Government Jokes: Laughing All the Way to the Bank

Government Jokes: Laughing All the Way to the Bank

"One of the biggest lies in American is. I'm from the government and I'm here to help." This famous joke leads to more wasteful spending by encouraging cynicism. Thousands of government programs have been created and funded because a majority of lawmakers believed these initiatives were essential and will benefit our democracy.

With government programs representing over 30% of our economy, it's inevitable that there are plenty of instances where they don't work as intended, for example:

• helping survivors who were hit by a hurricane
• giving farm subsidies to millionaires
• taking 10 years to deliver a letter
• finding weapons of mass destruction
  

The media is loaded with stories about government waste and incompetence because bad news sells. These stories continually seep into the minds of ordinary taxpayers who support reasonable and valuable programs but this compassionate attitude is extinguished by the widespread belief that everything our government does is terrible. This cynicism causes Americans to wind up not caring what the government does as long as it stays away from them.

The result of this leave-me-alone attitude leaves more government money to those who know how to use the system rather than hate it. Most every large company in America takes advantage of government grants, loans, contracts or free services. Real estate entrepreneurs like Donald Trump credits using government programs to make his first million dollar deal. Vice President Dick Cheney received over $3 billion in government contracts when he was running Halliburton. George W. Bush received $200 million in government loan for his baseball team. Even millionaire broadcaster Sam Donaldson tapped little-known government services to fund his cancer surgery. And why do families making over $100,000 a year receive more financial aid for college than those making less than that (1). Seniors with incomes over $150,000 receive more government benefits than older folks living on less than $15,000 (2). And here is something most American's would find hard to believe...only 12% of government handouts goes to the poor (2)

As long as average Americans ignore government programs and don't care how they are run, there will be more jokes about incompetence. If you paid for a service from a private company, you would invest effort to find out about that service and complain loudly if it does not work right. The media has been successful in convincing ordinary taxpayers that it's not worth it to demand an end to wasteful spending. Meanwhile there are plenty of folks and companies that are laughing all the way to the bank.

Matthew Lesko
Entrepreneur and Author of over 100 books on government benefits
matthew@lesko.com
303-929-8400

1) U.S. Office Of Education, National Center For Education Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_317.asp?referer=list
2) Page 151 "Running On Empty", Peter G. Peterson, former Chairman of Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2004