Read it.

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Helena Pitcock, a former USDA employee who was with the agency for 32 years and who worked as a farm loan manager, says that knowledge of massive fraud in the Pigford ‘black farmers’ settlement program was widely known inside the agency.

This admission comes among other blockbuster revelations about the multi-billion dollar stealth reparations scheme that Breitbart News has exposing for several years, including a description of how the Pigford scheme was kept alive by Senator Barack Obama in 2007.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Pigford was one of the more blatant racist vote-buying schemes that the Democrats have ever done, although I’m sure that they have others in the pipeline … like this one.

Read it. And watch the video.

SoloPower, a California based solar panel company that received hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal incentives, is struggling to stay afloat amid production delays, a leadership exodus and layoffs.

Yet another waste of taxpayer money attempting to push a rope in a real world that simply doesn’t give a damn about ‘green’ energy until it can be competitive with existing sources.

Read it.

Fraud could be a major reason that the number of people enrolled in Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) has risen so dramatically over the past 10 years, according to two letters written by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The number of enrollees in the program grew by almost 60 percent between 2003 and 2012, from 5.58 million to 8.82 million people, the March 11 letter to acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration Carolyn Colvin says. This rate of growth is twice what the previous decade experienced.

Gotta have that disability money to go with your Obama Phone.

For example, some people receive SSDI before receiving a Commercial Drivers License, which requires a rigorous physical exam—indicating that they are not disabled. And some people simply lie about their income to receive the benefits, according to the chairmen.

Oh, say it ain’t so.

Read it.

Government-mandated and union-backed project labor agreements (PLAs) are increasing costs on taxpayer-funded projects across the country even as local, state, and federal governments face a budget crunch.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Buying votes with taxpayer money is what politicians do best, and unions have a lot of votes to sell … and they don’t come cheap.

Read it.

Grade-schoolers may want to stock up on Rice Krispies, Fruit Roll-Ups, Doritos, Welch’s Fruit Snacks and Smartfood white-cheddar popcorn. Those products are among scores of popular food items that may no longer be sold at schools under newly proposed federal regulations.

You may ask: What business is it of the Federal government what food items are sold at schools? That’s a very good question.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture last month released draft rules, spelling out what kinds of foods may or may not be purchased on school grounds under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

Of course! The way to Hunger-Free Kids is to ban them from eating certain types of food. Hmm … not sure I follow that one….

Signed by President Barack Obama, the law aims to reduce childhood obesity. It imposes healthier food standards on schools participating in the federally subsidized breakfast and lunch programs administered by the USDA, covering most of the public education system.

Ah. They take government money for ‘subsidized breakfast and lunch programs’, so they dance to the government’s tune.

The agency laid out a complex set of criteria for determining what foods can be sold.  (It also estimated the number of extra man-hours a year that local and state administrators nationwide would have to spend on compliance:  926,935 hours or more than 100 years.)

Well, of course. It’s the government: Paperwork-R-Us. Sounds like yet another reason to keep your kids away from government schools.

A person claiming to be a teacher from North Carolina took a dimmer view, likening the regulations to “Soviet Russia.”

Ya think?

Read it.

The latest 2012 salary figures released by the White House show 20 staffers were making the maximum $172,200. Many of them are well-known President Obama aides, including Press Secretary Jay Carney and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. Most carry the title of “assistant to the president.”

But underneath them are dozens of “deputy” assistants and “special” assistants to the president, most making six-figure salaries — like the climate change advisers. A review of the 2012 salaries by FoxNews.com shows 139 White House staffers making $100,000 or more.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Two ethics advisers each make close to $140,000.

Guess they couldn’t afford good ones.

Read it.

The same week that President Obama’s administration announced that due to sequestration, White House tours would be cancelled, sources at the White House announced that it would be hosting megastars Adele and Beyonce at Michelle’s 50th birthday party next year. “America’s First Lady will be holding a huge celebrity-packed party for her birthday at the White House next year and, as she adores Adele and Beyonce, she has asked them both to sing,” the source told the UK Daily Mail. The source did say that “The Obamas will pay Adele’s expenses as it’s a private party, not a State one.”

But will they pay all the expenses of the party? Security arrangements? Food? Cleanup? White House parties are expensive affairs.

