in 2022.

There's no real accountability from the

government to the customers, the American

people. And so no one should be surprised that the

government has horrible customer service, that it

wastes resources, that it steals your resources, that

it does stupid and wasteful things from them.

Meanwhile, 54% of Americans today believe their federal

income taxes are too high.

Yet the United States is one of the least taxed among

the developed nations.

Tax revenue in America accounts for a little more

than a quarter of the country's GDP, compared to

an average of 34.11% among developed countries.

Particularly compared to other Western European

democracies where people have the same standard of

living as we do, our taxes are really relatively low.

Taxes are a matter of perception.

It's a matter of how people feel about it and the value

that they feel they're getting for the taxes that

they pay.

Only about 20%, really more like 18% or so, of

government spending is actually on what most people

would say they think government does.

In the private sector, if somebody is doing something,

they see what they're trying to do or sell and

then determine how to do it and then how much it will

cost. In the federal government, everything is:

go spend the money.

If that doesn't work, go spend more money.

So why do taxes feel so high in the United States?

And why does so much of it get wasted?

Billions of taxpayer dollars go wasted every

year. Take improper payments, for example, which

cost the US $247 billion in 2022.

These refer to payments that were made incorrectly

by the government.

Over the last two decades, the US government has lost

almost $2.4 trillion in payment errors.

An improper payment can be both an overpayment and an

underpayment. An overpayment may be

fraudulent, going to the wrong person, going to

someone who is ineligible, going literally to someone

who's deceased.

You ask most people, how much money do you lose in a

day, a month, a year or something like that?

And they would say none of it, right?

I know what I'm spending my money on, right?

Maybe on occasion somebody drops a dollar bill.

But the government has just lost, as if you dropped on

the sidewalk, trillions and trillions of dollars over

the last few decades. And that is money that was

stolen from hardworking Americans to just simply get

wasted.

But that's not all.

Oversight reports from nonprofits and senators like

Rand Paul claim that billions of dollars are

being wasted every year, f rom spending $1.7 billion

maintaining empty government buildings to

accidentally investing $28 million on forest camouflage

uniforms to be used in the deserts of Afghanistan.

Duplicated programs are another concern.

The Government Accountability Office every

year issues a report on duplicative and overlapping

programs, and every year they find more of these

programs. For example, everyone should be connected

to broadband, at least everybody who wants to be

connected. Yet in the federal government, the

Government Accountability Office found 133 broadband

programs across 15 federal agencies.

Just one example of the duplication and overlap

among many programs throughout the federal

government. And the federal government spent $42 billion

over a three year period and people are still not

connected.

Experts say the problem mainly stems from the way

our government tries to solve an issue.

In the private sector, if somebody is doing something,

they see what they're trying to do or sell and

then determine how to do it and then how much it will

cost. In the federal government, everything is go

spend the money. If that doesn't work, go spend more

money.

The way that our systems work is that we didn't

thoughtfully do anything.

The way that our programs are done is it's one

Band-Aid thrown on top of another.

Somebody got into office and said, I want to have a

grant program that's named after me.

So none of these are really designed to work with each

other. None of them are designed to respect each

other.

Federal spending has risen over 20% since 2019,

adjusted for inflation.

The federal government reported $1.38 trillion in

federal budget deficit in 2022.

That same year, the national debt hit almost $31

trillion for the first time in history.

As the government spends, as it runs up a deficit, a

debt, that is now America's second mortgage, that is now

a quarter of $1 million per household, what happens is

it's sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

It's destroying investment.

It's mortgaging our futures, it's slowing our

growth. Today, the inflation you're seeing is a

large result of that.

Taxes have also never felt more unfair in the US.

First of all, the top has ballooned.

There's just so many more people who are really,

really, really rich than we ever had.

And secondly, the numbers of ways that they can get

out of paying taxes has also increased.

So it's not so much that their rate is bad, it's that

they don't pay that rate and that really makes people

mad.

I absolutely dismiss those kind of claims that the

wealthy aren't paying their fair share.

I mean, first of all, they're paying the

overwhelming majority of the taxes that are paid in

this country.

According to most recent available data, the top 1%

of earners paid more than 42% of federal personal

income tax in the United States.

That's true. They do pay billions and billions of

dollars in taxes.

