The federal government is capable of enormous waste, which obviously is bad news, but the worst forms of government spending are those that actually leverage bad things. The old welfare system, for instance, paid people not to work and have babies out of wedlock (this still happens, but it’s not as bad as it used to be). Paying exorbitant salaries to federal bureaucrats is bad, but it’s even worse if they take their jobs seriously and promulgate new regulations and otherwise harass people in the productive sector of the economy. In a previous video on the economics of government spending, I called this the “negative multiplier” effect.
One of the worst examples of a negative multiplier effect is the $100 million that taxpayers spend each year to subsidize the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This video has the gory details.
