Government is supposed to be of the people, for the people, and by the people. It is a shame it is not run by people like you and I that have live within the confines of a budget. The latest hair pulling news comes from the Inspector General's office that suggest that Louisiana State agencies have wasted half a million dollars on airline tickets. Wait, it's not like they bought tickets to places they didn't need to go, they bought tickets they didn't even use and they let them expire. In other words you and I just got hosed again.

State Inspector General Stephen Street issued a report yesterday that said between 2011 and 2013 state agencies purchased over half a million dollars in non-refundable airline tickets and then did not use them. To make matters worse, most of those tickets could have been used as credit on other tickets for travel in the same year. These boondoggle agencies simply swept our money into the trash can.

To make matters worse this same issue was discovered in 2010 and brought up by the Inspector General's office to those agencies that were involved in wasting our money.

"We've reviewed it again, pointed it out again, and we are hopefully confident that there will be some steps taken to address the problem.  It's been represented to us and the response is that is happening."

Those are the words of Stephen Street as reported by the Louisiana Radio Network. Hopefully this time there will be some consequences that go along with blatant waste and misuse of taxpayer dollars.

Maybe the state should simply disallow air travel for any agency that can be named in this current report. Maybe if those employees and agency directors had to spend a year going Greyhound or riding the Megabus then maybe they would come to understand that you and I are no longer willing to put up with asinine kind of behavior.

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