Tax and Spend

Government spending makes us all poorer.

"According to the Census Bureau, the federal government employed 2.8 million individuals in 2011. Another 19.2 million people worked for state and local governments. And what do these 22 million produce? Nothing but stacks of forms and regulations governing almost every aspect of our lives. A quick trip to your local government building will verify this fact. "

That isn't just waste. Bureaucrats make the rest of us less productive too.

"An additional 1.4 million wake up in the morning donning one of the uniforms associated with the US military. People in the armed forces not only produce zero for human consumption, they actually destroy the land, labor, and capital necessary for the creation of goods and services that help satisfy human wants."

That's just waste.

"Furthermore, the productive sector must hire legions of workers to fill out paperwork that the non-producing bureaucrats require businesses to answer. Firms have entire floors of people that do nothing all day but reply to the demands of non-producing paper-pushers sitting in government buildings."

Government bureaucracy creates a mirror bureaucracy in the private sector.

"As for land, The Daily Paul estimates that the federal government alone owns 30 percent of the land in the United States upon which sit military bases, government buildings, national parks and areas where human activity is banned. Though estimates for state and local government property ownership are less reliable, one can easily imagine the percentage to be at least a third of that controlled by the federal government, which means government at every level controls at minimum 40 percent of the land mass in the country. "

More waste.

"Just like the Roman gazing at the wonder of the Colosseum during the times of Emperor Vespasian, citizens in countries around the world stare in awe at government buildings, the residences of presidents and monarchs, and monuments commemorating some national event or paying homage to a political figure. The building material, wiring, flooring, and equipment used for construction could have been used to make a good to satisfy the wants of the average person. We post pictures to Facebook pages showing us standing before grandiose government buildings, but we never see the other side of the coin: someone doing without, because the resources that could have served his needs were embedded in a tribute to state arrogance."

I just wrote an essay about that.

Big spending Republicans - that's pretty much all of them - won't vote for cuts, splitting the House majority. Claim that Paul Ryan's budget is the problem even though it cuts nothing.

"What happened here? This bill to fund the THUD served as Republicans' starting point in negotiations with Democrats. The GOP used the Ryan budget — which it passed more than four months ago — as a blueprint for the cuts they would need to make.
But the problem with Ryan's budget is that it works in abstractions, and is never binding. And Republicans learned that, for the sake of saving face while going back to their districts, the heavy cuts projected in the Ryan budget just weren't workable. "

There are no cuts. This is a great victory for crony government. Republicans are destroying their chance to make gains in 2014.

Reporter obtains three Obamaphones.