Federal bureaucracy is kind of like a wild animal. Both can kill you, but bureaucracy has the law on its side.
Europe is buckling under the weight of immense debt and bureaucracy. It’s an amazing turn of events. American liberals look fondly to Europe. This comes from Euro tourist trips to Paris, Rome, and London. They see all the beautiful places, they ride on the rail, and they believe everything is perfect in Europe. They don’t notice the highly segregated cities, the high unemployment, and the fact no one actually rides the rail.
Europe is failing despite the fact the United States subsidized their economic model for a half century. It’s infuriating. Now Europe is looking to the United States for a bailout. We’ve saved the continent in two world wars and given them free health care for over 50 years and now we’re supposed to bail them out?
If there was only one great example I could cite that encapsulates Europe’s bureaucracy run amok… Wait, there is! European Union officials spend time and resources dedicated to proving water doesn’t hydrate. Huh? No, I’m really telling the truth.
EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.
Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.
People spent three years on this? These are the same bureaucrats that are shoving climate change down our throats and we’re supposed to take them seriously because they’re doing “serious research.” Right! Before anyone thinks “this can’t happen in America” I should remind you it already is.
Anyone remember the Climate Change Program Manager? American taxpayers are paying between $103,000 to $155,000 per year for a fantasy position at the National Park Service. Massive bureaucracy is crippling the world. You never know when the bureaucracy is going to attack.
A man in New Bedford caught a 881 pound tuna fish. Carlos Rafael was excited, but he’s going to need a bigger boat. Not to protect him from sharks, but from the great federal bureaucracy.
However, when Rafael rolled down the dock in Provincetown there was an unexpected and unwelcome development. The authorities were waiting. Agents from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Law Enforcement informed him they were confiscating his fish — all 881 pounds of it.
Even though the catch had been declared and the boat had a tuna permit, the rules do not allow fishermen to catch bluefin tuna in a net.
Why in the hell is there someone enforcing this law? I can understand cracking down on poachers, but this wasn’t the case. The guy accidentally caught the fish. I have no idea how much the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is paying these people to ruin people’s lives. I don’t want to know. I’m sure it would be too depressing for words.
In Idaho, a man protecting his family shot a grizzly bear but he forgot to ask daddy government if it was okay first. Daddy government arrested the man for killing an endangered animal. I think if most Americans were faced with the choice of following a government regulation or letting their family get mauled by a vicious grizzly they would do the same thing Jeremy Hill did. Kill the bastard.
Americans are like frogs in a pot. The water keeps getting warmer but we’re too distracted to notice we’re getting boiled/screwed. The long arm of bureaucracy is slowly strangling the country. Too much government. Too many bureaucrats. Too many laws and not enough common sense.
“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Some see George W. Bush and Mao Zedong as cut from the same cloth, though only one was truly stupendous.
Breaking news out of Russellville, Ark. today… A middle school yearbook in this formerly sleepy town included a list of the five worst people of all time. Numbers four and five, respectively, were – you guessed it – George W. Bush and Dick Cheney! How awesome is that?
No one is sure how the list ended up in the yearbook, but the superintendent has vowed to put a stop to such shenanigans in the future. It could have been the teacher supervising the production of said yearbook, or it could have been a student prank. Either way, neither scenario bodes well for public education in The Natural State.
Certainly, Bush and Cheney are horrible human beings by any measurement, but how did Pol Pot get glossed over, or Stalin, or Mao, or even Lady Gaga? I suppose that’s the problem with public education these days. The real monsters tend to get glossed over in favor of the faux monsters… Republicans, conservatives or anyone else who believes in limited government.
So let’s create a new top five list based on who killed the most people through policies they instituted as heads of state:
- Mao Zedong in a landslide, anywhere from 49 million to 170 million (hard to get accurate numbers from totalitarian regimes)
- Josef Stalin, somewhere in the 20-30 million range
- Adolf Hitler, 12 million
- Leopold II of Belgium, 8-10 million in the Congo
- Hideki Tojo, 5 million
Why were the majority of worthy candidates conspicuously absent from the list? Do they receive their due in the classrooms of Russellville or any classroom in the U.S. for that matter? Something tells me they don’t. Most of the Top 20 rule or ruled over communist regimes. You know… The Utopian ideal where you imagine all the people, living life in peace, and so forth.