Reminds me of a story — oh, yes:

And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. The rich [man] had exceeding many flocks and herds: But the poor [man] had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man’s lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. — 2 Samuel 12:1-5

Obama and the Democrats sittin’ in a tree — A.S.S.H.O.L.E….

Read it.

An undercover Transportation Security Administration inspector reportedly brought a mock improvised explosive device stashed in his pants through two layers of security and was cleared to board a commercial flight last month.

The New York Post reports that the TSA’s special operations team staged a mock intrusion at the airport on Feb. 25. The inspector brought the mock “bomb” through a magnetometer, which failed to detect the device, a source told the paper.

The other security check that failed to catch the mock device was a pat-down, according to the report.

Welcome to Security Theater. The purpose of the TSA is not to protect airplanes from terrorists, but to inconvenience passengers while soaking up taxpayer money and providing government jobs for union members. If they happen to catch any bad guys, well, that’s gravy that can be used for propaganda purposes to get more money. Is this a great country, or what?

Read it.

Visitors to the nation’s capital looking for a White House public tour are out of luck starting this weekend, courtesy of what the Secret Service says is its own decision to deal with the sequester cuts.

But while the agency said it needed to pull officers off the tours for more pressing assignments, the budget ax didn’t swing early or deep enough to curtail a host of recent Secret Service-chaperoned trips like President Obama’s much-discussed Florida golf outing with Tiger Woods and first lady Michelle Obama’s high-profile multi-city media appearances.

Guess the Obamas haven’t heard that the government is out of money.

Read it.

Another federal employee has come forward to claim the Obama administration resisted efforts to ease the impact of sequester.

A U.S. park ranger, who did not wish to be identified, told FoxNews.com that supervisors within the National Park Service overruled plans to deal with the budget cuts in a way that would have had minimal impact on the public. Instead, the source said, park staff were told to cancel special events and cut “interpretation services” — the talks, tours and other education services provided by local park rangers.

“Apparently, they want the public to feel the pain,” the ranger said.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. Another peek into the kleptocratic state being run out of the Obama White House.

Any business under financial pressure will try to cut areas that don’t affect customers. But customer are the people who bring in the money, and (in the case of government) their customers aren’t the public that they allegedly serve but rather the legislators that fund them, so the way they get more money is by having the herd bellowing and threatening to stampede. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

Read it.

In the next few days, the Obama Administration will cancel self-guided tours of the White House. The cancellation comes in the wake of the White House having to trim around $600,000 from its annual budget. If anyone on the West Coast was planning a trip to DC next week, perhaps they can instead snag a seat at one of two wine tastings, sponsored by the Agriculture Department. Spending cuts for thee, but not for me is the Obama Administration’s approach to the sequester.

Next week, the USDA is sponsoring a California Small Farm Conference, which will featuring tasting receptions of regional vineyards and breweries. Next month, the agency is sponsoring the Priester National Extension Health Conference in Oregon. That event will also feature a wine tasting from local vineyards.

We can still spend money on frivolous shit, so long as it only benefits government employees and not the public. Don’t want to lose track of our priorities, after all.

Read it.

The American Action Forum estimates the regulations, which include caps on serving sizes and calorie counts, will cost schools $127 million and require more than 926,000 hours of paperwork.

Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at the institute, says the proposals amount to yet another unfunded federal mandate for state and local governments, “at a time when many of their budgets are still struggling.”

Well, if the school doesn’t take Federal funds for feeding their kids, then they won’t be subject to the regulations, will they? “Oh, but we couldn’t do that!” Of course not.

Read it.

Hey, somebody has to pay for cracking down on opposition protestors, oppressing Christians, and unleashing Sharia morality police on the populace. All that doesn’t come cheap.

Well, that didn’t take long.

Read it.

As the federal budget goes off the rails, Joe Biden’s getting back on — with Amtrak.

The looming sequester is forcing the veep to once again take the train — as opposed to military aircraft — to his weekend trips home to Delaware.

Poor baby.

Read it.

Two high-tech luxury jets that the FBI convinced Congress were needed for the fight against global terrorism have instead been used to ferry around Attorney General Eric Holder and his predecessors, as well as FBI Director Robert Mueller, according to a government report released Thursday.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Heather Mac Donald has a modest proposal.

