Democrats Build More Pyramids, Call It Economic Activity

Show OffHisMeds a Democrat, and he’ll show you somebody who thinks all government employment and all government spending – regardless of how wasteful and pointless – is a good thing. This pathology takes many different forms: constantly reducing class size so as to hire more teachers; endless “infrastructure” projects; giving money to the states to subsidize Medicaid; outright transfer payments (known as Revenue Sharing) to states to help them meet payroll; the endless expansion of the bureaucracy.

The list goes on.

OffHisMeds calls this activity “Pyramid Building”. Like the ancient pyramids of old, the enterprise serves no practical purpose, it consumes vast amounts of wealth, and virtually nobody benefits from it other than the people involved in building, servicing and maintaining the pyramids. They are also monuments to the egos of their builders, who see in themselves a god-like stature not apparent to everybody else, although “everybody else” is picking up the tab.

There are a couple of important differences, though, between Modern pyramids and those of, say, ancient Egypt. For one thing, nothing tangible comes of Democrat pyramid building. Egypt built hundreds of towering structures made of stone and marble. Democrats built Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the National Institute of the Arts, AARP, as well as the departments of Energy, Education, Interior, Justice and Commerce, to name but a few.

Democrats also co-opt and render pointless other once functional institutions such as our military and NASA, making them havens for terrorists or bastions of entropy and political correctness, their primary functions long-abandoned, their sole purpose to build yet more pyramids, however insubstantial, and including (but not limited to) such follies as neighborhood outreach programs in Afghanistan, and building up the esteem of Islamists.

And unlike ancient pyramids of old, these modern pyramids aren’t impressive, will not stand the test of time, serve no useful purpose, and will never pay off; not even as tourist attractions some thousands of years in the future. In fact, virtually none of them have any physical substance at all.

For today’s example in Democrat pyramid building, I give you the National Transportation and Safety Board. As federal agencies go, the NTSB is particularly worthless, as this story will illustrate. The story is straightforward, and the causes painfully apparent to anybody who saw a picture of the destruction: A semi was stopped on a highway by an accident; a pickup truck crashed into it, despite there being no obstructions to the view of the driver; a school bus crashed into and rolled over the pickup; a second school bus crashed into the rear of the first. The pickup driver and a female student were killed.

After seeing the picture, I opined to a co-worker that all three vehicles involved in the chain reaction collision with the Semi clearly hadn’t been paying attention, and that the bus drivers in particular had lapsed into “herd” mode, blindly following the movement of the vehicle in front of them. Particularly inexplicable was the failure of the first bus driver to see the stopped Semi ahead over the pickup truck in front of her.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol concluded within hours that “the 75-year-old driver of the first bus was "inattentive," and the 38-year-old driver of the second was "following too closely." Enter the NTSB. When OffHisMeds heard that the NTSB had insinuated itself into the investigation, he wondered if he would hear what he always hears whenever the NTSB is involved in an accident: “the investigation will take 12 to 18 months”. As any follower of government folly knows, this little bit of Democrat-speak is a catch-all justification for endless government dithering, consumption of tax dollars, unaccountability and pointless employment.

Sure enough, NTSB Vice Chairman Christopher Hart said "people, vehicles and the environment at the crash scene will be evaluated by the team of 14 investigators, though a final report could take up to 18 months”.

OHM waits with bated breath to hear of the location where the NTSB will transport the damaged vehicles so as to reconstruct them in their entirety, employing CSI-like technology (including but not limited to lasers, infrared and all manner of exotic chemicals) to the wreckage and the expenditure of millions of dollars so as to reach the same conclusion as the Missouri State Highway Patrol and Yours Truly, who essentially did it for free.

OHM just wishes the NTSB jerk-offs would get on the same page as the rest of humanity and conclude their investigation in the same timeframe as the Missou SHP, content that the obvious answer is the answer, and requires neither a fourteen month investigation, or their continued presence.

Fat chance.