Not exactly a food related blog today, but one that does show how ridiculous our government is. This is not just me, this actually comes from a very interesting publication authored by Senator Tom Coburn, the junior senator from Oklahoma. You can read the entire report here "Report" Or I can give you some of the highlights.
First off, the NFL, the PGA and the NHL are all registered as not for profit entities with the IRS so that they do not have to pay an estimated 91 MILLION dollars in taxes. The NFL alone has an estimated 1 billion dollars in assets and has never paid any taxes since the sixties. I don't have any money, maybe I should look into being not for profit. Rats, that won't work, you have to make a billion dollars a year to be considered not for profit. Just being broke means you have to pay more taxes than the rich do.
The year 2012 was the most unproductive ever for Congress. They did less than most high school student councils. Some of the really cool things that they did take credit for include:
Oklahoma kept the Murray State Park Airport open even though only 1 plane a month on average lands there. It was kept open in order to keep federal money coming in.
NASA spent 947,000 dollars on developing food to serve on Mars.
California researchers got 325,000 federal dollars to build a mechanical squirrel that they call "RoboSquirrel" that they use to find out why rattlesnakes miss their strikes when a squirrel is wagging its tail over when not wagging. Money well spent.
The USDA (oops, there is a food connection) spent 325,000 dollars to promote caviar. At up to 400 dollars an ounce, it is the perfect food for ALL Americans.
The National Science Foundation used 30,000 in Federal Grant money to show that students can accurately determine if a person is gay or not by looking at their facial features.
Sargeant's pet products received 505,000 dollars for capital improvements to make dog shampoo.
The USDA and Department of Commerce is spending 1.3 million dollars to aid Pepsico, one of the top 100 largest companies in the country, to open a Greek yogurt shop in downtown New York
Purdue University researchers used part of a $350,000 National Science Foundation grant to examine the benefit golfers might gain from using their imagination to imagine the hole being larger.
sheesh, it is getting late, I need to do some stuff, bake bread, work on another batch of my home made kimchee, brush my teeth, bend over, stretch, look directly at the sun until my retinas burn, and really, do just about anything other than think about how much the Federal government wastes. The stupidity of government is epitomized so eloquently by one of its own, and you can indeed read all of the top 100 wasteful projects as defined by Senator Tom Coburn here "Report"
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