McCaskill on waste in Iraq and Afghanistan

KANSAS CITY, MO (KCUR) - An investigation published Wednesday, figures that at least 30 billion, but probably 60 billion dollars, have been wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Senator Clair McCaskill thinks those figures are low, but she says it’s not going to be easy to cut the waste, fraud and abuse.

McCaskill, a Democrat, says contractors have a lot to do with the losses. They’ve become an enormous part of the defense effort, especially overseas, and one that she says they aren’t well regulated, not at all.

The Wartime Contracting Commission agrees, and suggests more than a dozen ways tighten scrutiny on contractors, weed out the careless, and criminals … and save billions a year.

 But McCaskill says some powerful companies will likely go to war over those reforms.

"These are very profitable corporations, that have relied, extensively in terms of their bottom line, on sloppy contracting procedures, that have been embraced by the Department of Defense, the Department of State and USAID," the Senator from Missouri said.

It isn’t just contractors. The report shows that project selection has caused a lot of the waste in Iraq and Afghanistan. Things like power plants that, once built, are not maintained.

Frank Morris, KCUR

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Senate votes to cut $6B ethanol tax credit

The U.S. Senate has voted to end a six billion dollar a year tax credit supporting the ethanol industry. But ending the subsidy would still leave ethanol with lots of federal support.

The Senate vote has a prominent ethanol export tolling the bell for the blending credit.

Professor Bruce Babcock, who drives past miles of corn fields on his way to work at the University of Iowa, says this would do the ethanol industry no harm. "The writing is on the wall that this ethanol tax credit is not long for this world," Babcock said.

Federal mandates already require oil companies to blend ever more ethanol into gasoline.

Looks like we’re going to be relying on the biofuels mandates to make sure blenders use biofuels, rather than bribing them to use it with six billion dollars," Babcock said.

In fact, Babcock thinks killing the subsidy could actually help ethanol by removing the stigma of being a subsidized industry.

It may strengthen support for the ethanol mandate, and the tariff on imports. Long as those two hold up, Babcock thinks ethanol’s golden.

Frank Morris, Harvest Public Media

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