Musings on Washington D.C.

By Tom Quiner

Barack Obama has never had to make anything.
He has never built a business.
He has never had to meet a payroll.
For the record, there is nothing wrong with that. His gifts lie in different areas. When you look at the vast expanse of our federal bureaucracy, which consists of some 2,700,000 employees, few of those folks are entrepreneurial in nature either. If they were, the federal bureaucracy is the worst place in the world for them to work, characterized as it is by rigid rules, regulation, and political correctness.
During this shutdown, a man who has never really worked in the private sector says it is vital to get government up and running again for the sake of the private sector.
He says we’ve got to get the Department of Agriculture up and running for the sake of DOA employees “out there helping some farmers make sure that they’re making some modest profit.” (Heaven forbid if they made immodest profits, whatever that would be!)
The man who has never worked in the private sector says we’ve got to get HUD reopened for the sake of their employees “helping somebody buy a house for the first time.”
We little people out in the sticks are not bright enough to do it by ourselves without the federal bureaucracy holding our hands, is the suggestion of the man who has spent the bulk of his adult life receiving a paycheck signed by taxpayers.
I have a different view from this man, Barack Obama. I humbly suggest that the federal bureaucracy, is bloated and far removed from reality.
Do they do some good work? Of course. But the cost of the meddling in the workings of our free enterprise system is profound, and it has gotten worse.
Every single new government regulation incurs a cost on the private sector. Obamacare alone has added tens of thousands of new regulations.
All of these new Obamacare regulations will ADD 127 million of hours of new regulation time to federal bureaucratsevery year.
The average federal employee earns about $83,000 a year (according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis), or let’s call it about $41.50 per hour, assuming they work a forty hour week 50 weeks out of the year.
That’s going to cost taxpayers about an extra $5.3 billion A YEAR in new government regulations. In the scheme of things where we’re running annual deficits of a trillion dollars, I suppose $5.3 billion is chump change. But this doesn’t factor in new hiring that that will be necessary as Obamacare ramps up. Nor does it factor in the compliance cost to the private sector.
It dawns on me that Barack Obama does have a gift: he’s good at manufacturing regulations, lots of them, especially when he had Democrats in control of the House and Senate.
So as us little guys out in the sticks have watched our median income drop about 6.5 percent over the last dozen years, we can’t but help but marvel at how Washington D.C. has become a boom town with median incomes growing over 23 percent in the same time period.
Government regulations are a booming!
To paraphrase Horace Greeley, “Go East, young man.”
The government will be back in business in no time knocking out new regulations faster than you can say “Obamacare.”
The pay is great. So are the benefits.
And it’s practically impossible to get fired!