There is nothing more permanent than a temporary government building—unless it's a temporary tax.
Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.
There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.
All government operation is wasteful, inefficient, and serves the bureaucrat rather than the consumer.
Before they got vengeful, conservatives had some useful points to make about welfare. Government 'help' is too often guilt-assuaging gesture. It creates layers of wasteful bureaucracy. Too much help of the wrong sort creates a culture of dependency that swamps our ability to provide.
Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.
Government isn't a good way to solve problems ... [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. ... [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. ... [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame.
Among the weeds choking out growth and good government are the hundreds of boards, commissions, and advisory committees that have sprouted over the years. They devour time, money, and energy far beyond any real contribution they make.
Deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency and corruption are more likely to hold back growth.
We use our tax dollars to pay some bureaucrat to kill a mountain lion, dig a hole and bury this precious beast. No one gets to eat it, nobody gets to buy licenses, fees and taxes themselves. And that's only after a mountain lion has killed somebody! Oh my God! And the Osbournes are still No. 1!
As with most things governmental, failure does not mean having to try something else. It means spending more money.
Well, you could take several stories off the buildings of most U.S. government agencies and we'd all probably be better for it too.
I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.
Too many vital education dollars that should be spent in the classroom are bouncing around in the federal bureaucracy.
The vast amount of waste and sheer stupidity in government - from the Pentagon to the Food and Drug Administration - could fill committee agendas for years.
People know that billions of pounds are wasted. Billions of pounds never get near the families that need it. It is an absolute outrage that hard-working people go out to work every day, get up early, come back late, don't see enough of their families in order to pay taxes to fund vast bureaucracies that are inefficient in order to fund a welfare system which allows too many people to sit for the whole of their lives on out-of-work benefits without going out to look for work.
We still have systems we don't need, we have infrastructure we don't need. Why do you have over 900,000 bureaucrats working in one way or another in all these systems.
