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Welfare Bureaucrats Swarm Like Locusts Upon The States

-By Warner Todd Huston

Mark Tapscott has an odd idea of a fun time, but I’m glad he does. He was casually tooling through the info posted on the website of the U.S. Census Bureau and decided to see how many welfare bureaucrats there were working in the states. I know, I know, Tapscott needs to take up bowling or something. But, still, the numbers he found are instructive.

He found, for instance, that out of every 100,000 residents, the State of New York has 256 welfare bureaucrats and Wisconsin has 249. That’s quite a number, isn’t it?

That means that New York, having 19,541,453 residents, has at least 50,026 welfare bureaucrats feeding off the taxpayers. Wisconsin, why it employs 14,080 welfare workers.

These number are, well, idiotic. But they are true nonetheless.

Here are the top ten as Tapscott calculated:

• New York – 256
• Wisconsin – 249
• New Hampshire – 241
• Ohio – 228
• Minnesota – 208
• California – 189
• Pennsylvania – 178
• North Carolina – 174
• North Dakota – 164
• New Jersey – 146

Tapscott also had an excellent point. He asked what the readers thought this proved? He then answered saying that it proved that just about anyone with an Internet connection could find this information.

That ought to scare the dickens out of government employees everywhere because it represents a level of transparency and, ultimately, accountability that is unprecedented.

Indeed it should. But will our politicians be wary of this fact and act in a more upright manner? I doubt it.

Still, it was a good exercise and more people should try it out.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

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