Of course, the government is ripping off the taxpayer.
The current Federal Government shut down began on Saturday, December 22, 2018. The reason for the shutdown is President Trump's request for USD$5.6 billion to start funding the construction of the USD$23 billion dollar wall.
Supposedly, 800,000 non-essential government workers are currently not being paid. Let's just ignore the thought of 800,000 people working for the Federal government who are not essential for running the government. Instead, let's focus on the budget for these people.
The budget is grouped into two large definitions, discretionary and non-discretionary or mandatory. There is also the payments on the interest on the $22 trillion dollar national debt. That payment is over $65 billion a year.
Imagine the wall we could build if there wasn't any debt.
Mandatory Spending
The mandatory items can't be cut by the President and require Congress to stop doing these items that the Federal government shouldn't be doing in the first place. The biggest part mandatory spending is Social Security and Medicare. So, when people say "Medicare for all!" What they are really saying is, "The Federal Government is already overspending so let's add to the most expensive and fraud laced program and break the system!! Woo hoo!! Totalitarianism!!"
Anyway, we can't get money out of those programs and there is no way that would cover the cost of the wall.
Since 2003—when certain agencies were required by statute to begin reporting improper payments—cumulative improper payment estimates have totaled about $1.4 trillion. For fiscal year 2017, federal entities estimated about $141 billion in improper payments—composed of estimates for 90 programs across 21 agencies. This total was down from about $144 billion for fiscal year 2016, but up from about $137 billion for fiscal year 2015.
~ source: https://www.gao.gov/
Medicare and the Earned Income Tax Credit
Medicare programs, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit
account for about 74 percent of this total. The total of the reported estimates for the three Medicare programs—Medicare Fee-for-Service (Parts A and B), Medicare Advantage (Part C), and Medicare Prescription Drug (Part D)—was $51.9 billion for fiscal year 2017, down from $59.7 billion for fiscal year 2016.
Discretionary Spending
So, let us focus on the current spending of which the President has the discretion of putting money into or not.
According to The Balance, the requested amount of discretionary funding amounts to $1.305 trillion for fiscal year 2019. Here is a little chart showing the amounts per department in the billions.
As you will noticed, the Department of Defense is the largest chunk. You will also notice, that the Department of Defense is probably the only item in the budget that was outline in Article I Section 8 of the U.S.A. Constitution. So, let's just ignore the DoD, Homeland Security, and the VA. Let's focus on the other areas.
If you break down the yearly budget to 12 months and then to a 30 day month, you will see that the Federal government is spending USD$0.8 billion a day. If this was the salary cost for the people working there, then by not paying them for 6 days, we could have the funding for the wall.
So, right now, the Federal government has been shut down for 15 days. There is probably no way there will be an agreement by Wednesday, which would easily bring us to 3x the number of days needed to start the wall.
The Hard Truth
Of course, the problem is, that money is going to spent by those departments, one way or another.
That's right, every time there is a shut down, the Congress steps in an back pays the Federal workers. But, that is only the permanent Federal workers, not the contractors. The Federal government employees thousands, if not millions of contract workers. They actually don't know how many they employ.
- Top 100 Contractors of the U.S. federal government
Top contracts in 2015- Department of Energy ($23 billion)
- Health and Human Services ($21 billion),
- NASA ($13 billion).
Those employees will not be paid for not working. And as you can see from the Department of Energy and NASA, they consist of the majority of the budget. When these contractors don't work, they are neither paid by the company that employs them or by the Federal government.
But, where does that money go?
This is probably a good question for every member of Congress.
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