Festivus may have entered pop culture because of Seinfeld, but when it comes to the airing of grievances, no one has been more committed to the cause than Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).
Every December 23rd like clockwork, Sen. Paul takes to Twitter to share his long list of grievances. This year he picked on members of Congress and President Trump (being mostly lighthearted). However, his airing of grievances always focuses on one key issue: wasteful government spending.
While most of Sen. Paul’s rant is lighthearted and funny, any proper deficit hawk or fiscal conservative will find themselves growing angry when reading about some of the ludicrous ways the federal government has been spending taxpayer money.
Everything he tweets about has been included in The Festivus Report 2019, in which Sen. Paul states:
“It’s easy if you’re a conservative to get depressed. But don’t give up. I will continue to fight the wasteful spending. In the future, I will rate each waste of taxpayer dollars I cover on a scale of 1 to 5 pigs as I hand out the ‘Platinum Pig Awards.’ Stay tuned for more about that. Meanwhile, this year,I am highlighting a whopping $50,463,462,292.35 of waste…”
Here are just a few of the more noteworthy line items:
$22,000,000: Bringing Serbian Cheese Up To International Standards
Even while the U.S. has been hitting a historic cheese surplus, which will eventually hit 1.4 billion pounds, our government thought it would be a good idea to spend $22 million on improving the quality of cheese in other countries. The “Sustainable Local Development Project” taught local Serbians to follow the cheese standards of the International Organization for Standardization and helped producers adopt best practices.
$2,120,040,355.35: Converting An Abandoned Mental Hospital Into Secure Government Agency Headquarters
If you need a secure and state-of-the-art facility to house agency operations, you would turn toward an old and abandoned former mental hospital as your first choice, right? …right? That is exactly what the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been trying to do since 2005. To the tune of more than $2 billion taxpayer dollars, GSA and DHS have been attempting to retrofit and renovate St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C., and have been running into roadblock after roadblock. This is made even worse by the fact that they could have picked from 12 other problem-free locations.
$2,000,000: Improved The Quality Of TV In Moldova
In theory, this money was spent to combat the influence of Russian television propaganda in Moldova. In reality? The acting president of Moldova has already countered this, “[B]an[ing] most television and radio programs not produced in the European Union, the US, or Canada, or by the states that have not ratified the European Convention on Transborder Television.”
You can find the rest of the wasteful ways the government spent your taxpayer dollars detailed in Sen. Paul’s report here. We hope any grievances you aired on Festivus were not nearly as grievous as the way the government has been wasting money over the past year.