Perhaps a good place to start looking at government waste is in the military contracts, specifically those tied to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

A new report from a bipartisan commission set up to scrutinize the unprecedented use of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan concludes that the United States has wasted tens of billions of the nearly $177 billion that has been spent on those contracts and grants since 2002.

The report, titled “At What Risk? Correcting Over-reliance on Contractors in Contingency Operations,” said its estimate may even understate the problem because it may not take into full account ill-conceived projects, poor planning and oversight by the U.S. government, as well as criminal behavior and blatant corruption by both government and contractor employees.

“For many years,” the report says, “the government has abdicated its contracting responsibilities – too often using contractors as the default mechanism … without consideration for the resources needed to manage them.”

And I’m sure the number is higher. I wonder if they even considered the $9 billion that went missing in Iraq in 2003-2004? You know, that money, which whenever Democrats brought up the Republicans didn’t want to hear about it.

How can we even begin to talk about “financial responsibility” when this gross lack of oversight/accounting can continue to go on in our government without any talks of reform?