  Ax the “diversity” bureaucracy. In 2012, the Pentagon spent $570,000 on a Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan that, as usual, replicated a chain of stultifyingly identical diversity efforts, including the 2011 final report of the Military Leadership Diversity Commission on strategies for enhancing on-going diversity efforts (the report, From Representation to Inclusion: Diversity Leadership for the 21st Century Military, contained such diversity chestnuts as “a new definition of diversity for the 21st century,” and recommendations regarding “metrics,” “diversity leadership and training,” “promotion,” and “recruiting”); the 2011 Office of Personnel Management “Government-Wide Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan; DOD’s 2009 Report to the White House Council on Women and Girls; and a 2007 RAND report, Planning for Diversity: Options and Recommendations for DOD Leaders. Put the Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS), and Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO) on starvation diets. Suspend the Women’s Equality Day and Women’s History Month celebrations, the Latina Style Symposium, and the Women of Color Technology Awards.

Mark Steyn examines the wacky world of government.

The federal bureaucracy, per President Obama’s executive order, is as a matter of policy not enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. Nevertheless, midst all the various activities of Undocumented-Americans to which the government remains indifferent (vehicular homicide, drug dealing, etc.), there are some national-security threats that are too serious to ignore — such as home schooling. So the feds have spared no expense in hunting down a handful of foreigners they’re determined to deport.

Richard Epstein point out some inconvenient truth.

We should be uneasy about any and all income declines, period. But, by the same token, we should collectively be pleased by increases in income at the top, so long as they were not caused by taking, whether through taxation or regulation, from individuals at the bottom.

This conclusion rests on the notion of a Pareto improvement, which favors any changes in overall utility or wealth that make at least one person better off without making anyone else worse off. By that measure, there would be an unambiguous social improvement if the income of the wealthy went up by 100 percent so long as the income of those at the bottom end did not, as a consequence, go down. That same measure would, of course, applaud gains in the income of the 99 percent so long as the income of the top 1 percent did not fall either.

This line of thought is quite alien to thinkers like Saez, who view the excessive concentration of income as a harm even if it results from a Pareto improvement. Any center for “equitable growth” has to pay as much attention to the first constraint as it does to the second. Under Saez’s view of equity, it is better to narrow the gap between the top and the bottom than to increase the overall wealth.

In other words, the Berkeley Professor’s program is based on ideology, not science. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The real motivation is the undoubted fact that any scheme of ‘take from the rich, give to the poor’ has the invisible but very real third clause ‘let government employees wet their beaks’. As in class action suits where the lawyers get millions while the alleged beneficiaries get a coupon for some cheap stuff, government income redistribution programs benefit plan administrators a lot and ‘the poor’ very little — aside from the rampant fraud and abuse that always occurs.

The blunt truth remains that any government-mandated leveling in society will be a leveling down. There is no sustainable way to make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. But increased regulation and taxation will make both groups poorer. Negative growth hardly becomes equitable if a larger fraction of the decline is concentrated at the top earners.

Read it.

The federal investigation into the relationship between Democratic donor Dr. Salomon Melgen and Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) has exposed the rampant culture of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which by some estimates cost taxpayers as much as $98 billion in fiscal year 2011.

The raid by the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) of Melgen’s eye center in Florida spanned two days in late January. The involvement of HHS indicated “the search-and-seizure raid has ties to a possible Medicare fraud inquiry,” the Miami Herald reported. The FBI reportedly went in after authorities spotted a shredding truck; boxes and bags of evidence were removed from Melgen’s office.

Read it.

Because the Obama administration classified the shootings, which ended with 13 people dead and 32 others wounded, as workplace violence, those who survived have not receive Purple Hearts and medical benefits normally extended to people wounded in action.

Why, sure — everybody Going Postal in the workplace is of Arabic descent and shouts ‘Allahu Akbar!’ when they’re shooting up the local grocery store. Nothing to see here, move along, move along….

Read it.

“Only the government could spend $150 million to start a battery company and not come up with a single battery,” Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) said. Pompeo has introduced legislation to end all energy tax credits.

“The president last night during his State of the Union address remained confident he could continue to pick winners and losers,” Pompeo said. “No wonder we’re $16 trillion in debt.”

Read it.

Billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being wasted in Afghanistan on fruitless reconstruction projects that are awash in corruption and have little government oversight, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

Additionally, lack of oversight may have led to the United States funding the purchase of Iranian oil in direct violation of sanctions against Iran.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion last year to provide phones to low-income Americans, but a Wall Street Journal review of the program shows that a large number of those who received the phones haven’t proved they are eligible to receive them.

