But the concerns with Port KC don’t end with finances alone. A series of audits from 2021 through 2024 flagged serious internal control problems, including one where the finance director had full authority over journal entries, deposits and account reconciliation—with no oversight. Port KC has repeatedly promised to fix these issues and repeatedly failed to act.

PortKC’s most recent audit, dated April 30, 2025 (but which seems to have been posted to the website on August 29, 2025), contains the same financial concerns on page 52. Specifically, a “significant deficiency in internal controls over financial reporting.”

My column was published after the 2025 audit but before it was made publicly available. PortKC could not have effected any changes for the 2025 audit—but I wish someone at PortKC had alerted me that I was actually undercounting the years auditors were pointing out the same, unaddressed shortcomings. So much for claims of transparency.

The post Correction: PortKC Ignoring Its Own Audits for Five Years, Not Four appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I don’t mean Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs), or the Distinguished Budget Award that seemingly every city under the sun gets.

I mean an audit. The type of audit that gives people nightmares and, presumably, makes them more careful in their accounting and reporting out of fear.

In recent years, we have seen plenty of examples of failed accounting procedures in local government. There have been outright thefts, failures to competitively bid contracts, plenty of conflicts of interest and cronyism, and much more. I don’t think that politicians and bureaucrats in Missouri are less honest than in other states, but I do think that the huge number of small municipalities and other special taxing districts in our state gives them more opportunities for varying degrees of corruption.

We have seen local auditors who totally failed to do their jobs. Seriously, check out these links to the St. Louis County auditor’s page and be amazed at how few audits the office has actually performed over the past decade.

There is a bill in Jefferson City that expands the ability of the state auditor to preemptively begin audits of local governments when there is evidence of problems. Currently, the auditor needs to be invited by local officials or receive a petition from citizens. The former isn’t always done by local officials—for obvious reasons—and the latter can be time consuming and difficult.

This proposal, which is now on the governor’s desk, is an excellent one. It would benefit the taxpayers of our state.

Would it make local officials and bureaucrats nervous? I certainly hope so.

The post The Type of Audit We Can All Agree On appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• Why we need to empower the auditor’s office
• Medicaid eligibility problems
• Missouri’s property tax assessment woes
• An update to MOSchoolRankings.org
• Committing to innovation in education

Click here to find the newsletter.

The post Show-Me Institute’s October 2023 Newsletter appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fast forward a decade or so, and the county has unfortunately appeared to have returned to those undistinguished roots. Several years ago, the council appointed an individual to the auditor position who had essentially no experience in large-scale government auditing functions. Over the past several years, the inability to actually do such audits has resulted in an auditor’s office almost without audits. This is not an exaggeration. It just takes a moment to compare the output of the St. Louis and St. Charles county auditor’s offices to see the striking difference. One has some very short reports over the past several years. The other (St. Charles) has real audits.

In fact, if you go to the two pages that list St. Louis County audits and reports, there is exactly one (ONE!) released financial document in all of 2020 and 2021, and that document is one (ONE!) page long.

This county auditor oversees a very small staff of just 2 or 3 people The auditor is not just overseeing audits and reports; he has to actually do the work himself. Members of the St. Louis County Council have recently asked for a state audit of county funds in light of the fact that the county auditor has not performed this vital task. The county council is also considering instituting tighter qualifications for the position.

With the enormous amount of money coming into St. Louis County over the past year from federal aid, the office of the county auditor is more important than ever. The county needs a qualified, independent auditor’s office to provide oversight on the spending. (The auditor’s office is one of two positions in St. Louis County government that reports to the council, not the county executive.)

Loyalty is a wonderful thing and calling for people to be replaced is not something anyone should ever be cavalier about, but it is well past time for St. Louis County to have an auditor who will get the job done.

The post St. Louis County Needs to Get the Auditor’s Office in Order appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• The city’s TIF policy “does not clearly define the evaluation process or criteria to be used in project selection.” Without clear criteria, city officials have subjective power to pick which companies or developers receive hundreds of millions in tax incentives. This creates horrible incentives for companies and gives too much power to lawmakers.
• The city’s policy “does not include effective project cost limits or overall program cost controls.” The city’s TIF program has grown significantly over the years. Limits and cost controls would cap TIF usage, which would help assure that the approved projects have been carefully vetted and that only the best projects are selected.
• The audit also discovered that “projects were approved with flawed cost-benefit analyses, including overestimated revenue projections.” A cost–benefit analysis is supposed to be completed in the application process and helps to determine if TIF should be awarded. The audit found that of the thirteen projects analyzed, eight had cost–benefit analyses that contained serious flaws or were missing the cost–benefit analysis altogether.

