"Every dollar spent by government is a dollar earned by individuals. Government must always ask: Are your dollars being wisely spent? Can we afford it? Is it not better for the country to leave your dollars in your pocket?"—Ronald Reagan, 1977

Current Issue

Department of Larceny

Labor Day A Perfect Time To Abolish The DOL

If you were given 58 billion dollars, could you write a two-sentence mission statement for your project and not have two typos or grammar mistakes on your web page?

Let's take a look at a site of a division within the Department of Larceny:

President Bush, would you please inflate the budget for the DOL to 59 billion dollars so that extra billion could be spent to form a task force with a goal to create a web page and find a replacement for "inthe" and then fund a symposium for the DOL employees titled "Why Labor Market is Not a Compound Word"?

It is all downhill from there for your hard earned dollars ripped from your paycheck and directed to the DOL. It does get much worse.

Would you like a rebate on your money given to the DOL's "National Skill Standards Board"? Since 1995, 45 million was spent to create standards in occupations that include bellboys, bus boys, and waiters. We all would have some keen interest in the 28-page booklet published that gave detailed instructions on how to clear tables.

Still don't believe we are globalists? The DOL has a "Bureau of International Labor Affairs" that has sent money to India to (supposedly) "fund technical assistance to India on mine safety and health, designed to reduce deaths and injuries among Indian coal miners through training for miners, managers, and unions." (I thought union dues would take care of this sort of thing).

I hope the coal miners in Pennsylvania and West Virginia think about that as they head home after a hard day's work realizing that some of what they thought they earned for their family gets routed out of the USA and to Indian coal miners. Instead of Labor Day, we instead should celebrate "Constitution Day" and ask all citizens—and the 15 million illegal aliens—to reflect on our founding principles. Come to think of it, maybe we should reflect on India's founding principles also.

Another DOL division, OSHA, the Department of Safety and Health Administration, has a cute little blurb on its site. Listed in their section "The Public We Serve"—lawyers! Once in a great while, the government speaks the truth.

The Job Corps is also a division of the Department of Larceny. "Job Corps is the nation's largest and most comprehensive residential, education and job training program for at-risk youth, ages 16 through 24". Take a guess. How much do you think is spent per participant? $31,700 per year! And the Department of Education's "Adult Education" program? $493 per participant!

President Bush, could you please add another billion dollars and make it a nice round 60 billion so we can have a task force to figure out this glaring oddity?

In an Administration report to the president on the effectiveness of various DOL divisions, the "Employment Service" has a rating of "Unknown". They currently do not rate themselves on any performance, just "how many they serve". 58 billion dollars and we can't even have a measure of effectiveness.

The mission statement on the main DOL site underscores why this is another useless government black hole.

Fosters and promotes the welfare of the job seeker Most of us have sought employment at one time. How much fostering of welfare did you receive? I did not get any fostering, and I certainly did not receive any welfare.

Improving working conditions I thought everyone knew that working conditions were improved by the one million plus attorneys contorting the law, and your ex-office buddy telling you about a good lawyer who got him a million bucks for a sore wrist, or as the lawyers call it, carpal tunnel syndrome. I have worked, supervised, and owned businesses and I have yet to see any working condition improved by the DOL. It is usually businesses that improve their own working conditions to attract employees and avoid lawsuits.

Strengthen free collective bargaining In a free market, do we need the government to do any strengthening of collective bargaining? Isn't that what the employer and the employees do on their own? And just who is strengthened here? The employer? The employee? With socialism, I take it that the employee would receive more strengthening.

As you go through more of the mission statement, every mission is either an overlap with another agency or should not be part of a free market in the first place, such as "helping employers find workers". Aren't job seekers supposed to find employers? Has socialism made the slugs so sluggish that, instead of encouraging them to seek employers, we spend 58 billion to help employers seek workers—with unemployment rates high?

We face a grave national security risk, including Mueller, Cheney, and Rumsfeld stating that we should expect a WMD attack on the United States. President Bush recently has stated he "wants Congress to reign in spending" even though he has added more layers of fat to his two budgets than Congressman Jerrold Nadler has added to his triple chin. Yet, we still continue on with more waste, more fraud, and more globalistic welfare than ever before in our nation's history.

Tax slaves who want their freedom back and want true national security should be demanding that this nation end its state controlled, communist modeled government and abolish these useless and overlapping tax hogs contributing to further destruction of our former great nation.