And why should they? It’s the Free Obama Phone!

The Lifeline program—begun in 1984 to ensure that poor people aren’t cut off from jobs, families and emergency services—is funded by charges that appear on the monthly bills of every landline and wireless-phone customer. Payouts under the program have shot up from $819 million in 2008, as more wireless carriers have persuaded regulators to let them offer the service.

Isn’t that what government is all about? Taking money from wage-earners and giving it to freeloaders?

Read it.

Funny how everybody wrings their hands over ‘cold-hearted capitalism’ and nobody ever mentions how callous government employees can be (and typically are). This is a town run by Democrats, the Party of Compasson.

Read it.

If you’re already feeling nostalgia over the recent ending of National School Choice Week, take heart – there’s always a new horror to uncover connected to the operations of our public education system. Auditors have discovered that some of California’s largest school districts are skimming money meant to pay for meals for low-income students and spending it elsewhere.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The state Senate report concluded that the eight California school districts examined dramatically understaffed school cafeterias and tended to serve processed foods rather than more expensive fresh foods. Consequently, they were able to hoard large sums of federal and state student meal money that they then diverted to illegal uses, the report said.

Read it.

No, but the New World Order certainly does. We’re just trying to help out….

– $80,000 study on why the same teams always dominate March Madness;

– $315,000 study suggesting playing FarmVille on Facebook helps adults develop and maintain relationships;

– $1 million for an analysis of how quickly parents respond to trendy baby names;

– $50,000 to produce and publicize amateur songs about science, including a rap called “Money 4 Drugz,” and a misleading song titled “Biogas is a Gas, Gas, Gas”;

– $2 million to figure out that people who often post pictures on the internet from the same location at the same time are usually friends; and

– $581,000 on whether online dating site users are racist.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it. And watch the video.

KRQE-Albuquerque reported how New Mexico welfare recipients are taking advantage of a loophole that allow welfare dollars to withdrawn from ATMs.  Those recipients are spending their welfare dollars at stripclubs, bars, and racetracks.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

And I’d say more than half are underqualified for their jobs.

Vedder, whose study is based on 2010 Labor Department data, says the problem is the stock of college graduates in the workforce (41.7 million) in 2010 was larger than the number of jobs requiring a college degree (28.6 million).

And yet the government keeps pushing people into college — at taxpayer expense. One of the pervasive flaws in modern public policy is taxpayer-funded oversupply of politically fashionable goods, such as college graduates, ‘family’ farmers, school administrators, and (dare I say it?) government employees.

Read it.

Jobless Americans are paying millions in unnecessary fees to collect unemployment benefits because of state policies encouraging them to get the money through bank-issued payment cards, according to a new report from a consumer group.

People are using the fee-heavy cards instead of getting their payments deposited directly to their bank accounts. That’s because states issue bank cards automatically, require complicated paperwork or phone calls to set up direct deposit and fail to explain the card fees, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit group that seeks to protect low-income Americans from unfair financial-services products. An early copy of the report was obtained by the Associated Press.

It’s not about helping the jobless — it’s about making sure that government employees don’t join them. ‘Make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity; that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.’

Read it.

Jeff Counceller says a dying fawn he found on someone’s porch three years ago surely wouldn’t have lived had he and his wife not nursed it back to health on their eastern Indiana farm. The Connersville police officer insists they had no clue that they could be breaking the law.

The couple’s good deed put them at odds with the state Department of Natural Resources, and prosecutors earlier this month charged Jeff and Jennifer Counceller with illegal possession of a white-tailed deer, a misdemeanor that carries up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Read it.

The function of government is to hire and pay government workers. Government workers understand this even if you don’t.

Read it.

No good deed goes unpunished in New York: the state has abruptly cut off a contract with the independent auditor who found that the state had been wasting federal money meant to be spent on Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts.

Thomas Sadowski, the fired consultant, told the Times Union that he was escorted out of the building when he visited the New York Office of Emergency Management shortly after he filed his report on November 17.

The state hired Sadowski for his extensive experience in emergency procurement management with the federal government. The certified public accountant also did similar work for 10 years at the U.S. Department of Interior’s Inspector General’s office. Sadowski also trained the U.S. Forest Service, Alaska Fire Service, National Interagency Fire Center, Colorado Wildfire Academy, and other government agencies.

