Great Moments in Government: The IRS Apologizes for Bias while Simultaneously Denying Bias

I’m happy to bash the IRS, but I usually try to explain that our anger should be focused on the politicians who created the corrupt, 74,000-page tax code.

But sometimes the IRS deserves some negative attention. The tax collection bureaucracy has thieving employees, incompetent employees, thuggish employees, brainless employees, and victimizing employees.

The senior folks at the IRS also deserve scorn for bone-headed decisions such as squandering millions of dollars on a P.R. campaign and a scheme to regulate and control private tax preparers.

Now it seems we have another reason to condemn the tax-collection bureaucracy. The IRS is engaging in Nixon-type political harassment.

Here’s some of what the Associated Press just reported.

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday. Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

Heaven forbid somebody self-identify as being patriotic. Obviously a cause for investigation by the IRS.

And it’s rather ironic that the IRS felt compelled to apologize just a few days after President Obama just told us we shouldn’t listen to “voices” telling us that bad things happen in Washington.

But it’s not just that the IRS targeted groups opposing big government. The bureaucrats also violated the rules designed to protect taxpayers from IRS abuse.

…groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said. “That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association. “The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

But you can put your mind at ease because senior IRS officials assure us that the targeting of Tea Party groups had nothing to do with political bias.

Lerner said the practice was…not motivated by political bias. …IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress in March 2012 that the IRS was not targeting groups based on their political views. “There’s absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people” who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman told a House Ways and Means subcommittee.

Just like we’re supposed to believe that political bias had nothing to do with all the IRS harassment of conservative groups during the Clinton years. The message from the elites in Washington is “Nothing to see here, move along.”

But as the Wall Street Journal warned at the time, it seems there is a remarkable lack of curiosity about patterns of IRS abuse.

…once we agree that a politicized IRS is a dangerous thing, it is hard to understand the see-no-evil approach taken by the Congress, the press and the judiciary about serious, current allegations of exactly this. …organizations have been using the Freedom of Information Act to find out if there is anything to the extraordinary run of audits that happened to hit a number of tax-exempt organizations that might reasonably be described as Clinton enemies. …we have lots of Clinton enemies who have suffered actual audits, and very little interest in finding out whether this was simply a massive coincidence or the result of something more sinister.

And now we’re going through the same process again.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a lesson to be learned about the dangers of giving power to politicians and bureaucrats.

Yet another argument for the flat tax. If there’s no charitable deduction, there’s no opening for a politically biased IRS bureaucracy to investigate and harass non-profit groups because of their philosophical beliefs.

P.S. On a lighter note, here’s the IRS version of the quadratic formula, and a cartoon showing how GPS would work if operated by the IRS.

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How Bureaucrats and Politicians Conspire to Rip Off Taxpayers

I can say with great confidence that government bureaucrats are overpaid compared to people in the productive sector of the economy.

Why am I sure that this is true, particularly when the so-called Federal Salary Council claims bureaucrats are underpaid?

For the simple reason that the “job opening and labor turnover” data from the Department of Labor is the best way to measure whether a group of workers is overpaid or underpaid.

And you probably won’t be surprised to learn from this data that bureaucrats at the federal, state, and local level are only about 1/3rd as likely to quit their jobs as workers in the private sector.

They’re less likely to leave their jobs, needless to say, because they generally get paid more than they’re worth.

But just in case you think this data is unconvincing, let’s look at some additional research.

Sita Slavov of the American Enterprise Institute explores this topic in an article for U.S. News & World Report.

…studies show that, while the salaries of public sector workers are roughly in line with those paid in the private sector, public sector workers receive substantially more generous fringe benefits, such as pensions, health benefits, vacation and job security. …Why are public sector workers so highly compensated? And, why is their compensation so heavy on benefits? Workers certainly value benefits, such as access to group health insurance, and many benefits are tax advantaged. But do public sector workers really value these benefits more than private sector workers? Edward Glaeser and Giacomo Ponzetto have attempted to address these questions in a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper entitled “Shrouded Costs of Government: The Political Economy of State and Local Public Pensions.” The authors present a formal model in which public sector compensation is determined by a political process that pits politicians against each other in a competition for votes. They show that this political process results in a public sector compensation package with generous benefits.

In other words, bureaucrats are over-compensated, and much of their excess compensation is in the form of generous fringe benefits.

The new study cited by Sita looks at why this happens.

Public sector workers have an information advantage over other voters. In particular, they are better informed about their own compensation packages. Moreover, this information advantage is more pronounced for benefits than salary. This is plausible because information about public sector salaries is available to the general public… In contrast, information about public sector pensions is less widely available, and because of complications involved in valuing future pension benefit promises, it is also more difficult to interpret. As a result, politicians propose generous public sector compensation that is tilted towards benefits rather than salary. A politician who tries to scale back public sector benefits will lose support from public sector voters (who are hurt by the benefit cut) without gaining much support from other voters (who gain from lower taxes but are poorly informed).

My interpretation of these findings is that politicians and bureaucrats basically conspire to rip off taxpayers.

In exchange for campaign contributions and other forms of political support, the politicians give the bureaucrats excessive compensation. But they make it difficult for taxpayers to figure out how they’re getting robbed by concentrating a big share of the excess in harder-to-measure fringe benefits.

Another advantage of that approach, by the way, is that the bill for all the retiree benefits doesn’t come due until some point in the future, by which time the politicians who put taxpayers on the hook often have retired or moved on to some other position.

But these promises do translate into real costs sooner or later, as taxpayers have painfully learned in places such as diverse as California and Greece.

Though, to be fair, governments get into fiscal trouble because they also make irresponsible commitments to all workers, including those in the private sector. America’s long-term fiscal crisis, for instance, is because of poorly designed entitlement programs.

Bu this isn’t an excuse to do nothing. It just means we have to reform entitlements and also trim back the excessive compensation for the bureaucracy. This video elaborates.

P.S. If you still aren’t convinced that bureaucrats are overpaid, look at this remarkable map.

P.P.S. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that bureaucrats also don’t work as hard as the rest of us.

P.P.P.S. I’m more concerned about the overall size of government than I am about the pay levels of bureaucrats. I’d much rather focus on shutting down the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for instance, instead of simply trying to reduce the pay of HUD bureaucrats.

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California’s Golden Bureaucrat Snags $400K of Yearly Compensation – for the Rest of Her Life!

A regular feature of this blog used to be a “taxpayers vs bureaucrats” series, which featured outrageous examples of government employees getting wildly overcompensated.

I even narrated a video on the topic of excessive pay and benefits for bureaucrats.

But I stopped the series because it was too depressing. How often can read stories like this, after all, and not feel glum about America’s future?

• The chief bureaucrat of a low-income California city getting almost $800,000 per year.
• Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000.
• A school superintendent in New York raking in more than $500 thousand of annual compensation.
• A California government official raking in $822,000 of taxpayer-financed loot in just one.
• A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only 2-1/2 years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year.
• A New York school bureaucrat simultaneously getting a $225,000 salary and $300,000 pension.
• California taxpayers being forced to pay a fired bureaucrat $550,000 for unused vacation time.
• An employee of the New Jersey Turnpike system raking in annual compensation of $320,000.

But I must lack willpower because I can’t resist writing about the latest scandal involving bureaucratic bloat.

Check out some of the ridiculous details about the woman who has earned the title of California’s Golden Bureaucrat.

Alameda County supervisors have really taken to heart the adage that government should run like a business — rewarding County Administrator Susan Muranishi with the Wall Street-like wage of $423,664 a year. For the rest of her life. …Muranishi’s annual pension will be equal to the dollar total of her entire yearly package — $413,000. She also has a separate executive private pension plan, for which the county chips in $46,500 a year.

Yes, you read correctly. She’ll be ripping off taxpayers “for the rest of her life.”

But if you want to get even more upset, check out how she’s bilking the people.

…in addition to her $301,000 base salary, Muranishi receives:

• $24,000, plus change, in “equity pay’’ to guarantee that she makes at least 10 percent more than anyone else in the county.
• About $54,000 a year in “longevity” pay for having stayed with the county for more than 30 years.
• An annual performance bonus of $24,000.
• And another $9,000 a year for serving on the county’s three-member Surplus Property Authority, an ad hoc committee of the Board of Supervisors that oversees the sale of excess land.

Like other county executives, Muranishi also gets an $8,292-a-year car allowance.

I’m relieved she’s getting a car allowance. The poor thing otherwise would have to rely on public transit. And isn’t it nice that she automatically gets a “performance bonus”? Sort of defeats the purpose, though, if it’s automatic. But what do I know, I’m just a taxpayer.

Even though I obviously lack the special insight needed to justify bloated compensation packages for California bureaucrats, I have enough common sense to know that the over-burdened taxpayers of California are being stretched beyond the breaking point – especially now that the looters and moochers have imposed a new 13.3 percent top tax rate on the state’s dwindling supply of high earners.

