> I'd love to see a source that shows "hundreds of billions" in actual waste, in an itemized fashion. This is again my point. You're waiting for me to show up

> I'd love to see a source that shows "hundreds of billions" in actual waste, in an itemized fashion. This is again my point. You're waiting for me to show up with links at your front doorstep showing you a perfectly digested and itemized list for information that you should be seeing all the time if you have a healthy list of news sources. So where I see this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2012/05/31/medicare-and-medicaid-fraud-is-costing-taxpayers-billions/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2012/05/31/medic... Even though it references Eric Holder's mentioning that fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid is probably between $120 - $180 billion, that's not an itemized list. In your mind, I'm sure you think that crusso provided no evidence whatsoever that there's plenty of waste in the budget. My guess is that your world view just doesn't include the possibility that the government could be tragically wasteful of money. I'm sure that if you looked around at the Heritage Foundation, they probably have itemized lists, but you'd disregard that because of the source, I'd suspect. Really, the only groups you trust to tell you that there was hundreds of billions of dollars in waste wouldn't dare do that kind of research in the first place. The idea of earmarks is to attach them to a law that was going to pass anyway. That makes absolutely no sense. Why would they include earmarks in a bill if they were superfluous. They're there to grease the wheels. They're incentives to get congressional votes. They're bribes, but legal.