Biggest government outrages of the year

A lot of ink has been spent hashing out whether the impending health reform bill is the end of civilization as we know it, but here are three under-reported factoids that deserve a little more attention.

1) After Citigroup and other banks repaid $116 billion of the TARP bailout money, Congress decided to turn the money into a slush fund instead of returning it to the treasury.

This epitomizes what is wrong with our big, corrupt government and the clowns who run it. It was bad enough for the Treasury Secretary to scare us into spending $700 billion of borrowed money bailing out companies who ran their business into the ground. Now that the banks are paying us back, we should be paying down our skyrocketing debt. But Congress is acting like they just found a pile of money under the mattress. I guess they forgot that the taxpayers will have to pay it back some day. Pelosi/Reid are defending their actions by saying that the money will be used to create jobs. I contend that the only jobs those bozos know how to create are government jobs. This leads in nicely into item two:

2) Federal workers enjoyed a giant salary increase in the middle of the worst recession of our generation.

19 percent of federal workers earned six figure salaries in '09, compared with 14 percent the year before. The average federal worker now earns about $70,000 a year, compared with around $40,000 for the average private sector worker.

Personally, I'm tired of hearing the phony outrage about the obscene salaries and bonuses that CEO's are making. If you're offended by what a corporation is paying its top executives, don't invest in their stock. Don't buy their products. At least corporations theoretically have to answer to their shareholders for how they compensate their employees. If a business is losing money, everyone has to tighten their belts. Now tell me, who does the government have to answer to when it sets pay for its workers? Whether our government is effective or not, Congress just keeps hiking the federal budget. If they run out of money, they just increase our debt, or raise taxes. If I don't like the job the government is doing, I don't have the option to withhold my money from them. All I can do is vote the spenders out of office. However, since we are on the brink of having the majority of voters get more in government services than what they pay for, I don't think my vote is going to count for much.

3) The federal debt is now $12.2 trillion, and Congress is trying to raise the debt ceiling to $14 trillion.

$12 trillion is a pretty abstract number, so let me put it in context. The government would have to take all the profits of all the Fortune 500 companies for the next 145 years to pay off that debt, not including the new interest costs. We will NEVER, EVER pay off that debt. That's not a problem as long as the world continues buying T-bills. But just remember, they are only interested in keeping us afloat as long as we are the biggest consumers around. Once Europe and the developing nations are able to sustain their economies by buying and selling from each other, they'll dump us. If we continue using the money we're printing to pay off Wall Street and foreign speculators instead of producing real goods and services, we could be in for Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation. So just remember that the next time these spendthrift Democrats tell you about some new plan to pour money into a government black hole.