In response to the audit, a city spokesman said that most suggested reforms are not required by state law. Just because something isn’t required by the state doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done in order to instill fair practices and proper use of taxpayer funds. The problems with the TIF program have been talked about for years, and research suggests that incentive packages like these don’t work. How many chances do the city and this program get? How many times do these problems need to be pointed out before we start to see some real change?

The post How Many Chances Does TIF Get? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Auditor Nicole Galloway wrote: “The county has not developed a plan for ensuring that performance evaluations of the programs funded by COMBAT are performed annually as required by county code.” She recounted how the county sold a building to the Independence School District for $10 “without an independent appraisal or cost-benefit analysis” after spending $1 million in COMBAT funds on renovating the building. But perhaps her biggest hit was on failure to oversee contracts:

The County Legislature appropriates COMBAT funds to outside agencies, without going through the comprehensive process the COMBAT unit follows in awarding similar contracts to agencies. The contracts awarded to one outside agency by the County Legislature, totaling $120,000 during 2017 and 2018, were a questionable use of COMBAT monies.

In a story on the audit in The Kansas City Star, Mike Hendricks wrote that, “Galloway alleged no criminal wrongdoing and offered few surprises,” because the audit:

. . . largely mirrored findings of the private accounting firm that Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker hired in late 2018 to review the drug and anti-violence program she now oversees. Baker released that report on COMBAT last fall.

In response, the Jackson County COMBAT Communications Administrator issued a release welcoming the audit and pledging to make changes. The county also set up a webpage where people can make anonymous allegations of mismanagement of funds.

This is welcome, but as we pointed out in 2016, the problem is not merely that a few contracts may have been mishandled, but that there is scant evidence this anti-crime tax is doing anything to reduce crime. Kansas City is in the midst of a years-long, nation-leading spike in homicides. Can anyone argue that if the COMBAT program were suspended entirely that anything would change? The onus is on the county to make its case, and if it cannot, the program should be dismantled.

The post Missouri Auditor Blasts Jackson County Anti-Crime Program appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri’s governor and other state officials attributed the decrease in enrollment to the state’s improving economy. It makes sense that an improving economy would reduce the need for government-funded health benefits, as more people are employed today than were a year and a half ago. But as Missouri’s enrollment is declining faster than the national average, and the state’s economic growth remains lackluster compared to the rest of the nation, it is unlikely the economy alone can fully explain the drop in enrollment. I think the following point from the Medicaid director’s statement highlights an important yet under-discussed driver of the enrollment change:

From 2014 to 2018, a previous administration did not robustly verify eligibility requirements of individuals on an annual basis and therefore automatically renewed a significant number of enrollees, many of whom did not qualify for assistance . . .

In other words, the drop in Missouri’s Medicaid enrollment is not surprising because the program has been providing health coverage to individuals who did not meet eligibility requirements. This is a shocking admission from our state’s government, considering the federal government requires states to annually verify each participant’s Medicaid eligibility.

The extent of the wasteful spending remains unclear, but the fact it occurred is sadly unsurprising. A recent audit of the Medicaid program in Louisiana found that 82% of enrollees were ineligible at some point during the year they were enrolled. My colleagues and I have written about the state’s potential for wasteful Medicaid spending, and this report confirms our worst suspicions.

As Medicaid costs consume more and more of our state’s budget, limiting improper spending on ineligible individuals is essential. Policymakers should consider a new investigation into how much taxpayer money was wasted while wrongfully propping up the program’s enrollment in the first place.

The post Why is Missouri’s Medicaid Enrollment Falling? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The auditor notes that the fiscal impact of proposed pieces of legislation was not followed up by analysis after the fact. 

State law does not require a post-implementation review of fiscal notes to determine the actual fiscal impact of legislation enacted in comparison to fiscal note estimates. Post-implementation reviews would be especially beneficial for legislation impacting the tax base or for which the fiscal note included an estimated impact on tax revenues.

