'Cash Strapped' VA Forgot It Had $43.1 Million Stashed Away

Investor's Business Daily ^ | 06/29/2015 | John Merline

[IBD editorial writer]

When not pleading poverty, the Department of Veterans Affairs can be awfully careless with its money.

[pieceofthepuzzle]

Unfortunately, $43.1 million won’t go very far. The requested 2015 VA budget is ~$68.4 billion.

[USNBandit]

Uh huh

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3301129/posts

Seems nothing at the VA gets any notice until it hits the $50 million dollar mark

[Fresh Wind]

It's not like real money was stolen or lost. That money never really existed in the first place, in the sense that the $20 in your pocket exists.

The $43.1 million really existed only as a promise from one account to another.

Typically, unspent money stays with the treasury.

That's why agencies are under pressure every year to find something to do with the money that is allocated to them, even if the money is totally wasted on brochures, Christmas Festivus parties, or prostitutes.

So the VA actually did the country a favor by not spending that money.

Every year agencies submit budgetary requests to Con-gress. They deliberately overstate their needs in anticipation of the inevitable cuts. And part of that process is creating dire scenarios of chaos and misery that will surely result if they don't get every penny they ask for.

But if, by some miracle, more money comes in than they expect, they have to find creative, wasteful ways to use up that money, because to spend less than is allocated means that the next year's cuts to their inflated requests will be even larger.

[ETL]

“’Cash Strapped’ VA Forgot It Had $43.1 Million Stashed Away”

Stolen taxpayer loot.

[Chode]

they've been saving it for bonuses...