Bloated Government

Washington doesn’t have a budget deficit problem, it has a spending problem. Every elected official including our own go to Washington to bring back the money we shouldn’t have sent them in the first place. Using an average for every dollar we send as taxes to Washington, 30% of that dollar is used up as operating expense and overhead. So every elected official in every state tries to bring back that reduced portion in any way they can, highway dollars, education dollars, food stamp program dollars, museum dollars, safety dollars and a zillion other project dollars, some necessary and a whole lot not necessary. Each community would be better off keeping more of the whole dollar and using local expertise to determine how to spend it.

Here are some examples of our bloated federal government: The USDA was created in 1862 when more than 80% of all American families earned their living from the land. Today that figure is 1%. Most of departments could be eliminated or transferred to the Dept. of Interior. The USDA and the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services are among 16 different agencies involved with food safety. (I’m not going to talk about our subsidized agriculture products because it is apparently too painful to go to a free market where third world countries could compete against our exports. Please don’t call me to debate this statement because I am a good reader with a fair modicum of common sense!!)

The federal education bureaucracy runs more than 788 programs in 40 different agencies at an annual cost of over one billion dollars per agency. Programs to address problems associated with juveniles stretch over 10 departments, 3 independent agencies one federal commission and one quasi-official agency. Separately, they administer 131 juvenile programs and cost over 4 billion dollars annually. There are 342 economic development programs managed by 13 agencies with little or no coordination.

At least 70 programs across 57 different departments and agencies receive more than 16 billion dollars a year to fight illegal drug use. Among the most blatant examples of government waste and mismanagement are the 19 drug “intelligence center” dispersed among 10 departments. Much of the information gathered is “off limits” to other agencies. (Our battle to stop drug user growth, drug imports and distribution to the end user, is a colossal failure. But those in authority refuse to admit it because such a huge number of bureaucracies have been created that it would be next to impossible to move that money into prevention and treatment programs. Someday, someone will have the guts to try.)

(Most of this information was taken from a syndicated columnist who occasionally appears in the JS. He is far too conservative to appear as frequently in the JS as say the liberal Clarence Pitts.)

These next statements come from an article in the WSJ 7/18/05. “In any given year the National Institute of Mental Health supports between 10 to 20 studies of pigeons, its portfolio bulges with grants given to examine marriage, adolescence, happiness and other aspects of human behavior. Now in its 19th year one noteworthy award fuels the quest to determine why male Japanese quails are attracted to female Japanese quails”.

The National Science Foundation was created to fund basic research, such as how pigeons think.

On economic grounds alone, NIMH’s failure to do more research on severe mental illness is foolish; they should also be working on is whether bipolar disorder is increasing in children, whether SSRI antidepressants really cause suicides, or how to find more effective drugs to treating schizophrenia. The annual cost of these illnesses is now more than 40 billion in federal Medicaid, Medicare, SSI and SSDI funds and is rising.

As a Peoria County Board member, I accept part of the blame for our County Budget growing to almost $100,000,000 dollars. The public has to give me support by insisting that more government functions should be bid out, privatized or combined. Spending will not stop until those in the private sector insist on changes needed to make government smaller and less costly.

My next blog will be on an article on how New Zealand rolled back government.