The Washington Post’s Philip Bump misses the forest for the trees:

According to Gallup, Americans think that the federal government wastes 51 percent of every tax dollar it collects. In other words, 51 cents of every dollar. $510 for every $1,000 you pay on April 15. Which is so immediately ridiculous that it’s hard to believe anyone actually thinks that.

That estimate has gone up over time, but has been at or over 50 percent since Obama took office. Gallup made a nice little graph to demonstrate the trend. Unsurprisingly, Republicans are more likely to assume waste, estimating 59 percent of every dollar is wasted.

(Gallup)

Offering the benefit of the doubt to respondents, the odds are nearly 100 percent that this was not a conscious calculation intended to make an accurate estimate. It is probably 1) a semi-intentional exaggeration meant to express frustration with the government, in the way that you might disparage a spouse’s purchase by rounding up to the nearest million, and/or 2) because definitions of “waste” almost certainly vary. Some people think food stamps are a waste, for example, and during the Iraq War, a lot of Americans felt as though the entire endeavor was a waste, in the pejorative sense, even if the money wasn’t being wasted in an economic sense.

But that’s actually a very good analogy. Because during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, money was quite literally wasted. A commission created by the 110th Congress set out to determine exactly how much of the government’s investment in contractors in those two conflicts went to waste. And the findings were staggering: between $31 billion and $60 billion of money given to contractors went to waste.

Another investigator, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), looked at how money had been spent to rebuild that country after the war. Last year, he reported that at least $8 billion of the $60 billion spent on reconstruction had been wasted. In part, that’s thanks to the $4 billion given to military commanders to do with as they saw fit.

Waste. Tax dollars that either did no good or which cannot be traced. And in the case of that $4 billion, this is hard cash, being given away.

However! The total cost of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan topped $4 trillion. Even if you target the high end of the SIGIR and commission estimates, that’s $68 billion in waste — or 1.7 percent. It would take 30 times that much waste to hit the 51 percent mark. The audits mentioned above are hardly exhaustive, looking only at a subset of spending. But it’s the most fraught subset: contracting and rebuilding versus war fighting and military spending. SIGIR found $8 billion of $60 billion wasted — or 13 percent. A lot. But much less than 51 percent.

It’s worth reiterating that point. This included a program which literallyhanded out cash to people, which is not how most government spending operates. Even when handing out cash, the amount of waste was below 50 percent. Now some of you have already moved a step ahead. What about food stamps and welfare, you ask, which is about as close to handing out cash as we’re going to get in this analogy (besides employee salaries).

In part because the programs are so politically contentious, the government tracks fraud in welfare programs closely. The most recent data provided by the Department of Agriculture puts direct food stamp fraud at1 percent. Overall waste, including errors, was at 4.07 percent according to data reported at the end of last year. Fraud in unemployment insurance was at about 3 percent in 2011, which doesn’t include other waste. Waste and fraud in Medicare? About 8.5 percent at the high end as of last year. And so on.

Lots of wasted money, which is frustrating and should certainly be a priority for government administrators. But it is very, very far from 51 percent.

Consider what a waste rate of 51 percent would mean. In fiscal year 2013, the government took in $2.77 trillion in tax revenue (operating at a deficit of $680 billion). If 51 percent of that went to waste, that would mean over$1.38 trillion in money that the government is spending where it shouldn’t. Here we go back to our second rationale above: Maybe people just think we shouldn’t be spending money on war or foreign aid or post offices or the social safety net. Fair enough. But assuming that the tax revenue was allocated proportionate to overall spending, veterans benefits, health care programs like Medicaid and Medicare, and the military accounted foralmost 55 percent of that. So unless you think Medicaid and Medicare are complete wastes of money (and at this point we assume such people exist) or that we should drastically reduce the size of our military (same disclaimer here), you would have to think that the vast, vast majority of everything else government spends money on is wasted.

Really? The comments indicate that Mr. Bump might want to rethink his premise:

• You can’t exactly believe that an agency’s self-reporting of fraud is not going to be self-serving ? When is the last time any level of government announced their incompetence ? Also, the definition of waste used here which includes money that can’t be tracked is incredibly faulty. The infamous Bridge To Nowhere, for example, was 100% tracked and accounted for. Most people would say that is a waste, but not this author. Using food stamp credit cards at casinos and on cruise ships seems wasteful but is technically tracked.
• Philip, here’s where you went wrong, you feel that the government programs, all of them are worthwhile. When we read day after day about the fraud, waste and abuse of Government dollars (our tax dollars) the perception is easy. I work with our “civil servants” and can tell you straight up you could go to any public building (Fed) and pull the fire alarm and fire every 3rd person out the door and the next day there would be no definable difference in performance, work output and or accuracy – in fact it might even go up as SOMEONE got fired. The federal government is to large to manage hence waste, fraud and abuse.
• If instead of writing to please people like Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington (though no doubt excellent preparation for the Washington Post), Mr. Bump had spent several decades in the federal government as I did, he might be chiding American taxpayers for underestimating the waste that goes on.
• MR. Bump, you sadden me. By your own definition, “dollars that either did no good or which cannot be traced,” we’d have to declare 100% of the Pentagon’s budget to be “Waste” (since the DoD will not / cannot be audited).
  Clearly, every penny spent in the “War on Drugs” is a “waste.” It’s a waste of money, of time, of lives and of revenue opportunities.
  The fact that the government has so much “surplus” military hardware that they can equip, e.g., the Ferguson, MO police department with combat gear is evidence of the waste.
  Loosey-goosey billing and payment practices in Medicare and Medicaid; three- and four- and more-levels of duplication of functions…. the list goes on and on.
• FIX, please get out of your ivory press room.
  Go work as a grocery checker for a week. Better yet: a year.
  You will plainly see:
  1) A lot of people receiving food stamps are fully able bodied.
  2) A lot of food stamps are spent on junk foods, i.e. wasted. (soda pop, candy bars, energy drinks, chips, etc.)
  3) Food stamp recipients spend their stamps on food and then, in the same transaction, spend their cash on beer, wine and cigarettes. Giving them the food assistance was a waste – they could have used their own cash, they simply don’t.
  4) For many recipients, receiving food stamps is a way of life – an entitlement they teach their kids how to use in the checkout aisle.
• Come on Phillip! A simple recitation of all of the events involving federal waste are legion. Does one have to recount all of the WAPO articles in recent years that highlight one federal agency after another acknowledging that they have screwed up or going to great lengths to hide their obvious incompetence in the handling of USA tas dollars. Why should we believe anything that comes out of the federal government when bureaucrats obviously do not know what the word “accountability” means. What the taxpayer does get from politicians and bureaucrats in return for questioning waste and incompetence is obfuscation, delay, misdirection, lies and non-response. It is so bad inside the DC beltway that the comedic events of politicians lying to bureacrats and bureaucrats lieing to politicians is just an ordinary every day activity. 51% in my view demonstrates an uninformed public who have not been watching the game of dodge-ems daily played inside the DC beltway!
• Yes and Medicare waste and fraud is estimated by CBO at $60-90B a year. The IRS admited to sending out 11M fraudulent refund checks in 2012, sometime a thousand to the same address. HHS has found 100’s of thousands of fraudulent ObamaCare applications. If you want to blame the results of this poll on the military and the war on terror, you are not a journalist, you are just a political hack.
• Our government spends 6.85 million dollars every minute, and borrows 43 cents of every dollar spent. So, what is it that they are doing right?

Keep this in mind: The worst teacher, the police officer who is a bully, the laziest municipal employee, and, of course, all 535 members of Congress and all 132 state legislators are being paid by your tax dollars.