As of now, the U.S. National Debt is approximately $12,109,260,252,116.20 (not including another $100,000,000,000,000.00 or so in unfunded liabilities).
Now that you have some perspective, let's see what the Political Class is up to.
Postal Employees Live It Up!
The U.S. Postal Service lost $3.8 billion last fiscal year and expects to lose $7.8 billion this year. That hasn’t prevented employees from indulging in fancy foods and booze on the USPS’s dime. A recent audit by the USPS inspector general found $800,000 in unjustified and “imprudent” purchases, most of which occurred in just a five month span.
Fed Workers Owe Billions In Taxes
According to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents obtained by a Washington D.C. news station, 276,300 federal employees and retirees owe Uncle Sam $3,042,200,000 for 2008 alone. Sadly, the figure marks a substantial increase from the $2.7 billion in taxes that federal workers and retirees stiffed the government in 2007.
Practically every federal agency has delinquent employees, according to the IRS figures, and the agency with the most tax scofflaws is the U.S. Postal Service with nearly 30,000 workers who owe $297,933,756. Incredibly, this is an improvement from 2007 when more than 54,000 postal employees failed to pay over $407 million.
Retired military personnel make up around 33% of the money owed ($1,343,538,055) and nearly 30,000 active-duty military employees owe the government well over $100 million. More than 400 employees in the U.S. House of Representatives failed to pay close to $6 million and 231 in the U.S. Senate owe nearly $2.5 million. Fifty employees in the Executive Office of the President, which includes the White House, still owe $812,917.
The perpetually scandal-plagued Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is the cabinet agency with the highest delinquency rate at around 4% and the Treasury Department wins for best compliance with less than 1% of workers who didn’t pay their taxes last year.
Sen. Reid Pulls a Fast One
Rather than go back to the drawing board and write a better bill, Reid instead did something that much of the U.S. Constitution and the rules of the U.S. Senate exist to prevent: he quickly rammed a sweeping and unpopular bill through the Senate before the American people could learn how it would affect them.
Reid’s strategy was cynical, undemocratic, and corrupt. Reid systematically suppressed a full CBO cost estimate of his legislation. He bought senators’ votes with billions of the American people’s tax dollars.
Big Business loves Big Government.
Big Business Goes Big for Health Care Reform
“What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times a few months ago.
That manipulation should disturb us. But contrary to Rich, it is not the work of “corporatists” who have sprung up to attack Progressive reforms proposed by Obama and the Democratic majority. Manipulation is what we got many years ago when we traded a more or less free market for the “Progressive” interventionist state. When government is big, the well-connected always have an advantage over the rest of us in influencing public policy.
And of course, radical, racist appointments.
La Raza Activist Named U.S. Ambassador
A leftist La Raza activist previously forced out of a U.S. ambassadorship for her close ties to a terrorist-sponsoring foreign government has been nominated by President Obama to a key administration post.
Mari Del Carmen Aponte, a former director at the extremist Mexican group National Council of La Raza (see the press release applauding her nomination) and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, has been handpicked by Obama to be the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador. That means Aponte, an attorney and independent consultant, will represent the State Department in the civil war-ravaged Central American country.
