Why are more people working for the government than in the private sector? I want to describe what I call the political money cycle. It is the Mother's Milk of Big Government.
It is getting frightening the extent the monster of Big Government has grown. I want to describe what I think is the workings of the government political money cycle. It describes the public union/representative symbiosis as well as the huge lobby industry. It applies to both Democrats and Republicans:
The people’s representative enables government contracts and grant money to go out to a body of recipients. These contracts and grant money, of course, represents your tax dollars. The recipients of this tax money, to insure continued receipt of contracts or grant money, send campaign contributions back to their political benefactors. It cannot be emphasized enough that such campaign contribution “kickbacks” are in actuality, your tax money being recycled back to the representative. What they represent are an incentive to the politician to increase the cost of government so that the flow of these kickbacks can grow. This money is called the politician’s War Chest. Let’s take a closer look at the War Chest.
The War Chest is that sum of money, from political kickbacks and donations from the electorate. This sum of money does not sit in some bank until it is spent on the cost of a campaign. No, this money is being invested in the money market. Usually, the politician has good advice from his “friends” on where to invest that money. You can be certain that these War Chests are much larger than the amount accounted by the Public Disclosure Reports. In fact, over the years a politician is in office, they can amass millions in market growth. This the true power of the incumbent. It makes the idea of being in office without term limits a very lucrative business. It cannot be emphasized enough that all of this wealth generation is from tax money and donations. All of that money is an encouragement to the politician to grow more government and increase the level of taxation for their own personal wealth. Personal wealth? Yes, all the politician has to account for is what is stated by the Public Disclosure Reports. The wealth generated by that money is between public official and the IRS. I emphasize that the publicly stated value of the War Chest is not the true value of the War Chest. I am not even certain if that money needs to be reported to the IRS. I can imagine these politicians have a law that makes them exempt. Some Freeper out there may know more about that.
The more I think about this political money cycle, the more concerned for this nation I become. I hope it provides something someone can chew on and think of a way to break this political money cycle that encourages runaway government spending.
I learned something very similar to your line of thinking at a TeaParty educational seminar.
The thought process that was explained to us was quite simple - that our representative government no longer represents us. That instead, it represents various industries and their lobby’s, because once a group makes their initial contribution to a candidate/representative, that they never have to make it again with THEIR money. This is because the representative repays his/her “debt” to these contributors with tax breaks, kickbacks, and the like, (using money acquired from our taxes of course).
So, with their one time expenditure/investment, the contributors have primed the pump, and they never have to dip into their own capitol again.
Further, the “representative” becomes much more interested in representing these contributors in order to continue receiving ever increasing amounts of monetary support from said contributors, than from representing us.
*Cue the Ned Beatty clip from, “Network”.
Pretty bleak stuff indeed, FRiend.
May God give us strength, and guide our course.
Tatt