The Festivus Airing of 2024’s Federal Spending Grievances
If you were a fan of the Seinfeld television show in the 1990s or the reruns that still air and stream today, you know that Festivus is an alternative holiday celebrated by George Costanza’s father with some unique traditions. Perhaps the most notable tradition is the “airing of grievances” during the Festivus meal, in which each person tells the others all the ways they disappointed them during the past year. Here’s the clip featuring Jerry Stiller’s immortal performance introducing the practice:
One of the joys of covering the federal spending beat comes during the year-end holidays when Senator Rand Paul embodies the spirit of Festivus and catalogs examples of wasteful spending so you can hear about them in his annual Festivus report.
It’s a lot of fun to read, and the 2024 report captures over $1 trillion worth of taxpayer dollars that U.S. government bureaucrats badly spent. Here are my favorite three wasteful spending examples from this year’s report:
- A Florida man named Patrick Parker Walsh scammed $8 million in COVID-19 Relief funds from the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans. While that alone makes him one of many thousands of fraudsters who exploited these programs in a huge failure of government oversight, what makes him special is he used the money to buy himself an island. That’s almost supervillain stuff!
- The IRS blew $15 million when it tried to get into the business of preparing and filing tax returns for Americans without congressional approval, duplicating a service that already exists in the private sector and is even free of charge for many to use. This one stands out to me because of personal experience. The IRS tried to do my taxes in 2022, bungled the job by hallucinating income I never earned, and then demanded I pay tens of thousands of extra income taxes for the make-believe money they claimed I made. It took months to get them to realize their mistake and drop their claim. What I learned from the experience is that they are simply not up to the job of preparing and filing anybody’s tax returns.
- You can always tell when supposedly creative people have run out of any good ideas. They will take the titles of their intellectual property and add words like “on ice” to the end. Because doing whatever it is they’ve been doing, but now on ice skates, offers that one chance for a last cash grab. The only thing that’s worse is when the government subsidizes the cash grab, as happened with the Bearded Ladies Cabaret’s performance of Beards on Ice. The National Endowment for the Arts gave up $10,000 to the Bearded Ladies Cabaret because they pledged to call attention to climate change through the ice-skating performance of cabaret’s drag queens.
There are dozens of more examples in the 2024 Festivus Report. What other examples of wasteful government spending do you suppose it’s time to hear more about?
