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The Government Racket: Washington Waste from A to Z
National Review, Sept 14, 1992 by Martin L. Gross
The Government Racket: Washington Waste from A to Z, by Martin L. Gross (Bantam, 270 pp., $7.99)
MY secular Bible for 1992 is this trade paperback, which has recently hit the bestseller list. It's a great little piece of detective work, far more significant than most of what passes for investigative reporting. Gross has delved into the federal budget, and after a dose perusal found that it wasn't telling us half the real story. He calls the official budget "a masterpiece of confusion, obfuscation, and lies" in which "everything that could be scandalous is hidden." Consider federal overhead, defined here as "rent, telephone, supplies, travel, copying, etc." Governments can hide their overhead and pass the costs along to taxpayers, because they don't have to make a profit as usually understood. This means they can afford to hide their overhead even from themselves. And that is just what our government does, by burying most overhead expenses under such nebulous headings as "Other Services." Gross added up all the "Other Services" entries in the budget, and found they came to $170 billion. That's billion, as in Perot. Gross did a separate inquiry into how much the government spends just on decorating and furniture. An official of the General Services Administration didn't know: the budget listings are hopelessly vague. A ranking bureaucrat can spend $100,000 making his office posh. These days government, not business, is where avarice really runs amok, because it is unchecked by the fear, or even the possibility, of failure. Anyone who's in business is--well, in the wrong business.
COPYRIGHT 1992 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