Some still believe this Utopian brotherhood of man is possible through a benevolent and massive centralized bureaucracy, whilst those who want smaller government are racist Nazis. Apparently these Utopians have forgotten, or purposely forgotten, what happens when you cede responsibility and independence to a small group of people who say they have your best interests in mind while pursuing their best interests. I’m just sayin’…
Current day politicians could learn a lot from Calvin Coolidge.
Late last night Congress struck a budget deal. This has been a brutal process. The Democrats avoided passing a budget in 2010. It was an election year and the party lacked the courage to pass anything. The new budget isn’t perfect, but it’s an improvement over the past decade. In the grand scheme of things this budget does little to address the long term problems we face.
As I wrote yesterday liberals are completely clueless about the current fiscal nightmare. It’s laughable to see the left’s reaction to the compromise. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein beleieve this miniscule cut will harm the economy.
Right now, the economy is weak. Giving into austerity will weaken it further, or at least delay recovery for longer. And if Obama does not get a recovery, then he will not be a successful president, no matter how hard he works to claim Boehner’s successes as his own. Clinton’s speeches were persuasive because the labor market did a lot of his talking for him. But when unemployment is stuck at eight percent, there’s no such thing as a great communicator.
The government has been running up debt for thirty years. If the government is the source of economic recovery why is the economy in the doldrums? Liberals suffer from this romantic idea that the government is the solution for every problem. How can we blame them? They all went to college and all they learned about economics is that FDR saved us in the Depression (BTW it’s a little more complicated).
It’s been three years of unprecedented spending by Obama and company and none of the meager growth the nation has experienced over the last six months can be attributed to the government. Calvin Coolidge once said that “the chief business of the American people is business.” This quote was used by New Deal historians to twist Coolidge’s legacy into a pro-business President who didn’t care about about Wall Street squashing the Forgotten Man. Coolidge gave that speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. on January 17, 1925. Here is the last paragraph of the speech:
We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.
There is a cynicism on the left that believes that the individual person is unable to prosper without the help of the State. Statism is based on the idea that wealth isn’t created, but that it is gained at the expense of someone else. This isn’t an idealistic philosophy. In fact, wealth redistribution has been used all over the world for two centuries by totalitarians and tyrants. I have called the idea Utopian because it is an impossible outcome.
Wealth isn’t stolen. It’s created by the hard work and the magnificent imagination of individual people. Almost all of the big ideas of the last three centuries didn’t come from the government. Calvin Coolidge was right. Americans are idealistic. I am an idealist. The American ideal is that free individuals can govern themselves more efficiently that citizens controlled by the state.
What about large corporations? In most cases unchecked corporations arise from poor government regulation. The government has given us the rules for energy providers in the United States. The same could be said about telecommunications, airlines, banks, and farming. None of those are free markets. They’ve been regulated into corruption. Can someone please point me in the direction of a nation that has an ideal situation with corporations? Why do we think copying other nations is the key to success?
The American idea is the exception to the rule. The American left longs for the United States to adopt the long standing statue quo. The arguments are simple: “If we only had European health care.” “If we had a work like the French.” “If we only had cheap drugs like the Canadians.” These simple ideas overlook the fact that Americans have subsidized Western Europe’s way of life for a half century. It’s the American idealist who paid for Europe’s defense. It’s the American idealist who paid for Europe’s health care.
Tomorrow’s grand idea isn’t free health care or high speed rail. Free entitlements aren’t new ideas. They’re legislative candy given to citizens who no longer think for themselves. The State creates a citizenry that doesn’t look inwardly for solutions, but instead looks to the state for handouts. The grand idea is that there is no perfect form of government. Their is no fair system. Mankind is flawed. A strong State is a flawed state. The men who created our government weren’t perfect, but they understood these basic truths. The path to prosperity comes from the individual and not the government.
Do you want to know the real reason the Egyptians built the Pyramids? It’s because they didn’t have the technology to build high speed rail. Let’s face it, high speed rail is a waste of time. The people who believe in it exaggerate the usefulness and underestimate the costs. Florida Governor Rick Scott torpedoed the ludicrous Tampa to Orlando high speed rail plan and he has good reasons.
