The Washington Examiner has an excellent column by Timothy Carney about a subject that just drives me nuts: government using tax dollars to lobby other governments for more tax dollars. We have written about the issue of government lobbying before here at the Show-Me Institute, but I can honestly say that few things make me angrier. (Be sure to check out the comments from the last link!) From the Examiner piece:
State governments have overspent, largely on salaries that far exceed those in the private sector and benefits packages that dwarf what most Americans get. So now those governments are spending their money on powerful high-dollar lobbyists, with the paramount goal of getting access to more federal money. But the federal government is hopelessly in deficit.
The result is this: Local government officials are using your money to hire former government officials to ask current federal officials to give local governments more federal money — and future taxpayers will foot the bill for this whole racket.
