Federal Jobs are Mere Overhead

Federal bureaucrats argue that they deserve compensation packages double that of the people who pay their salaries because the government types are more educated.  Paying a PhD to conduct research and write reports is a waste of resources if someone else with a bachelor’s degree could perform the same function for fewer tax dollars.  Add to the equation that entering public service does not make anyone more effective, productive, or conscientious, and lack of competition makes them complacent.  If anything, many bureaucrats seem to be educated well beyond their intelligence levels, possessing abstruse information that has little, if any, practical value.

However, bloating bureaucracies with overly educated upper-crust twits seems to be the raison d'être of many in the current administration.  Federal regulatory agencies alone have more employees than McDonald's, Ford, Disney and Boeing combined.  While the overall US economy grew 5%, regulators’ budgets grew by 16%; their workforce increased by 13% while the number of private sector workers increased 5.6%.  O-buma stiffed taxpayers with over 281,000 new federal employees--almost all of them are reliable Corruptocrat supporters--since he took office.  Worse yet, we borrow forty cents of each dollar that he pays them from the Chinese.

Borrowing money to pay for the $1.75 trillion annual cost of regulation is only sound economic policy if evaluated with progressive math.  Team  O-buma has imposed 75 new major rules in its first 26 months, costing the private sector more than $40 billion.  Compounding matters is that the regulators and their regulations add no value to the goods and services that they regulate.  They create neither profits nor wealth.  More than anything, they are an albatross about the collective neck of taxpayers.

Much more is on the way.  The Federal Register notes that more than 4,200 regulations are in the pipeline.  That doesn't count impending clean air rules from the EPA, new derivative rules, or the FCC's net neutrality rule.  Nor does that include recently announced fuel economy mandates or eventual ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank regulations.  This is standard-issue Theftocrat incrementalism, nationalizing industries through confiscatory taxation and oppressive regulation.  While he is making businesses incapable of expansion and new job creation, O-buma is prancing across the nation in his pretty Canadian-built job bus bleating about the feds creating private sector jobs.

Other bobbleheads are on the same rhetorical page.  The simpleton whom O-buma appointed to squander money at the Department of Agriculture claims that redistributive welfare programs such as food stamps are actually stealth stimulus programs that create jobs outside government. 

It should be noted that both saving and investment are also economically productive activities contributing to credit availability and business growth respectively…taxpayers whose money is used to fund food stamp programs may have spent their money on other things, including food, thus also contributing to the economy without expensive interference from the federal government.

Jay Carney, the White House’s Charlie McCarthy-like spinmeister, echoed this sentiment.  He argues that unemployment programs that pay people not to work actually create new jobs with the money that is taken from taxpayers.

Speaking of squandered tax dollars, the ever-brilliant Jared Bernstein who, along with Susan Romer, predicted that O-buma’s Porkulus Plan would prevent unemployment from increasing beyond 8% is now predicting that through 2012 the most optimistic forecast would be for about eight-and-a-half percent.  If that is the case, there should be a Republican in the White House in January 2013.  Say Amen, sisters and brothers!

May your gods be with you.