Writing in the New Hampshire Union Leader, Steven Schooner explains one downside of Congress rushing legislation to try to help Katrina victims.
Credit cards with a “micro-purchase threshold” of $250,000 per transaction. Talk about an oxymoron.
This is an invitation to abuse:
A mountain of inspector general reports, Government Accountability Office studies and congressional hearings demonstrate that the government’s management of its charge cards is abysmal.
[. . .]The stakes are high. During fiscal year 2003, with a micro-purchase limit of $2,500, the government’s 26 million purchase card transactions cost more than $16 billion. Procurements between $2,500 and $25,000 accounted for another 10.5 million transactions worth $15 billion.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., estimates that, each year, up to $150 billion, and possibly $200 billion, worth of purchases could be swallowed by this authority. That might overstate the risk, but the potential is enormous.
We need to step back and think about exactly what we want to do with 100s of billions of federal dollars we are apparantly so willing to throw at this natural disaster. I'm not saying we shouldn't help the Katrina victims, or rebuild New Orleans and other devastated Gulf coast communities. I just want some idea what we might we might be paying for with our future tax dollars.
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