Thought this was pretty good...

[INVIGOR]

...

[thevirtual]

The whole point of this post is an argument against the public option?

If you think the public option is a "government takeover of healthcare" you aren't thinking right.

[south]

I believe it's more of a post against government bloat, inefficiencies, corruption. And I agree. It's insanity.

[fab]

Does anybody remember the reason given for the establishment of
the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY.... during the Carter Administration?

Anybody?

Anything?

No?

Didn't think so!

Bottom line. We've spent several hundred billion dollars in support of
an agency...the reason for which probably not one person who reads this can remember!

Ready??
It was very simple...and at the time, everybody thought it very appropriate.

The Department of Energy was instituted on 8-04-1977.
TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.

Hey, pretty efficient, huh???

AND NOW IT'S 2009 -- 32 YEARS LATER -- AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS "NECESSARY" DEPARTMENT IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR. THEY HAVE 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES; AND LOOK AT THE JOB THEY HAVE DONE! THIS IS WHERE YOU SLAP YOUR FOREHEAD AND SAY, "WHAT WAS I THINKING?"

Ah, yes -- good ole bureaucracy.

Oיh my!

[HarveyJ]

Your analogy is so amazingly far off the mark it's beggars belief that you don't really know better.

Departments don't get new staff in a manner like that if they're only one person, or even if they're only 100. They're subsumed into other departments that already have admin staff.
They only get their own admin staff when they are actually large enough to warrant it, which the DOE certainly is.

The DOE is responsible for, among other things, maintaining nuclear power facilities, radiological enrichment stations, and various other radio-active hazards. A job they seem to be doing commendably, considering that there are over 100 power facilities (let alone the others), and there's only been one nuclear incident in US history.
They clearly still have their night watchmen.
They're also involved in sequestering nuclear waste, government funded R&D into alternative energy sources and fuel efficiency measures, etc. But hey, let's just create something with one purpose, and leave it at that, and never actually, y'know, improve it in any way shape or form so some guy three decades later can ***** about it on that computer network DARPA is cooking up.

I suppose DARPA should be shut down too, I mean, they spent nearly $100b ($100,000,000,000) in 2008 because they're doing more than just inventing better rockets and body armour. Clearly spending beyond their usefulness.

As for foreign oil, American dependence on foreign oil is entirely based on an old policy of ensuring stocks within North American territories are not depleted as a contingency measure. Better to use the resources of other people until they're gone... then you're the only one with any left.
Or do you just like being a willfully ignorant fear monger?

[INVIGOR]

...