For example, the auditor finds that the estimated fiscal impact of a particular bill (SB 19 in 2015) was estimated at $15.2 million annually, but she claims the actual cost for the first two years of implementation was about five times greater. To reach that number, the auditor simply examines revenue from before adoption with revenue post-adoption and assigns all the impact to a single bill. Officials from the Department of Revenue make this exact point in the text of the auditor’s report (page 9):

DOR personnel could not identify the actual cause in the reduction in corporate income taxes, but indicated SB 19 (2015) was likely one of the contributing factors along with other potential factors including “other legislative changes” and “changes in the overall economic market.”

The point the auditor is making is valid and laudable: we don’t know the actual cost of the tax laws we’re adopting. Public policy is only as good as the information it relies upon. The Show-Me Institute welcomes any thorough analysis of tax policy—but the auditor’s report may be worse than doing nothing at all as it ascribes all the change in revenue to a single legislative act.

The DOR indicated in the report that such data are often misleading and collecting it can be a burden to businesses, but that the department is implementing a revenue system that may allow for more analysis. Undertaking such an analysis “would require a substantial increase in full-time employees,” which is politically unlikely.  Perhaps allocating more resources to track fiscal impact of legislation is something the legislature should consider—if only to guard against the overly broad assumptions being made in the auditor’s report.

The post Auditor Report on Tax Incentives and Exemptions appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

All in all, it was a depressing affair. But, as it moves from the present into the past, we do have an opportunity to try and learn from what happened. I can think of two key lessons:

Lesson 1: Audits are essential

Little if any of the malfeasance in this case would have been brought to light had it not been for an audit of the system’s finances by the state auditor. That process uncovered almost $40 million in misspent funds and led investigators to the guilty parties. It’s not difficult to imagine that if comprehensive audits of all of the state’s 520 school districts were conducted, the state could uncover other cases of wink-and-nod arrangements and misspent funds.  What was found in St. Joseph is reason enough to suspect that similar cases might well be out there, and the state should make auditing at least some sample of districts a priority.

Lesson 2: Basing pensions off the last three years of earnings, even if legal, is a bad idea.

Missouri calculates a teacher’s pension based on the average of their final three years of employment. By awarding himself extra compensation during those years, Colgan was not only adding to his present paychecks, but also increasing the amount of money he would receive in retirement. What Colgan did was illegal, but plenty of teachers and superintendents goose their pensions by taking on administrative roles or other positions in their final three years of employment to increase the value of their pensions.  We want the best people for these jobs, not just folks who want more in their retirement checks. By taking a teacher’s entire career into account when calculating their pension, we can avoid such problems.

It’s easy to shrug St. Joseph off as an isolated, ugly case of abuse of power, but we do so at our peril. We will pay for our mistakes in any case; the only question is whether we will learn from them.

The post Lessons to Be Learned as Former Saint Joseph Superintendent Heads to Jail appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

High among those jeopardized priorities: state benefits for some of Medicaid's very neediest beneficiaries. This video from the Foundation for Government Accountability provides an example from cash-strapped Illinois.

The good news is that this year both the House and Senate have passed legislation to implement these regular audits. Barring any legislative hiccups in the final mile, this could be good news for taxpayers, currently qualified Medicaid beneficiaries, and other state priorities. Stay tuned.

The post House Passes Medicaid Audit Bill appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Universities have to be able to weather these events, though; otherwise, nothing will ever get done. It’s clear that the recent turmoil was more than the administration could overcome. Much ink was spilled in the post-mortem of the Wolf presidency, but I prefer to look to the future rather than dwelling on the past. I’m more interested in what we can do to improve Mizzou as the university moves forward.

That’s why I was heartened to see a legislative effort to promote greater transparency in the university system. Taxpayers and citizens have a vested interest in the university, and they can’t know if their hard-earned dollars are going to productive ends if they don’t know how those dollars are being spent. Louis Brandeis had it right—sunlight is the best disinfectant—and illuminating the inner workings of the university system can empower citizens to influence how the system is run.

