AMERICA’S CRISIS OF GREEDY GOVERNMENT LOOTERS

America is in crisis because the people responsible for governing the country are looting it instead.

Obamacare has sent health insurance premiums and budget deficits soaring, clobbered employment, dragged down economic growth. But it’s been a bonanza for big health insurance companies, to whom President Obama plans to hand $8 billion more taxpayer dollars.

Executives at investment banks who should have gone to jail for reckless and deceptive lending got bailouts. Thanks to a law passed by the Democrat Congress in 2010 that clobbered their competitors, "too big to fail" banks have increased their market share.

"Renewable" energy firms produce little electricity at exorbitant cost, but reap billions in taxpayer subsidies.

Illegals have committed more than 3,000 murders and 8,000 sexual assaults in Texas since 2008, the governor said. More flood across the border because Democrats see them as future Democrat voters; big business sees cheap labor.

More than 500 veterans died or were seriously injured last year due to "inappropriate" care at Veterans Administration hospitals, according to internal documents. The Office of Special Counsel is investigating 67 claims of retaliation against whistleblowers at 45 VA facilities in 28 states. Managers altered records to conceal neglect, and to obtain bonuses they hadn’t earned.

It’s hard to find a government agency anywhere that isn’t run mostly for the benefit of those who staff it.

Federal employees make 74 percent more than do workers in the private sector, when benefits are included. Not many do much to earn it.

*With a billion dollars to spend and two years to plan, the Department of Health and Human Services couldn’t build a functioning web site.

*The Department of Homeland Security has a $38.2 billion budget, more than 240,000 employees, but can’t stop the flood of illegals.

*Despite more money and the benefit of experience, FEMA performed about the same following Hurricane Sandy as after Katrina.

Government unions lower the quality of public services, said Harvard Prof. John Donahue in his 2008 book, "The Warping of Government Work."

In every bureaucracy, those who care most about expanding its power will achieve dominance over those who care most about performing its mission, said novelist Jerry Pournelle.

The Devil’s bargain in which Democrats – in exchange for votes and campaign contributions – lavish taxpayer dollars upon bureaucrats, and shield them from accountability, intensifies Pournelle’s "Iron Law of Bureaucracy."

That’s why we have so many teachers and bureaucrats with six figure incomes; so many young people who don’t know the things they need to know to succeed in life, so many veterans suffering from neglect.

Trade unions had no better friend in the White House than Franklin Roosevelt, but he opposed collective bargaining for public employees.

Government unions are "not only incompatible with the spirit of democracy, but inconsistent with every principle upon which our government is founded," ruled a New York Supreme Court judge in 1943.

For most Americans, the last five years have been the toughest economically since the Great Depression. But between 2008 and 2011, the median income of federal employees rose 36 times more than for Americans overall.

Politicians in Washington are richer than ever – some through practices for which people in the private sector are sent to jail.

Four of the five wealthiest counties in the U.S. are suburbs of Washington D.C., where the politicians, lobbyists and bureaucrats live. The average salary for federal employees in the nation’s capital is more than $100,000.

The IRS breaks the law, destroys evidence, lies to Congress. The EPA planned to garnish wages of "polluters" without a court order. During the brief government "shutdown" last year, the National Park Service deliberately inflicted as much pain as it could on visitors to national parks.

Bureaucrats act more like our masters than "public servants." They "function almost as an entitled aristocracy, with little to justify their power and privileges," said Iain Murray in his 2011 book, "Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats are Getting Rich Off of You."

Abraham Lincoln paid tribute to the Union soldiers who "gave the last full measure of devotion" so that "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

It’s slipping away.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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