Little Debbie Snack Cakes

I was in charge of a fund raiser for the drama department at one of the schools I worked in. We sold “Little Debbie” Snack cakes at school. I had cases of “Little Debbie’s” in my classroom. Every time I pulled the snacks out to sell them, I ate one and put money in.

During this fundraiser, I gained ten pounds. My children would come to the classroom at the end of the day and I would be eating a snack. One day, one of children told me that a lot of “Little Debbie’s would make one big Debbie.” I didn’t eat another snack after that.

The same can be said about government growth. We look at wanting the government to do one small thing. Then we give them another small responsibility. This keeps going on until the Government is too big for things to function properly. When we look at the growth of federal powers during the 20th Century our founding father’s would not recognize the government they created.

The government that began as three departments (War, Treasury, State) has eaten so many “Little Gov” snack cakes that it has become cumbersome, slow, indecisive, and has agencies that are redundant and fail to act with wisdom. Law enforcement is only one example. We have multiple agencies doing the same or similar jobs and they might talk to each other and they might not.

One private job site (federaljobs.net), disguised to resemble a real government site, currently is advertising that the IRS needs 17,000 agents to enforce President Obama’s new health care legislation. Although I hope that the IRS is not adding that many agents and that the job site has misleading information, I understand that any job added to a government agency is one more that I’ll have to pay taxes to support.

We need to audit the agencies and responsibilities of each agency. Doing this, we can streamline government services and at the same time we can help make government more responsive to the needs of the citizens.

We need to be careful about the number of “Little Gov’s” that we add to the government. When we give the government more responsibility, we give up our responsibility. We do not give our children very much responsibility and as a result they do not have many rights. When we turn our responsibilities over to the government we also turn over some of our rights.