I used to have lots of posts about TSA inefficiency and stupidity, but then I got discouraged and stopped. It seemed pointless to discuss the issue when there was no hope for improvement. I still think that’s the case, at least so long as Obama is in the White House and acting as a toady […]

What’s the difference between a real job and working for the government? I used the think the answer was that bureaucrats are overpaid, usually for being in positions that shouldn’t even exist. Then I thought the difference was that bureaucrats got lavish benefits, about four times as much as people in the productive sector of […]

I’ve had dozens of posts about overpaid bureaucrats. Indeed, I’ve largely stopped blogging about the topic because it is so depressing to constantly be reminded about how a privileged class of people is manipulating the system to coercively obtain undeserved compensation from their less-fortunate neighbors. But every so often I see a story which cries […]

Let’s start in Washington, where USA Today reports that there are “at least 17,828 federal employees whose annualized salaries totaled $180,000 or more in September 2010.” That’s rather distressing news for taxpayers, but these excerpts from the story provide additional reason for us to be upset. …their ranks soared from the 805 with annualized salaries […]

I’m not a big fan of the IRS, but usually I blame politicians for America’s corrupt, unfair, and punitive tax system. Sometimes, though, the tax bureaucrats run amok and earn their reputation as America’s most despised bureaucracy. Here’s an example. Earlier this year, the Internal Revenue Service proposed a regulation that would force American banks […]

Eli Lehrer of the Heartland Institute has an article in the Weekly Standard claiming that underfunded pension plans are not the problem with state budgets. This paragraph is a good summary of his article. In the end, many states facing very large current budget gaps—New York, Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin among them—have pension systems that […]