Posted on 02/11/2008 5:12:32 AM PST by Dukes Travels
If you want to be president of the United States, it is a good thing to tell the electorate the federal government is too big and you will shrink it. Yet if you are president of the United States, you may find this impossibly hard to achieve.
The problem has two dimensions. First, the great sprawling bureaucracy that is the U.S. Civil Service has, on average, very low productivity. Second, the population is always calling for more government services, not fewer.
In the private sector, the size and cost of the federal government could be reduced by demanding higher productivity and dismissing poor performers. But in the federal bureaucracy, it is nearly impossible to do so. In the private sector, the possibility of losing your job is an ever-present factor. Federal employees have de facto lifetime employment. Unable to introduce the fear-of-firing as a disciplinary tool, reformers have instituted performance bonuses to shake up the federal bureaucracy. But they have not worked.
(Excerpt) Read more at northstarwriters.com ...
lets see.....the civil service has low productivity...what happens in the private sector...you get fired...let’s try that one, ya know, accountability for your job..
The federal government is a massive violation of the Third Amendment.
Accountability and the Government? The hell you say!
I know...it is a novel idea ;)
Pare it down with a meat axe.
Reduce legislative staffs by 75%.
Eliminate the DOE. (Among others.)
I believe that the Founders may have recognized the syndrome that we are being subjected(!) to, and acted on it: We're going to end up paying for government salaries, benefits and retirement with our tax dollars, but there'll be precious little money left over to ACTUALLY provide the demanded services...
For example, in our state, the county road commissions are crying that they have no money left for snow-plowing the roads. They want to raise the state gasoline tax (which hasn't been raised in ten years).
The problem is, the state government is stealing the present gasoline tax and dumping it into the general fund, and giving back just a little to the county road commissions. Also, the state is pocketing the state sales tax on gasoline sales (the state sales tax has TRIPLED in those same ten years, and the price of gasoline per gallon has more than doubled, and the road commissions would be ROLLING in dough if they got even half of it...).
To top it all off, our state levies sales tax on the FEDERAL gasoline tax!
...But our county road commissions are broke, and we need to raise taxes...
That’s pretty funny, but I’d like to here your arguments.
Instead of actually quartering soldiers in people's homes to monitor their government sentiments, you declare their homes to be government property, and charge the former owners RENT (in the form of property taxes).
Then, you tax ANY "income" (and have a five or six thousand page manual that nobody understands to define said "income").
Finally, you take the money thus gained and set up a standing army, and install an ever-increasing bureacrazy of well-paid government officials, quartered in their own little mansions, eating the bountiful provender provided by YOUR tax dollars, and resting easy in the knowledge that their health care and pensions are secured by YOUR sweat.
Then, you pass a bunch of laws that enable you to monitor the anti-government & anti-taxation sentiments of the serfs at your whim, and the standing army (which is also housed and fed by the same mechanism) is at your beck and call if needed. [How many cops showed up to snuff out that SINGLE crazy in Los Angeles last week? 200? And they were backed up by the National Guard, if needed, and the U.S. military, if needed...]
Penumbras and emanations, and all that.
What's pretty funny about the scheme is that nobody is on to it - we're all the Wild Pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp...
Actually Article I, Sec. 8
True, but it's not as catchy as arguing what I argued in post #10.
Think about it:
How many of the Founders a) lost their homes because of unpaid property taxes and/or b) were imprisoned for income tax evasion?
The modern QuarterMeisters had to wait till the Founders were dead 100 years before they started pulling this crap.
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