Speaking of employees, it's no wonder we trust locals more than feds. Mill Valley, for example, has a staff of about 100. In contrast, she says, federal service tends to reward its leaders based on the number of people beneath them and the amount of money those subordinates earn. Years ago, Barnes had finished college and was waiting for law school to begin when she was hired as part of a huge, short-term project to combine Navy personnel files from two facilities into one. The government canceled the project just before she started work.
Civil service is tremendously inefficient.
When viewed from a wide-angle perspective, the U.S. tax burden appears light. The Department of the Treasury, for example, likes to point out that as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product, total tax revenue represented less than 28 percent in 1994. That's one of the lowest ratios in the developed world. In contrast, Germany's taxes totaled nearly 40 percent of its output. Denmark weighed in at 52 percent.