The Governmental Money-Vacuum

The drunker I get, the more it seems to me that you slave away at your stupid job every day of your stupid life, hating every moment of it, reviling all the idiotic people you deal with every hellish day, but you bravely and heroically put up with the aggravation, tedium and ennui because you desperately need the money.

And then your idiot boss comes walking up, out of nowhere, and wants to get in your face, complaining about all of your mistakes, and erroneous reports, and missing deadlines, and leaving work early, and how you bring your putter and a golf ball to work so that you can practice putting on company time, which you loudly deny by shouting, “That’s a lie! That’s a big stinking lie! If I was practicing, I would be better than I am! And if I was better at putting, I’d play so much more golf that you probably wouldn’t see me for freaking days at a time! But here I am, working at my stupid job, proving that I am not practicing putting on company time!”

And so you, tragically, put up with this, too, because you still need the money, a circumstance alluded to in an earlier paragraph where I also needed money, a literary device to show you that there may be many variables in the universe, but needing money is actually more of a constant.

You find it curious that no matter how much you work, you always have less and less money at the end of the month. It’s outrageous! And you want to know where the money went! “Hey”, you shout. “Somebody is stealing my money!”

More probably, it is the wife and kids wasting my money on frivolities like, for example, going to a movie, when they have a perfectly good TV at home where they can watch movies for free, instead of costing me money.

Or they are eating in a restaurant, instead of coming home to eat food that is, admittedly, past its expiration date, but the loss of crispness, taste and nutrition are more than offset by the savings that add up when paying the much lower cost of this food, some of which is actually free if you dig it out of the dumpster out back.

I personally don’t eat it, of course, but it ought to be good enough for teenagers, and if they don’t like it, then they can get a job and buy their own food!

Justifiably incensed and angry about all of this financial foolishness, I am on my way out the door to yell at the wife and kids for being such wanton wastrels, foolishly buying whatever it is that they are buying that is wasting all my money, when I happened to see that the real reason my money is disappearing is revealed in an editorial in The Washington Times: “We Can’t Afford This Government.”

This was no doubt prompted by the announcement by Americans for Tax Reform that “the average American worked 231 days just to support government, which consumes 63.41 percent of national income.” Yow! The government consumes two-thirds of income! We’re freaking doomed!

Even more horrifically, the cost of government is getting monstrously, exponentially, catastrophically higher, as, “Just two years ago, Cost of Government Day fell an astonishing 34 days earlier,” which is a tax increase of 17.3% in two years! And now the Obama administration wants to raise taxes even more! We’re freaking doomed!

A lot of this is due to, as USA Today reported Aug. 10 and The Washington Times reminds us, that “federal pay and benefits per employee now average more than twice that of private workers: $123,049 compared to $61,051.”

An interesting sidebar is that “Federal salaries outpaced inflation in the past decade by 33 percent.”

Now, as angry as you get about the income disparity between the gilded public servants and their impoverished masters, it is worse than that because I notice that this gain of 33% by federal workers is only the part that was more than inflation, which was, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27%, meaning that federal salaries went up 60% in 10 years! Un-Freaking-Believable (UFB)! It’s surprising they only make double what we private-sector people make!

Imagine how fabulously well these public employees would have done if they had invested their money according to the dictates of the Fab-U-Tastic Mogambo Portfolio Theory (FUTMPT) and invested it all in gold, silver and oil! They would all be multi-millionaires!

This only proves that buying gold, silver and oil, as per the immortal FUTMPT, is not only immensely profitable, but it’s easy, too! As in “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”

The Mogambo Guru
for The Daily Reckoning