The six figure income and no income folks in that example have one thing in common: not doing their part. The six figure dude wants to keep what is owed to the state for himself, 'cause I guess he thinks his roads aught to be paved for him for free. The no income dude wants to be taken care of for free. Same idea.
As for the wealth staying at the 1%... umm, they buy mansions, yes? Crazy expensive cars? Hire people to drive them, and people to answer their door? Buy their own planes, and hire people to fly them, stay at fancy hotels, etc etc etc.... They blow through a ton of money. Where does all of that go? I would think if they had more, they would spend more. There's no point to holding on to money besides to maintain whatever standard of living you want when you stop making income, and/or unless you're planning on giving it to someone or a cause when you die. For serious, you can't use it after you die. This actually makes the idea of only ridicu-taxing if the wealthy sit on it seem like a good idea. Obviously, let them hold on to some for retirement / funds for their children or w/e.
Alright. Now. Be sure to check out the "Archives" section on the site referenced below. It's got one link for every month from March 2009 through current. I do hope you're not seriously going to just say 'lolno' to this. It's all made up, exaggerated by 30x, right? ofc it is. Go back to sleep. I'm not trying to say all government spending and programs need to end, I'm trying to say they just go wild with it 'cause it's not their money.
EDIT:
“I place economy among the first and most Important virtues – and debt as the greatest of dangers. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load with perpetual debt. If we can prevent the Government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of caring for them, we will be happy.”
Can You Identify the Most Egregious Example of Wasteful Spending by the Welfare State?December 23, 2011 by Dan Mitchell
I’ve commented many times about wasteful government spending,
including Social Security bureaucrats spending $700 thousand to party at a luxury resort,
HUD bureaucrats giving huge subsidies for welfare recipients to live in upscale neighborhoods,
rampant fraud in the unemployment insurance program, and
tax dollars being used to subsidize a grown man wearing diapers and living as an “adult baby.”
Those are depressing examples, but here are three additional stories that may be even worse. They all show how entitlement programs squander other people’s money.
1.
A local news outlet in Oregon revealed that recipients can use food stamps to buy luxury products:
Oregon Trail Cards — which are part of the state’s food stamp program — can be used to purchase luxury coffee concoctions at Starbucks counters inside grocery stores, investigators from Fox 12 in Oregon have discovered. …According to federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) guidelines, people cannot buy foods that will be eaten in the store or hot foods. However, luxury items that are allowed include soft drinks, candy, cookies, ice cream, even bakery cakes and energy drinks that have a nutrition facts label.
2.
Benjamin Domenech of the Heartland Institute reports that hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on penis pumps:
According to data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare has spent more than $240 million of taxpayer money on penis pumps for elderly men over the past decade, and will surpass a quarter of a billion dollars this year for costs since 2001. The cost to taxpayers for the pumps more than quadrupled during that period… And these represent only the costs for external devices, technically classified as “Male Vacuum Erection Systems,” not implantable devices or oral drugs such as Viagra.”
3.
A Seattle TV station has an expose about a woman receiving various forms of welfare even though she lives in a million-dollar home.
Search warrant documents unsealed Friday in federal court reveal that she received more than $1,200 a month in public housing vouchers, plus monthly cash from the federal and state government for a disability, as well as food stamps. Property records show the woman lives in a 2,500 square-foot home, with gardens and a boat dock, that is valued at $1.2 million. Records show she has received welfare benefits while living in the plush home since 2003. Records also show she truthfully provided her address when she applied for benefits.
These are the stories that I keep in mind
every time I hear some politician whining that “spending has been cut to the bone” and higher taxes are needed.
P.S. I’m happy to report that American taxpayers were not victimized by the all-time record for the most absurd example of government waste, which took place when
British taxpayers financed sex trips to Amsterdam for welfare recipients.
In Addition to Its Many other Flaws, Obamacare Is Becoming a Racket for Overpaid Government BureaucratsI’ve certainly complained about Obamacare from a fiscal perspective, warning that it means
higher taxes and more spending.
And I’ve also warned that it will make our health care system less efficient and could lead to some of the
horrifying examples of rationing and poor care that you find in the United Kingdom (scroll to the bottom of this post for some shocking examples).
But if you need another reason to be upset, it turns out that Obamacare is going to be a very lucrative gig for a new crop of government bureaucrats.
Here are some very
disturbing details from the Pueblo Chieftan in Colorado.
