If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million).
We've become a nation of takers, not makers
In this masterful piece, written by Stephen Moore, it is pointed out that government payrolls have steamed over private sector payrolls by a margin of two to one.
Translation? For every private sector employee in the industries mentioned in the report, there are two government bureaucrats overseeing the operations of our government and nation.
Is it any wonder why we're so fornicated up?
Before any government employees think I'm wailing and railing on all government employment, let me make it clear: I'm not.
I've been on the government dole myself a few times since reaching the age of eighteen more than several decades ago. The first was when I was a young enlisted man in the Air Force. The second time was when I worked for the Defense Department right out of college. The third--and final--time was when I worked in federal law enforcement.
However, the interesting thing about two of those three government jobs was that we were anything but overstaffed and overmanned. In the Air Force, Vietnam had recently ended and an idiot named Jimmy Carter took his smirking, incompetent face and ideas to Washington. One of the first things the peanut brain did was gut the military, starting with personnel and then in the same broad stroke, the B-1 bomber project and the cruise missile project. All the reductions meant no money for training, reliable equipment, ammunition and the other stuff a warrior needs to do his job. And in 1980, we paid the ultimate price for Carter's head-up-the-ass mentality.
Operation Eagle Claw, the failed Iranian hostage rescue mission, we lost eight servicemen due to the incompetence of the Carter administration and their insistence that more attention, funds and personnel power be made available to black-hole social welfare programs than the defense of this nation and the rescue of our citizens held in Tehran.
A lot of of us have never forgiven Carter for that. Every time I get close to doing so, I see the son of a bitch pandering to Obama and I'm reminded why I have less than no use for Carter--or for the Kenyan imposter.
The Defense Department was bloated with do-nothing civilians and ticket-punching military officers. To that end, damn little has changed except to grow more bloated while the actual fighting force of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard have been slashed.
Today's Pentagon is made up of little more than armchair warriors and water-cooler commandos. The real warriors--the ones who keep us safe at night--have about as much interest in serving in the Pentagon as they do being a test subject for a new strain of syphilis.
In federal law enforcement, I only saw two agencies who were bloated: The FBI and the ATF. The others, like US Border Patrol, US Marshals, DEA, Customs. . . hopelessly short on agents--although their respective headquarters were never lacking for desk-jockeys.
FBI I could see. After all, the "B" does stand for bureaucracy and bureaucracy is the FBI way. But ATF? Our inside joke at my agency was trying to remember the last time an ATF agent made an arrest or made a case having anything to do with alcohol or tobacco. Always firearms. And drugs. ATF became notorious in numerous judicial districts for investigating drug cases, swooping in with door-kicking raids, and then hoping they'd find a firearm somewhere along the way.
In short, ATF has always been as useless as tits on a turtle. Today, nothing has changed with them. They are still useless--except to the Mexicans to whom they seem to enjoy supplying illegal guns and weapons to. (House panel subpoenas ATF for documents on gun program
At our agency, I can assure you we were always short-handed--which increased, exponentially, the danger of the job. I miss that job like I miss disco music.
There are other government jobs and duties that I support wholeheartedly. I'm a pilot, and as such, I've had air traffic controllers help me out on occasions where without them, things might have gotten pretty interesting. The pilots within the FAA served a useful purpose in ensuring that our airports were safe to fly in and out of, among other things.
The problem with the FAA is the non-aviator types who pollute the agency. The biggest problem is when the Administrator and other key, senior-level "bosses" are not pilots, but are in charge of an "aviation" entity. . . you get the proverbial fustercluck.
Same goes with our law enforcement agencies. I remember a U.S. Marshal appointee by President Bush (senior) in '89 who was a banker. Had never fired a gun in his life, let alone carried one. Yet, for all the hard work and massive dollars he donated to his state's U.S. Senator during a re-election campaign, the payoff was a gold-badge and the chance to play cops and robbers for four years.
Now how the hell can you, as a cop, respect or work for someone like that?
Welcome to government.
I cringed when George W Bush announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Another instant fustercluck--and now one of the fastest growing, most bloated and undisputedly most incompetent of ALL of the government agencies. After all, they over see the infamous and sexually-challenged Transportation Security Administration.
I rest my case.
HUD, Department of Education (an oxymoron if there ever was one), Health and Human Services, Department of Transportation (where all the senior bureaucrats have people who drive or fly them around--not competent enough to do it themselves), Department of Energy (checked gas prices lately?), and so on and so on.
The bloated levels of sheer incompetency are staggering.
Then we move into the individual states, then individual counties, and individual municipalities--all fed with money that trickles in from the federal government and the endless wealth redistribution process of taking tax dollars, then holding states and cities hostage in order to get some of their own money back.
And finally, school districts.
Here in Texas, the teachers are crying and demanding that we tap into our "Rainy Day Fund" so that they can continue teaching to the idiotic TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) test, how guns and hunting are bad, how it's okay for Heather to have two or more mommies, why Muslims are our friends, why we should welcome Julio and Pedro the illegal aliens into our state and feed them, teach them and give them free everything, etc etc.
The taxpayers' response? Go pound your erasers.
These are the same teachers that we've entrusted to teach basic economics, civics and government to our kids, yet these numbnuts can not even grasp the basic principle that we have too damned much government--more government than we have source of taxes (the revenue that feeds the insatiable government payroll coffers)?
Weren't the public employees' union geniuses in Wisconsin crying about the same thing? And the teachers' unions in New Jersey?
It's a real dichotomy when you have government employees who simply do not grasp where the source of their paycheck comes from. It's even worse when they don't give a damn. We seem to have both going on right now.
It's no wonder we're broke and going broker. The bigger the government gets, the more rules, regulations and ordinances it has to create in order to protect the myriad of little kingdoms the bureaucrats protect more fiercely than a lioness guarding her cubs. Then you have to have regulators to enforce those rules, and then revenue collectors to collect the fines and penalties for non-compliance. And with that money, more bureaucrats are hired in order to create more rules and regulations, thus necessitating the need for more enforcers resulting in the need for more revenue collectors.
We have become slaves to our government.
We made a statement in the 2010 elections, but too damn many of our so-called Republicans have already forgotten their campaign pledges. These are primarily the old school assholes who ran for re-election. The freshmen seem to remember why the hell we put them there.
We need to keep reminding them.
And then in 2012, we need to give them some new co-workers and send the old RINOs home to a private sector job.
If they can find one.
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