The reform efforts have two central planks (available here and here). The first calls for the Missouri state auditor to complete a comprehensive audit of the university every year. The people of Missouri (many of whom will never have a child set foot on Mizzou’s campus) fund the university system to the tune of half a billion dollars every year. Is it going to fund research on Twilight fans, or is it being used to put more microscopes in the chemistry lab? Right now, we don’t know, and we should.

The second reform requires all instructors to put their syllabi and course reading lists online. Now, it’s not as if these documents are top secret today, but in the past when citizens and researchers have asked for access to syllabi to find out what students were being taught, Missouri universities have stonewalled them. Again, taxpayers have a right to know what they are paying for, and they should not have to pull teeth to find out what is actually being taught in the university’s classrooms.

The University of Missouri system is an important part of the fabric of our state. Not only does it instruct tens of thousands of our students every year, but it also serves as the locus of important research, debate, and discussion. A thriving Mizzou is good for Missouri, and greater transparency will strengthen the university and give Missouri citizens greater confidence that their tax dollars are going to fund important work.

The post Greater Transparency Would Be Good for Mizzou appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We actually went back about eight years and found that there was over $25 million paid in stipends either unapproved, unauthorized or improper. I have to say, with all the money paid in stipends, the district would not be in the condition it’s in if it were under control.

This quote comes from the late Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich, in remarks about his report on the St. Joseph School District. In the same story, Schweich reported, “There were significant other problems with payroll, overtime hours, summer school credits, nepotism issues and other questionable spending.”

The St. Joseph District is not alone in wanting to spend more money. The Kansas City Public School District has been putting “trial balloons” in the air for some time seeking to increase the taxes that fund schools. Many education advocates want to spend more money on teachers and in the classroom. But in Kansas City, the amount spent per student, approximately $16,000 per pupil per year, is already very high. The likely problem, as highlighted by Schweich’s audit in St. Joe, is that the money is often not making it to the classroom; it is being eaten up by administrators through bad policy and perhaps even fraud.

In his 2011 audit of the Kansas City School District, Schweich found lots of similar problems. According to a story by KCTV:

The district could not account for $4 million in food costs and student incentives, repeatedly failed to competitively bid projects and monitor contracts, has excessive overtime and failed to properly oversee its closed buildings, the audit found.

The state audit said a principal at Lincoln College Preparatory Academy made $58,000 in unauthorized purchases and cash withdrawals. Jamia Dock is no longer at the school and has been charged in Jackson County Circuit Court with stealing more than $25,000 in district funds. She has pleaded not guilty and the case is still pending.

The Kansas City School Board was also faulted for repeatedly violating the Missouri Sunshine Law.

Schweich’s 2011 audit grade for KCPS was “Fair,” of a four-point scale including “Excellent,” “Good,” “Fair,” and “Poor.” According to the auditor’s office, most of these findings assume that district spending numbers are correct, which means they don’t do the time-consuming work of digging into expenses. Even still, for Kansas City to score in the bottom half is an indictment.

Many parents and teachers want to see more money making it to the classroom. As Schweich’s comment at the top of this post suggested, efficient money management means that more money can be made available where it matters most. If the Kansas City School District wants to build trust with parents, teachers, and taxpayers, they should invite a thorough and recurring examination of their books and remain transparent in all their expenditures.

The post Audit the Kansas City Public Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This fact is made all the more obvious by this story, reported last week.

Missouri’s Medicaid program could have recovered as much as $27 million from more than 30,000 estates of deceased patients but did not file claims in time, according to a statewide audit of federal programs released Tuesday.

Federal and Missouri laws allow the state to recover Medicaid funds spent on a participant as a state debt but a claim against the person’s estate in probate court must be filed within a year of their death. Of 9,321 cases closed in fiscal year 2014 by the MO HealthNet Division, an average of $15,000 was recovered from 6 percent of those, according to the audit.

The $27 million estimate is based on a similar estimated recovery rate for the 30,000 cases that were past the deadline to file. . . .

According to the audit, “MHD personnel indicated there are not sufficient staff in the Probate and Estate Unit to process all probate estate cases timely and cases are not prioritized in an effort to maximize recovery.” The department says it will work to fix the problem but that response is a recurring theme in audits of Missouri’s Medicaid program.

