Money Down a Rat Hole

Starbucks, cell phones, e-readers and fraud.  We can pay our debts if we want.

The last three weeks have cast up three massive pharma frauds cases:

• Big:  $750 MILLION fraud dealing with payola for blood drugs. (Newsweek).
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• ‎Bigger:  $1.3 BILLION fraud dealing with payola for bipolar drugs. (Business Week)
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• Biggest:  $3 BILLION fraud dealing with payola for heart and mood drugs. (New York Times)

This is the kind of stuff that is driving the "Occupy Wall Street" folks -- the sense that corporations are ripping us off blind, no one is going to jail behind it, and no one is even being forced to give up their bonuses for designing and green-lighting these frauds.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office says $125 billon in improper payments were made by Uncle Sam last year, with $70 billion of this being done by Medicare and Medicaid alone.

And, of course, it's not just improper payments is it?

The IRS says the "tax gap" between what they should be collecting and what they do collect is in excess of $350 billion a year. But what are they doing to close that gap? Not much. More than 10,000 cases of tax fraud in excess of $2 million have been filed in the last five years, but the IRS has yet to resolve a single one of these cases so far.

Meanwhile, companies like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Facebook, Forest Labs, Microsoft, and Google are using legal tax dodges and loopholes like the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich to avoid paying hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. taxes.

Any question now why this country is going broke? These are the U.S. Government's own numbers!

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