Posted on 12/08/2016 5:52:06 AM PST by Kaslin
A friend is fond of saying, “But for the federal government, Washington would be Richmond.” He’s not dissing Richmond. He’s making the common sense observation that behemoth government is the reason DC metro thrives. After all, as of late 2014, five of the nine richest counties in the U.S. were commuting distance from Washington.
A Trumpian government reform project would reduce the federal government as an engine of DC metro’s wealth. That wealth has created legions of affluent professionals, in and out of government, who reside in DC’s ever-sprawling reach. These government-dependent pros are about protecting their turf and growing government when possible. It’s not mainly ideology that drives them; its paychecks and contract fees. Follow the money first.
The Washington metro is where there is the most concentrated number of influential constituencies for big federal government. Federal employees and contractors tend to be better educated and upwardly mobile. More than some are two-income households and can command well over $200,000 annually in combined pay. There are benefits and pensions, too. These pros make up a powerful lobby-army dedicated to advancing their interests – whether or not that conflicts with what’s best for the nation. Middle and working class citizens across the republic get short shrift.
In the wake of Trump’s election, American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson wrote, simply: “The federal government requires structural reform.” That sentence has huge implications. Structural reform of the federal government isn’t sexy, but a significant overhaul of it could do more to promote economic vitality and, not incidentally, safeguard our liberties than slews of other initiatives.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Time to defenestrate the mandarin class.
Anybody who has spent time up around the environs of DC and can easily see the largess, growth and excess of ‘activity’ in the local economies that exist SOLELY off the backs of US taxpayers. It is a rarified atmosphere of hustling, bustling, well, HUSTLING and siphoning of resources from the rest of this country. It is disgusting, and it needs to dismantled completely.
Yes, it’s INFLUENCE of the worst kind - as disproportionate as it is. It’s the reason why the national DC media based there, its pundits and all the hangers on have such a terribly wrong view of the drive through America they have been raping for decades.
I have a suggestion: Make Washington DC Detroit Again! Starve them out and treat them like bubonic plague flea-infested rats. Burn it all out.
Move the Department of the Interior to Des Moines or Denver. Close the Dept of Education. Also close the Dept of Energy.
Make these so-called 'DC pros' chase their money away from D.C. If there is no money to be had by sticking around in D.C., but a lot of money elsewhere, they will all leave, and D.C. will shrink.
First of all, get rid of all lawyers leeching on federal government. I heard a joke that, if you have a fender-bender in D.C., chances are that one or both involved are lawyers.
So, so much to do!
YES!
It’s TIME to DownSize DC!
Close entire Rogue/Un-Constitutional Departments, including their SWAT Teams.
The only way to remove the embedded subversive leftist who have systematically been destroying the Rule of Law and our Constitutional restraint on Fed. Government.
It's not federal paychecks. It's so-called "private" contractors that rake off the federal bonanza.
I live in D.C. Federal salaries are capped about about $190,000 (SES-III including locality pay) except for the small handful of Undersecretaries and Cabinet positions where the pay goes up to $205,000, scant compensation for having to work 24/7 travel a lot to places you don't want to go to give speeches you don't want to give to folks you don't want to meet with all while dressed in business suits (and at this pay you are not buying a lot at Brooks Brothers). Rank and file federal salaries are significantly lower than that. Two married senior federal employees can barely afford a modest house in a decent D.C. neighborhood.
No, the problem is all the hoards of federal employees who do nothing for the taxpayer in return for this goodly, but not over the top sum of money.
The one's who cash in on the federal bonanza, the folks who are buying the over-the-top mansions in Potomac MD and McClean VA are not government employees, but support contractors, and in particular the executives in contracting firms who skim off the profit on contracts to provide services inside the beltway. These are the guys who, in Eric Trump's words are "doing well while doing nothing at all."
Trump has already provided a couple of high-profile examples, e.g. Air Force 1. But Ash Carter and Frank Kendell burying the report of $125B in excess personnel costs is another example of the D.C. fraud, corruption and cronyism.
The out of control federal acquisition process serves the interests not of the taxpayer or the federal staff, but the support service contracting industry that supports the federal acquisition PROCESS. And it is all process. To manage an actual OUTCOME means to prejudice a process, and that would be UNFAIR. [The Orwellian rot is everywhere].
There’s a vast supporting cast of hangers-on, sucking the juice out of the agencies we support with taxes. Trump’s arrival might be the best chance to peel this back...
Fine, but do you know what the Department of Energy actually does - where it's real money actually goes?
Answer, very little of DOE's money goes to [wasted] energy programs because mostly what DOE does is nuclear weapons. It is the civilian agency heir to the atomic energy commission. That part is not well-managed either, but DOE does not do what you or Sarah Palin think it does.
And no serious person cognizant of the DOD acquisition scandal thinks that moving this function to DOD would be a cost saving efficiency.
The problem is not actually that the federal agencies don't have legitimate and necessary functions and missions. The problem is that they do them all uniformly badly. The termites have rotted out the foundations of the government everywhere, and the rats are in the granaries eating the seed corn. Democrats and Republicans have shared equally in the despoliation of the commons.
The point of private contracting should be to deliver more for less, not substitute an overbloated government bureaucracy with an overcharging private monopoly.
They don’t call it (and a bunch of others) Crystal City for nothing. It is disgusting. It’s like that Capitol City in Hunger Games (Panem?), IMO.
I’ve lived in and around DC for fifty years now. During that time it’s grown from an easily manageable big town or small city to very much a big, metropolitan city. What used to be a ride out to the country is now a daily commute, within the confines of the limited Metro system.
While so many saw the rest of the country suffer economically, with businesses closing, there were few, if any, similar signs in this area. Shopping malls housing Bloomingdales, Nordstrom and Tiffany continued to bustle, with parking lots full of BMWs, Mercedes and Audis ... and Expeditions. Not only did the denizens not notice, they didn’t care.
It’s past time to create economic growth in spheres and locales other than the federal government and Metro DC.
Well that is what has happened. It began under Clinton, with Al Gore's reinventing government, bringing the efficiency of crony capitalism to government operations. Bush / Cheney continued it. The Halliburton scandal is real. It's just that at that point everyone was doing it. Why have a soldier do something when a private contractor could do it at 10 times the cost.
Total federal employment has not increased in years. Salaries have been pretty well capped for a decade or more. Where your money is going is to the private cronies.
All good intentions... till the 17th Amendment is repealed the construct for a massive federal government will remain... The 17th Amendment is the framework for what we have now...a large non-functional central government run by the Uni-party.
The 16th Amendment fuels its growth from the hard work of the “little guy” taxpayer.
Till either both or one of those Amendments are repealed... we, as a country live in a failing democracy, not a Republic... democracies never end well per history.
:Large governments are a cancer to capitalism as they feed on normal economic policies and bastardize the entire system.
I agree there are some functions of DOE that are worthwhile and need to be kept alive. These probably represent a small chunk of the agency’s budget.
I don’t agree with cutting government salaries across the board. Unions are perfectly ok with falling together. What they really hate is individualism.
They should be expected to perform at a high standard and if they don’t they should be fired. If they do better, they have a chance at a raise.
Governor Mitch Daniels once tried to contract welfare services to IBM. They did a horrible job so he challenged the government unions to see if they could do a better job again and they did. That is the real point of privatization, that you won’t be protected if you fail to perform.
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