WASHINGTON – It’s time to take the pole out of the crawlspace.
In the most wonderful time of the year for Washington budget hawks, Sen. Rand Paul on Friday released his annual broadcast of spending complaints in honor of the holiday immortalized by “Seinfeld,” “Festivus.”
From scientific experiments on transgender monkeys to $38 million in COVID payments to dead people, Paul’s report detailed what he called “a whopping $9 billion of waste” of taxpayer funds.
“Last Festivus, we lamented that the national debt reached an astronomical $30 trillion,” wrote Paul (R-Ky.).
“Amazingly, in a short year, career politicians and bureaucrats in Washington have managed to approach $34 trillion in debt, without even thinking twice.”
Sen. Rand Paul on Friday launched his annual spending complaint broadcast in honor of the holiday immortalized by “Seinfeld” “Festivus.” AFP via Getty Images
Paul criticized both political parties for contributing to the deficit by voting to raise the debt ceiling at the end of May, “authorizing the government to borrow an unlimited amount of money until 2024.”
“As Congress spends to reward its favorite industries and pet projects, American taxpayers are forced to pay the price through record inflation and crippling interest rates,” he said in the report.
“The same big spenders banded together, once again, to continue sending Americans’ hard-earned money to foreign countries and funding endless wars, all while ignoring our porous southern border.”
“I have a lot of problems with federal spending,” he added, channeling Frank Costanza, “and now it’s time to hear all about them.”
Paul’s 2022 Festivus Report revealed some of the most egregious government spending this year.
Lots of money for Barbies
Hi Ken! Do you want to defraud the government?
While 2023 was the year of “Barbenheimer,” it was also the year of “Barbencrimer” for some scammers of the $800 billion COVID Paycheck Protection Program, according to the report.
From scientific experiments on transgender monkeys to $38 million in COVID payments to dead people, Paul’s report detailed what he called “a whopping $9 billion of waste” of taxpayer funds. carefully chosen
The program, which offered loans to small business owners to keep their workforce employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, used an artificial intelligence system to verify proof of identity, which scammers quickly took advantage of.
Instead of actual employee IDs, some scammers uploaded photos of the Barbie dolls to the artificial intelligence system, which apparently accepted the obviously plastic faces as “proof of identity” and approved sending checks to the scammers behind the scheme.
“The verification system did not detect the doll images uploaded by the scammers,” the report says.
“Somehow, the Small Business Administration sloppily approved Toyland applicants and sent inadequate COVID-19 PPP payments.”
While it’s unclear how much of the $800 billion in funding approved by Congress made it into Barbie’s tiny hands, Paul took the opportunity to relitigate the entire federal response to the outbreak.
Paul criticized both political parties for contributing to the deficit by voting to raise the debt ceiling at the end of May, “which authorized the government to borrow an unlimited amount of money until 2024.” Irina Kulikova
“Some of us saw the writing on the wall and predicted that shutting down our economy and printing more money to pay the nation to stay home from work would be a fiscal disaster,” Paul wrote.
“But using Barbie’s face as proof of identity to steal taxpayer money was not on my COVID waste bingo card.”
Monday for ‘starving artists’, like Post Malone
Taking advantage of COVID funds is not always a crime, even though it may seem like it, Paul explained.
During the pandemic, the government offered financial assistance to entertainment venues affected by closure orders through the Small Business Administration’s Shuttered Venue Operators Grant.
The program, Paul said, “was supposed to provide a lifeline to small entertainment businesses across the country.”
In reality, according to the report, the SBA doled out more than $200 million to “dozens of famous music artists and their touring companies.”
“So-called ‘small business owners,’ such as Post Malone, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown and Smashing Pumpkins, received up to $10 million each,” Paul said.
“Even Nickelback got $2 million.”
Other artists and groups that participated in these grants were Usher ($3.1 million), Leann Rimes ($2 million), Melissa Etheridge ($3.9 million) and Slipknot ($9.7 million).
“While some may claim that these funds were used to support support staff,” Paul wrote, “the artists were not required to do so and we have no way of determining how these blank checks were used.”
What a ‘tank’ job
Only the best for our service members, and apparently that means fresh lobster, considering the Pentagon’s purchase of an $8,295 lobster tank from a restaurant equipment company in Springfield, Virginia.
“We all know that the Department of Defense purchases for military operations,” Paul said in the report.
“One would imagine that guns, ammunition and tanks might be among those items purchased, but according to USASpending.gov, they are not the type of tanks you are thinking of!”
While the seemingly generous spending appeared in this year’s Festivus report, the purchase actually took place in late 2016, according to USASpending.gov.
But the Kentucky Republican apparently can’t let a little fact-checking get in the way of an excellent pun.
“I understand that military personnel need to eat, but does the Department of Defense really need a lobster tank?” Paul wrote.
“I think we can all agree that these are not the tanks Americans thought they were funding with their tax dollars. “
“As Congress spends to reward its favorite industries and pet projects, American taxpayers are forced to pay the price through record inflation and crippling interest rates,” he said in the report. fake images
doing tricks
Government funding for brutal experiments on primates took up several pages of this year’s Festivus report.
First, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spent nearly half a million dollars to forcibly change the gender of male monkeys, according to the report.
“That’s right, NIAID is using $477,121 of your tax dollars to fund the forced feminization of male rhesus macaques,” Paul said in the report.
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“Using taxpayer funds from the NIAID, a Florida laboratory set out to examine what would happen if female hormones were administered to male monkeys.”
The reason?
To study whether male monkeys full of female hormones were more susceptible to HIV.
“The lab worked to convert male lab monkeys to ‘transgender’ to address ‘social injustices’ suffered by ‘transgender people’, such as ‘transgender women who were assigned a male outfit at birth but express their gender along a feminine spectrum,” the report reads. .
The problem?
“Critics point out that monkeys themselves are not susceptible to HIV, and argue that injecting male monkeys with female hormones is unlikely to provide relevant information or help humans,” Paul said.
In another experiment, the National Institutes of Health spent $171,000 of its money studying the play habits of monkeys, an experiment that began in 2014 but continued for nearly a decade afterward.
The experiment consists of subjecting the monkeys to three series of tests. The first two present “clear patterns” for winning, while the third pays randomly.
What they discovered was that monkeys like to gamble and that they share humans’ “unfounded belief in winning and losing streaks.”
So keep this in mind the next time a monkey says he has a “system” for winning at blackjack.
The debt itself
But Paul’s biggest problem is the $659 billion the federal government paid just to cover the interest on his debts.
“It doesn’t take a genius to predict the dangers of spending money the government simply doesn’t have,” Paul wrote.
“Apparently robbing Peter to pay Paul is not a good tax strategy.”
The total interest for 2023 is higher than the $475 billion paid in interest last year, because “when the national debt increased further this year, interest payments increased by $184 billion,” according to the report.
“Since we don’t have the funds to pay for that, we have to borrow, a large part of it from China,” lamented the senator.
“We borrowed from China to pay interest on funds we couldn’t afford to spend in the first place.”
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Source: vtt.edu.vn