Washington D.C. is simply not accountable. Do you believe that every cent of your tax dollars spent by your elected officials should be online? Should government spending be viewable in real-time? Transparency would be revolutionary.
Related: The Destruction is the Distraction
The more we, the voters, know about our elected officials’ respect, or lack thereof, for your tax dollars, the more responsible our elected officials will be. That in turn will mean better our government. The stats in this post are from OpenTheBooks.com and their article in RealClear Politics.
The elected leaders in the nation’s capital are lobbying for a $3.2 billion bailout. If the House took only a cursory look, they’d see plenty of places to cut the fat. Let’s start at city hall. Is the mayor really worth more than any governor in the country?
- The D.C. mayor gets $220,000 in annual pay. What do you think, too pricey?
- At a salary of $212,000, the D.C. City Council chair out-earns every member of Congress except Speaker Pelosi. She earns $223,500.
- The Metropolitan Police Department chief is paid $272,156. This tops every four-star general in the U.S. military (they make $268,332).
- The salary for the superintendent of the D.C. public schools gets $280,000. That is far more than the secretary of the U.S. Department of Education who earns $199,700.
- The D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation chief is paid $10,000 a year more than the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, who manages one-fifth of all the land in the country.
Responsiveness of our representatives to our concerns
Some “Heroes Act.” Heroes to whom? Certainly not you, the taxpayers. Half a billion here. Half a billion there. Pretty soon they will be spending real money. The federal debt continues to explode. It has quadrupled in the last 20 years. Today, 8/28 it has surpassed $26.6 trillion and is rising rapidly. The deficit this year is unknown.
It will be somewhere around $4 trillion, the equivalent of a wartime deficit. The entire federal debt in 1992 after 216 years, two world wars, depressions, countless natural disasters was $4 trillion.
The Pelosi state bailout bill, HEROES Act, clearly screams, “So what? It’s not my money.” By the time our country’s debt becomes so corrosive to your livelihood, to your life, that it can’t be ignored, as it will, Pelosi and the big spenders in both major political parties will be long out of office.
Call your congressional representatives in Washington D.C. Tell them it is time they demonstrate responsibility with actions, not just words. Let them know you are acutely conscious that they are spending your tax dollars. Tell them you are absolutely opposed to bailing out states. They are wasting money with no fiscal sense. They have no care at all for future generations of Americans.