“I didn’t believe I did anything to be escorted off the premises,” Sadowski told the Times Union. “I wasn’t trying to get back at anybody or get anybody in trouble.” But Sadowski said he believed he was fired for finding the waste. “I was relieved of my duties because I identified these problems,” he said.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it. And watch the video.

Read it.

President Obama has signed a law that will give himself and all presidents Secret Service protection for life, reversing a law passed during the Clinton administration that gave former presidents a security detail for only 10 years after leaving office.

What does he know that you don’t, hmmm?

Read it.

The British regular forces are to receive their first new pistol since World War II, as the long-serving Browning 9mm sidearm is replaced by a new weapon from the well-known Austrian firm Glock.

At that, they’re still ahead of the American armed forces, which has used the 9mm Biretta M9 since 1980. There are plans afoot to pick a newer standard pistol — in fiscal year 2013-14 … if there are funds available to pay for the study.

The Glock has triple safety mechanisms which mean that its firing pin will not move forward unless the trigger is back, the trigger cannot be moved back unless a finger is pressing on its front and the weapon will not fire if dropped. The weapon’s hammer is internal, and as such cannot snag on clothing or be bumped inadvertently into a different position.

Glocks have been available commercially since 1982.

One of the most amusing aspects of all of these ‘CIA plot to do something nefarious’ movies (yeah, Jason Bourne, I’m lookin’ at YOU) that Hollywood keeps cranking out is the firm belief on the part of moviemakers  that government agencies not only have the latest and greatest toys to play with, but even better toys than civilians are allowed to have. Any government employee (and military service members are government employees) know that this is ludicrous nonsense — rare is the government organization that gets equipment that is only ten years behind what is available to civilians, much less better than.

Oh, ya think?

A lawsuit recently filed in the United States Court of Claims may shed further light on the corruption of the Obama administration’s “green energy” programs. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of XP Vehicles, Inc. and Limnia, Inc., companies that competed for Department of Energy loans under a Congressionally-authorized program. The owners of XP eventually realized that there was no real competition, and that the whole Department of Energy program was a scam intended to funnel money to Obama and Democratic Party campaign contributors and political allies. They allege in addition that DOE misappropriated proprietary technology that they submitted in connection with their loan applications, and gave that technology to Obama administration cronies.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

They’re on the dole — and watching the pole.

Welfare recipients took out cash at bars, liquor stores, X-rated video shops, hookah parlors and even strip clubs — where they presumably spent their taxpayer money on lap dances rather than diapers, a Post investigation found.

A database of 200 million Electronic Benefit Transfer records from January 2011 to July 2012, obtained by The Post through a Freedom of Information request, showed welfare recipients using their EBT cards to make dozens of cash withdrawals at ATMs inside Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn; the Blue Door Video porn shop in the East Village; The Anchor, a sleek SoHo lounge; the Patriot Saloon in TriBeCa; and Drinks Galore, a liquor distributor in The Bronx.

The state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA), which oversees the “cash assistance program,” even lists some of these welfare-ready ATMs on its Web site.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

The federal government has emerged as one of the most potent factors driving income inequality in the United States – especially in the nation’s capital.

The capital is totally under the control of the Federal government. If they can’t get D.C. right, why believe that they can get anything else right?

Read it.

 The cargo of the train was owned by Bioversal Trading Inc., or its US partner Verdero, depending on what stage of the trip it was at. The companies “made several million dollars importing and exporting the fuel to exploit a loophole in a U.S. green energy program.” Each time the loaded train crossed the border the cargo earned its owner a certain amount of Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs), which were awarded by the US EPA to “promote and track production and importation of renewable fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.” The RINs were supposed to be retired each time the shipment passed the border, but due to a glitch not all of them were. This enabled Bioversal to accumulate over 12 million RINs from the 24 trips, worth between 50 cents and $1 each, which they can then sell on to oil companies that haven’t met the EPA’s renewable fuel requirements…

Smart People doing Smart Things — at your expense. Aren’t you proud?

Read it.

In a classic tale illustrating the “law of unintended consequences,” a new report concludes that President Barack Obama’s $3 billion “Cash for Clunkers” taxpayer-funded boondoggle artificially drove car prices up, not down, and unleashed an “environmental nightmare” through shredding, not recycling, many of the 690,000 cars people traded in for an up to $4,500 car credit.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Boston’s Fox 25 reports that state officials in Massachusetts cannot confirm the location of 19,000 welfare recipients, which could be costing the taxpayers of Massachusetts roughly $7.6 million every month.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The Crust takes care of its own.

