Government Spending

A quick reminder. We get irritated at the junkets, expensive dinners, and bigwigs patting each other on the back, because they offend our sense of justice.  How dare they?  Yet that is not the bulk of the money being thrown away.  The growing army of ever less-useful government employees, who earnestly believe that the world needs more of their tribe to be hired to do similar things is a bigger problem.  Many of these programs reinforce each other, of government advocacy for more “awareness” about a topic, which will lead in turn to the government doing more about it.  The ratchet moves in only one direction. 

Then, over all, are the promised monies called entitlements, very difficult to remove because the people on them have qualified for them by law.  That’s what “entitlement” means – you met the criteria for a program and you are entitled to it. People get irate when the bill comes due because they believe they never wanted that to happen, but that’s not quite true.  We did want it to happen.  All those things sounded like a good idea when we were ordering off the menu.  We just don’t like the bill for it. But now it’s the law.  To back that off is going to involve changing the laws, not just finding some money under the seat cushions.  Still, we can at least try to stop increases as our first step. The electorate will find that painful enough.