The Sarasota Herald Tribune refused to print Scott’s justification, but they published Sean Snaith’s op-ed endorsing the plan. Snaith must have been taught economics in a cave because his justification rings hollow. Governor Scott’s press release sheds some light on the subject.
- The truth is that this project would be far too costly to taxpayers and I believe the risk far outweighs the benefits.
- Historical data shows capital cost overruns are pervasive in 9 out of 10 high speed rail projects and that 2/3 of those projects inflated ridership projections by an average of 65 percent of actual patronage.
- It is projected that 3.07 million people will use the train annually. Keep in mind that Amtrak’s Acela train in Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore only had 3.2 million riders in 2010. And that market’s population is 8 times the size of the Tampa/Orlando market.
The fact that high speed rail is a bad idea is well documented. Unfortunately, the brain-dead masses will be disappointed. The Utopian choo choo train is a progressive’s dream come true. “But it creates jobs!!” some will say. So what? If creating jobs is the only basis for determining whether or not to spend billions of dollars why not just build a huge pyramid in Sarasota? Or, a gigantic indoor ski resort in Houston, Texas (that’s Club Soda’s Utopian dream to keep all the Texans away from Colorado at Spring Break, though he justifies it by claiming it will create jobs).
One could argue that the Pyramids in Egypt are far more useful than high speed rail would be in the United States. Let’s build a 300-story pyramid made out of granite. People will travel from all over the world to see it. It will be a boon for tourism. Plus, think of all the jobs we’ll create making it and after it’s finished there’s no upkeep. Hell. Charlie Crist could live there, keep the place tidy and be a tour guide. The government won’t have to subsidize it after its completion.
That’s the dirty little secret about high speed rail. It’s the classic Field of Dreams economics in action: Build it and they will come. Except that no one does. Sean Snaith wasn’t taught economics in a cave. He learned from Kevin Costner. What happens when there aren’t enough people riding on the rail? You guessed it! Taxpayers subsidize it! If we’re going to build something completely pointless at least build something that people want to see.
We begin this Bill of Rights Countdown with what is likely the most misunderstood Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment, or Article I:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Pretty clear, huh? However, progressives often reinterpret the First Amendment to say:
Congress shall not allow any reference to or discussion of religion in the public square, and shall prohibit the free exercise thereof if the religion teaches something we disagree with; and abridge freedom of speech, and of the press, if we disagree with the speech and deem it to be “hate” speech; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances unless we agree with the petitioners.
In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued against including a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. His argument was that enumerating such rights would allow the government to abridge rights it was never given the power to address in the first place:
I go further and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power…
Federalist No. 84, from which I drew that excerpt, deserves to be quoted in full because it is a compelling argument against a Bill of Rights. It was also predictive of the convoluted ways and means by which future totalitarians would seek to abridge those rights and find powers and rights in favor of a centralized government over the people that were never intended to be granted.
Though compelling, I disagree with Hamilton. Totalitarians will always find ways to expand the scope of government interference in the lives of individuals. They don’t need a Bill of Rights to do so. A Bill of Rights gives us something specific to use in our fight against the totalitarian leanings of those who, in the name of “social justice” or some other concept of fairness, will abridge our freedoms in order to enforce an unattainable Utopian brotherhood of man.
Imagine all the people, murdered for Utopia.
I have no faith in humanity. The ironic thing is that the left does. On the one hand the left constantly cries about evil corporations and the racist theocrats populating the Tea Party, then on the other expects us to entrust everything to a corrupt centralized bureaucracy.
The left is very selective about the inherent goodness of humanity and who, exactly, inherited this supposed goodness. Apparently, those of us who believe in limited government and that our rights are endowed by the Creator did not receive this magical gift of goodness. We are racist homophobes who also hate children.
The entire concept of denigrating one group of people and painting them as evil incarnate whilst imaging all the people living life in peace as we progress toward some secular humanist Utopia is the definition of irrational.
Please keep in mind that each time someone has envisioned Utopia and then seized the power necessary to make it happen that literally millions were murdered or shipped off to various types of camps for “re-education.” That’s the problem with Utopia; it requires the elimination of those who haven’t hopped on board the Utopian Express.
