Posted on 03/24/2025 6:25:45 PM PDT by asinclair
Taxes and the Peter Principle: it's been quite a few years since Laurence J. Peter wrote his book about the result of uncontrolled promotions in an organization. What struck me is that this Principle can also be applied to uncontrolled debt spending by government.
Why talk about this? I was looking at the Debt Clock, and wondering how we got to where we owed more than the national Gross Domestic Product, and how taxes at all levels continue to grow to just below the breaking point for most people. It was then that I was reminded of this Principle, and started me thinking.
Back in the toddler days of the United States, government followed the small-government model as formulated by the Founding Fathers. Think of the rural community, wanting to improve education for their children. The town fathers would bring the people together to build a schoolhouse and hire a teacher. Simple, and affordable by the residents of the town. Then the Peter Principle kicked in: the monster started to grow and metastasized. Which lead Mark Twain to observe, "in the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
This cancer grew in other parts of the United States government structure. The cancer feeds on the taxpayer, nibbling continuously until the patient (middle class) gets so sick that it all but dies off. The Peter Principle opines that taxes will grow up to, hopefully only near, the breaking point.
Spending outstrips collection. The Congress starts running out of things to tax. But that doesn't stop the ballooning payouts. Instead, our Congresspeople decide to declare war on everything under the sun and start borrowing. And borrowing. Unchecked, they max out the Federal credit card. And beyond.
Spending "for the public good" wasn't enough. Graft is currently out of control.
We were not supposed to have career politicians. Now the political class has risen to their level of incompetence. (And to an alarming level of incompetence when it comes to honor and ethics, which was not part of the original Principle.)
To fix this, radical surgery is required. Just as a company, burdened with useless overhead, has to declare bankruptcy and start over, the Federal government is going to have to undergo a major bureaucrat-ectomy. Its statutes and regulations also need a severe pruning. And I don't envy the Treasury's job to try to manage the outsized debt obligation, which has risen to at least three hundred thousand dollars per taxpayer.
And, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, "and so it goes."
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/4306256/posts
Commerce Secretary Lutnick shares some promising ideas to deal with the problem.
This is what it looks like when the money starts to dry up.
We’ve all known that at some point someone would have to slash spending, people wouldn’t buy our bonds or we’d have to offer insane yields to get people to buy our bonds.
We were warned this was coming a third of a century ago.
I guess we will soon figure out who was getting the kickbacks from USAID when multimillion dollar mansions and yachts hit the market.
But it never runs out of things to spend on.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.