November 21
The following excerpt is compiled from two online sources "The Waste List" and "Economic Collapse Blog".
#2 According to the Washington Post, the U.S.
government is going to leave 7 billion dollars worth of military equipment behind in
Afghanistan.
#3 It is being projected that the trip that
the Obamas will be making to Africa will cost U.S. taxpayers $100,000,000.
#6 The IRS spent $60,000 on
a film parody of “Star Trek” and a film parody of “Gilligan’s Island”.
Internal Revenue Service employees were the actors in the two parodies, so as
you can imagine the acting was really bad.
#10 During 2012, the salaries of Barack Obama’s
three climate change advisers combined came to a grand total of more than $370,000.
#13 During 2012, $25,000 of
federal money was spent on a promotional tour for the Alabama Watermelon Queen.
#15 NASA spends close to a
million dollars a year developing
a menu of food for a manned mission to Mars even though it is being projected
that a manned mission to Mars is still decades away.
#16 During 2012, the federal government spent 15 million dollars to help the Russians recruit nuclear
scientists.
#18 The U.S. government spent 27 million dollars to teach Moroccans how to design and
make pottery in 2012.
#20 The federal government still sends about 20 million dollars a year to the surviving family members of
veterans of World War I, even though World War I ended 94 years ago.
#22 During fiscal 2012, the National Science
Foundation gave researchers at Purdue University$350,000. They used part of that
money to help fund a study that discovered that if golfers imagine that a hole
is bigger it will help them with their putting.
#25 During 2012, the National Science
Foundation spent $516,000 on the creation of a video game called “Prom Week”
which apparently simulates “all the social
interactions of the event.”
#31 The National Institutes of Health recently
gave $666,905 to
a group of researchers that is conducting a study on the benefits of watching
reruns on television.
#32 The National Science Foundation has given 1.2 million dollars to a team of “scientists” that is
spending part of that money on a study that is seeking to determine whether
elderly Americans would benefit from playing World of Warcraft or not.
#33 The National Institutes of Health recently
gave $548,731 to
a team of researchers that concluded that those that drink heavily in their
thirties also tend to feel more immature.
#35 In 2011, the National Institutes of
Health spent $592,527 on
a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
#40 If you can believe it, the federal
government has actually spent $750,000 on
a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
#41 The U.S. Agency for International
Development spent 10 million dollars to create a version of “Sesame Street”
for Pakistani television.
#43 The National Science Foundation spent $198,000 on
a University of California-Riverside study that explored “motivations,
expectations and goal pursuit in social media.” One of the questions the study
sought an answer to was the following: “Do unhappy people spend more time on
Twitter or Facebook?”
#45 The federal government recently spent $74,000 to
help Michigan “increase awareness about the role Michigan plays in the
production of trees and poinsettias.”
#46 In 2011, the federal government gave $550,000 toward
the making of a documentary about how rock and roll contributed to the fall of
the Soviet Union.
#53 Last year, the federal government spent $96,000 to
buy iPads for kindergarten students in Maine.
#59 The National Science Foundation recently
spent $200,000 on
a study that examined how voters react when politicians change their stances on
climate change.
#60 The federal government recently spent $484,000 to
help build a Mellow Mushroom pizzeria in Arlington, Texas.
#61 At this point, China is holding over a
trillion dollars of U.S. government debt. But that didn’t stop the United
States from sending 17.8 million dollars in foreign aid to China in 2011.
#62 The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the
largest snack food maker in the world (PepsiCo Inc.) a total of 1.3 million
dollars in corporate welfare that was used to help build "a Greek yogurt
factory in New York."
#63 The National Science Foundation recently
gave a whopping $697,177 to
a New York City-based theater company to produce a musical about climate
change.
