How We Spent Your Money

skip down to the 'BLAH BLAH' part if you aren't interested in the numbers...



as of my writing this, there are 313,547,622 million people that are citizens of the United States - according to the US Census Bureau : shown here

as of my writing this, there are just over 2,100,905 people employed by the United States government (federal) - according to FedScope, a website managed by the US Office of Personnel Management : shown here

the average Federal employee earns $76, 231, also according to the Office of Personnel Management : shown here

which means: on average, we spend $160,154,089,055 a year on salaries for our hired federal employees every year.  That's $160 Billion, and doesn't include contract workers... which is an important thing to notice.

in business school we learned that it generally costs an employers twice an employee's salary to have them.  half for their salary, the other half for things like insurance, pension matching, office space, paper, pens, gas, keeping the lights on, and so on.  so let's factor that in.

now we are spending $320,308,178,110 per year before they do any work.

WAIT - they are working for us, but they produce... well, they produce government.  and there is ZERO profit margin in government.  the government doesn't make us any more, it only costs us money.  it's needed to keep the roads paved and the prisons running, but at no point is there a cash return on investment.

one would think that we the people would want to spend as little as possible on this - we want to get the job done well, but we don't want to spend any more than we have to, because every penny spent is just gone.  we have to eat food, but we don't just fire out large amounts of money on food everywhere, because all it does is keep us alive.  sure, sometimes its nice to eat fancy, and we always want to eat well, but we're not always going to pay for a steak dinner when on the average day we just want a sandwich... right?

in 2010 the federal government took in roughly 2,500,000,000,000 ($2.5 trillion), and over 1% was spent on the people we employed to spend it.  so then they went to work: and work they did, spending $3.5 trillion according to the White House, and reported by the Washington Post shown here.

that was NOT a typo.  we spend more than 1% of our federal tax dollars paying people to spend 140% of what we gave them to spend.  and here's the REAL kicker, they spent $251 billion alone on interest on the debt we created doing this over and over every year.

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH...

if you're reading this, you probably think you're informed.  well, the actual numbers are above, stated by public record and verified by what is considered to be a liberal newspaper that backs the current elected party of power in 2012.

the facts are simple: we have created a government that lives to validate itself.  it spends, and then it supports itself by spending more.

CHANGE - the current president was elected to bring 'change', but his change was focused on social change, change that would make everyone feel good about life.

life, is not good.  it's just not good for us if the government that represents us is spending 140% of it's income every year.  that is plain an simple math.  it's the government's job to maintain the services we all use: roads, schools, prisons, fire departments, and so on.  these services we all need, just like we need to eat... but let's face reality here people; the fattening of our nation is proof we don't eat well.  why should we spend a fortune on our government when we don't even spend it on ourselves?

put your annual income into a calculator, then multiply it times 1.4 - then imagine paying an account to tell you to spend that much every year and have nothing to show for it.  you can rent cars and houses, but you can't save anything with that money - that's what we are doing.

AND we have built a machine that costs us $320 Billion a year to do it.

we are seeing more arguments over a man's right to have sex with another man than we are this issue in the news today!  WHO CARES what two men or two women do in the privacy of their own home??

as of the writing of this, the state of California found itself $16 Billion over budget for this year - everyone running in a panic worried about their part of the government losing their funding.  GOOD - it's about time people start to figure out the mess we are in.

PAY ATTENTION HERE - THIS IS THE ROOT OF MY MESSAGE:
you cannot govern morality, and you cannot provide a lifestyle with government - the government can't tell anyone how to live, and you can't even things out for those who are at a disadvantage.

if you want to make a drug illegal, you can do that, but it's not going to make a stoner any less a stoner.  and telling the gay person they can't be married doesn't make them any less gay.

subsequently, paying for the poor doesn't make them any less poor, and paying for the uninsured doesn't make them any more insured.

and paying for more government doesn't make it do a better job.

we can argue the angles of trying to make these theories work, but in the long term there is only epic cost and probable failure.  and in trying to do so we have created a bloated government that sits around looking for reasons to justify itself.

you want to see change?  thin the heard - let's clear out the government and let them fight like the rest of us.  focus the government on civil rights laws, enact term limits on all non-military federal employees above $50,000 per year, let each state decide what it wants to spend on schools and prisons, and only spend federal money promoting the idea that we should choose to take care of each other, instead of expecting the federal government to do it for us.

the idea that we can force everyone to take care of each other is nice... but it's not reality.  there will always be that group of self-righteous dicks that think they are alone and only need to keep their kids fat and their trophy wife thin, and you can't force them to really care about others.

you just can't, its a fact.  you cannot force someone to care by enacting tax laws and loopholes.

and you cannot make a government work by spending more than it has or trying to force people via taxes to pay for things they don't care about.

let it go.  taxing people more so that we can spend right will only cause this nightmare to increase, because your 'right' is 'wrong' to someone else.

we as a nation need to focus on reality: the reality is that we have to take care of each other.  we have to do it, not the government.