LOS PAYASOS - YOUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK

Govt loves its cars, all 642,233 of 'em Americans love their cars, and so apparently does Uncle Sam. He's got 642,233 of them. Operating those vehicles — maintenance, leases and fuel — cost taxpayers a whopping $3.4 billion last year, according to General Services Administration data obtained and analyzed by The Associated Press. While Cabinet and other officials say they need the vehicles to do their jobs, watchdogs say mismanagement of the government fleet is costing millions of dollars a year in wasteful spending. For example: _ At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, fuel consumption and inventory are down, yet overall costs have increased significantly. Officials there can't figure out why. _ The Interior Department was told by its own watchdog that it should cut its inventory, but it's added hundreds of vehicles. _ The VA has some cars that are barely driven. One just disappeared. Add to that the cost of drivers, a perk given to high-level government officials. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters has two drivers. Their salaries totaled more than $128,000 last year. The driver for Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt earns about $90,000 a year. That's more than double the average salary of an office manager or accountant, and about $35,000 more than a registered nurse earns, according to a salary calculator provided by CareerBuilder.com....
S.F. mayor proposes fines for unsorted trash Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents' trash to make sure pizza crusts aren't mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom. And if residents or businesses don't separate the coffee grounds from the newspapers, they would face fines of up to $1,000 and eventually could have their garbage service stopped. The plan to require proper sorting of refuse would be the nation's first mandatory recycling and composting law. It would direct garbage collectors to inspect the trash to make sure it is put into the right blue, black or green bin, according to a draft of the legislation prepared by the city's Department of the Environment....
America's $53 trillion jumbo loan Americans are now tasting the sour fruits of unaffordable mortgages: foreclosure, bankruptcy, falling markets. The nation, too, is staring at overwhelming debt, made worse by this week's forecast of a whopper federal deficit. Washington mustn't let this burden rise, for the sake of global financial markets and future US generations. It's true that the $482 billion deficit chasm estimated for fiscal year 2009 doesn't look so deep when taken as a percentage of the overall economy – 3.3 percent of gross domestic product compared to the 1983 nadir of about 6 percent. But this is just one "mortgage" that the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) must meet. It owes on all the deficits it has accumulated over the years (the national debt), and it has jumbo liabilities to come in the form of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Adding all those liabilities together, the government has dug itself into a $53 trillion fiscal hole – the equivalent of $175,000 per person living in the United States. If the White House and Congress continue to follow the do-nothing plan, in another 30 years or so the federal government will spend more than twice as much as it raises in taxes....
Higher Math One-thousand-one-hundred-fifty-eight is a pretty big number, especially if you're talking about pages you've got to read. To get your bearings, "War and Peace," long the standard for overwhelming verbiage, weighs in at about 1,500 pages, while on the other side your average Harlequin romance novel is around 200 soapy pages. None of these figures, though, are close to this whopper -- 452 billion. So what's any of this got to do with the price of tomatoes, as they say? Well, nothing, but it's got a lot to do with the price of college and your taxes. On Tuesday night, a congressional conference committee passed legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HEA) that if enacted - and it seems it will be - will drive up both the price of college and your tax bill. But don't bother trying to nitpick it; the legislation is 1,158 pages long and is expected to be voted on by the full House and Senate today. It is doubtful many members of Congress will read even a little of the bill before it's given a final yea or nay. And what's the significance of 452 billion, you ask? In dollars, it's the newly projected size of the federal deficit, a huge shortfall to which the new HEA will only be adding digits....
SMOKE AND (BROKEN) MIRRORS In recent years, state and local governments across the United States have passed measures to outlaw smoking in bars, says the American. The public health rationale is simple: to protect bar patrons and employees from exposure to secondhand smoke. But according to economists Scott Adams of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Chad Cotti of the University of South Carolina, smoking bans have had some unintended and deadly consequences. Specifically, they have led to an increase in drunk-driving fatalities. The economists studied a variety of municipalities that passed smoking bans. According to their research: * The passage of the bans led to a significant increase in the danger posed by drunk drivers. * Fatal accidents involving a drunk driver increase by about 13 percent; this is approximately 2.5 fatal accidents a year for a typical county. The evidence is consistent with two mechanisms -- smokers searching for alternative locations to drink and smokers driving to nearby jurisdictions that allow smoking in bars, say Adams and Cotti....