Once upon a time, it was said the Pen­ta­gon paid $435 for a ham­mer.  At least they got a ham­mer out of it.

Fed­eral statutes state that even if a gov­ern­ment pro­gram has ended and no longer being funded, it must main­tain a bank account until that bank account is terminated.

No one in D.C. is doing the paper­work to offi­cially ter­mi­nate the accounts.  With­out the accounts being ter­mi­nated, there’s still an annual main­te­nance fee which must be paid.

It is one of the odd­est spend­ing habits in Wash­ing­ton: This year, the gov­ern­ment will spend at least $890,000 on ser­vice fees for bank accounts that have noth­ing in them. At last count, Uncle Sam has 13,712 such accounts, each with a bal­ance of zero.

These are sup­posed to be closed. But nobody has done the paper­work yet.

So even now — as the sequester bud­get cuts have begun idling work­ers and frus­trat­ing trav­el­ers — the gov­ern­ment is still required to pay $65, per year, per account, to keep these empty accounts on the books.

In this time of aus­ter­ity, the accounts are a reminder of some­thing that makes aus­ter­ity hard: expen­sive habits, built into the bureau­cracy in times of plenty. The Obama admin­is­tra­tion has spent the past year try­ing to close these accounts with some success.

But only some.

Yeah…the Obama admin­is­tra­tion is too busy play­ing games at the FAA and ignor­ing requests to pri­or­i­tize spend­ing dur­ing the Sequester.  Lit­tle things like “sav­ing the tax­pay­ers money” get lost in the turf war.

If this were hap­pen­ing to any­one in the real world — get­ting charged monthly for an empty bank account — they would have closed it years ago.  Only in government…

Via the Jimmy Kim­mel Show:

(I for one am NOT proud to pay for any of these activities…)

The crap-sandwich which was the 2008 Farm Bill (the only veto over­turned of the GWB pres­i­dency and trum­peted by idiots like Steve Kagen and Tammy Bald­win) strikes again!

(H/T Scott Lin­ci­come)  More money for the fuel addi­tive no one wants!

The White House will decide in com­ing weeks whether to attempt to blunt low prices in the U.S. sugar mar­ket by buy­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of tons of sur­plus sugar and sell­ing it at a loss to ethanol makers.

If approved, it would be the first time the sugar-for-ethanol pro­gram, cre­ated in 2008 and known as the Feed­stock Flex­i­bil­ity Pro­gram, has been put into operation.…

Large crops in the United States and Mex­ico have pushed New York futures prices below the trig­ger price for poten­tial for­fei­ture by proces­sors of sugar to the government.

The sugar is used as col­lat­eral on USDA price-guarantee loans.

For­fei­tures could begin in July, with the expi­ra­tion of USDA loans that guar­an­tee grow­ers will get at least 20.94 cents per lb for sugar. The remain­der of the loans expire in September.

“We’re doing it because it’s the law,” U.S. Agri­cul­ture Sec­re­tary Tom Vil­sack said on Mon­day at the North Amer­i­can Agri­cul­tural Jour­nal­ists meet­ing. The ton­nage pur­chased “is still not decided,” he said.…

The 2008 farm law directs USDA to make sur­plus sugar avail­able to ethanol mak­ers, a pro­vi­sion penned in the early days of the bio­fuel boom with the goal of cre­at­ing feed­stocks in addi­tion to corn.

So to sum it up, the USDA made a bunch of price-guarantee loans avail­able to farm­ers if the price of sugar ever tanked.  Well, the price is tank­ing because of mar­ket forces and so “to com­pen­sate for the loss” the excess sugar will be bought by the gov­ern­ment (nat­u­rally) and then make the sugar — likely from corn — avail­able to ethanol makers.

You got to love idi­otic farm pol­icy like this.

In the mean­time, sugar beets and sugar cane will con­tin­ued to be sub­si­dized (at above mar­ket prices) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is on an all-out jihad against “Big Sugar…” which is bought and paid for by Big Government.

Make up your frickin’ mind why don’t you?