The politicians have a fund called the Members Representational Allowances Account which pays for operating expenses for their office. As you can imagine, it is unbelievable what they do with taxpayer money.

There are 441 members (435 voting members) of the House and 100 members of the Senate for a total of 541 members. From June 2009 until March 2010, the politicians spent $1,013,162,955 to run their offices. Now, if you do the math, that comes to roughly 1.8 million dollars and change of expenses per member for a mere 9 months. Really? It is not tough to see why we are trillions in the hole.

Let’s take a look at what expenses we are flipping the bill for:

$114,925 for a get away to a resort for a planning meeting for the Democratic Caucus
$552 million for payroll for all staff members and interns
$34.9 spent on health insurance
$854,000 spent on life insurance – that is a lot of life insurance which they could easily get on their own dime
$18 million on computer hardware
$5 million on computer software
$7.5 million spent on office supplies – that is $1540 per member per month
$565,000 on new carpet
$317,304 on new drapes
$2.6 million on food and beverages – These guys are living like rock stars
$604,000 on bottled water
$84,794 spent on companies that specialize in coffee
$9,450 on coke products
$11 million spent on newspapers and resources
$9,809 for paper shredding – thought that would be much higher – that comes ot to 7.4 million pages shredded
$12.5 million spent on travel

And that is just a sampling…

And still my favorite expenditure that I just feel so good about every time I pay my taxes…

$18,000 a month for Nancy Pelosi’s office….It doesn’t get any better than that.

I don’t know whether, to laugh, cry, or get angry. The waste is sickening.

Tags: Bob Brooks, budget, politicians