It’s no surprise that lots of high-paying jobs are relocating to states like Texas with better tax policy. Nor is it a surprise when pro golfers like Phil Mickelson warn they may leave the state. But when even a certified leftist like Bill Maher says he’s thinking about escaping, you know the situation is serious.

So for the umpteenth time, I will predict that the combination of bloated government and punitive taxation will lead to fiscal crisis in California.

Too much government spending and the Laffer Curve are not a good combination.

When you lure too many people into riding in the wagon and penalize those pulling the wagon, bad things happen. Doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at France or California.

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Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, which State Has the Most Bureaucrats Compared to Teachers of Them All

I like rankings and maps because you get to see a lot of information in a single image.

I’ve shared some maps making very interesting international comparisons.

• Which nations have the most red ink.
• Which nations are money laundering centers (hint, not tax havens).
• A crazy left-wing “Happy Planet” map.
• Another silly map supposedly showing that America is one of the world’s most authoritarian nations.

Here are some good state maps with useful information.

• Which states have no income taxes.
• Which states give the highest welfare payments.
• Which states are in a “death spiral” because of too many takers and too few makers.

And I even have a local map.

• How many of the nation’s richest counties are in the D.C. metro region.

Now we have a map, based on some research from the Friedman Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, showing which states have the most education bureaucrats compared to actual educators.

I’m ashamed that my state of Virginia is the worst in the nation. Maybe paying for this bureaucratic bloat explains why our Governor recently broke his promise and imposed a huge tax increase.

I’m also shocked that Illinois is one of the best states in the nation, at least by this measure. Though I suspect this is the exception to the rule and the Prairie State will still be neck and neck with California in the race to bankruptcy.

Though Illinois is much closer to the bottom than to the top in the “Moocher Index,” so maybe it’s not as bad as we think.

P.S. If you like this “educrat” ranking, here’s a “Poverty Pimp” ranking of “public welfare” bureaucrats compared to state population. Ohio and Alaska do poorly in both, for what it’s worth.

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Wise – and Amusing – Words on Government from Ron Swanson

I’m not a TV watcher. I don’t even have cable. So I’m only vaguely aware that there’s a program called “Parks and Recreation.”

Based on these clips, though, it seems that Ron Swanson would be my favorite character.

Let’s start with his inside assessment of government efficiency. This is the snarkiest clip I’ve seen about local government, rivaling this brutal video on overpaid firefighters.

Makes my video on overpaid bureaucrats pale in comparison.

But is he right about local government? Well, read this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this and decide for yourself.

Oh, and don’t forget what our feckless local school officials are doing to America’s children.

Swanson also has an amusing take on the general topic of bloated government.

I’d apply the same level of skepticism to the defense budget, of course, but Swanson’s character is on to something. Sort of the same theme of government being bloated and overweight that can be found in cartoons here, here, here, and here.

Then there’s this gem.

The piglet comparison, needless to say, made me think of this famous Chuck Asay cartoon.

I’m curious, by the way, whether Swanson’s character on the program is unappealing. In other words, is this an example of Hollywood seeking to mock libertarianism?

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Thomas Sowell Exposes Dishonest Budgetary Scare Tactics and Cartoonists Mock Obama’s Hysteria

Public finance experts are quite familiar with the budgetary shenanigans of cossetted government bureaucracies.

They even have terms to describe how agencies and departments try to manipulate outcomes by claiming that any requirement for fiscal restraint will necessitate cuts to the most politically popular parts of the budget.

• The “fireman first principle” – Describes how local government bodies (often coordinating with local politicians) will claim that firemen will have to be laid off and/or firehouses will have to close if there is any budgetary discipline. You can replace firefighters with cops or teachers if you want. The key point is to divert attention from the countless ways that local governments waste money by focusing on the few things that voters actually care about.
• The “Washington Monument syndrome” – Based on a real-world example during the 1970s of the National Park Service claiming it would have to shut down tourist access to popular Washington-area sites if it was subject to fiscal restraint, the modern-day equivalent is President Obama scaring people with hysterical assertions about threats to food safety and airline operations.

Thomas Sowell clearly understands this racket.

Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do? The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

Bingo. Bulls-eye. A perfect analysis of bureaucratic incentives and public-choice economics.

Sowell then describes what’s now happening in Washington.

The Obama administration is following the same pattern. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, released thousands of illegal aliens from prisons to save money — and create alarm. The Federal Aviation Administration says it is planning to cut back on the number of air traffic controllers, which would, at a minimum, create delays for airline passengers, in addition to fears for safety that can create more public alarm. …it serves Obama’s interest to maximize the damage and the public alarm, which he can direct against Republicans. President Obama has said that he would veto legislation to let him choose what to cut. That should tell us everything we need to know about the utter cynicism of this glib man.

The political cartoonists also are having a field day making fun of Obama’s silly demagoguery.

Let’s start with Michael Ramirez. You can see why he’s currently leading in the best-cartoonist poll.

Nate Beeler also has a good contribution to the debate. The President is acting like the world is going to end because spending is going to be “slashed” by 1.2 percent, which means – gasp! – that spending will “only” grow by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

Yet somehow Armageddon has not occurred.

Indeed, the worst possible outcome for Obama and the other statists is that people notice zero negative impact when spending is restrained.

This Steve Kelley cartoon is very appealing to me because it shows the President going after the sequester when the real problem is an excessive burden of government spending.

Last but not least, we have a very good Scott Stantis cartoon.

The Stantis cartoon is particularly insightful because the GOP has won the battle, but the war is not over.

As I noted yesterday, Obama will have several additional opportunities to undo the sequester savings.

Thomas Jefferson was right when he warned that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

P.S. You can enjoy more sequester cartoons here, here, and here.

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Let’s Shed a Tear for those Under-Appreciated Bureaucrats Who Get Lavish Pensions and Live in $700K Homes

When I first read this story in the Washington Post about supposedly under-appreciated federal bureaucrats, I was tempted to focus on the sentence referring to “the sledgehammer of budget cuts scheduled to hit today.”

Is the Washington Post so biased and/or clueless that reporters really think that a 1.2 percent reduction in overall spending for the current fiscal year (which means the federal budget would still be larger than it was last year) represents a “sledgehammer of budget cuts”?

But I just mocked the New York Times last week for its reporting about supposed “deep spending cuts” and I also nailed the Washington Post back in 2011 for using the term “slash” for a budget plan that would have shaved a miniscule $6 billion from a budget of $3,800 billion.

So instead I want to focus on the part of the story featuring self-pitying remarks of federal bureaucrats. Here’s a good sampling.

…federal workers in Mantua say…having “United States Treasury” atop their paycheck [now] means having to defend yourself against arguments, from strangers and even from your own relatives, that you’re an overpaid and underworked leech. …many federal workers are…bothered by the growing sense that the careers they chose may now seem unattractive, even unworthy. …on a recent visit to Missouri, he got fed up with ritual denunciations of federal workers… Won, a federal worker for 31 years, resents the notion, now commonplace on talk radio and Web sites devoted to bashing the government, that federal workers carry a lighter load than their for-profit counterparts. …older government workers…are concerned about their pensions but even more anxious about why politicians are so willing to make federal employees the target of popular rage.

Excuse me while I wipe away the tears and compose myself. There are so many stories of unbearable hardship.

• It’s absolutely heartbreaking to read about those unfortunate, oppressed, and under-appreciated bureaucrats who live in “a leafy section of Fairfax County where houses sell in the $700,000 range.”
• And you can understand my tears of sympathy for folks who, as one bureaucrat admitted, had jobs where the “pay was guaranteed and you couldn’t get laid off.”
• Moreover, we all share the pain of bureaucrats who must deal with uncomfortable comparisons, such as the fact that “pensions, once considered routine, have become a wild luxury in the private sector, so when many Americans hear that public employees still get retirement pay, they can get frustrated.”

Perhaps we can create a civilian version of the Medal of Honor, given to the bureaucrat who suffers the most because of the “sledgehammer” cuts and those mean people on “web sites.”

Indeed, I think we have our first recipient. But brace yourself before you read this passage. The anguish and suffering may haunt you for the rest of your life. This bureaucrat is enduring unimaginable hardship.

..has already cut back in anticipation of the forthcoming budget slashing: He told a carpenter who was going to build bookshelves in the living room that the $5,000 job will have to be put off, and he told his doggie day care provider that he’ll have to go without that service when the furloughs kick in.

Oh my God! Not only are we failing to appreciate government bureaucrats, but the “budget slashing” will lead to neglected pets as well. What sort of cruel and heartless society have we become?!?

And imagine the Keynesian death spiral that will occur when the carpenter and dog walker then have to cut back on their purchases? Maybe we need to take Bastiat’s advice and go break some windows!

To make matters worse, there are mean-spirited people such as Chris Edwards at places such as the Cato Institute that have the nerve to point out that federal bureaucrats get about twice the overall level of compensation as those in the productive sector of the economy.

How can that man sleep at night after making such an invidious comparison?

But there’s another cad at the Cato Institute who actually had the nerve to narrate this video, which unfairly uses facts and data to show that the federal workforce is over-compensated.

