Government costs more than citizens can support

Ordinary Americans may not have a Ph.D. in economics, but we have enough common sense to understand the government, especially since we're the ones who fund it.

Government -- at any level -- does not produce anything, therefore it has no money. The government gets its money from taxing the people and businesses in the productive private sector of the economy.

Nowadays, ordinary, hard-working Americans are concerned that we in the private sector will no longer be able to fund the salaries, benefits and pensions of our fellow Americans who depend on the government (wholly or partially).

Consider these figures I gleaned from the U.S. Census Bureau:

The population of this country is about 308million; 40 million are retired; 18 million are employed by the federal government; 16 million work for state and local governments; 79 million are in school; and 36 million are on welfare. That leaves 119 million (about 38 percent of us) to do the work that creates the taxes to pay the others.

Note that our representatives will tell us the federal government only employs 2.9 million civil service workers. While that is correct, they forget to mention money paid to contract workers, military personnel, postal workers and people paid through federal grants.

Also note, the numbers cited here do not include the billions of tax dollars that are paid out in graft and bribes masquerading as "earmarks" or federal "business as usual."

Jane Kenny

Bluffton