One of the funniest, bad sad, commentaries on life I ever read was by P.J. O'Rourke. It was on the state of poverty in the U.S. I don't have the book in front of me, so I don't have exact numbers, but it went something like this.

Poverty is defined as a family of 4 having less than a $20,000 yr income. IF you took all the families in the U.S. that fit this, then divided by the total spent by the U.S. gov't on poverty programs, you come out with $20,000 / family.

His point was that if you have a guy in gov't whose job it is to sign checks for poor folk, and didn't have to have all these agencies involved, it would seem that there wouldn't be any poor people any more.

Pf

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>We had a good idea with Superfund, but too much of the 100s of billions of dollars has gone to the lawyers and beauracrats instead of actual cleanup. If that money had been directed straight to cleanup instead of fault finding, finger pointing, and bringing in truck loads of lawyers, we would have about 90% of all hazardous wastes sites eliminated by now. The higher the gov't level the less efficient that gov't is at resolving local problems.