Professor Elam

Star Parker sums up just where we are in the govt growth department. She also makes some good points about the lat Sen Kennedy, always a champion of forbidding school choice. Yet his entire family attended private schools!

Ms. Parker stops short of posing the interesting question. And it has been on my mind a good deal.

When will we get to the point that government consumes more than one half of the economy?  She speculates that we are nearly there now, I suspect that counting all local governments and taxing agencies we are there. Rush says that 40,000 tax well to do taxpayers support New York City, he left by the way. Such folk continue to exit high tax states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and California.

As she says the lack of any personal responsibility on the part of politicians allows this to happen. President Obama decried the graft in Africa, skimming profits off the top of the economy. Yet he does the same thing with the highest corporate taxes in the world in the US. No wonder companies scramble for whatever tax haven they can find.

I continue to read that local schools are scrambling to balance budgets.  They consider various cuts in services and layoffs. This avoids the obvious answer and the hard questions. Why not just give an across the board pay cut?  Everyone sacrifices some money, all keep their jobs, and the cuts simply come in to the point that the budget balances. We do such things personally, as Star points out, and so does any business that stays afloat. But where do we see this in government?  Why is a government job sacrosanct as to its salary?

Or as one wag observed, if the Post Office is serious about improving its service, why is there a Fed Ex box in front of most Post Offices these days?  Good question, has anyone asked the Presidential Press Secy?