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Originally Posted by onetime2
There is little doubt that the government and its agencies are inefficient at spending and tracking money it receives.
Until monies can be tracked responsibly I am not in favor of throwing more money into the system. That being said, being unaccounted for is different from being wasted or going into the pockets of the corrupt. It could very well have been used on perfectly legitimate and worthwhile things with no real way to "account" for it. To make the jump to corruption or waste requires evidence.
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Interestingly, measures that seek to root out inefficiency or that require justification for every dollar spent are often more costly than the inefficiencies they propose to combat. President Carter initiated a system called zero base budgeting where any agency or administrative unit that received money had to justify every dollar they received, not just increases or decreases from year to year. Traditionally, the budget process for next year begins with the budget from this year, and makes changes on the margin. As its name suggests, zero base budgeting starts from scratch.
A funny thing happened when they went through all the expenditures. They found that most of them were reasonable, and that a relatively small number of budget outlays were "bad." Moreover, the additional administrative overhead both in the agencies and in the budget process itself was found to be too costly to justify the gains.
Just a bit of history.