Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You

by Iain Murray

Overview

They’re Stealing Us Blind

Remember when we used to call government employees “public servants”? They’re servants no more—now they’re bureaucratic masters of the universe, claiming inflated salaries (up to two times as much as private sector employees) and early retirement with unparalleled pensions and benefits. And how do they spend their time? When they’re actually working, they spin red tape and regulations that make your life harder (and their lives easier), your taxes higher, and your share of the nation’s debt unsustainable.

Like true bureaucrats they like to scurry around in the dark, doing their mischief outside of public scrutiny. But no longer: Iain Murray—author of the rollicking exposé The Really Inconvenient Truths—knows all about bureaucrats and their lairs, because he used to be one himself. In Stealing You Blind he blows the whistle on the out-of-control bureaucracy whose greed could actually tip our country into a financial abyss.

In Stealing You Blind, you’ll discover:

• Why the wealthiest congressional district in America is in a recession-proof suburb of Washington, D.C.
• How the Department of Transportation went from having one employee making $170,000 or more to having nearly 1,700 making that much—during the peak of the recession
• Why even FDR thought federal workers shouldn’t be allowed to unionize
• How state, local, and federal bankruptcy could be coming your way thanks to public employee union greed
• Why bureaucrats regard taxpayers as sheep to be shorn—and how they do it
• Ten steps to fight back and regain control of our government from the parasitic bureaucratic class
  

Filled with devastating facts about how government workers are living large off the rest of us and driving our country to financial ruin, Stealing You Blind is a rousing call to reclaim our rights as taxpayers and save our economy from the bureaucrats who are choking it to death for their own benefit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596981539
Publisher:	Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date:	07/11/2011
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Iain Murray is Vice President for Strategy and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank that works to promote free markets and limited government. Murray also directs the Center for Economic Freedom at CEI. For the past fifteen years at CEI, Iain has written and lectured extensively on free markets and the environment, labor policy, finance, the EU, and trade. He tweets at @ismurray and is a Contributing Editor at Instapundit.com. Before coming to CEI, Iain was Director of Research at the Statistical Assessment Service. A
former civil servant in the United Kingdom, where he helped to privatize the railroad industry, Iain immigrated to the U.S. in 1997 and remains a British citizen. He holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of London and a Master of Arts from the University of Oxford. He is married with two children and lives in Northern Virginia. Iain is a long-suffering fan of the Washington Redskins, Sunderland AFC, and the England cricket team. He likes to brew his own beer and play board and table-top games with friends.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Part 1 This Is Al Gore's House. What Does Yours Look Like?

Chapter 1 Lifestyles of the Rich and Powerful 1

Chapter 2 Government 101 11

Part 2 Stand and Deliver!

Chapter 3 The Tax Army 29

Chapter 4 Red Tape Bondage Games 43

Chapter 5 It's for the Children! 65

Part 3 Robber Barons in Action

Chapter 6 Private Sector Jargon, Public Sector Performance 79

Chapter 7 Union Men 99

Part 4 Your Friendly Local Robber Barons

Chapter 8 Municipal Madness 127

Chapter 9 The Education Bubble 149

Conclusion: A Program for Public Sector Reform 173

Acknowledgments 189

Notes 191

Index 205

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Stealing You Blind




“Where do all your hard-earned tax dollars go? You don’t know the half of it! . . . This must read manual takes you on a maddening tour that starts at Al Gore’s mansion, winds through the ever-expanding empire of Nanny State busybodies in Washington, and dives into bloated municipal payrolls from the Big Apple to Bell, California. Murray outlines imperative reforms to rein in these new robber barons. If you believe public servants should serve the public and not themselves, get this book.”

—Michelle Malkin, Fox News Contributor and author of Culture of Corruption



“A powerful government, the liberal myth goes, places a check on special interests and provides a counterbalance to the power of the wealthy. In truth, government growth instead creates a new class of Robber Barons—handsomely paid ‘public servants’ who soon monetize that service to become obscenely paid revolving-door lobbyists and ‘consultants.’ Recovered bureaucrat Iain Murray paints the unseemly picture of ‘our new leisure class’ in vivid—and often rage-inducing—detail.”

—Tim Carney, author of Obamanomics and Senior Political Columnist, The Washington Examiner



“Iain Murray eviscerates what he calls the new robber barons, the great empire-builders of the public sector. It is a story of greed, arrogance, and power that would make even a domineering nineteenth-century industrialist blush. This isn’t just a smart and entertaining take-down, but a call to action.”

—Rich Lowry, editor of National Review

From the Publisher