Ultimately, it’s a spiritual issue. Utopians are, if not anti-God, anti-religion. If they’re not atheists, apatheists (those who don’t really care either way) or agnostic, they believe in the equality of all religions and that none have a monopoly on the truth, though each religion actually claims to be the one and only truth. In other words, they want their cake, and they’d like to eat it, too, despite the fact that this all-religions-are-equal-I’m-a-spiritual-person-but-not-religious nonsense is an intellectual and spiritual cop-out.
All religions, except for New Age BS, force you to choose. However, you actually have to read the scriptures of that particular religion to get the full story. I would wager that most people who get teary-eyed about the beauty of the world’s religions and how they’ve embraced religious diversity have never actually spent time in the scriptures of the world’s religions.
Then, it’s these same people who turn around and call Tea Party members “tea baggers,” say ugly, deeply personal things about people with whom they disagree and generally treat people as objects. And therein lies the difference between the secular humanist, who loves the idea of people but basically has nothing but contempt for them as individuals, and the right-wing fundamentalist wacko Christian. The ignorant Christian is more likely to see each person as an individual, each with his or her own dignity and worth. That’s why Christians, and particularly fundamentalist Christians, tend to be conservative. Christianity is an individualistic religion that stands athwart of the socialist perspective. It also demands that the listener (or reader) decide. Either you believe that Christ was who He says He was – that is, the savior of the whole world – or you don’t. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity put it best:
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg – or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”
The Christian believes that, as John wrote in his Gospel, “…men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” And, they include themselves as indicted and convicted in this verdict. They are no better than their fellow man, and this understanding undergirds all of the beliefs that follow, from individual relationships to politics.
Because the Christian believes in the inherent depravity, not the innate goodness of humanity, including himself, he believes in limited government. After all, if humanity is motivated by selfish aims is it really a good idea to entrust individual control to a small group of powerful people?
I’ve noticed an interesting common thread between people who lean both left and right. When you get into a discussion about the relative corruption of one political party or the other, they’ll say, “Well, they’re all pretty corrupt; it doesn’t matter which political party they’re affiliated with.” And I agree with this statement. But if you lean left and believe this to be true, aren’t you arguing against your own ideology? If politicians of all political stripes tend toward corruption, is it really a good idea to entrust them with greater power and more money?
But the progressive seeks to control and manipulate others, using the power of the state to realize their Utopian aims. It’s no different than the priest, pastor or holy man of your choice using their place as God’s spokesman to do the same thing. Given this, and the empirical and well-documented historical track record of mankind, it is only logical to decentralize and minimize the state as much as possible. Otherwise, when the state controls every aspect of the individual, from what he drives to what he eats, the individual is supplanted and liberty is destroyed.
A few months ago Mexico City launched a bicycle sharing program called Ecobici. The program allows people to use a bike for a short period of time and drop it off at stations scattered throughout the city. As you can imagine, the green zealots love this idea. Mexico City isn’t the first to try this program. Paris and Berry College in Rome, Georgia have tried the program and it hasn’t worked.
The problem is that when these stupid programs fail no one bothers to tell the evangelical greenbots. Now Washington, D.C. is about to embark on the Tragedy of the Commons:
The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently, and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen
The program may work well for a few weeks, or even a few months, but eventually the bikes will end up stolen and scattered all over metro Washington D.C. It only costs $5 to ”borrow” a bike that’s worth considerably more than $5. What’s going to stop thieves from simply taking the bikes? Once again, leftists are banking on the inherent goodness of humanity, which is a unicorn-and-rainbows fantasy. Imagine all the people, stealing bikes in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one… The question is, will anyone bother covering the program after it’s bankrupt and scrapped?
The monuments of social justice
It’s no surprise that the average American is ignorant about economics. Public education places a higher value on evolution than it does on something practical like economics. If Americans had a better understanding of economics we wouldn’t have stupid policies like the minimum wage or “smart” growth.
