For ages, the federal government and local governments following suit have claimed they needed very good benefits to attract the best people. Besides salaries, these benefits included lavish retirement plans rooted in promises of matching funds onward to medical care on the job as well as after retirement.

Large private corporations, once thought impregnable, also played the same game. In some ways, you might say they had to in order to compete for talent with the largest employer in the country, the federal government.

The government didn’t forget to throw a few crumbs to the small independent companies that made up the bulk of America's middle class. Incentives in the form of deferred taxes or 401(k)s promised, through wise investment, to allow those left out of the benefit windfalls to catch up. Everybody could be said to be in on the deal in one way or another.

And unions that once did something worthy to protect workers from unscrupulous employers and harsh working conditions got in on the act. Having foreseen the decline in membership in the private sector, and having already pushed for benefits about as far as they could, swung to building their membership from public servants that couldn’t leave the country. They preserved their own bureaucracies until membership was more than seventy percent government workers, pushing for better and better benfits for these workers who were never mistreated by their employers, the people who pay taxes.

The federal government also offered pension insurance in the form of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) that would back up a private corporation’s promises to its employees. Of course, participation was voluntary and the participants had to pay an annual fee for this insurance. There’s also little evidence that the PBGC did anything to invest the premiums it collected and more to suggest that the money went down the same hole as our surplus Social Security payroll taxes without being reported as a bogus “trust fund” and without being addressed by employee/taxpayer unions.

It was a wonderful game that could, in many ways, be attributed to the mysteries of capitalism until companies finally began to see how much these benefits were costing them on their bottom lines. Having never calculated the long term effects of their benefit programs or simply ignoring them, major corporations like General Motors and Ford are now claiming they must close plants, layoff thousands, cut benefits, or go bankrupt.

Do we dare jump to the conclusion that these companies didn’t realize that their benefit programs put them in the insurance business? That paying benefits depended on constantly expanding sales, contributions, and more and more employees and customers to pay for the increasing health and retirement costs. That they were gambling with the welfare of people without adjusting to changing demographics and profit pictures. But then, they were themselves insured by the government were they not?

The truth is that it’s always been a gouge. Lavish pension plans have always been unfair and discriminating. And the PBGC seldom assured the entire tab, has usually made settlements of less than the full promise, and is today more than $28 billion in the hole leaving America's taxpayers to pick up the tab.

For instance, everyone loves, respects, and appreciates our first responder police and fire people who receive as much as 8-to-1 in matching retirement benefits because their unions argue their lives are at risk. Yet, these occupations are far down the list of on-the-job fatalities. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, police rank something like twenty-eighth while firemen rank close to forty-third. Truckers, farmers, and construction workers who rank first, second, and third dying on-the-job do not receive the same lavish benefit plans. No one provides them much of anything in benefits and it stands as a glaring contrast to what can be accomplished by government agencies that seem to believe they have an endless supply of taxpayer money.

Worst of all, cities, states, and private corporations have nowhere near the federal government’s ability to borrow billions, even trillions, to support their benefit programs. When Congress and the administration show financial irresponsibility by planning budgets far in excess of their expected revenue and never biting the bullet, they can go out and borrow the difference from investors and foreign countries. Only the federal government, the organization that started this ball rolling and did little to control it, can ask China to come through with the cash to fulfill its commitments.

As someone said recently, isn’t it ironic that a communist country like China can loan us money to buy their goods then get paid back with interest making a profit at both ends? Who are the better capitalists?  

After we’ve passed the point of no return, those professional politicians who could long ago have done something about it are making inane statements such as; “this is the only time the country has been at war without sacrifice from the public.”

Ask the people who spent a working lifetime at General Motors, Ford, or Delphi how they feel about not making sacrifices. Ask the owners of small local restaurants and stores how they feel about the government’s ability to regulate monopolies as was done to AT&T ages ago. Ask the rest of the world how they feel about our invasion and occupation of a hapless country we harassed for more than a decade when it would have been cheaper to send tankers filled with money to pick up their oil. And while you’re at it, ask them how they feel about more than 725 military bases spread throughout the world protecting our “national interests” with more to come in Iraq and possibly Iran after we follow Israel into that old enemy’s territory. Ask yourself how you feel about your heating bill this winter.

It just goes on and on. The country is being run by people who will say and do anything to get elected, have little understanding of the social and economic consequences of their actions, and think mostly of covering their own butts.

If you doubt this, take a look at the federal government's own "Federal Employees Life & Health" fund. An account that never has any income or contributions, pays out millions in benefits every month, and when it makes these payouts usually increases its holdings with the same sort of bogus bonds that are in the Social Security trust fund.