30 Stupid Things The Government Is Spending Money On

by Michael Snyder
The American Dream
Mar. 02, 2012

If you want to get paid for doing something stupid, just turn to the U.S. government. The U.S. government is paying researchers to play video games, it is paying researchers to study the effects of cocaine on Japanese quail and it has spent millions of dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly. The amount of money that the government wastes is absolutely horrifying. Do you remember all of that political wrangling over the debt ceiling deal last year? Do you remember how our politicians told us that there were cutting spending as much as they possibly could? Well, it was all a giant lie. As you will see below, the U.S. government is spending money on some of the most stupid things imaginable. What makes all of this even worse is that we are going into enormous amounts of debt in order to pay for all of this. We are borrowing billions of dollars a day in order to pay for stupid stuff that no government on earth should ever be paying for. Trust me, you are going to find it hard to believe some of the stuff in this list. It is almost inconceivable what our politicians are doing with our tax dollars.

The following are 30 incredibly stupid things that the federal government is spending money on....

#1 The U.S. government is spending $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

#2 The Obama administration plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars helping students from Indonesia get master's degrees.

#3 If you can believe it, the U.S. government has spent $175,587 "to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior".

#4 The U.S. government spent $200,000 on "a tattoo removal program" in Mission Hills, California.

#5 The federal government has shelled out $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their research on video games such as World of Warcraft. Wouldn't we all love to have a "research job" like that?

#6 The Department of Health and Human Services plans to spend $500 million on a program that will, among other things, seek to solve the problem of 5-year-old children that "can't sit still" in a kindergarten classroom.

#7 Fannie Mae is about to ask the federal government for another $4.6 billion bailout, and it will almost certainly get it.

#8 The federal government once spent 30 million dollars on a program that was designed to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangos.

#9 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.

#10 According to USA Today, 13 different government agencies "fund 209 different science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs -- and 173 of those programs overlap with at least one other program."

#11 A total of $615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.

#12 China lends us more money than any other foreign nation, but that didn't stop our government from spending 17.8 million dollars on social and environmental programs for China.

#13 The U.S. government once spent 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.

#14 One professor at Stanford University was given $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love.

#15 The U.S. Postal Service spent $13,500 on a single dinner at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse.

#16 The National Science Foundation once spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians "gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions".

#17 A total of $1.8 million was spent on a "museum of neon signs" in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#18 The federal government spends 25 billion dollars a year maintaining federal buildings that are either unused or totally vacant.

#19 U.S. farmers are given a total of $2 billion each year for not farming their land.

#20 The U.S. government handed one Tennessee library $5,000 for the purpose of hosting a series of video game parties.

#21 A few years ago the government spent $123,050 on a Mother's Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia. It turns out that Grafton only has a population of a little more than 5,000 people.

#22 One professor at Dartmouth University was given $137,530 to create a "recession-themed" video game entitled "Layoff".

#23 According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. military spent "$998,798 shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas and $293,451 sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina to Florida".

#24 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once shelled out $30,000 to a group of farmers to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host guests for overnight "haycations".

#25 The National Institutes of Health paid researchers $400,000 to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.

#26 The National Institutes of Health also once spent $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#27 The National Institutes of Health loves to spend our tax money on really bizarre things. The NIH once spent $800,000 in "stimulus funds" to study the impact of a "genital-washing program" on men in South Africa.

#28 According to the Washington Post, 1,271 different government organizations work on government programs related to counterterrorism and homeland security.

#29 The U.S. government spent $100,000 on a "Celebrity Chef Fruit Promotion Road Show in Indonesia".

#30 The feds once gave Alaska Airlines $500,000 "to paint a Chinook salmon" on the side of a Boeing 737.

How in the world can our government be so foolish?

Anyone that claims that there is not a lot of stuff that can be cut out of the federal budget is lying to you.

All of this crazy spending is going to get us into a massive amount of trouble eventually. Already, on a per capita basis the U.S. national debt is worse than the national debts of Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.

We have accumulated the biggest debt in the history of the world and we are adding to it at a rate of about 150 million dollars an hour.

Our politicians strut around as if they are the smartest and wisest leaders in the history of the world, but the truth is that someday people will look back in horror at the decline of our once great society.

The federal government needs to stop spending so much money on stupid things and needs to stop pushing our national debt to nightmarish new levels.

Unfortunately, the corruption in Washington D.C. is so deep and so pervasive that it is going to be almost impossible to turn it around.