Worst of all, he actually suggests at the end of the video is that the real problem is that the federal government is far too large. What sort of place would employ such unreasonable folks?

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Just Because California Is Terrible, that Doesn’t Mean Texas Is Perfect

Texas is in much better shape than California. Taxes are lower, in part because Texas has no state income tax.

No wonder the Lone Star State is growing faster and creating more jobs.

And the gap will soon get even wider since California voters recently decided to drive away more productive people by raising top tax rates.

But a key challenge for all governments is controlling the size and cost of bureaucracies.

Government employees are probably overpaid in both states, but the situation is worse in California, as I discuss in this interview with John Stossel.

But being better than California is not exactly a ringing endorsement of Texas fiscal policy.

A column in today’s Wall Street Journal, written by the state’s Comptroller of Public Accounts, points out some worrisome signs.

As the chief financial officer of the nation’s second-largest state, even I have found it hard to get a handle on how much governments are spending, and how much debt they’re taking on. Every level of government is piling up incredible bills. And they’re coming due, whether we like it or not. Even in low-tax Texas, property taxes have risen three times faster than the inflation rate and four times faster than our population growth since 1992. Our local governments, meanwhile, more than doubled their debt load in the last decade, to more than $7,500 in debt for every man, woman and child in the state. In Houston alone, city-employee pension plans are facing an unfunded liability of $2.4 billion. But too many taxpayers aren’t given the information they need to make informed decisions when they vote debt issues. Recently I spent several months holding about 40 town-hall meetings with Texans across our state. Each time, I asked the attendees if they could tell me how much debt their local governments are carrying. Not a single person in a single town had this information.

In other words, taxpayers need to be eternally vigilant, regardless of where they live. Otherwise the corrupt rectangle of politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and interest groups will figure out hidden ways of using the political process to obtain unearned wealth.

P.S. The second-most-viewed post on this blog is this joke about Texas, California, and a coyote, so it must be at least somewhat amusing. If you want some Texas-specific humor, this police exam is amusing and you’ll enjoy this joke about the difference between Texans, liberals and conservatives. And if you want California-specific humor, this Chuck Asay cartoon hits the nail on the head.

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More Stomach-Turning Horror Stories from the UK Government-Run Healthcare System

During the Obamacare debate, Paul Krugman told us we could ignore stories about what was happening across the ocean, writing that “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”

Every so often, I wonder how Krugman would define a “scare story.” How about starving babies to death, as I wrote about last month? Would he say that’s “false,” or simply not a “scare story”?

Let’s look at some new information from the U.K.’s government-run system and see whether we can expect our healthcare to improve or deteriorate now that Obamacare’s beginning to get implemented.

We’ll start with a look at how the overall British system is performing, including the remarkable and depressing fact that more than 1 in 10 patients are victimized by “basic errors,” leading to 5.2 percent of deaths.

The largest and most detailed survey into hospital deaths has revealed that almost 12,000 patients are needlessly dying every year as a result of poor patient care. The researchers from The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine based the study on 1,000 deaths at 10 NHS trusts during 2009. The study revealed that basic errors were made in more than one in 10 cases, leading to 5.2% of deaths, which was the equivalent of nearly 12,000 preventable deaths in hospitals in England every year. The research published in the British Medical Journal’s Quality and Safety publication found that errors occurred when hospital staff made an incorrect diagnosis, prescribed the wrong drugs, failed to monitor a patient’s condition or react when a patient deteriorated. Errors in omission were more frequent than active mistakes. The majority of patients who died were elderly suffering with multiple health conditions, but the study found that some patients whose deaths were preventable were aged in their 30s and 40s.

Now let’s look at healthcare – if you use the term loosely – at one Government-run hospital. The UK-based Telegraph has the stomach-turning details.

Hundreds of hospital patients died needlessly. In the wards, people lay starving, thirsty and in soiled bedclothes, buzzers droning hopelessly as their cries for help went ignored. Some received the wrong medication; some, none at all.Over 139 days, the public inquiry into the Stafford hospital scandal has heard testimony from scores of witnesses about how an institution which was supposed to care for the most vulnerable instead became a place of danger. Decisions about which patients to treat were left to receptionists…and nurses switched off equipment because they did not know how to use it. …patients were left so dehydrated that some began drinking from flower vases. By the time the hospital’s failings were exposed by regulators, in 2009, up to 1,200 patients had died needlessly between 2005 and 2008. …on the wards, patients – most of them elderly – were left in agony and screaming for pain relief, as their loved ones desperately begged for help. The human toll was dreadful. In the course of 18 months, one family lost four members, including a newborn baby girl, after a catalogue of failings by the hospital. …Patients were left without medication, food and drink, and left on commodes. Basic hygiene was neglected: a woman was left unwashed for the last four weeks of her life. Relatives tried to keep their loved ones clean, scrubbing down beds and furniture and even bringing in clean linen. One consultant described how amid the chaos, it seemed at though nurses became “immune to the sound of pain”.

It’s disturbing to read something like this, but can you imagine the horror of having a sick child in one of these wretched British institutions?

I’m not saying there aren’t mistakes and instances of sub-standard care in U.S. hospitals. I’m sure that’s the case. And regular readers know that I’ve complained about the absurd government-caused inefficiency of the American healthcare system.

The point I’m making is that horror stories are more common from the U.K. because the entire system is a bureaucracy. The nurses and doctors on that side of the Atlantic are akin to clerks at the Postal Service and DMV on this side of the Atlantic.

P.S. If you want more horror stories about government-run healthcare in the United Kingdom click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

P.P.S. And to close on an upbeat note, click here to learn how we can save America’s healthcare system.

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While Much of America Suffers with Stagnation, Washington’s Political Class Is Having a Very Merry Christmas

In large part because of an excessive burden of government, the American economy is suffering European-style stagnation, with even the Washington Post now confessing that growth far below the long-run trend.

This helps explain why job creation has been so dismal in recent years, with more than twenty million Americans out of work, underemployed, or dropped out of the workforce.

But there is one pocket of enormous prosperity in America. It will warm your heart to know that our overlords in Washington are living the life of Riley.

Here are some of the highlights of a remarkable Reuters expose about the fat cats of big government, starting with the huge gap between the insider elite and the poor.

In the town that launched the War on Poverty 48 years ago, the poor are getting poorer despite the government’s help. And the rich are getting richer because of it. The top 5 percent of households in Washington, D.C., made more than $500,000 on average last year, while the bottom 20 percent earned less than $9,500 – a ratio of 54 to 1. That gap is up from 39 to 1 two decades ago. It’s wider than in any of the 50 states and all but two major cities.

One small but important correction in the previous excerpt. As I have noted many times, the “poor are getting poorer” because of “the government’s help.”

The article then explains that a lot of the redistribution in Washington is from taxpayers to a pampered elite.

…in the years since President Lyndon Johnson took aim at poverty in his first State of the Union address, there has been an increasingly strong crosscurrent: The government is redistributing wealth up, too – especially in the nation’s capital. …Two decades of record federal spending and expanding regulation have fostered a growing upper class of federal contractors, lobbyists and lawyers in the District of Columbia area. …Direct spending by the federal government accounts for 40 percent of the area’s $425 billion-a-year economy. …Roughly 15 cents of every dollar from the entire federal procurement budget stays in or around the government’s hometown, said Stephen S. Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. Last year, that was about $80 billion out of $536 billion in procurement spending, he said. The 15 percent share is far greater than the region’s 2 percent portion of the U.S. population. “We’re seeing an enormous transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the Washington economy,” said Fuller.

And all this spending leads to an elitist class of cronyists, politicians, contractors, bureaucrats, and lobbyists. No wonder the DC area is home to some of the richest counties in America.

But unlike other well-to-do areas, the wealth in DC is rarely accumulated by honest means.

Instead, it’s the result of perverse form of redistribution to big-government insiders. Check out these horrifying details.

Washington-area workers with incomes above $100,000 rose to 22 percent of the workforce, up from 14 percent in 1990, adjusted for inflation, a Reuters analysis of Census data found. …there are 320,000 federal jobs in the Washington area. Within the District of Columbia, 55 percent pay $100,000 or more. …Nearly 13,000 lobbyists registered with the government last year and reported $3.3 billion in fees, or about $260,000 per lobbyist. That’s 22 percent more lobbyists and 37 percent more inflation-adjusted revenue per lobbyist than in 1998… Times are flush for Washington lawyers as well. The number of attorneys in the area has risen 44 percent, twice the national rate, to 41,000 since 1999. Their average income, adjusted for inflation, rose 35 percent to $156,000.

I guess we know who’s having a merry Christmas.

All these rich bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicians, cronyists, and contractors certainly are living the good life, as revealed in a Washington Post story on the “Region’s Rising Wealth.” Here are some sordid excerpts.

…the D.C. region already has a reputation as one of the most affluent in the country. But the area is fast emerging as a home to the truly rich as well. High-end luxury retailers are responding. Brands such as Aston Martin are expanding their operations into the area — betting, for instance, that there will be plenty of customers who can afford the $280,000 sports car James Bond drives in the movies. …Already there are 500 Aston Martin owners in the area with the potential for more.

