Since I am in a ranting mood.....
That is not to say that the government, at any level, is organized in some kind of efficient way either....
Billions spent on weapons systems, hardware, satellites and other crap for the military that is the next thing to useless....I just had to laugh at the following article on Savinar's site today....
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they’ve been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn’t turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren’t about to let it go.
A military that is designed to project power and protect our oil supply and keep the system together another year, which is unable to protect two of our three tallest buildings from attack by a seven-foot, left-handed, cave dweller on dialysis, and unable to conquer a nation of 22 million rug salesmen in five years, at the expense of a Trillion dollars....and unable to protect our southern border from an invasion by somewhere between six and ten million potential guerilla fighters....
A school system in which the lowest paid people, the teachers, are the least respected, but simultaneously the ones in charge of performing the actual customer service, while the good old boy ex-football coaches, as Ross Perot used to say, are running the show, making the curricculum decisions to fit the economy of 1977, while the kids are going to have to earn a living in 2037, while the little kids in Malaysia are working their asses off to learn English so they can take our jobs while we sell hamburgers to one another.....In our state, the two highest paid State employees are the two football coaches at the state universities... followed by the basketball coaches.
The ongoing catastrophe that is our "social welfare" system, that is anything but, and fails to produce anything except another generation of government-dependent thugs....and the development of a permanent underclass...
State and local agencies that are used as a jobs program, to fatten up a particular constituency, or tilt regulatory activities in one way or the other, rather than as a way to provide government services.... The Democrats used to be the prime proponents of this, as anyone who has waited in line at the DMV knows, but Republicans became expert in this by populating the federal agencies with of graduates of Liberty University and other similar places ref: Monica Goodling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_GoodlingOur billion-dollars worth of jails are full of non-violent drug users, while our biggest growth industry, from various reports, is the importation of "illegal" dope from places such as Afghanistan, which is ostensibly under the control of the US Military, and one or more of our Southern neighbors.....
Our bridges fall down, our levees break....one thunderstorm in Chicago sends our air-traffic-control system, if you want to call it that, into complete chaos.... we have a massive bureaucracy in charge of preventing 75 year old ladies from carrying on more than three ounces of &^#$& toothpaste aboard an airplane flight...and containerloads of dope and other contraband coming into the country via the highways and ports....
But, we keep spending the money. In fact, we spend much more than we take in, because the coward politicians will not go to the public and ask them to pay for the government services...I don't blame them. They're probably embarrassed, the system being in the condition that it is in. They might be held accountable. And accountability.... that's a joke. A politician's popularity is more linked to how much pork he can bring back to the state.... and congress still has a 90 percent re-election rate, despite the chaos.
The bailout thing... that adds a completely new dimension to the problem....an unprecedented taxpayer reward of incompetence.... or corruption... or some combination, never before seen in human history. Ironically that whole thing has an excellent chance to swamp any of the above in terms of the sheer magnitude and audacity ....
I can come to only one conclusion: We are stupid. I guess people are people.... maybe it's human nature. Individually, we can all see that there is a problem, but collectively, we are a bunch of idiots. I am afraid there is going to be a lot of chaos, and there is no way to make it any better with the system the way it is, and no guarantee that any other system will make it any better. But, it's unsustainable, at the scale at which we are now trying to run it, in the way we are trying to do it.
Sorry to tell you this close to lunchtime. It's enough to make you sick.