That's because they're rich.

They have money to tax.

The bottom of the income distribution doesn't pay

many taxes at all because they don't have much money

to get taxed on.

A 2021 analysis from the White House revealed that

the wealthiest 400 billionaires pay an average

tax rate of 8.2%, a much lower rate compared to

average working Americans.

Additionally, Americans feel they aren't seeing

enough visible returns for how much they pay.

While the US does enjoy lower taxes compared to

other developed countries, citizens pay extra for many

services. Out-of-pocket health spending per capita

in the US in 2019 was $1,235,

compared to just $687 average for OECD members.

The US pays a higher average tuition fee for a

bachelor's degree compared to most other developing

countries for both public and independent private

institutions.

Most of our taxes go to Social Security and

Medicare. Look at your pay stubs.

That's where your taxes are going.

We finance in part our own retirement and our own old

age medical care throughout our lifetimes, from the time

we get that first teenage job to the time we get our

first job and on.

And other countries don't do that.

They build that into the tax structure.

Other countries just say, you're going to have this

amount of pension, you're going to have this amount of

health care and education, and they pay higher taxes,

but they get more for it.

Covid-19 especially brought the US government's wasteful

spending to attention.

In March of 2020, the United States struggled to respond

to growing threats presented by Covid-19.

With the economy on the brink of collapse, Congress

passed a series of bills intended to both fund the

public health response and keep the economy afloat.

But with massive government spending comes opportunity

for waste, fraud and abuse.

Unfortunately, Democrats conducted little oversight

of the over $2 trillion spent under the CARES Act.

The sad answer is we don't know actually exactly how

much got wasted. The estimates are hundreds and

hundreds of billions of dollars, if not, frankly,

trillions in the three-year period we're talking about.

But a lot of that is there was this rush to get money

out the door.

And so they were using structures that were never

very good. They were designed for much, much

smaller volumes of money going through them.

There was no accountability put in place.

There was no priority to put in systems so that even

retroactively we could figure out where the waste

and the fraud and the abuse was.

It's the job of the Government Accountability

Office, or GAO, to audit and report any wasteful

spending by the federal government.

It will look at a particular agency and it'll say, okay,

this agency seems to be understaffed, not doing a

very good job.

It seems to have a lot of errors.

If it's giving out money, it seems to have a high

error rate. It'll point to management problems in the

government with the hopes, which sometimes happens,

sometimes doesn't, with the hopes that Congress or the

executive branch will then take action to try to fix

the government.

I think they have enough power.

I don't think they have enough manpower or

resources.

One of the few areas where Citizens Against Government

Waste thinks more money should be spent is on the

Government Accountability Office and the Offices of

Inspectors General because they do provide a good

return on the "investment," the amount of money that's

being provided for them, I think in some cases $7 or $8

for every dollar spent in terms of recovering or

preventing wasteful spending.

In general, accountability over spending is severely

lacking in the US government.

There's no real penalty for misspending money or not

looking at how it's being spent, because the answer

is, go create another program.

The real problem here is that Congress doesn't put

its feet down and says in a new piece of legislation, we

demand that there's some real accountability.

Congress doesn't hold their feet to the fire and ensure

that these processes are put in place, that they're

well managed, that they're well resourced.

Some suggest simply shrinking the federal

government's responsibility.

If you want to cut the federal government, there is

a way to do it. Stop doing things, okay?

Just don't do those things anymore.

Give them to the states, privatize them, whatever.

Just don't do them anymore.

Almost everything else that the federal government does

is intended to help someone with a particular problem.

In many cases, that can be done through the private

sector or it can be done a lot more efficiently.

If someone could just figure out how much does it

really cost to help those 500 people that need

somewhere to live, rather than saying we're going to

spend $800,000 to buy them a condo, which has happened,

by the way. So it's not a matter of not trying to get

something done. It's just doing it the wrong way.

Experts say government efficiency is an essential

issue that the Congress must put more effort into

solving.

Congress is the entity that's supposed to be able

to say, I've got this report. We know where the

waste is. We're going to do better.

We owe it to the American people to be better.

And Congress does nothing with it.

And that's really the problem.

There's nothing you can do to make up for Congress not

doing their job. At the end of the day, what's going to

need to happen is Congress to do their job, to take