I’ve already shared an interview with Andrew Ferguson by Reason TV that should make all taxpayers upset. Why should ordinary taxpayers be coerced to subsidize Washington’s high-flying parasite economy?

Redistribution is a bad thing in most circumstances. But when you redistribute from poor to rich, that’s utterly perverse.

Well, thanks to profligacy by Bush and Obama, that’s exactly what’s happened.

The region’s top one percent of households make more than a half million dollars yearly — far more than the national average for the one percent, according to a study of Census data by Sentier Research, an Annapolis-based data analysis firm. And these top earners — many of whom are from dual-income households and benefit from federal contracting — weathered the recession better than their counterparts in some other metropolitan areas and the nation. More are moving beyond comfortable affluence to a much higher standard of living. “What is unique to D.C. is that there has been a change in the complexion of wealth here. There didn’t used to be much of this ultra-high-net-worth business here and now there is,” said Susan Traver, the regional president of BNY Mellon Wealth Management.

But everyone in the rest of America at least can go to sleep tonight with a warm and fuzzy feeling of joy, knowing that our money has created such comfortable lives for the political elite.

Milton Pedraza, the CEO of the Luxury Institute, a research and consulting firm, said that purveyors of luxury goods are drawn to the area because it has…a stable economy bolstered by the federal government. Government contracting, where some local entrepreneurs and business owners amassed their fortunes, has been a key driver of the region’s economy for three decades. A third of the region’s gross regional product still comes from federal spending… “Let’s face it . . . the only place with money during the recession was Washington, D.C.,” Pedraza said.

Perhaps we should make a slight correction in the previous excerpt. After all, shouldn’t it read “America suffered a recession because the only place with money was Washington, DC.”

Let’s wrap this up. A few years ago, I issued this video about overpaid bureaucrats.

But I now realize my mini-documentary only scratches the  surface. Yes, there are too many paper-pushers on the government payroll, and of course they get far too much compensation.

But what about unofficial government workforce of over-paid contractors? And all the lobbyists, consultants, and cronyists that exist only because we have a bloated federal government?

Our nation is being seriously damaged by this corrupt system, and I fear that the outcome will be Argentinian-style decline.

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Not only Do They Get Paid too Much, New Evidence Confirms Bureaucrats Don’t Work Very Hard

My Cato Institute colleague, Chris Edwards, put together a remarkable (and depressing) chart showing that federal bureaucrats get almost twice the level of compensation as workers in the productive sector of the economy.

Defenders of the bureaucracy (including a federal pay panel dominated by bureaucrats) claim that government employees actually are underpaid because…well…just because.

My modest contribution to the debate was to put together a chart based on the Labor Department’s JOLTS data, which shows that bureaucrats are far less likely to voluntarily leave their jobs than folks in the private sector, which is very strong evidence that they are being over-compensated.

But all this debate about pay is looking at only one part of the equation. What about the stereotype that bureaucrats don’t work very hard? Well, as anyone who’s ever visited a motor vehicles department or a post office already knows, that’s also true.

And the hard data confirm our personal observations. Here are the main findings of new research by Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation, which was published in the Wall Street Journal.

…overstaffing is a serious problem in government, and the best evidence is a simple empirical fact: Government employees don’t work as much as private employees. …new evidence from a comprehensive and objective data set confirms that the “underworked” government employee is more than a stereotype. …The time-use survey’s data on work time…allow us to analyze both the number of hours individuals work during a typical workweek and the total number of hours they work during the year. …What we found was that during a typical workweek, private-sector employees work about 41.4 hours. Federal workers, by contrast, put in 38.7 hours, and state and local government employees work 38.1 hours. …Put another way, private employees spend around an extra month working each year compared with public employees.

Here’s the chart Excel generated when I entered the data in a spreadsheet. It must be nice to get paid a lot to work a little.

Actually, maybe it’s not a bad thing that bureaucrats are lazy. Do we really want more diligent IRS agents? More hard-charging OSHA inspectors? Do we want Fannie and Freddie regulators burning the midnight oil concocting more affordable leading rules?

I think you understand my concern.

So this brings us back to the fact that they are paid too much. This video has the gory details.

The real issue, as I state at the end of the video, is that most government jobs shouldn’t exist at all.

By the way, Biggs and Richwine include a very important point in their op-ed about the connection between the current budget negotiations and the existence of an over-paid and under-worked bureaucracy.

This fact may hold different lessons for different people, but our own take is simple: Before we ask private-sector employees to work more to support government, government itself should work as much as the private sector.

As noted above, I want government to do less, not for bureaucrats to do more, but their point is still appropriate.

P.S. Here’s a good joke about government bureaucracy. Here’s a similar joke in picture form. And we find the same humor in this joke, but with a bit more build up.

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The $822,000-per-Year Bureaucrat and the Death of California

Over the years, I’ve shared some outrageous examples of overpaid bureaucrats.

• The chief bureaucrat of a low-income California city getting almost $800,000 per year.
• Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000.
• A school superintendent in New York raking in more than $500 thousand of annual compensation.
• A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only 2-1/2 years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year.
• A New York school bureaucrat simultaneously getting a $225,000 salary and $300,000 pension.
• California taxpayers being forced to pay a fired bureaucrat $550,000 for unused vacation time.
• An employee of the New Jersey Turnpike system raking in annual compensation of $320,000.

Hopefully we’re all disgusted when insiders rig the system to rip off taxpayers. And I suspect you’re not surprised to see that the worst example on that list comes from California, which is in a race with Illinois to see which state can become the Greece of America.

Well, the Golden State has a new über-bureaucrat. Here are some of the jaw-dropping details from a Bloomberg report.

The numbers are even larger in California, where a state psychiatrist was paid $822,000, a highway patrol officer collected $484,000 in pay and pension benefits and 17 employees got checks of more than $200,000 for unused vacation and leave. The best-paid staff in other states earned far less for the same work, according to the data.

Wow, $822,000 for a state psychiatrist. Not bad for government work. So what is Governor Jerry Brown doing to fix the mess? As you might expect, he’s part of the problem.

…the state’s highest-paid employees make far more than comparable workers elsewhere in almost all job and wage categories, from public safety to health care, base pay to overtime. …California has set a pattern of lax management, inefficient operations and out-of-control costs. …In California, Governor Jerry Brown hasn’t curbed overtime expenses that lead the 12 largest states or limited payments for accumulated vacation time that allowed one employee to collect $609,000 at retirement in 2011. …Last year, Brown waived a cap on accrued leave for prison guards while granting them additional paid days off. California’s liability for the unused leave of its state workers has more than doubled in eight years, to $3.9 billion in 2011, from $1.4 billion in 2003, according to the state’s annual financial reports. …The per-worker costs of delivering services in California vastly exceed those even in New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Ohio.

Actually, it’s not just that he’s part of the problem. He’s making things worse, having seduced voters into approving a ballot measure to dramatically increase the tax burden on the upper-income taxpayers.

I suppose the silver lining to that dark cloud is that many bureaucrats now rank as part of the top 1 percent, so they’ll have to recycle some of their loot back to the political vultures in Sacramento.

But the biggest impact of the tax hike – as shown in the Ramirez cartoon – will be to accelerate the shift of entrepreneurs, investors, and small business owners to states that don’t steal as much. Indeed, a study from the Manhattan Institute looks at the exodus to lower-tax states.

The data also reveal the motives that drive individuals and businesses to leave California. One of these, of course, is work. …Taxation also appears to be a factor, especially as it contributes to the business climate and, in turn, jobs. Most of the destination states favored by Californians have lower taxes. States that have gained the most at California’s expense are rated as having better business climates. The data suggest that many cost drivers—taxes, regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs—are prompting businesses to locate outside California, thus helping to drive the exodus.

Yet another example of why tax competition is such an important force for economic liberalization. It punishes governments that are too greedy and gives taxpayers a chance to protect their property from the looter class.

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Attack of the Taxpayer-Eating Zombie Bureaucrats

A regular feature on this blog is the government-stupidity contest between bureaucrats and politicians from the United States and the United Kingdom.

You can click here to peruse some of the most outrageous examples, including a couple of contestants from the private sector.

This has been a nip-and-tuck race for a long time, but the United Kingdom recently jumped into the lead with two jaw-dropping examples of moronic government behavior.

First, British bureaucrats took some kids away from their foster family because the parents didn’t believe in unlimited immigration, and, second, the U.K. government created a subsidy program that was so convoluted that not one single household in the entire country signed up for the goodies.

You know you’ve reached a special level of incompetence when a government is so bloody stupid that it can’t even give away money.

I was beginning to think the United States was doomed to also-ran status in this race.

But I should have known better. When it comes to finding creative ways to piss away other people’s money and make bone-headed choices, American politicians and bureaucrats are ready to meet the challenge.

This isn’t empty patriotism on my part. For proof, check out this Washington Examiner story about the federal government sending bureaucrats to a posh, $1,000-per-person conference, where they learned…I’m not making this up…how to respond to zombie attacks.

