Riffing on the various scandals plaguing the Obama administration, Jonah Goldberg hones in on one point that really isn’t getting enough play: the absolutely absurd "conferences" and "training sessions" that our federal agencies blow millions upon millions of dollars on. Writes Jonah:
Defenders of the IRS say, What’s the big deal? Everybody has conventions and motivational videos, why shouldn’t the IRS? As one person said to me on Twitter, "What do people find shocking that govt employees go to conferences and training. Happens in the private sector all the time." This overlooks the fact that the IRS is quite glaringly not "the private sector." Rather it is a unique government agency empowered to extract money from the private sector. If you don’t comply men (or women!) with guns will take your money by force or put you in jail or both. This fact alone should impose a certain humility and frugality on IRS culture.
But, more importantly, if the President of the United States is going to relentlessly hector the American people to behave as if we are at war [thus necessitating massive amounts of domestic spending], the least he could do is expect a certain espirit de corps from the people already working for the government. If we were in a real all-out war, would government agencies be spending time and money producing Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island spoofs?
The IRS, of course, is not alone in this. The GSA found itself in hot water last year when it "turned a one-hour ribbon cutting ceremony in Hawaii into a weeklong, taxpayer-funded vacation" and blew $800,000 on a conference in Las Vegas.
Waste is not limited to government conferences. JVL today highlights the absurdity of the government providing thousands upon thousands of dollars for rich idiots to buy electric sports cars that offer minimal environmental benefit. And, of course, you have all the various bits of pork and spending on research to determine the mating habits of blind undersea slugs or whatever.
I want to echo and amplify Jonah’s basic point. I’ve done a little work on campaigns to reduce the national debt; that experience left me with two thoughts. The first is that the wealthy are, rightfully, resistant to bearing any more of the taxation burden. The top 10 percent of taxpayers pay 71 percent of federal personal income tax despite earning 43 percent of the income. That is both unfair and untenable. To win the support of the wealthy, any tax hike will have to at least look like lower and middle class (and upper-middle class and lower-upper class) taxpayers are kicking in more.
Questions of fairness aside, I do think the wealthy would be willing to pay higher taxes—as long as they don’t think that money is being wasted. And here’s the second point: I believe a huge amount of the resistance to paying more in taxes is directly linked to the absurd waste that these wealthy individuals—these Type A, captain of industry, master of the universe personalities—see in the media day after day after week after month after year. The government is a black hole of waste and fraud, and even if that waste and fraud constitutes a tiny proportion of government spending, it’s an exceptionally visible proportion of government spending.
Waste cripples the confidence Americans have in the government. That goes double for the wealthy individuals on whose shoulders our solvency rests.