As they do, the gang of idiots that make up the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board (which should be shuttered, the ground on which they opined salted and the monies wasted on them used to hire more hard news resources) has decided that this money could be better used "for the children".
Perks for ex-staffers. HCEB, HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)
Keep in mind that this is your money. It is money taxpayers might be willing to spend on education or public safety or to protect children from abuse and neglect.Yes, keep that in mind. You should probably also keep in mind that ALL government revenue is (their words here) YOUR money. That's because the government doesn't MAKE anything. They don't produce anything other than laws, and there's no revenue driver there. In fact, except in limited cases such as the Tennessee River Valley Authority and other various utilities, the government is one giant cost center sucking resources from the revenue drivers of the United States.
This doesn't mean that government is inherently bad (although, I would argue that politicians are, and have to work to overcome their horrible natures). There's nothing wrong with being a cost center. In fact, in my day job I'm an accountant working for shared services at an oil and gas company. I don't 'produce' anything of value other than my work, which (ironically) is in regulatory reporting (in part).
But without someone like me filling this role the company would find itself in trouble because it would not have the ability to pay severance taxes and government royalty, or comply with the myriad regulations that are placed on us by alphabet soup agencies.
The problem is when you start to think that money sent "to the State" is going to be spent on education, public safety or to "protect children" (whatever the hell that means) because, I can assure you, it's not.
In fact, most of the money that we spend on government is used to.....run the government. This is true not only at the Federal level but also in States that pride themselves on so-called 'fiscal conservatism' as does Texas.
Because, despite what they will have you believe, it's never 'about the children' but about making sure that the bureaucracy continues to function. I don't say this to disparage government workers, because all bureaucracies operate in this manner, but just to state fact. There are currently more alphabet-soup agencies operating in the government than you think, even in your worst nightmares. What we read in newspapers and see on TV is just the very public tip of the iceberg. In fact, when you get caught up in the Kafkaesque nightmare that is government bureaucracy you realize just how all-encompassing it is.
What governments do is plan, and hold meetings. What they don't do (well) is 'get things done' or take care 'of the children' which is why you constantly hear about CPS 'missing it' on tales of abuse. Is that because the CPS workers are bad? No. It's because the CPS bureaucracy sucks up all of the financial oxygen.
Because that's how they run, it's how they think business should run as well. On any given day you have an army of taxpayer funded bureaucrats sitting around offices trying to determine how to more tightly (and expensively) regulate the sectors of the economy over which they've been granted dominion. And, yes, this even happens in a State such as Texas that hails itself as "business friendly".
Increasingly, the goal of these agents of change is not to streamline regulations in order to ease compliance, it's to make them as difficult to navigate as possible in order to increase government audit activity which they believe will increase fines and penalties, thus allowing the bureaucracy (and, they hope, their paychecks) to grow.
So it's a naive piece of writing from the gang of idiots over at the Chronicle to think that the money not spent on severance is going to go to the children, or public safety, or any other public good. The fact is that a large portion of the tax takings the government collects is going to be spent on feeding the machine.
Whatever follows the Republican Party after the Trump disaster needs to focus in on this and trumpet it to the skies. They need to show people just how an overbearing regulatory state (or, in Texas, a bureaucracy that's administratively broken) is a drain on both their financial well-being and their ability to succeed.
One of the biggest causes of voter anger is that the 'game is rigged' against the little guy and that only the big corporations can navigate the current marketplace in a manner savvy enough to succeed.
The Democrat's answer to this is to increase the size and scope of the machine promising that, by increasing the monies thrown into it, somehow efficiency will be attained and a wonderful new, Utopian era of democratic socialism will emerge.
Conservatives need to trumpet a different, more workable message. The idea being that by eliminating red tape and freeing the marketplace (except where safety is concerned) the ability of people to move among economic strata will be restored. Of course, their needs to be an admission that the GOP of old did, in fact, kowtow to large corporations and aided and abetted the machine in creating rules that only they can navigate, often to the ruin of small business.
Once this is flushed out of the way the focus needs to be on simple, fair, effective regulation that is easy for business to comply with and which ensures the integrity of the markets. I don't think there's much of an intellectual market these days for no regulation, except among Libertarians, and they're spending their time dancing on stage in thongs, but I DO think the public would get behind regulatory simplification, making it easier to comply, and easier to interact with a streamlined bureaucracy when compliance activities are needed.
Two weeks ago I took a day trip to Washington D.C. for my job. The oil and gas industry had the opportunity to meet with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to appeal for some sanity on soon-to-be published oil and gas valuation rules drafted by the Office of Natural Resources-Revenue (ONRR which is part of the Department of the Interior (DoI). These are far reaching regulations pertaining to federal and tribal royalties for oil and gas produced from federal leases. Conservatively (and falsely) the ONRR has decided that the industry-wide impact of these regulations would be $80MM per year. (In reality, it's probably closer to $200MM per year). To appeal these wide-ranging regulatory changes and plea for additional review the oil and gas industry was granted.....
30 minutes.
That's a problem. It should also be noted that small oil and gas companies had no voice at the table because, for the most part, they are being shut out of producing from federal leases due to the extremely high-cost of clearing the regulatory hurdles.
This needs to change.