“Give…me…your…wallet”

When zombies attack, the Department of Homeland Security will be prepared. …money from the DHS’s Urban Areas Security Initiative went to buy snow cone machines in Michigan. Places like Fargo, N.D., and Keene, N.H., now have armored vehicles at their disposal, as do many other small towns. Keene said the vehicle was needed to protect its annual Pumpkin Festival. Arizona used $90,000 in DHS funding to install a video monitoring system at the Peoria Sports Complex, because apparently it is in the taxpayers’ interest to monitor the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres during spring training. …But if you think that’s waste, you need to know about the extraordinary training that the DHS was able to provide to first responders this year. They made attendance at the HALO Corp.’s 2012 Counter-Terrorism Summit an allowable expense for federal grant money. Yes, the California-based security company’s five-day event was held at a posh island resort and spa just outside of San Diego and cost $1,000 per person to attend, but that’s not even the best part. The showpiece event of the summit made was a live war game of a zombie apocalypse, complete with 40 actors in full zombie makeup as well as “state-of-the-art structure, pyrotechnic battlefield effects, medical special effects, vehicles and blank-firing weapons” according to a promotional video by HALO President Brad Barker. This enabled first responders to participate in a real-life “Dawn of the Dead” scenario and to know precisely what to do when their neighbors start trying to eat their human flesh.

As the Boy Scouts say, it’s best to “be prepared.” And thanks to federal tax dollars, the Department of Homeland Security is ready to defend us from a zombie attack.

I’m basically at a loss for words. Is anybody minding the store back in DC?

“Must…waste…more…money”

Why did this federal contractor think this was a good idea? Why did the Department of Homeland Security think it should be an allowable expense? Why did bureaucrats think it was a worthwhile way of spending their time?

There are no good answers – other than the fact that folks are far more likely to be frivolous and wasteful when they’re spending other people’s money. And that applies to the other examples cited in the excerpt above.

An armored vehicle to protect a pumpkin festival?!? If the taxpayers of Keene, NH, actually think the Canadians are about to sneak over the border and swipe some pumpkins, they should kick in a few bucks and hire an extra cop.

But so long as the kleptomaniacs in Washington are giving away our money, local governments have every reason to dream up ridiculous wish-lists.

No wonder the burden of government spending has reached record levels.

P.S. Don’t forget that the Department of Homeland Security was created during the Bush years. Another black mark on that statist period.

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Free Markets Protect Consumers with “Mutually Reinforcing” Private Regulation

I’ve written before about the heavy costs of regulation, including these rather sobering statistics. Or, to be more accurate, here are some staggering numbers.

• Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms.
• The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion.
• For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are destroyed in the economy’s productive sector.

But a lot of people don’t focus on the cost of regulation. They are motivated instead by a desire to protect themselves against unknown risks, which they assume are exacerbated by companies that are greedy for short-run profits.

I acknowledged this concern in the November issue of Townhall magazine.

…it is difficult—or even impossible—for the average consumer to gauge safety. Are we flying on a well-maintained plane? Are we eating food that is free of salmonella and botulism? Is our workplace protected against dangerous machinery? Are our children vulnerable to chemical exposure? Since the vast majority of people have no way of answering these questions, we shouldn’t be surprised that many of them want some sort of independent oversight—especially since they suspect that businesses will be tempted to cut corners. After all, less money spent on health and safety means more profit for shareholders.

But I also explained how the free market produces very effective forms of private regulation.

…the desire for profits creates a big incentive for businesses to use good practices while producing safe and effective products. Imagine you’re the CEO of a major airline, and one day all the regulatory agencies disappear. Are you going to stop maintaining your planes? At the risk of stating the obvious, the answer is no. One disaster could be the death knell for an airline, particularly if there were the slightest hint that the company was skimping on upkeep. Moreover, it’s highly unlikely that investors would plow money into an airline when share value could disappear overnight because of an accident. And banks presumably would be leery about lending to an airline that faced the risk of quick bankruptcy. Moreover, insurance companies would have a very strong incentive to monitor the safety practices of the airline— and keep in mind no bank would lend money to an airline that lacked insurance. In other words, the competitive marketplace can be viewed as a very effective form of regulation. Instead of rules and red tape from Washington, the profit motive creates mutually reinforcing oversight.

This “mutually reinforcing oversight” does not guarantee that business won’t cut corners and/or make mistakes. But, then again, regulation from politicians and bureaucrats don’t stop that from happening either.

The key question to ask is which approach achieves the best results at the lowest cost.

The answer is the free market, though augmented by government regulations that pass a cost-benefit test, the tort system to discourage bad business behavior such as negligence, and the criminal justice system to fight behaviors such as fraud.

There will be a debate, of course, on where to draw the line. But one thing I can say for sure is that an intelligent system will never produce these examples of bureaucratic idiocy.

• Putting a store out of business for selling toy guns.
• Regulations making it difficult for trucking firms to weed out drunk drivers.
• Year-long sting operations by federal milk police.
• Rules harassing coffee shops with bikini-clad sales staff.
• OSHA requirements for expensive safety harnesses for people working 11 feet off the ground.
• Rules from the EEOC for “pee-shy” employees.
• The IRS making banks put foreign tax law above US tax law.

Remember, if government is the answer, you’ve asked a very strange question.

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Shocker: Bureaucrat-Dominated Panel Claims Bureaucrats Are Underpaid

Since I’ve been in Washington from more than 25 years, it takes something really remarkable to shock me. But when I read today that federal bureaucrats are supposedly underpaid, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, I thought somebody had sent me an article from the Onion.

But then I saw that the assertion of underpaid bureaucrats was put together by the stooges at the Federal Salary Council, a body controlled by government employee unions.

Here are some excerpts from a Federal News Radio report about their preposterous claim.

The gap in pay between federal employees and private-sector workers has jumped 8 percentage points since last year, according to new data presented at a Federal Salary Council meeting Friday. On average, federal employees earn 34 percent less than their private-sector counterparts, according to the council’s analysis. The pay gap, which is calculated using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics based on pay in 34 locality pay areas, was 26 percent last year. The council, which is made up of labor representatives and pay experts, makes recommendations on federal pay to the President’s Pay Agent.

But the article was fair in that it cited some contrary data.

A Congressional Budget Office study released in January found, overall, federal employees actually earn about 2 percent more in wages compared to private-sector workers, with wider differences based on education level. But a June 2011 report from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, indicated government pay outstripped private-sector pay by 14 percent.

Though the author of the article should have cited the work of my colleague Chris Edwards, who has revealed that federal bureaucrats get twice the level of compensation as people in the economy’s productive sector when you include the value of fringe benefits.

Here’s my video on the topic, which is filled with factoids.

But if you want the single piece of evidence that completely debunks the silly assertion that bureaucrats are underpaid, just go to Table 4 of this Department of Labor release. You’ll find the voluntary quit rate for different parts of the workforce.

As you can see from the chart, people in the private sector are more than three times more likely to quit their jobs.

Now ask yourself a simple question: Are people more likely to quit jobs when they’re underpaid or overpaid?

But that shouldn’t be the end of the discussion. The more important question is whether most federal bureaucrats should even have jobs. I’m mostly concerned about the fact that we have useless bureaucracies such as the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The fact that the bureaucrats are overpaid at these agencies is merely adding insult to injury. It’s the size of government that we should worry about, period.

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Germany’s Dark Vision for Europe

Like Sweden and Denmark, Germany is a semi-rational welfare state. It generally relies on a market-oriented approach in areas other than fiscal policy, and it avoided the Keynesian excesses that caused additional misery and red ink in America (though it is far from fiscally conservative, notwithstanding the sophomoric analysis of the Washington Post).

Nonetheless, it’s difficult to have much optimism for Europe’s future when the entire political establishment of Germany blindly thinks there should be more centralization, bureaucratization, and harmonization in Europe.

The EU Observer has a story about the agenda of the de facto statists in the Christian Democratic party who currently run Germany.

“Harmonization über alles!”

…what Merkel and her party are piecing together is a radical vision of the EU in a few years time – a deep fiscal and political union. The fiscal side involves tax harmonisation, a tightly policed Stability and Growth Pact with automatic sanctions for countries that breach debt and deficit rules, and the possibility of an EU Commissioner responsible for directly intervention to oversee budgetary policy in a crisis-hit country. …On the institutional side, the CDU backs a directly elected President of the European Commission as well as clearly establishing the European Parliament and Council of Ministers as a bi-cameral legislature with equal rights to initiate EU legislation with the Commission.

Keep in mind that the Christian Democrats are the main right-of-center party in Germany, yet the German political spectrum is so tilted to the left that they want tax harmonization (a spectacularly bad idea) and more centralization.

Heck, even the supposedly libertarian-oriented Free Democratic Party is hopelessly clueless on these issues.

Not surprisingly, the de jure statists of Germany have the same basic agenda. Here’s some of what the article says about the agenda of the Social Democrat and Green parties.

