Thanks to the National Science Foundation we can now be certain that the finger snap that Thanos used to wipe out half the life in the universe was only a special effect. He couldn’t have done that snap wearing the gauntlet.

Who knew?

We learned this courtesy of research done by an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, who informed the world: “Our results suggest that Thanos could not have snapped because of his metal armored fingers,” said Acharya, first author of the study. “So, it’s probably the Hollywood special effects, rather than actual physics, at play! Sorry for the spoiler.”

Senator Rand Paul featured this research, which cost $118,971, as part of his annual “Festivus Report” which highlights wasteful government spending. This year he identified $482,276,543,907 in government waste.

As with all spending, waste is in the eye of the beholder. In general no expenditure is wasteful if the money benefits you, and is extremely wasteful if the money comes out of your pocket. When times are flush the will to fight waste runs low, but when times are tight the tolerance for frivolity declines.

Unfortunately not a dime of that frivolous spending was directed my way. I guarantee I wouldn’t consider it wasteful at all.

People in government think times are flush because they are spending play money borrowed from the future, so the sky is the limit. But as Senator Paul points out, the largest chunk of that $482 billion in government waste is the interest on the national debt, which is $475 billion of the total.

So that “free money” the government spends every year through borrowing isn’t so free after all. Adding trillions to the national debt is not just eating away at the country’s future, but is creating an ever larger burden on current taxpayers. Maybe spending money to find out whether Thanos could snap his fingers in his gauntlet wasn’t a great investment.

Other waste Paul identified is enough to make you weep.

COVID relief topped the list of wasteful government spending, and in my experience Paul underestimates the amount of “emergency relief” funds that went to waste. Here in Minnesota half a billion was stolen from funds that were supposed to go to feeding children during the school lockdowns, and over the next few years billions of dollars in fraud will be uncovered (and probably glossed over).

One of the frustrating things about these lists is that the it is the smallest incidents of waste that are easiest to grasp and get angry over. The research grant to study Thanos’ finger snap might be silly, but the vast majority of government waste is buried in budgets in programs that sound innocuous.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are poured into programs that accomplish little to nothing other than funding bureaucracies and spreading money around. There is no one ridiculous expenditure to point at and make fun of, but the taxpayer is bled dry to do little but maintain the lifestyle of useless bureaucrats and nonprofit executives.

Government is far too big for anybody to get a grip on the budget. We all have an idea that the Pentagon wastes vast sums of money. But the Pentagon is a relatively small fraction of federal spending. The waste is even harder to find buried in the bureaucracies for this other spending.

The budget that we all talk about is that slice called “discretionary,” which Congress (supposedly) controls. But about 70% nobody even looks at most of the time, and the waste buried in there is astronomical. That spending was obligated by laws passed during prior Congresses and includes spending like Social Security and Medicare.

Nobody is minding the store there save the bureaucrats. Since Congressmen can’t take credit for this spending they just ignore it. That’s a bonanza for the grifters.

Government is far too large to manage. Elected officials are supposed to be the decision makers, but nobody can possibly get their mind around where all that money goes.

We seem to have reached a point where not trying to get a cut of all that wasteful spending makes you a chump. The feds seem incapable of saying no, so why not get a chunk for yourself?

We saw precisely that phenomenon during COVID, when the feds threw money at seemingly everybody in forgivable loans. I decided not to apply, and I feel like a chump. We’ve created a system where doing the right thing is punished–you just wind up paying for everybody else’s graft.

I think that is one of the reasons why we are usually disappointed in the officials we elect: the system is rigged against people who do the right thing, and even well-intentioned lawmakers give up and join the club. The alternative is being a chump.

I’ve seen it happen to good people. They “go Washington.” Perhaps it is weakness, but it’s the system itself as well. Not “going Washington”  means that your constituents back home wind up paying for everybody else’s graft without getting anything themselves.

Does that make it forgivable? You decide.