Suggest that getting rid of waste in a particular government
program would result in a savings of X millions of dollars and the
typical Washington green eyeshade type (or Democrat lawmaker, if it
doesn’t fit his agenda) will scoff that it’s but “a drop in the
bucket” —hardly worth fooling with. They forget the late Senator
Everett Dirksen’s dictum, “A billion here, a billion there and
pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
The latest case involves the
revelation that the Internal Revenue Service paid out
half-a-billion dollars to first-time home buyers who weren’t.
You’ll recall that this was part of the Obama 2009 “economic
recovery” program, designed to jump-start home sales. First-time
buyers would get credits of up to $8,000. Congress sweetened the
pot by giving $6,500 to current owners who traded up to a new
home.
The IRS’s inspector general recently reported finding that
some credits went to prison inmates, to people who did not buy
homes and others who bought before the credit program became law.
In all, the IRS paid our $29 billion to more than four million
people. To its credit, it denied the claims of more than 400,000.
That the program did not make an appreciable difference in the
housing market is not, of course, the fault of the IRS, but of
incorrect policy planning of the Obama Administration and its
Congressional allies. Nevertheless, tighter vetting of claims could
have saved several bucketsful of taxpayer funds.
Another periodic example of drops in the bucket that add
up to bucketsful are the reports of credit card abuse by government
employees. The green eyeshade wearers tired of poring over expense
claims for travel, so came up with the idea of distributing credit
cards, then auditing their usage afterward. Not all, but some
of users succumbed to temptation and ran up charges for theater
tickets, clothing, personal travel, spa treatments, and expensive
meals. This is the sort of outcome most folks out in Taxpayer Land
would have predicted, had they been asked. The solution (and the
saving of many “drops”): pre-approval of expense
requests.
A source of a steady flood of drops into the bucket
stopped in January: It is the lavish use of an Air Force 737 to
transport then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from Washington to
her home in San Francisco and back.
Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request
that resulted in a detailed Air Force accounting of her use of an
aircraft over a 16-month period in 2009 and 2010. Ninety-five
percent of the her trips were commutes from home to work. Total
mileage: 206,264, an average of 2,427 per trip. The passenger list
often included her adult children, grandchildren, in-laws, friends
and family retainers. The cost of in-flight food and alcohol was
$62,051 a year, more than the average American makes in that
time.
As for today’s Speaker, John Boehner, he flies
commercial.
The drop-in-the-bucket theory is not restricted to
Washington. In California, it was recently announced that the state
would no longer lease hang-the-expense automobiles for legislators,
nor would they any longer have unrestricted use of gasoline credit
cards. It was if the sky had fallen.
With California still facing a deficit of about $13
billion, it doesn’t seem like a lot to ask the legislators to set
an example by driving their own automobiles and be reimbursed for
legitimate business travel. Alas, no, this was too big a sacrifice.
After all, cutting out this perquisite would provide only a drop in
the bucket toward reducing that deficit. Better to raise taxes,
they said.
