways. In one case it is weakening our national defense. There is too much waste in defense spending. Here we have politicians not doing their duty. That’s just as bad (or worse) as costly, pointless wars:

The uncertainty over automatic cuts in U.S. defense spending to be triggered in January because of congressional inaction has spread to the engineers and project managers in South Florida’s aerospace industry.

Employees at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne here say that both personal and corporate planning is on hold, with any new ideas of spending being reined in.

[...] While the impact of the cuts is hotly debated in Washington, there’s no doubt about the alarm felt by defense contractors, who have embarked on a campaign to publicize them. Their situation demonstrates that while Congress has learned to live with stalemates and stopgaps and last-minute cliff-hangers, the rest of America has not.

The term “do nothing Congress” is a misnomer, suggests Johnson. Congress is doing something even when it’s not, he says. “When you’re required to make a decision and you don’t make one, that is a decision,” he says.

California transportation officials have spent millions of dollars making overpriced, unjustified repairs to houses the state owns in and around Pasadena, according to an audit released Thursday.

Caltrans bought the houses decades ago to bulldoze for the long-planned, never built extension of the 710 Freeway. The agency has spent $22.5 million since 2008 to maintain the homes, but transportation officials are “unable to demonstrate that the repairs were necessary, reasonable or cost-effective,” according to the report by the California State Auditor, which was sparked by a Times investigation.

via Caltrans spent millions on unjustified house repairs, audit says – latimes.com.

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California’s prized park system — from the Sierra Nevada to the golden southern beaches – is facing big problems as a high-priority audit gets underway to learn how officials stashed a $54 million secret surplus while soliciting money from local governments and others to stay afloat.

The independent state audit is scheduled to begin immediately and produce findings within the next few months, said GOP Assemblywoman Beth Gaines, who helped win bipartisan approval for the probe.

So much for Obama’s much vaunted auto bailout. The President threw money at the car industry so that he could buy votes from the swing states. The result is 4 straight years of Trillion dollar deficits:

The U.S. Treasury raised its estimate of the net cost to U.S. taxpayers of rescuing the country’s auto industry by $3.3 billion, as the weak economy restrains the industry’s rebound.

The Treasury told Congress in a new report seen on its website Monday that the cost of the government’s massive bailout of Detroit in the economic crisis of 2007-2008 would hit $25 billion, based on figures to May 31.

That compared a forecast loss of $21.7 billion based on figures to February 29, according to Treasury data.

Over the next 75 years, after Social Security drains its trust funds, the massive program is scheduled to pay out $134 trillion more in benefits than it will collect in tax revenue, according to agency data.

via How big is Social Security’s funding shortfall? – Wire Politics – The Sacramento Bee.

The U.S. federal budget deficit increased $70 billion in July and is on track to top $1 trillion for the fourth straight year.

The deficit for the first 10 months of the 2012 budget year, which ends Sept. 30, totaled $974 billion, the Treasury Department said Friday. That’s 11.5 percent less than in the same period last year. A slightly better economy has boosted income tax receipts.

via U.S. budget deficit totals $974B through July – CBS News.

United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials spent $2 million on an internship program that had one intern, as it failed to use properly $63 million in federal funding provided for USDA to protect itself from hackers.

The USDA inspector general discovered that the Office of Chief Information Officer (OCIO) “funded an intern program for a total of $2 million which, while funded as a security enhancement project, only resulted in one intern being hired full-time for ASOC [Agriculture Security Operations Center],” according to a new report.

via USDA spends $2M, gets one intern, program fails | WashingtonExaminer.com.

Source: Washington Post:

Four weeks after an $823,000 spending spree at a Las Vegas hotel, the General Services Administration spent more than $270,000 on a one-day, taxpayer-funded ceremony to reward good performers that featured a drum-band exercise and more than $50,000 in gifts and awards.

The Federal Acquisition Service entertained about 1,000 employees at two Arlington County hotels, with an additional 2,600 participating by webcast, officials said. Forty-nine attendees were flown in from offices around the country.

The revelations Thursday from GSA Inspector General Brian Miller come three months after his scathing report on a lavish, four-day training conference in 2010 for employees in the agency’s western regions.

Auditors say billions likely wasted in Iraq work – CSMonitor.com.

After years of following the paper trail of $51 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to rebuild a broken Iraq, the U.S. government can say with certainty that too much was wasted. But it can’t say how much.

In what it called its final audit report, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds on Friday spelled out a range of accounting weaknesses that put “billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation” in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in U.S. history.

“The precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known,” the report said.