Government growth
To the editor:
The question should be, is it grew or is it grewsome? I suspect you know the answer to that one. After considerable effort, I was able to find a report on that total number of government employees feeding at the government “trough.” The article was published by the Free Republic, a group interested in supplying important news somehow overlooked by our wonderful mainstream news media. According to this article, in 2008, the USA had:
Full-time federal employees – 2,518,100; part-time – 250,785. Full-time state – 3,818,577; part-time state – 1,451,002. Full-time local – 11,039,250; part-time local – 3,383,975. Grand total: 22,461,691 government employees. Based upon total population of 330 million people, this translates to 6.7 percent or one in every 15 citizens works for the government. This is an outrageous statistic. No wonder we have a $17.8 trillion national debt that is growing at a rate of $50,000 per second, that is out of control and likely to remain so.
In 1775 we had zero government employees and some 235 years later we have 22.4 million that do, in fact, not produce one penny of tangible product to our gross domestic product. They feed at the “public trough.”
Think about it, the original purpose of our government, as described by our founding fathers, was a mere six items. The published plan was to form a more perfect union, establish justice, provide for the common defense, secure the blessings of liberty, promote the general welfare and insure domestic tranquility. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of our purpose and objective. Do you really think we need 22.4 million government employees to accomplish a mere six goals? Appears like we have not been noticing all of the empire building and political appointments our leaders have been slipping by, right under our noses.
Our government at the national, state, county and city levels have been continually growing at both an unreasonable and unsustainable rate. To make matters really worse, each and every department of our government is constantly instituting a never-ending list of rules and regulations to control every phase of our lives to regulate our existence to a continually smaller zone. A recent bumper sticker I notices said: “Less government means more freedom.” Truer words were never spoken. We need to initiate some serious and honest changes to reverse this brainless trend unless we are prepared to crash and burn.
R.E. Workman
Cape Coral