Uncle Sam doesn’t need to do more, he needs to do less

Understatement from the Washington Times!

The new editor, Ed Kelley, of the Washington Times comes to the Times from The Oklahoman where he was the editor since 2003.  You can tell by the pages of the Washington Times today that he has taken over.  Unlike some Oklahoman that thought Ed Kelly was not conservative enough, I thought most times he hit the right tone and was not afraid to take on anyone which I found refreshing.

This is the paragraph that sounds like it could have come from The Oklahoman:

Social Security and Medicare were among the worst offenders because their books relied on implausible projections of future revenue. GAO used classic understatement to describe the imminent collapse of FDR’s old-age Ponzi scheme. “Social Security is now in a negative cash-flow position,” the GAO report deadpanned. “The growing gap between revenues and spending that is built into the current structure of the budget leads to continued growth in debt held by the public as a share of GDP; this is not sustainable.

How do you fix something like this?  This isn't about Democrat or Republican or how we got to this point, this is about fixing the mess the Government finds itself in today.  The problem that jumps out is the lack of willingness to work together to start getting the Government spending under control starting with the Senate Democrats refusing to pass a budget since April 29, 2009, which was a Bush budget.

The Senate Democrats who rule the Senate with an iron fist and trickery will not consider the Obama budget or the House budget which was passed on time after Republicans took over the House in 2011.  Due to a lack of a budget from the Senate for over 1,000 days, the Democrat Senate leadership should be on the outside looking in come January. The fact they haven't passed a budget since April 29, 2009, in Obama's first year in office speaks volumes at how they don't want to have the voters see the true budget.  They prefer to operate on continuing resolutions instead so agencies can operate with the same dollars instead of taking cuts.  That is no way to run Government and why the deficit continues to climb.

EDITORIAL: Big government expectations
Uncle Sam doesn’t need to do more, he needs to do less 

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Friday, March 2, 2012 

The government has grown so large that nobody really knows where its $3.8 trillion in annual spending goes. Each year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) tries - and fails - to make sense of federal-agency ledgers. On Thursday, GAO refused once again to certify the official balance sheets because they are so shoddily kept. 

The green eyeshades complained that Defense Department books are so bad they can’t be audited. Throughout the rest of the government, there are “hundreds of billions” in unreconciled funds. These are the same conclusions the GAO has come to year-after-year for the past 15 years, and yet Uncle Sam still refuses to get his act together. 

Private companies would never be allowed to get away with maintaining ledgers this sloppy, but Washington gives itself a pass. The numbers don’t add up for a simple reason: The bureaucracy doesn’t care about spending your money wisely. Bureaucrats don’t even care enough to keep track of it. 

Instead of replacing ineffective programs, congressmen love to create all-new ones dedicated to addressing the same goals. That results in a lack of focus. “If you’re spreading your talent out across more systems than you really have to, and you’re not concentrating on managing the performance of a fewer number of systems properly, you’re going to have even bigger problems,” Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro testified at a House Oversight subcommittee hearing Thursday. 

Last year alone, the federal government spent nearly $80 billion upgrading information-technology systems. Even these overpriced computers couldn’t keep up with the federal leviathan.

Excerpt:  Read More at the Washington Times