Indeed, there were more problems uncovered by the audit that a short news story frankly can’t get to, including documentation, oversight, payment, and coding problems. In fact, the sentence construction of “As noted in X previous audits” dots the report’s summary. In other words, many of these are enduring, not passing, problems.

If you believe in good government, the department’s semiannual refrain of “We’ll do better next time” should be intolerable. The solution isn’t growing the program; it’s fixing it. There are ways to make the Medicaid program in Missouri better. Expanding a broken status quo is not one of those ways.

The post Audit: Medicaid Program Rife With Problems appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Now enters the St. Joseph School District. As reported by the St. Joseph News-Press:

“We went back about eight years and found there was over $25 million worth of stipends either not approved, unauthorized or improper. That $25 million worth of stipends is what we found to be problematic,” [State Auditor Tom Schweich] told the crowd inside the Oak Grove Elementary School commons area.

Since there was not full documentation going back further than 2001, Mr. Schweich added, that number could be in excess of $40 million paid out in stipends over that period.

“That is a startling amount of money,” he said, followed by a collective groan from the audience.

“Startling” is an understatement. The questionable stipends account for, on average, over $3 million each of the last eight years that could have gone toward substantive and proper investments in the education of St. Joseph’s children. Instead, according to the News-Press, it appears the money went to a wide array of cronyistic efforts,

including $45 for a Sam’s Club membership for [Superintendent Dr. Fred] Czerwonka, $1,500 for a painting for [Chief Operating Officer Rick] Hartigan’s office and $7,650 in free Internet service for 16 individuals, including an individual the district claimed they did not know.

In the auditor’s words, the stipends operated much like a “slush fund.” Throw in $3.4 million in overpayments from the state to the district because of inaccurate reporting and a swath of closed district meetings that should have been open to the public, and you have the makings of a full-blown scandal in northwest Missouri. It remains to be seen whether criminal action will be taken in the matter, but that seems to be very much on the table at this point.

Frequent readers of this blog know about our positions on transparency (for) and cronyism (against), so I won’t belabor those policy prescriptions in light of the district’s failures. The sheer magnitude of the district’s blackbox behavior is a better argument for vigilance and reform of state and local government than my words alone could offer.

It also goes without saying (though I’ll say it anyway) that “per pupil spending” remains a meaningless statistic, a fact emphasized here. How much you spend “on” a student doesn’t matter if the line items are $1,500 on administrators’ art, rather than $1,500 on the art department.

And yes, there will be many important story lines that will be worth talking about as the district’s actions are fully vetted, but one story line that has to remain front and center is how shameful it is that it took more than a decade for these problems to fully come to light—and the risk that St. Joseph’s scandal is just the canary in the coal mine statewide. That this school district was insulated so long from critical oversight makes me wonder whether similar behaviors might be taking place in one of the other 519 districts (!) in the state . . . and we simply don’t know it yet.

More to the point: If Missouri’s school districts are going to tell the state they have funding problems, then it’s fair for the state and the taxpayers to take a fresh look at how each district spends, or misspends, the state’s tax dollars. That is especially true in light of St. Joseph’s present troubles.

Education funding should be for the children, not for the districts, and it’s time district books were cracked open and thoroughly reviewed. For the state to deliver a quality education for our kids, it needs to hold every district accountable not only to stop problems like this from happening again, but also to ensure that they’re still not happening someplace else.

The post Shock and Audit: St. Joseph School District Out Tens of Millions Because of Staff “Stipends” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Currently, only 42 cents of every dollar issued actually goes toward the construction of low income housing; the remainder goes to the federal government in the form of increased federal income taxes, to syndication firms, and to investors. State law allows claiming the same project costs under two or more tax credit programs. This “stacking” of tax credits can be lucrative for developers, but it generates no additional economic activity or state benefit.

To reiterate: Less than half of the money spent through the LIHTC program… actually goes toward the building of low-income housing. Page 16 of the audit goes through all of the auditor’s recommendations, including the idea of adding substantive spending caps to the LIHTC. That’s an excellent idea. When you have a billion-dollar budget-buster like this sitting out there, a strong cap is an obvious and common sense reform, though the Missouri House’s track record on tax credit reform issues has been abysmal.

Either way, the auditor’s report recognizes the need for reform to the LIHTC. It’s an open question whether the legislature will also recognize the problem.

