"I Gotta Lot Of Problems" - Rand Paul's 2020 Airing Of (Spending) Grievances Having been almost the lone voice of sanity this week in Washington as he lambasted the insane levels of 'pork' piled into the Spending/COVID Bill, Senator Rand Paul has turned his ire up to 11 with the release of his annual "airing of grievances" exposure of all that is bad and wasteful about America's politics. In a series of tweets, Dr.Paul offered little in the way of holiday cheer... that is sure to disgust many... Take Congress...PLEASE! They have really outdone themselves this year with the massive special interest giveaway disguised as a relief bill. It is a disgrace in both the level of spending and the process they used to try to sneak it through. But this week’s pork-a-thon isn’t new. My #Festivus Waste Report is now an unfortunate Holiday tradition, though a shameful one, if most legislators had any shame. Why? This one report details $54 BILLION in wasted spending. The average taxpayer pays around $10,000 in taxes. That means they set the taxes of 5,471,368 people on fire this year. And that’s just want we could document in one little report, and doesn’t come close to counting the unconstitutional things Congress spends on. What would $54 billion dollars of taxpayer money have funded if we had tried to use it properly? One example, it would have built 456,221 miles of road. It would have built TWO entire border walls with Mexico. It could have funded the Department of the Treasury for three years, not that we really want to spend that much at Treasury. Speaking of Treasury, I see Joe Biden says he intends to nominate Janet Yellen, former chair of the Federal Reserve to run the treasury. Talk about letting the fox in the henhouse. AUDIT THE FED! AUDIT THE TREASURY! AUDIT YELLEN AND BIDEN!! AUDIT EVERYTHING! Ok, now that I got that off my chest, back to the waste report. So this year, while the petty tyrants in many of our states closed the schools (against all science), Congress said oh, we can do better than that. So they spent $25 MILLION to teach English to rural, unemployed Romanians. They also spent $36 million to study why hair turns gray. I have a few theories on that, and they all have to do with being in the U.S. Senate with people who vote for the things in this waste report. They spent $1.5M to get Eastern Mediterranean kids to stop smoking hookah. Then they said hey, let’s go all out, and snuck a bunch of new rules about shipping vape products in the omnibus bill this week. They spent $3M to interview San Franciscans about edible cannabis use. Really. They must not have spent a lot of time around people who love cannabis. You do NOT need to pay them to talk about it. What’s next, government funding to get people to post more about their CrossFit and Keto programs? The government is never content to just waste money normally. They have to really put their shoulders into it. So this year, the Defense Department spent $1 BILLION in funds intended for Covid relief on unrelated acquisitions. In my favorite WTF moment of the #Festivus Waste report: Your government spent $4.5 million to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine. I do this all day long, and I swear to God I don’t even know what that means. Your betters have spent a lot of this year reminding you the rules don’t apply to them. French Laundry dinners. Traveling for holidays while promoting restrictions for you, the stories seem to come up all the time It came up in the bill this week too when they spent $20 million to rebuild a runway for private planes on Nantucket. This marks Dr. Paul’s sixth edition of the Festivus Report as he continues working to alert the American people to how their federal government uses their hard-earned money. This year, each story received a “Platinum Pig Award” that ranked the waste on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being the most wasteful). Sections are broken down into Health Care; Foreign Aid; Environment, Energy, Science; Military; and Miscellaneous, and highlights include lizards on treadmills, losing over 100 drones in Afghanistan, and combating binge-watching. Below is Senator Paul's full 'Festivus' Report: Tyler Durden Wed, 12/23/2020 - 16:20