…its commitments to establish joint liability eurobonds and a “common European fiscal policy to ensure fair, efficient and lasting receipts” would also involve a shift of economic powers to Brussels. While both sides have differing ideological positions on the political response to the eurozone crisis – they are talking about more Europe, not less.

The notion of eurobonds is particularly noteworthy since it would involve putting German taxpayers at risk for the reckless fiscal policies in nations such as Greece, Italy, and Spain. That’s only a good idea if you think it’s smart to co-sign a loan for your unemployed and alcoholic cousin with a gambling addiction.

All this makes me feel sorry for German taxpayers.

Then again, if you look at the long-run fiscal outlook of the United States, I feel even more sorry for American taxpayers. Thanks to misguided entitlement programs, we’re in even deeper trouble than Europe’s welfare states.

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Here’s Why the Cayman Islands Is Considering Fiscal Suicide

What Do Greece, the United States, and the Cayman Islands Have in Common?

At first, this seems like a trick question. After all, the Cayman Islands are a fiscal paradise, with no personal income tax, no corporate income tax, no capital gains tax, and no death tax.

By contrast, Greece is a bankrupt, high-tax welfare state, and the United States sooner or later will suffer the same fate because of misguided entitlement programs.

But even though there are some important differences, all three of these jurisdictions share a common characteristic in that they face fiscal troubles because government spending has been growing faster than economic output.

I’ve written before that the definition of good fiscal policy is for the private sector to grow faster than the government. I’ve humbly decided to refer to this simple principle as Mitchell’s Golden Rule, and have pointed out that bad things happen when governments violate this common-sense guideline.

In the case of the Cayman Islands, the “bad thing” is that the government is proposing to levy an income tax, which would be akin to committing fiscal suicide.

The Cayman Islands are one of the world’s richest jurisdictions (more prosperous than the United States according to the latest World Bank data), in part because there are no tax penalties on income and production.

So why are the local politicians considering a plan to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? For the simple reason that they have been promiscuous in spending other people’s money. This chart shows that the burden of government spending in the Cayman Islands has climbed twice as fast as economic output since 2000.

Much of this spending has been to employ and over-compensate a bloated civil service (in this respect, Cayman is sort of a Caribbean version of California).

In other words, the economic problem is that there has been too much spending, and the political problem is that politicians have been trying to buy votes by padding government payrolls (a problem that also exists in America).

The right solution to this problem is to reduce the burden of government spending back to the levels in the early part of last decade. The political class in Cayman, however, hopes it can prop up its costly bureaucracy with a new tax – which euphemistically is being called a “community enhancement fee.”

The politicians claim the tax will only be 10 percent and will only be imposed on the expat community. But it’s worth noting that the U.S. income tax began in 1913 with a top rate of only 7 percent and it affected less than 1 percent of the population. But that supposedly benign tax has since become a monstrous internal revenue code that plagues the nation today.

Except the results will be even worse in Cayman because the thousands of foreigners who are being targeted easily can shift their operations to other zero-income tax jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Monaco, or the Bahamas. Or they can decide that to set up shop in places such as Hong Kong and Singapore, which have very modest income tax burdens (and the ability to out-compete Cayman in other areas).

As a long-time admirer of the Cayman Islands, I desperately hope the government will reconsider this dangerous step. The world already has lots of examples of nations that are following bad policy. We need a few places that are at least being semi-sensible.

By they way, I started this post with a rhetorical question about the similarities of Greece, the United States, and the Cayman Islands. Let’s elaborate on the answer.

Here’s a post that shows how Greece’s fiscal nightmare developed. But let’s show a separate chart for the burden of federal spending in the United States.

What’s remarkable is that the federal government and the Cayman Islands government have followed very similar paths to fiscal trouble. Indeed, Caymanian politicians have achieved the dubious distinction of increasing the burden of government spending at a faster rate than even Bush and Obama. No mean feat.

This data for the U.S. chart doesn’t include the burden of state and local government spending, so the Cayman Islands still has an advantage over the United States, but I’ll close with a prediction.

Cayman’s proposed income tax

If the Cayman Islands adopts an income tax – regardless of whether they call it a community enhancement fee (to misquote Shakespeare, a rotting fish on the beach by any other name would still smell like crap), it will be just a matter of time before the burden of government spending becomes even more onerous and Cayman loses its allure and drops from being one of the world’s 10-richest jurisdictions.

Which will be very sad since I’ll now have to find a different place to go when America suffers its Greek-style fiscal collapse.

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Obama’s Right – in a Perverse Way – about Government Playing an Important Role for Small Businesses

President Obama recently got himself in a bit of hot water with his “you didn’t build that” remark, which trivialized the hard work of entrepreneurs.

But he is right – in a perverse way – about government playing a big role in the life of small businesses. Thanks to a maze of regulations, the government is an unwelcome silent partner for every entrepreneur. And we’re not talking small numbers.

• Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms.
• The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion.
• For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, one study estimated that 100 jobs are destroyed in the economy’s productive sector.

But sometimes an image helps to make things easy to understand. Here’s a chart from the Joint Economic Committee, which maps out the web of regulation imposed by Washington.

This chart does more than just show sources of red tape coming from Washington. It shows that “Washington” is really several entities, such as Congress, the executive branch, the courts, and so-called regulatory agencies.

These varies entities then impose regulatory burdens in various fields, such as labor, finance, tax, and environment.

Keep in mind, by the way, that each small pink circle actually represents an entire field of regulation. So when you see, for instance, the “Obamacare” circle, what you’re really seeing is this nightmarish image of regulatory complexity.

And don’t forget the role of state and local government.

Last but not least, remember that each regulatory bureaucracy is then capable of making individual decisions that…well, you judge for yourself.

• Putting a store out of business for selling toy guns.
• Regulations making it difficult for trucking firms to weed out drunk drivers.
• Year-long sting operations by federal milk police.
• Rules harassing coffee shops with bikini-clad sales staff.
• OSHA requirements for expensive safety harnesses for people working 11 feet off the ground.
• Rules from the EEOC for “pee-shy” employees.
• The IRS making banks put foreign tax law above US tax law.

Gee, it’s almost enough to make you think regulation might be the problem and not the solution.

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The United Kingdom Is Doomed by a Perniciously Wimpy Form of Political Correctness

Normally, I get pessimistic about the future when I think about wasteful spending programs that will drive almost all developed nations into bankruptcy. And America is on that list, by the way, because of our poorly designed entitlement programs.

But sometimes my despair is the result of idiotic political correctness and bone-headed bureaucracy. And for some reason, as shown by these examples, the United Kingdom seems to have a disproportionate share of morons who want to impose bad policy on their fellow citizens.

• A job-placement center got in trouble for discriminating against incompetent people by seeking “reliable” and “hard-working” candidates.
• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• A proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• The government wanted to require “competency tests” for pet owners.
• An ID requirement to buy teaspoons.
• The most useless sign in the history of the world.
• A proposal to ban skinny models.

But I don’t know if any of those horror stories can match this baffling story reported in the Telegraph.

Public Enemy No. 1?

When the chief starter at the London Olympics agreed to fire his pistol to start the races at a school sports day, parents thought it was a wonderful treat for their children. But they did not count on the intervention of health and safety officials from their local council, who ruled that the noise from Alan Bell’s starting pistol would be too frightening for the youngsters. Bizarrely, the local authority instead suggested playing a recording of a starting pistol on an iPod before agreeing to let Mr Bell start the races by sounding a klaxon. …One parent, who did not wish to be named, told a Sunday newspaper: “It was ridiculous. We were told that the children would be distressed by Mr Bell firing his starting pistol. “Anyone who believes they would be frightened by a starting pistol has never experienced the noise at a typical three-year-old’s birthday party. …Norman Gardiner, president of the Pitreavie Amateur Athletics Club in Dunfermline, said the decision was “health and safety gone mad.”

It’s amazing to think that the United Kingdom once ruled half the world, but now produces pencil-neck bureaucrats who think starting pistols are a menace to society.

But we Americans shouldn’t feel superior. We’re traveling down the same path.

• A Rhode Island boy got in trouble for bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• The military was criticized for giving Osama bin Laden an Indian code name (Geronimo) as part of the operation to exterminate the al Qaeda dirtbag.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.
• And how can we omit the politicians in San Francisco, who decided that banning happy meal toys was an appropriate use of government coercion.
• We also have regulations in Maryland governing the application of sunscreen at summer camps.
• And proposals in Seattle to require life vests on swimmers who are more than five feet from shore.

My initial instinct is that we should fire the over-paid bureaucrats who generate this kind of nonsense. I admit that such as step might only address the symptom of a politically correct world, but it would be a good start.

(hat tip to my fellow Bulldog Charles Oliver)

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The Joy of Government-Run Healthcare: The UK’s Gilded Bureaucrats and Dying Patients

I’m not sure whether this is a post about America’s dismal future if Obamacare is allowed to take root or whether this is a post about bureaucrats ripping off taxpayers.

But I do know that it shows that the insiders take care of themselves quite nicely when the government seizes more control of a nation’s healthcare sector.

