Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Billions in Bloat Uncovered in Beltway - WSJ.com

what a fascinating coincidence: the journal and their cousins at FOX news are both covering this story with zest. once again, the big, bad federal beast is wasting poor joe taxpayer's hard-earned money on frivolity like food-safety laws, economic development and the homeless. and it goes like this:

"The U.S. government has 15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, more than 20 separate programs to help the homeless and 80 programs for economic development.

These are a few of the findings in a massive study of overlapping and duplicative programs that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, according to the Government Accountability Office." Billions in Bloat Uncovered in Beltway - WSJ.com

of course, this is red meat for the people who have theirs (or think they do), and don't give a rip about what happens to anybody else. they are like ayn rand, who railed against the government until she got sick, and then she, too, had her hand out. who's there when you're at your most desperate?

these estimates of how much the government could save if some of these unspecified programs were consolidated doesn't take into account who put them into the budget to begin with. with all the bellyaching and gnashing of teeth among the tea partiers about government spending, they're just getting their share of government pork -- those earmarks that joe congressman inserts into spending bills to keep the folks back home returning him to office.

not to mention, even with the billions being bandied about, you know FOX and the WSJ won't be bringing up the small matter of subsidies to business interests that consume many more billions of the government budget than this so-called bloat. and don't even bring up the pentagon, where the real numbers we spend on "defense" in all its various manifestations tops a trillion dollars a year -- and we still don't feel safe!

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