Thursday, August 28, 2014

Why A Deputy Press Secretary?

     Nancy Pelosi once said that Mother Hubbard's cupboard is bare and there is nothing left to cut from the federal budget. The incomprehensible dishonesty of this statement illustrates in stark terms the utter contempt that Democrats have for the American public, a public they think has the combined intelligence as low as the combined honesty of congressional Democrats. Anyone with a sixth grade education knows that it can not possibly take almost 4 trillion dollars to run the United States government. And anyone who has looked at the budget for this country would immediately notice the literally hundreds of departments and programs that are mere duplicates of each other.
     I heard a news report recently that is just one small example of what is wrong with the federal government. The deputy press secretary defended President Obama's never ending round of golf by saying that sports and leisure activities are a good way to "clear the head" and "relieve stress." Beyond the stress of playing bad golf, I am not sure what stress the president has, and if his head was any clearer we would be able to see through it.
     Putting aside the deputy press secretary's high schoolish statement is the fact that it came from the Deputy Press Secretary. Is the job of press secretary really that tough, the whole hour a day he has to brief the White House press corpse, that he needs a deputy? I know that the Press Secretary probably does more than brief the media everyday, but still, is the position's responsibilities so great that the taxpayers of this nation must shell out their hard earned dollars for a Deputy Press Secretary?
     The waste of government is further exemplified by lower level bureaucrats having their own speech writers. In fact, the federal government employs, using taxpayer money, hundreds of speech writers that are at the disposal of bureaucrats, some of which may only give one speech a year. Our first president, George Washington, wrote his own speeches or had Congressman James Madison write them for him, without the use of public funds. If the federal government is hiring managers who can not express themselves in front of a group of people without having a highly paid speech writer put words in their mouths, maybe the nation can survive without their "management skills."
     Speech writers may only add millions to the budget, but there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of items in the federal budget just as wasteful. And millions of dollars turn into billions and hundreds of billions of dollars poured down the bottomless sewer of government waste. In fact, I contend that at least twenty five percent of the federal government can be eliminated without the slightest disruption to the citizens of this great nation, and in many ways the lives of the citizenry would improve immeasurably.
     The expansion of the federal government has taken place from the top down. George Washington had four members in his cabinet, today there are 16. Each cabinet level secretary has a department with thousands of employees and multi-billion dollar budgets. So when Nancy Pelosi says there is nothing to be cut from the federal budget, she is either being disingenuous, dishonest, obtuse, or all of the above. And when the Deputy Press Secretary says anything at all, I have to question why the Press Secretary can not say it, or better yet, give those duties to the Vice President. Not only would it save the taxpayers money, but it would provide some very humorous entertainment indeed.

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