Posted on 09/22/2011 8:22:53 AM PDT by AfricanChristian
The US Justice Department apparently paid $16 (£10) apiece for muffins for its staff. While this includes service charges and other mark-ups, how would one go about making a fiendishly expensive muffin at home?
Flour, sugar, eggs, milk, butter. Prices of these key baking ingredients are on the up. But even so, making muffins from scratch costs well under a dollar apiece.
So how can Stateside officials run up a bill of $4,200 for 250 muffins at a conference in a Washington DC hotel? This was the figure given in an audit by the US Justice Department's Inspector General released on Tuesday.
"By itemizing these costs, we determined that, with service and gratuity, muffins cost over $16 each," the auditors concluded.
Really? No, says political blogger Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, the $16 muffin is a myth.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Why are we feeding them anyway? Buy your own damn muffins.
Eric “Muffin Man” Holder
Have you seen the Muffin Man,
The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man?
Have you seen the Muffin Man
Who doesn’t have a brain?
I think the real question is who provided the muffins and got $16 for them. I expect that this was a payoff to a well-connected service-provider, perhaps run by a friend of the Obamas or Holder.
I worked on the huge money-wasting Future Combat Systems program from a remote site. I’d phone into meetings which were always scheduled at lunchtime. At the main sites the lunches, breakfasts, snacks were catered in. Having attended a few on-site meetings I can attest that these were only the highest quality restaurant food; never Subways. The lunches would be from one vendor, the coffee from Star Bucks and the rolls from a boutique bakery; often at the same time.
When I complained that I had to attend during my lunchtime, which was my own time, I was informed that I could order “the best food you want,” file for reimbursement and use the program charge code. I never did because I like my own food, thankyouverymuch. But this gives you an idea of how widespread this Uncle Sugar notion is through the government and all those that touch the government.
Have you ever noticed how FAT government employees are? Well, Uncle Sugar is why.
You can count on it.
In most government meetings the only way to get government people to attend is to provide free food. Otherwise it'll be a couple of Feds and a small army of support contractors trying to figure out what to do.
$4200 divided by 250 is $16.80 Kevin....
No, it's typical run-of-the-mill big-city hotel prices. A bowl of corn flakes at the Waldorf-Astoria is $8.50, after all.
Fraud and waste are intrinsic to spending by any large bureaucracy, doubly so if the money isn’t earned by the bureaucracy but confiscated from taxpayers. The only way to permanently shrink the fraud and waste is to shrink the bureaucracy - anything else will be temporary and usually ineffective.
The Muffin Man is seated at the table in the laboratory in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. Reaching for an oversize chrome spoon, he gathers an intimate quantity of dried muffin remnants, and brushing his scapular aside he proceeds to dump these inside of his shirt. He turns to us and speaks:
“Some people like cupcakes better. I, for one, care less for them!”
Arrogantly twisting the sterile canvas snoot of a fully charged icing annointment utensil, he poots forth a quarter ounce green rosette... heh-heh-heh...
Let’s try that again... he poots forth a quarter ounce green rosette near the summit of a dense but radiant muffin of his own design. Later he says:
“Some people... heh! Some people like cupcakes exclusively, while myself, I say there is naught nor ought there be anything so exalted on the face of God’s great earth as that prince of foods... the muffin!”
Girl, you thought he was a man
But he was a muffin
You hung around ‘til you found
That he didn’t know nothin’
Girl, you thought he was a man
But he only was a-puffin’
No cries is heard in the night
As a result of him stuffin’...
*epic guitar solo*
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