Read it.

In the town that launched the War on Poverty 48 years ago, the poor are getting poorer despite the government’s help. And the rich are getting richer because of it.

The top 5 percent of households in Washington, D.C., made more than $500,000 on average last year, while the bottom 20 percent earned less than $9,500 – a ratio of 54 to 1.

That’s because the Crust pay themselves first, and very well indeed. They don’t really care what happens to the poor; that’s just rhetoric to fool the Great Unwashed into keeping them in power with ‘low-information’ voting.

The federal government does redistribute wealth down to struggling Americans. But in the years since President Lyndon Johnson took aim at poverty in his first State of the Union address, there has been an increasingly strong crosscurrent: The government is redistributing wealth up, too – especially in the nation’s capital.

The beneficiaries are not the billionaire financiers and celebrities who have come to personify income inequality in the 21st century. Yet the Washington elite are just as much part of the trend, having influenced laws and decisions that alter the entire country’s distribution of income.

Government doesn’t alleviate poverty — to the extent that there is a bureaucracy dedicated to alleviating poverty, they will strive to preserve poverty in order to safeguard their own jobs and perks.

Read it.

It’s extremely hard to lose a government job, even when your poor performance results in the deaths of other Americans under your responsibility. Despite claims that heads were rolling after a report identified egregious security lapses in Benghazi, it appears the individuals responsible are merely being reassigned to new jobs.

The Crust takes care of its own. As John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: ‘GET A GOVERNMENT JOB!’

Read it.

The collapse of a government-subsidized battery manufacturer has caused the production of a government-subsidized electric car company to halt, raising questions about the government’s decision to support the two companies.

The problem when the government picks winners and losers is that the winners they pick far too often turn out to be losers. And we’re the ones who pay for the bureaucrats’ bad judgment.

Read it.

Are government employees overpaid? A six-part Bloomberg report answers that question with a resounding “Yes.” It also singles out one state as the biggest spender by far: California. This isn’t a case of a handful of isolated incidents. The team of Bloomberg reporters found a pattern of fiscal irresponsibility characterized by:

• Lack of control in overtime pay and unused vacation time payouts;

• Lack of coordination among state agencies which in one instance launched a costly salary bidding war for qualified personnel; and

• Compensation for pension fund managers that bears little relation to performance.

Unions are, by their nature, criminal organizations — the only tool in their toolbox is extortion. ‘Nice business you got here. Pity if something happened to it.’

Combine that with the natural tendency of government workers to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of the minimum amount of work (which miminum is often zer0), this result comes as no surprise.

Read it.

In the late 1980’s, 140 sea otters were transported from Monterey Bay to San Nicolas Island because there was concern that if there were an oil spill, the otters would be wiped out. Meanwhile, the government promised fishermen that areas south of Point Conception would be otter-free. But the plan didn’t work because the otters simply swam back to Southern California.

A rather stark reminder that just because the Federal government has a program doesn’t mean that anything useful will get done; it does guarantee that your money will be spent, however.

Read it.

Democrats live by the dictum “never let a good crisis go to waste.”  What better way to insert their campaign wish list into a Hurricane Sandy disaster aid bill?

To that end, Obama has submitted a $60.4 billion dollar aid request for recovery of damage from Hurricane Sandy.  His proposal is chock full of items from his campaign wish list, and will be considered before the Senate this week.

Pork, pork, pork, pork, pork, pork, pork, pork, wonderful pork, wonderful pork!

I have yet to hear the slightest attempt at explaining how this is any business of the Federal government.

Read it.

Hint: No. The purpose of government, as Jerry Pournelle never tires of saying, is to hire and pay government workers. Any money that eventually survives to reach it’s intended uses is an anomaly that they seek constantly to eliminate.

Read  it.

A newly-released report from the conservative Americans for Limited Government (ALG), obtained by Breitbart News, found that taxpayers are footing a $4.8 million bill for the salaries of 35 union officials at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The ALG report used documents the group obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showing that taxpayers are actually paying these 35 union officials’ salaries. Only three of them make less than $100,000 per year, and the average taxpayer-funded union boss salary is $138,175 per year.

Eight of the union bosses on the taxpayer payroll at the Department of Transportation make more than $170,000, too.