We know from recent events that state and city governments are literally going broke due to the large government workforce, the relatively high pay given to government employees and the retirements these employees have been promised or are actually receiving. This over-promising and over-governing is a problem both immediately and for the future.
The immediate problem at the state and city levels is currently being addressed and we'll see more pressure applied to reduce employees and retirements in the near future, but these entities will still need help from uncle sugar, and we all know that the federal government will eventually help bail them out, although I intend to argue that no help be given at all to governments that have over-promised and over-spent with taxpayer money for so many years.
But a little further down the line, and likely not too distant, is the federal government and its financial and budgeting woes. Our new republican legislators are trying to find a way to reduce spending, but I've not heard a word proposing that executive agencies like the EPA and the departments of Energy and Education, plus the IRS and its 16,000 new agents being added to help enforce compliance with Obamacare, be down-sized or outright abolished because of their bloated size and their negative impact on the economy. Getting rid of these agencies would not only reduce direct expenditures for salaries, benefits and retirement, but would reduce the number of liberals choking our nation with regulations that cause individuals and businesses such distress. And the consolation prize would be ridding ourselves of the specter of an education system that is worse under the Department of Education, energy that is more expensive and more scarce under the Department of Energy, and an EPA that has gone rogue and is legislating from within the agency in contradiction to the decisions of the courts and the congress that created it and defined its powers. Getting rid of these very harmful big-government organizations would save the nation nearly a trillion dollars each and every year, and we need this savings if our children and grand children are to have any financial future at all.
