Oh My Gosh - government spending is wasteful (gasp)

Did you hear - there's governmental waste in Washington, D.C, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. Oh my!

Of course, it's entirely reasonable that the WSJ would cover this story. It deserves to be covered. Any reasonable/ethical publication has a responsibility to cover this story (that's why it's in the Wall Street Journal). But, it's not news.

Raise your hands. How many of you actually thought the government wasn't wasting our tax dollars? How many of you thought the government did a moderately good job of using our money? No hands? How many of you thought the government was doing a poor job of handling our money. There's a few hands - mostly those who didn't anticipate a final option in this informal poll. Now, how many of you think the government is doing an abysmal, horrible, horrendous, stupefying, negligent, criminally inefficient, wasteful and disgraceful job of handling the nation's purse strings?

There they are - all the hands are in the air.

We all know government wastes our finances like someone trying to bail out a sinking ship with a pasta strainer. If we heard that, for every dollar well spent by the government, another $10 are utterly wasted, no one is going to express any serious surprise.

And, with that level of faith in the government, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, the other Democrats in Congress, the Liberal Progressives from universities to soup kitchens, from union halls to abortion clinics, from East Coast to West - all believe in bigger government. If you'll pardon the mixed metaphors, it's like asking your teenage daughter to hold onto the family credit cards in order to stick to your budget.

This is why, beyond the unConstitutional nature of Obamacare, it's a moronic idea to give the government a bigger say in health care. Less ... less of a say, that's the solution.

Obama claims Bush drove the economy into the ditch. Of course, that makes as much sense as blaming the last lemming over the cliff for the bloody mess on the rocks below. But, regardless, the point is that the government has a function and the people in the Beltway seldom seem to recognize the limitations of their roles.

Big government translates to a more powerful government. And a more powerful government translates to a less empowered populace. A more powerful government also translates to a more wasteful government.

Let's assume the government is not as bad as the example I used in the fifth paragraph of this story - wasting $10 for every dollar well spent. Let's suppose that the government only wastes $1 for every two dollars it spends. That's still 50 percent wasted.

Based on this scenario, if the government has access to $1 trillion of our money, that means they're wasting $500 billion. If the government has access to $14 trillion, that means they're wasting $7 trillion. I choose a number closer to the prior than the latter. For your final question in this unscientific poll, which do you choose? And, no, you can't raise your hands for both answers. That kind of logic is only accepted in places like Detroit and Washington, D.C.