Like denverpilot said, we all have blood in our hands, it's not just govt. When you're in a subsidized industry to any degree, you're just as much a leech as the "urban" TSA GS-7. This is Shawshank, we're all "innocent" here buddy. Food and hospitality business owners calling their govt worker and oil rig job clients "leeches", that's how g-d cognitive dissonant this place is sometimes.
I don't know I'd say that was the intent of my post, but I guess it works. My point was not that "good gub'mint jobs" are bad or unneeded necessarily (some aren't), but that we've totally lost control of spending on them, meaning by default we aren't making any real priority decisions on which ones to keep and which ones to toss.
We're all, every Citizen, roughly $45,000 in the hole and that number is growing very rapidly. I know personally that a concentrated effort to pay off over $30,000 in consumer debt took me roughly ten years making a GOOD salary but having "over-bought" in housing and other big ticket items that we weren't willing to part with.
It's really hard to find individuals that haven't benefitted in some way from government spending, is always the argument -- which is completely true, of course. That's the whole point of it, when done right. Maximum good for maximum Citizens.
The problem I have is that the spending is at this point, quite literally, out of control. There's politicians who wrangle over where to spend, but virtually none who don't spend like drunken sailors on shore leave, when the actual votes are cast.
And with an essentially two Party system of two Parties that only spend, not cut (going back and forth cutting the other Party's "favorite stuff" in alternating fashion, is not cuts, it's just a pendulum swinging back and forth), I see no end to adding to the annual deficit, nor reducing the debt load.
Obviously some deficit spending and some level of debt is reasonable, but it's pretty obvious that there's plenty of unreasonable results and outcomes from it all. All do-able because the money flows too freely.
The proof, as one person has pointed out, is in the pudding of just how much is taken from someone with an average salary or business. It's hitting levels where with salary stagnation for most people, that taxes are eating into the ability to have reasonable discretionary income for low salaries, and really good discretionary income levels for those who bust their butts.
In the end, we don't have control over our shared priorities or a sense of what government should do and what it shouldn't. Everything is ripe for government intervention and subsidies for stuff of questionable real and sometimes moral value.
That $45,000 doesn't include the likely bailouts for stuff like underwater pension funds and the trillion or so dollars that will likely be defaulted upon by college graduates of dubious degree programs who'll be unable to make a salary capable of paying back the cost of their education.
I don't even have a problem with the kids who want Grandpa Bernie to give it to them for free, or any of the other social mandates -- I just want to see a real plan on how they're going to be funded and sustained. In other words, "What are you willing to give up to have that?" Just like real world household budgets.
Anyone who's lived through digging out of massive personal debt and didn't take the easy way out with a bankruptcy car wash (which granted, are easier and more effective for a business than an individual), just isn't ever going to be a super-fan of the poor budgetary discipline of bureaucracies. We could chop the Federal budget by about half and everyone would still be living the life of a Prince or Princess compared with developing nations -- but we're all pretty much spoiled brats at this point, "needing" way more things than we should.
I know plenty of private sector folks who'd nearly kill for the terms of employment many have in some of the government's largest bureaucracies. I would normally say me included, but after long thought on it over the years, I wouldn't trade my knowledge and experience of what destroys a company and leads to 400 of 500 laid off without warning. Nor the ability to see and recognize fiscal risk in the private sector that it gave me.
That same sense of risk also makes it really hard to ignore the Master Caution light and alarm going off regularly about these over-funded government things that don't return or add as much value as they cost. Too much waste and not enough "we can't afford that, here's what's more important to everyone" overall.
It'd be fascinating to see how fast we'd get control of the spending if the IRS couldn't collect automatically from payroll deduction but instead had to get a check from everyone monthly that they had to write.
But obviously I'm not holding my breath on that brilliant piece of social engineering going away. There are still people who think they're getting a great deal when they get their "tax refund" every year. They often have no idea what they actually paid for their own government services and wouldn't ever think of bottom line calculations and/or just reading their pay stubs or the real number on their 1040 every year. It's a LOT of money.
Most folks with a bill that high personally, look for less expensive and more efficient use of money. And they cut non-essential things out of their budget.