Gallup has a new poll showing that a plurality of Americans don’t mind letting the Bush tax cuts expire for people making more than $250,000. Why should the average American care? Stick it to the rich guy and all that. This kind of populist thinking is like crack for politicians, except more addictive. It’s also dangerous. Rich people will do what they always do when you raise their taxes. They’ll fire some people. That middle class worker who thought they were “sticking it to the man” must sure feel good in the unemployment office.
The most liberal parts of the United States are our mega cities. A quick visit to the dystopian cities of Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Boston is a truly eye-opening experience. There are two groups of people who live in Detroit: The super wealthy or the super poor. The middle class has been wiped out by high taxes, unemployment, and government mismanagement. These are the fruits of “sticking it to the man.” Taxing rich people doesn’t help our society. It certainly doesn’t hurt the rich.
The progressive solution to dystopia is more idealistic plans. It’s like the captain of the sinking Titanic trying to find more icebergs to ram into in order to fix the gaping hole. The captain would name this solution “Smart Sailing” or something clever to be able to market it effectively. Who can oppose anything with the word “smart” in the title? Maybe if we educated people about economics it wouldn’t be so easy to fool people by simply clamoring for “smart growth” and other euphemisms for sheer idiocy.
What's more likely? This makeshift truck boat is headed from Cuba to the U.S. to escape an oppressive regime, or it's headed from the U.S. to Cuba with refugees clamoring for universal health care?
What motivates someone to build a boat out of a Cadillac and brave 90 miles of open ocean to leave Cuba for America’s shores? What motivates someone to risk life and limb and trek across vast desert wastes to leave Mexico and other Central American countries for America?
On the other hand, what motivates America’s citizens to stay put, excepting crazies like Lee Harvey Oswald, and spend all their time on Facebook? Could it have something to do with American exceptionalism, driven by its foundations in liberty and freedom?
The simple fact that people the world over are willing to die to get to America tells me all I need to know about which system is best. America, in short, is fantastic. But it’s not fantastic because our government has forced some utopian notion of equality on its citizens or provided “rights” like health care, housing and a comfortable standard of living. Our comfortable standard of living exists because government never provided it in the first place.
America was founded on the notion that governments are instituted to protect our rights to pursue such things with very little or no government intervention. In fact, government intervention was seen as a threat to liberty and freedom. This philosophy is the only sane and logical approach to good government in an imperfect world. The evidence that this is true is overwhelming.
The evidence that a giant centralized government that meddles in and plans every aspect of a citizen’s life is destructive is also overwhelming. While the likes of Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and Danny Glover return from worker paradises like Cuba and Venezuela with glowing reports of utopian equality, the citizens of those nations languish in widespread poverty and oppression.
No one who believes in American exceptionalism believes America is perfect, but America is the closest model to perfection we have and are likely to have. Again, this is not because our government has made everything perfectly safe and wonderful for each and every citizen; it’s because a person free to pursue happiness is more likely to find it on their own than through someone a thousand miles away who thinks they know what’s best for them.
The left in America, meanwhile, is constantly advocating for “social justice,” and other euphemisms to control the individual. In practice, this supposed social justice leads to a concentration of wealth and power in the ruling class. Those of us who believe the world is imperfect and that there’s no such thing as Utopia, other than the small town in Texas of that name, understand how dangerous it is to cede our responsibilities, and ultimately our liberties, to a powerful minority.
Just ask any Cuban who’s not with one of their Party handlers if they’ve found Utopia. Sure, they have “free” health care and I’m sure gun violence is practically non-existent, but at what price? I don’t know about you, but I’m much more willing to take my chances in a free society and all the risks that come with it than to be controlled within an inch of my life by the state.
I have a feeling that most people agree with me since I don’t see a lot of people in Miami building makeshift boats to escape America and take advantage of Cuba’s health care system and high “literacy” rates. What I see instead are Canadians coming to America for health care because they have to wait months, if not years, for treatment.
Nor do America’s progressives head for the supposedly greener pastures in more “progressive” nations. Maybe that’s because deep down they understand that America is not the racist, imperialistic devil they’ve been taught it is, but actually is the land of opportunity. I suppose progressives don’t understand that our opportunity is, as the founders put it, derived from our Creator and not a central planning authority, a.k.a., the Federal government. They must think it appeared out of thin air.