The post State Audit Recommends Sunset Of Low-Income Housing Tax Credit appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

. . . failed to perform adequate due diligence on the startup company, its officials, and information provided by the company.

This is not the first time that the Show-Me Institute has written about Mamtek. Clearly, the BCS did not do a good job managing the entire Mamtek project, but that is not the point. The main point is that the government should not be engaging in economic development projects in the first place.

It would be bad enough for a private entity to fail to perform adequate due diligence on a project; however, at least a private entity would be using its own money when it invests in a project. A government entity, on the other hand, risks the taxpayers’ money in these development projects. People do not have to invest in a private company, they do have to pay taxes.

The government has a few core functions. Picking favorite economic development policies is not one of them. The state should leave economic development to the private sector and let people choose with their own money which project is worthwhile; the decision should not be up to some bureaucrat in Jefferson City.

The post The DED Gets Audited . . . Hilarity Does Not Ensue (Part 1) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Would it surprise you to learn that the State Auditor does not have the jurisdiction to audit the Brentwood Fire Protection District?

According to the State Auditor’s website:

The State Auditor’s office does not have original jurisdiction over most local governmental entities except school districts or counties with no county auditor. Therefore, the only way the State Auditor’s office can obtain jurisdiction to perform an audit in these areas is either through the petition process, or through a governor’s request.

This year, the Brentwood Fire Department has been allotted $2,190,664 from the city budget. The Post-Dispatch alleges that anywhere between $12,000 and $28,000 was misused every year.  The city could hire an independent auditing firm to investigate, but various firms have missed this is in the past.

If Brentwood residents want the State Auditor to review how their taxpayer dollars are spent, residents must petition for an audit. According to Ch. 29.230 of the Missouri Revised Statutes, the petition requires a minimum number of signatures. In Brentwood’s case, the petition would need 15 percent of the total number of ballots cast for a gubernatorial candidate in the most recent election.

In the 2008 General Election, 4,805 of the 5,738 registered voters in Brentwood cast ballots, according to information provided by the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners.  Some of those ballots may not have included votes for a gubernatorial candidate, but, assuming that they did, 721 registered voters must sign the petition to trigger an audit under state law.

For additional information regarding an audit request, please visit the State Auditor’s website by clicking here.

The post A “How To” Guide for Brentwood Residents appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The audit found fault with the legislature’s “fiscal note” system that estimates projected program costs.

“Fiscal notes associated with legislation establishing or modifying tax credit programs do not accurately project the financial impact on the state’s general revenue fund collections,” the audit said. “For 15 tax credit programs reviewed, the actual redemptions exceeded the projected long-term fiscal impact by a net amount over $1.1 billion for the five years ended June 30, 2009.”

Fiscal notes sometimes failed to accurately predict how many people and businesses would participate in the programs, the audit said. Sometimes agencies administering the credits would make changes that increased costs.

In 1997, the legislature enacted a tax credit for historic preservation, a program that offers subsidies to people refurbishing old buildings. The estimate of the program’s cost at that time was $14.3 million per year. When the legislature modified the program a year later, the fiscal note projected an “unknown” cost.

“Based upon our methodology, the projected fiscal impact was $14.3 million annually and $71.5 million over the 5-year period, while redemptions totaled over $637 million,” the audit said. “Recent tax credit program audits have shown agencies consistently overstate the economic benefit of tax credit programs.”

Of course, this is no surprise. On top of the difficulties inherent in projecting a program’s impact into the future, politicians always overhype a program’s benefits and undersell its costs. They will even use all manner of political influence and accounting chicanery to manipulate the projections produced by independent scoring agencies. Even at the federal level, where the highly respected and nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office does its level best to accurately project a bill’s costs and benefits, members of Congress frequently game the process by requiring the CBO to score unrealistic versions of bills. The most obvious recent example of this subterfuge is the last CBO scoring of the recently passed health care bill, which, in order to achieve the illusion of deficit neutrality, includes 10 years of taxes and only six years of spending — as well as cuts to Medicare that we all know will never come. Just remember that no matter how bad a government program sounds when a politician proposes it, the reality is almost certainly worse.

Link via John Combest.

The post Painting a Rosy Picture appeared first on Show-Me Institute.