September 2, 2011 3:34PM

This Week in Government Failure

By Tad DeHaven

Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:

Over the last decade, annual average military wages rose 6.6 percent, federal civilian wages rose 5.0 percent, and private sector wages rose 3.0 percent.
A rule‐of‐thumb to remember is that total federal spending is 3 to 4 percentage points of GDP larger than usually reported by officials.
Imagining that more federal infrastructure spending will be a panacea for the economy is a liberal fairy tale, detached from the actual experience of most federal agencies over the last century.
We’ve nearly tripled the cost of sending a child all the way through the K‑12 system, while performance near the end of high school has been stagnant (reading and math) or even declining (science).
Small Business Administration to close? Unfortunately, no.

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