Bernie Sanders’ stance on wealth inequality being “the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time” has garnered him support from many frustrated Americans.
Indeed, wealth inequality in America is particularly reprehensible when one considers the sheer amount of government waste that goes on behind the scenes: we’ve reported before on a bureaucrat who “worked” 4 hours a week, which somehow justified his 143,000 dollar salary.
This sort of thing happens in a system which politicians themselves admit to being bought and paid for by the corporate interests.
During a campaign event in Iowa, he spoke of this very issue, “when we talk about making government more cost effective, it doesn’t simply mean cutting Medicaid and food stamps…What it does mean is taking a hard look at an agency, which receives $600 billion per year where there is an immense amount of waste and fraud…”
While all the arms of government are responsible for some part of this colossal waste of taxpayer funds, none have managed to take your money and spend it quite as frivolously as the military; $600 toilet seats? Sure, you need to pay the most to get the best; which is why that $500 hammer is 250 times more hammer-y than your regular one.
Coin-sized rubber roller wheels valued at only $7.71, for $1,678 each from Boeing? Bah, these are small costs…
How about a 43 million dollar gas station? No problem, just punish the whistle-blower…
What about the 362 million dollar easily-stoppable “unstoppable” war ship? Or that 640 million dollar ship which the Coast Guard did not even want?
Sanders points out that even Donald Rumsfeld had once made a speech about “trillions of dollars in the Dept. of Defense that we can’t account for”- just a day before September 11th, what a coincidence, and nobody did anything about it as Sept 11th gave the military all the reason it needed to greatly increase its wasteful spending.
Sanders points out that Congress “tried” to affect the spending habits of the Department in 2009 by passing a law “requiring the DoD to be audit-ready by 2017. After spending—no wasting—billions on failed accounting software, the department is likely to miss that deadline…” Ironically, even more money was wasted when the military “tried” to reduce its wastefulness.
It is also ironic that the soldiers who “benefit” from the 500 dollar hammers (corporate suppliers that sell these overpriced items are the real beneficiaries) are completely dependent on food stamps to eke out an existence.
Sanders highlighted this discrepancy: “And while we have massive cost overruns with defense contractors, we’ve got deployment after deployment for our soldiers, and we’ve got military families on food stamps. So maybe we want to change that.”
Sources: Occupy Democrats, VICE
