Penna Dexter

In an election year, the economy takes on heightened importance in voters’ thinking. A good question to ask is: are my elected officials wasting my money? Are they using taxpayer dollars responsibly?

David Ditch at The Daily Signal, tries to answer that question at least as it pertains to the current administration’s “4 worst wastes of 2023.”

Waste #1:
How can we forget the $1.9-trillion-dollar spending package passed — without a Republican vote – in 2021? It was the third massive stimulus done as “COVID response.” David Ditch writes that $350 billion of it went to state and local governments who spent “much of it on golf courses, tourism, food stamps for the rich, bonuses for government workers, a pickleball complex,” — in other words they didn’t really need it. The unspent funds, tens of billions of dollars, were supposed to expire this year. But the administration quietly issued a rule to give states more time to figure out how to spend this “hoarded” money that was slated to go back into the federal treasury.

Waste #2
In June, the administration lost its attempt at the US Supreme Court to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt, which, of course, means taxpayers would have funded it. Mr. Ditch reports that the administration still found ways to “force taxpayers to cover the cost of other people’s degrees” to the tune of $132 billion, “more than $1000 for every household in the country.”

Waste #3
This past September, the US Centers for Disease Control ordered 20 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine for kids. David Ditch emphasizes the waste: This is “several times larger than the number of pediatric COVID-19 vaccines administered to date.”

Waste #4
After Congress nixed a plan for an environmental jobs program called Climate Corps, the administration unilaterally revived 20,000 of those positions.

Thanks to The Daily Signal for alerting us to this waste. Americans should tell their leaders they’re sick of it.