When a society’s philosophy shifts from “endowed by the Creator” to “endowed by a centralized bureaucracy,” you can kiss freedom goodbye. Even atheists who understand human nature and have an inkling of history know that it’s far better to be endowed by what they consider to be a mere sociological illusion than it is by their fellow man, who has a long and storied history of doing everything he can to oppress and control others to benefit himself.
Why else do they riot in Greece when their benefits are going to be cut so that the government remains at least nominally solvent? Why else do America’s senior citizens, supported by the AARP, fight tooth and claw for the unsustainable entitlements that will bathe their descendents in debt and, ultimately, economic calamity?
Do they really care about their fellow citizens, particularly those who will follow them? They can cry and whine about the “children” all day long, but until they make actual sacrifices for said “children” you can bet that the “children” are being used as human shields to ensure they get all the goodies the taxpayer can provide them.
America’s unfunded liabilities – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – currently stand at more than $110 trillion. That’s a “t” followed by “rillion,” and it’s not a typo. That works out to about $350,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Who’s going to pay for that? Will it be the senior citizens currently receiving benefits, or will it be Yours Truly and my children and grandchildren?
Tell a senior citizen that their benefits will need to be cut to ease the burden on future generations and observe the wrath that follows. So, if you hear a senior citizen say something weepy about the “children” and how we have to secure health care or whatnot for them, know that they’re really looking out for themselves. You can safely substitute “me” for “children” whenever you hear a Democrat defend the latest unsustainable program, as in, “We’re doing this for [me].”
Something tells me that future generations will be building rafts out of used compact fluorescent light bulbs and heading for China. If we continue on this “progressive” path, America will no longer be that “city upon a hill” that brought the oppressed to its shores.
Imagine if America’s founding had been based on “social justice” and providing creature comforts (health care, unemployment insurance, etc., etc.), rather than the individual’s freedom to pursue those things through their own ingenuity and industry. If based on the former, would we have the same standard of living we do now? What would the world look like now if America had been founded as a nanny state? I’m not sure, but there’s a good chance we’d all be speaking German.
I suppose this will be the Climate Change Project Manager's office. Nice six-figure BS job if you can get it.
With the economy still in the tank and unemployment continuing to hover around ten percent, a lot of people are starting to wonder, “Where’s my bailout?” Well, if you look at the salary and employment stats in the public sector (city, county, state and federal government) you’ll see exactly where your bailout went.
Your bailout – or at least your hard-earned tax dollars that are partially funding the corporate fat-cat bailouts (the other portion being financed by the Chinese, among others) – is also being used to create make-work six-figure nonsense jobs, such as Climate Change Program Manager at the National Park Service. This ridiculous job, with a pay scale between $103,000 and $155,000, is just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended). According to the Dec. 11, 2009 edition of USA Today:
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted. Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector… When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.
Moreover, the New York Times reported in August of 2009 that while the private sector lost 6.9 million jobs, state and local governments added 110,000 new jobs. All of this data – and it goes on and on and on, if you care to look into it – strikes me as horribly backwards.
I’m no economist, but if deficits are skyrocketing and companies are looking for relief so they can begin hiring again, wouldn’t logic dictate that government cut jobs, siphoning those people into the private sector, while providing tax incentives to individuals and private sector companies?
In December of 2009, 382,758 federal employees were making $100,000 or more annually. That’s more than $38 billion in what is largely bureaucratic largesse. Last I checked it’s the private sector that actually produces our GDP, not government jobs that essentially produce nothing. That’s a lot of nothing we’re getting for our billions.
Why we’re headed down the same road as western Europe, California, Massachusetts, New York, etc., etc., which ultimately leads to economic crisis and bankruptcy, I’ll never know. Or, maybe I do know…
It’s all about power and payoffs. The more the private sector and citizens cede to the state, the more power and money that’s funneled to the state and its dependants. It’s simple mathematics with the additional wild card of human nature (it’s corrupt, by the way).
While some see this as a Utopian system, rational people recognize that an all-powerful, controlling state destroys liberty and freedom. The explosive growth of public sector payrolls and jobs is simply another data point in a trend line that shows America headed toward the abyss. If you’re not concerned about it, you should be.
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