Here’s a report from the UK-based Telegraph about how bureaucrats at a Scottish branch of the National Health Service are bilking taxpayers.

National Procurement, a branch of the NHS National Services Division, arranged for staff who are deemed to be “regular users” of cars for business to get the cars through a taxpayer-backed vehicle-leasing scheme. …Figures provided by National Procurement in response to a Freedom of Information request showed that…one in eight members of staff, had used the 4x4s and convertibles to drive to work. Much of the insurance, petrol, road tax and leasing is funded by the state.

And we’re not talking cheap automobiles. Keep in mind, when you read this next passage, that £25,000 is almost $40,000.

One employee was leased a £27,000 Mercedes, while three other workers have been driving £23,000 S-line Audi A3 sports cars. Another employee received a £28,300 Audi TT. Since the beginning of this year, five new cars have been leased to staff, including a four-door BMW worth more than £30,500. Other leased vehicles include another Audi sports car worth more than £25,000 and three Range Rover Evoques costing up to £29,500.

So how do they work this scam? Simple, they take needless trips.

…staff have had to clock up a minimum of 5000 business miles during office hours to qualify for the scheme. …A department source told the Herald newspaper that some members of staff were using their leased cars for 80-mile round trips between National Procurement’s two offices, in Larkhall, Lanarkshire, and South Gyle in Edinburgh, even though there are adequate video conferencing facilities at both locations.

One hopes that this scandal in a Scottish branch is an exception and that most bureaucrats don’t behave in a similarly reprehensible fashion.

But given the bloated size of the National Health Service bureaucracy, it’s more likely that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There is an entitlement culture in most government bureaucracies, and I would be shocked in the paper pushers and memo writers hadn’t figured out how to manipulate the system

And since there are more than 1.6 million of them, the magnitude of the fraud is presumably enormous.

The obvious follow-up question is whether taxpayers in the United Kingdom are getting some good value from this army of cosseted bureaucrats?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Here are some chilling excerpts from a story in the Daily Mail.

NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday. Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia… There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP. Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’.

Here are a couple of horrifying examples.

Professor Pullicino revealed he had personally intervened to take a patient off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated. He said this showed that claims they had hours or days left are ‘palpably false’. In the example he revealed a 71-year-old who was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia and epilepsy was put on the LCP by a covering doctor on a weekend shift. Professor Pullicino said he had returned to work after a weekend to find the patient unresponsive and his family upset because they had not agreed to place him on the LCP. ‘I removed the patient from the LCP despite significant resistance,’ he said. ‘His seizures came under control and four weeks later he was discharged home to his family,’ he said.

In other words, government-run healthcare in the United Kingdom is a great scam if you’re an insider. But not such a good deal if you’re someone who needs, well, healthcare.

Sort of makes you wonder what Paul Krugman was thinking when he wrote, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”

I guess the English newspapers are making up stories to denigrate their own nation. If you want to see more of these “false” stories, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

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California’s Fiscal Policy and the Lesson of Humpty Dumpty

I’ve almost exhausted my interest in California’s suicidal fiscal policy. How many times, after all, can you write about politicians over-taxing and over-spending to the point of economic ruin?

But everyone has a cross to bear in life, and (if you allow me to mix my metaphors) griping about bloated government is my Sisyphean task.

So here’s a good cartoon about the bankruptcy of Stockton, California. I assume the California egg is supposed to be Governor Brown, but that’s not important. The obvious lesson is that the entire state will follow Stockton into collapse unless there’s a dramatic shift in policy.

As explained in this video, the main problem with state and local governments such as California and Stockton is that there are too many bureaucrats and they are paid too much (this cartoon makes the same point in a more amusing fashion).

But to be more specific, what’s killing them are the promises for retiree pensions and health care.

Interestingly, the federal government also is heading toward a fiscal cliff because of promises to spend money on retirees, but the nitwits in Washington have created entitlements for the entire population and not just for a privileged class of bureaucrats.

So the moral of the story is that as goes Stockton, so goes California. And as goes Greece, so goes America.

P.S. You can see some other cartoons from Lisa Benson here, here, here, here, and here.

P.P.S. Here’s a great Chuck Asay cartoon about California.

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On Reason TV, Andrew Ferguson Discusses the Parasite Economy of Washington, DC

Back in February, I posted this startling map showing that 10 of America’s 15-richest counties are the bedroom communities surrounding Washington, DC.

There’s a lot of money in Washington because federal bureaucrats are wildly overpaid, as I document in this video, and also because there is a huge shadow workforce of contractors, consultants, and lobbyists who have their snouts buried deeply in the public trough.

In an interview for Reason TV, Andy Ferguson talks about how these well-paid parasites have created a bubble economy in Washington.

And you know it must be true because even the leftists at Politico wrote a story acknowledging how the DC area was thriving at a time when the rest of America was struggling.

In other words, the poor and middle-class people in the real world are paying high taxes to subsidize the indolent moochers of Washington.

You would think that’s one kind of redistribution that the left would oppose. Heck, it’s almost enough to make you think that it would be a good idea to reduce the size and scope of the federal government.

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Contract for Buffalo Teachers Shows the Wrong Way of Cutting Excess Bureaucratic Blubber

Government bureaucrats are significantly overpaid compared to folks in the productive sector of the economy.

So you would think I’d support cuts, especially the kind that get rid of excess blubber in the government workforce.

But not when it means higher costs for taxpayers, and that’s exactly what’s happening in New York, where Buffalo taxpayers cough up more money every time some bureaucrat goes under the knife for cosmetic procedures such as liposuction.

Here are some excerpts from a report in the UK-based Daily Mail.

Teachers in Buffalo are getting plastic surgery on the tax payer’s buck, it has been revealed. Tummy tucks, liposuction and Botox are all part of the controversial one of a kind health plan. …it is a perk that comes with a price tag. Last year Buffalo schools paid $5.9 million for its teachers to have plastic surgery. In 2010 the figure was up at $9 million. …60 teachers spent $30,000 each on procedures in 2011, an investigation by the school board revealed, and because the schools are self-insured, tax payers foot the bill. …The policy to pay for teachers to have surgery started out innocently enough – it was intended for accident and burns victims in need of reconstructive surgery. But in the age of cosmetic surgery the rider extends to arm lifts, face lifts and breast enhancements, with surgeons advertising their services in the teacher’s union newsletter.

Wow. It’s bad enough that government workers get excessive salaries and gold-plated benefits. But this takes it to a new level.

At least we see an example of economics in action. How likely is it that plastic surgeons would be advertising in the union’s newsletter in the absence of taxpayer financing?

P.S. Here’s David Letterman’s top-10 list of how to tell you’re a unionized government bureaucrat. Liposuction isn’t on the list, but wait ’til next year.

P.P.S. Just in case you think I’m exaggerating about overpaid government employees, take a look at this map showing 10 of the 15 richest counties in America.

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Great Moments in Local Government, the New York City Edition

I’m periodically dumbfounded by the bizarre actions of government.

Indeed, I even put together a post comparing amazingly stupid policies in the United States and United Kingdom. And I later updated that post with new details of brainless bureaucracy.

Top U.K. entries included an effort to stop children from watching Olympic shooting events and (what must be) the most pointless sign in the history of the world, while leading American entries included preventing a girl from boarding a plane because her purse had an image of a gun and a local school calling the police because a little girl kissed a little boy in gym class.

But I don’t mean to just pick on the anglo-sphere. I’ve also noted the idiocy of the Greek government, which thinks it’s appropriate to subsidize pedophiles and collect stool samples as a condition of getting a business license to set up an online company.. And let’s not forget Italy’s new government of technocratic experts, which managed to appoint the wrong person to be Junior Agricultural Minister.

Saving NYC from the scourge of toy guns

But don’t overlook New York City, which really is in a special category.  And what are the “leaders” of the city that never sleeps doing to demonstrate their blundering incompetence? Well, read it and weep, courtesy of the New York Post.

The owner of a discount store in Brooklyn says the city is holding him up for $30,000 in fines he can’t afford — all because he stocked six toy sheriff sets that included plastic guns. And now the .44-caliber fines for the orange-tipped, obvious fakes are forcing him to close for good.

Isn’t this wonderful? These reckless politicians and bureaucrats will bankrupt an entrepreneur and destroy jobs, while achieving no legitimate public policy purpose.

But don’t be surprised. This is the same crowd that does things such as help prisoners sign up for food stamps, ban bake sales for spreading unhealthy food, and fine you $2,000 for idling your car for more than three minutes.

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Obama Administration Supports Rogue IRS Regulation in Order to Please Europeans, even though It Will Undermine American Banks and Hurt the U.S. Economy

I’ve written several times about a proposed IRS regulation that would force American banks to put foreign law above U.S. law. I’ve repeatedly warned that the scheme, which would force financial institutions to report the deposit interest they pay to foreigners, is bad economic policy, bad regulatory policy, and bad banking policy.

