State Parks, the newest embarassment, good luck in November on tax increases

Why am I not surprised?  It seems everyday there is a new outrage in government spending.  It happens at all levels.  It is the lack of oversight by those we elect and hire to spend the taxpayers money.  Now we see the State Parks Director and her assistant resigning for the mess they oversaw.  How long will we allow this to keep going on?

Usually when a public employee steals they get caught sooner or later.  Usually, when the perp goes on vacation, the person who fills in finds their scam and reports it.  It happened here in Nevada County many years ago when a fellow swiped a couple of million bucks using a closed grant bank account.  He was caught when he was on vacation and a check came in and the jig was up.  The Auditor was not doing his job just as there doesn't seem to be any oversight in Sacramento or Washington DC. 

Reading the State Parks story in the Union this morning I actually found it humorous.  I know that sounds strange but since there was so much written about the closures in California, and the resultant mobilization to keep the parks open, I guess I saw a curious juxtaposition.  The liberals running the parks, you know, the holier than thou folks, and the liberals running the not-profits, were in bed together but the State folks were secretly sleeping with others and lying through there teeth.  We have told people for many years, the government will screw over everyone since they are equal opportunity screwers.  But, the relationships the grant seekers and self proclaimed eco do-gooders have with the government is no different than any other relationship.  Left or right.  Government has become so large and the people in it so crass this is what all of us receive.

So here in our little county, the relationships were one sided love affairs.  The kids in our schools now get to see the lessons of why we on the right are skeptics and don't trust government much.  Perhaps SYRCL and the other folks who were hosed by the State Parks people should go into the schools and teach a bit of this lesson.  Well, probably not, but one can only hope.

With all the light starting to be shined on some of these fiasco's by the GAO, and the rest of the alphabet agencies in our country, how does anyone vote for any tax increase?  I have a solution though.  There should be contracts signed with private sector auditors to go through the books of every single agency and department at all levels of government here in America.  From the special districts, cities, counties, states and Feds.  We need a baseline set of data.  Sort of like starting from scratch.  We need to  ascertain that the  trillions we give these people are spent as the law describes.  Take a couple of years and use a whole lot of people to do the inspections.  Somewhere I read that every billion dollars supports 20,000 full time jobs.  So if these people uncover a billion wasted dollars, or stop the spending of a billion dollars, then we can solve the unemployment problem almost overnight.  Then when we get done with the audits, all government agencies will use the "baseline" budgeting technique from now on.

The State Parks is just one agency.  There are many taxes, fees and exaction's we pay to the government and now we can agree, left and right, that our money is being misspent can't we?  I would suggest the State Parks be the first department to clean house of its employees and start over.  My guess is there are a lot of people who withheld the truth of the 55 million bucks.  Governor Brown needs to regain our trust and show the taxpayers he means business.  My guess is hell will freeze over first.