Eye-popping salaries proposed for employees of the health benefits exchange being formed in Colorado grabbed the attention of Republicans and Democrats alike on Thursday. A subcommittee of the board charged with establishing the exchange is considering a draft budget for its federal grant application that would create 24 positions and pay those employees a total of more than $3 million annually to manage the health care cooperative. The average annual salary of a health benefits exchange employee would exceed $125,000 under the plan. …“We have executive directors (of state departments) that are in charge of thousands of people here that make significantly less than that,” said Sen. Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs. …A Democrat on the committee overseeing enactment of health benefits exchange legislation in the state agreed that the figures are worthy of scrutiny. …Under the health care overhaul, states were required to establish exchanges. Colorado authorized its exchange this year in SB200.
Keep in mind that the $125,000 figure is an average, which means many of the bureaucrats will be getting much bigger paychecks.
And also remember that we’re talking Colorado, not someplace like New York City where the cost of living is a bit higher.
Even more important, the article refers to the “average annual salary,” which means it probably doesn’t include the gold-plated benefit packages that are far more generous than generally available in the private sector (state and local bureaucrats, for instance,
make out like bandits on pensions).
And to show that this story is just the tip of the iceberg, let’s recycle
my video about overpaid government bureaucrats.
And if all the data in the video doesn’t convince you,
check out this chart.
The Joy of Government-Run Healthcare: The UK’s Gilded Bureaucrats and Dying PatientsI’m not sure whether this is a post about America’s dismal future if
Obamacare is allowed to take root or whether this is a post about
bureaucrats ripping off taxpayers.
But I do know that it shows that the insiders take care of themselves quite nicely when the government seizes more control of a nation’s healthcare sector.
Here’s a
report from the UK-based Telegraph about how bureaucrats at a Scottish branch of the National Health Service are bilking taxpayers.
National Procurement, a branch of the NHS National Services Division, arranged for staff who are deemed to be “regular users” of cars for business to get the cars through a taxpayer-backed vehicle-leasing scheme. …Figures provided by National Procurement in response to a Freedom of Information request showed that…one in eight members of staff, had used the 4x4s and convertibles to drive to work. Much of the insurance, petrol, road tax and leasing is funded by the state.
And we’re not talking cheap automobiles. Keep in mind, when you read this next passage, that £25,000 is almost $40,000.
One employee was leased a £27,000 Mercedes, while three other workers have been driving £23,000 S-line Audi A3 sports cars. Another employee received a £28,300 Audi TT. Since the beginning of this year, five new cars have been leased to staff, including a four-door BMW worth more than £30,500. Other leased vehicles include another Audi sports car worth more than £25,000 and three Range Rover Evoques costing up to £29,500.
So how do they work this scam? Simple, they take needless trips.
…staff have had to clock up a minimum of 5000 business miles during office hours to qualify for the scheme. …A department source told the Herald newspaper that some members of staff were using their leased cars for 80-mile round trips between National Procurement’s two offices, in Larkhall, Lanarkshire, and South Gyle in Edinburgh, even though there are adequate video conferencing facilities at both locations.
One hopes that this scandal in a Scottish branch is an exception and that most bureaucrats don’t behave in a similarly reprehensible fashion.
But given the bloated size of the National Health Service bureaucracy, it’s more likely that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
There is an entitlement culture in most government bureaucracies, and I would be shocked in the paper pushers and memo writers hadn’t figured out how to manipulate the system
And since there are more than 1.6 million of them, the magnitude of the fraud is presumably enormous.
The obvious follow-up question is whether taxpayers in the United Kingdom are getting some good value from this army of cosseted bureaucrats?
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Here are some
chilling excerpts from a story in the Daily Mail.
NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday. Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia… There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP. Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’.
Here are a couple of horrifying examples.
Professor Pullicino revealed he had personally intervened to take a patient off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated. He said this showed that claims they had hours or days left are ‘palpably false’. In the example he revealed a 71-year-old who was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia and epilepsy was put on the LCP by a covering doctor on a weekend shift. Professor Pullicino said he had returned to work after a weekend to find the patient unresponsive and his family upset because they had not agreed to place him on the LCP. ‘I removed the patient from the LCP despite significant resistance,’ he said. ‘His seizures came under control and four weeks later he was discharged home to his family,’ he said.
In other words, government-run healthcare in the United Kingdom is a great scam if you’re an insider. But not such a good deal if you’re someone who needs, well, healthcare.
Sort of
makes you wonder what Paul Krugman was thinking when he wrote, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”
I guess the English newspapers are making up stories to denigrate their own nation. If you want to see more of these “false” stories, click
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here and
here.