My arguments have included:

• Explaining that this onerous regulatory scheme will result in capital fleeing to other nations, needlessly harming the financial sector and putting American banks at risk.
• Explaining why the proposal is a threat to human rights since many foreigners keep money in the United States because they live in nations with unstable and/or repressive governments.
• Explaining that the IRS action is a gross abuse of the regulatory process since an executive branch agency does not have the authority to overturn laws enacted as part of the democratic process.
• Explaining that this proposed regulation is just the beginning, and that proponents hope to issue follow-up rules that would cripple policies making America a haven for global capital.

But these points don’t seem to matter to the Obama Administration, which is ideologically committed to the anti-tax competition agenda of Europe’s welfare states. This is why the White House supports all sorts of destructive policies, including not only this misguided regulation, but also the creation of something akin to a world tax organization that will have power to block free-market tax policy.

A new article in the Weekly Standard explains what’s at stake.

Early last year the Treasury Department published its “Guidance on Reporting Interest Paid to Nonresident Aliens,” which would require banks to report to the Internal Revenue Service the interest paid to foreign depositors with a U.S. bank account. While the Treasury and the regulatory apparatus insist that the cost and inconvenience of adhering to this regulation is next to nothing, the rule may cost the U.S. banking system hundreds of billions of dollars in lost deposits, in turn costing our economy billions of dollars, while providing no discernible benefit to banks, depositors, taxpayers, or the U.S. economy. …a much bigger problem—for banks and the economy—than the compliance costs is the threat of a massive capital flight. The United States is a very popular place for foreigners to park their savings, for a variety of reasons. For starters, we offer a stable government that can be trusted to keep its hands off deposits—something that appeals greatly to residents of Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, and any number of other unstable countries. …As a result, a staggeringly large amount of savings from abroad is currently held in U.S banks. While the Treasury asserts that “deposits held by nonresident alien individuals are a very small percentage of the [total] deposits held by U.S. financial institutions,” that very small percentage amounts to more than $3.7 trillion, according to a 2011 Bureau of Economic Analysis report, hardly a pittance. The massive amount of foreign savings here is a boon to the U.S. economy. Banks lend against these deposits, mainly to companies here in the United States. Jay Cochran, an economist at George Mason University, studied the impact that the more limited 2002 reporting requirements would have had on the banking system, estimating that it would have resulted in nearly $100 billion in deposits leaving the U.S. banking system. A reporting regulation that covers all foreign accounts would likely result in two to three times more capital flight. The impact would be harmful not just for the banks but for the broader economy. The decline in profits in the banking sector alone from a roughly quarter-trillion-dollar capital flight would be in the range of $5-10 billion—which makes a mockery of the notion that the costs of the regulation are under $100,000.

For more information about this wretched proposal, here’s a video I narrated on the topic.

To put it bluntly, the Obama Administration is pushing this regulation because it thinks the anti-tax competition agenda of Europe’s welfare states is so important that it is willing to risk the health of the American economy, undermine the soundness of U.S. financial institutions, disregard the rule of law, and abuse the regulatory process.

Indeed, this proposal is even worse than the increasingly infamous Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

And that’s saying something, because with each passing day, it is more and more obvious that FATCA is a destructive law that will significantly harm the American economy. But at least it’s a law, one that was approved by Congress and signed by the President. And the costly FATCA regulations being developed by the IRS are for the purpose of enforcing the law.

The interest-reporting IRS regulation is also costly and destructive, to be sure, but what makes it so perverse is that it is – at best – completely gratuitous. It is being advanced solely for reasons of ideology, regardless of the law and consequences be damned.

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Government Insiders Rip Off Taxpayers…Again

I’ve written many times about politicians and bureaucrats screwing taxpayers with lavish compensation packages, but this story from Philadelphia is jaw dropping.

Councilwoman Marian B. Tasco is retiring Friday, but only so she can collect a $478,057 pension check and return to work Monday, when she will be sworn in for her seventh term. Tasco was one of six Council members to enroll in the city’s controversial Deferred Retirement Option Plan, better known as DROP. She did not immediately return a request for comment. …When DROP was introduced during the Rendell administration, it was thought that it would cost little or nothing. But a study by the administration of Mayor Nutter said DROP had cost the city $258 million over 10 years.

Remember stories like this every time ones of these reprehensible politicians claim that spending has been cut to the bone and taxes have to be raised.

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California’s Top-One-Percent Bureaucrats

Every so often (about 362 days per year), I come to the conclusion that government is a racket for the benefit of special interests.

Greece  would be an example. And if we limit ourselves to the United States, California is probably the poster child for a kleptocracy masquerading as a government.

Here are some absurd details, from a Bloomberg report, about bureaucrats ripping off taxpayers.

Manglicmot is one of 42 state nurses who each made more than $1 million in those six years, mostly by tapping overtime, according to payroll data compiled by Bloomberg News. Together, those nurses collected $47.5 million. In 2008, Manglicmot was paid $331,346, including $211,257 in overtime. The extra pay that allows some nurses to triple their regular compensation underscores a broader trend in California, where government workers are paid more than in other states for similar duties and civil-service job protections hamper efforts to close budget gaps. Governor Jerry Brown said this week that revenue will fall short of expectations, triggering $1 billion in cuts to school busing, libraries and care for children, the elderly and the disabled, among other programs. “California taxpayers should be outraged,” said Lanny Ebenstein, an economics lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and president of the California Center for Public Policy, a research institution critical of public-sector compensation. …California is home to city managers whose compensation is higher than the governor’s, prison doctors who make more than counterparts elsewhere, Los Angeles firefighters who collect twice the national mean and state workers who reaped $1.7 billion more than their regular salaries last year, from overtime and unused vacation pay to physical-fitness incentives.

I can only imagine how horrible it would feel to be a California taxpayer, particularly since the story just cited is merely the tip of the iceberg.

This video from Reason TV is a good explanation of how bloated bureaucracy has helped to cause a deteriorating situation in the Golden State.

And here’s my video on the overall topic of overpaid bureaucrats.

Last but not least, don’t forget the video from the folks at Government Gone Wild.

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Mind-Blowing TSA Stupidity and Political Correctness

I’ve had some fun mocking the bureaucrats from the Transportation Security Administration, including stories such as:

o Confiscating a plastic hammer from a mentally retarded man.

o Detaining a woman for carrying breast milk.

o Hassling a woman for the unexplained red flag of having sequentially numbered checks.

o Demanding that a handicapped 4-year old boy walk through a metal detector without his leg braces.

o Putting an 8-year old cub scout on the no-fly list.

Keep in mind that these are the geniuses who still fail to catch guns and box cutters – even when using the body-scan equipment!

With this track record of incompetence, this next story probably won’t be too surprising. Here are some excerpts from a report showing a freaky combination of brainless stupidity and idiotic political correctness.

Dangerous Weapon?!?

Vanessa Gibbs, 17, claims the Transportation Security Administration stopped her at the security gate because of the design of a gun on her handbag. Gibbs said she had no problem going through security at Jacksonville International Airport, but rather, when she headed home from Virginia. …her preference for the pistol style didn’t sit well with TSA agents at the Norfolk airport. Gibbs said she was headed back home to Jacksonville from a holiday trip when an agent flagged her purse as a security risk. “She was like, ‘This is a federal offense because it’s in the shape of a gun,’” Gibbs said. “I’m like, ‘But it’s a design on a purse. How is it a federal offense?’” After agents figured out the gun was a fake, Gibbs said, TSA told her to check the bag or turn it over. By the time security wrapped up the inspection, the pregnant teen missed her flight, and Southwest Airlines sent her to Orlando instead, worrying her mother, who was already waiting for her to arrive at JIA. …TSA isn’t budging on the handbag, arguing the phony gun could be considered a “replica weapon.” The TSA says “replica weapons have prohibited since 2002.” It’s a rule that Vanessa feels can’t be applied to a purse. “Common sense,” she said. “It’s a purse, not a weapon.”

The moral of the story, needless to say, is that we should listen to Steve Chapman and shut down this counterproductive bureaucracy.

And then listen to Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, so we can allow the private sector to do a better job at much lower cost.

(h/t: Instapundit)

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Bureaucrats Gone Wild

This narrator probably won’t get rich, like the guy who did the “Girls Gone Wild” videos, but this is the second-best video I’ve ever seen on the bloated and overpaid government workforce.

I especially like how he understands that the problem is the size of government, and I also admire his recognition that Republicans often are just as bad as Democrats.

He also highlights the danger of creating a society where a majority of people are moochers instead of producers.

By the way, here’s the…ahem…best video I’ve ever seen on the topic of costly and excessive bureaucracy.

Actually, I don’t care which video you prefer, so long as you are outraged by the fact that federal bureaucrats get twice as much compensation as people in the productive sector of the economy.

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The Federal Budget Process and Bureaucratic Incentives, Nicely Captured by a Cartoon

I’ve done a video on excessive compensation for bureaucrats and I’ve written many times about wasteful spending, but here’s a cartoon that manages to effectively combine both concepts.

If your eyes are getting old like mine, you may need to click on the image to read everything.

This cartoon is good, but here’s another that is remarkable because it does capture the mindset that exists inside the government.

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