More big government, anyone?

A warning sign from the city is displayed in front of the Animas River as orange sludge from a mine spill upstream caused by the Environmental Protection Agency flows past Berg Park in Farmington, N.M., last week.
A warning sign from the city is displayed in front of the Animas River as orange sludge from a mine spill upstream caused by the Environmental Protection Agency flows past Berg Park in Farmington, N.M., last week.

The 2016 Republican presidential campaign should have as a central theme the inefficiency of the federal government, but today's increasingly handout society will make it tough for the GOP field to make tracks with such an argument.

That's a pity because the last six years are rife with examples. The unpopular Affordable Care Act and the Internal Revenue Service scandal aside for the moment, the last few days have demonstrated the need to roll back the government's role in our lives.

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* Environmental Protection Agency accidentally unleashes 3 million gallons of mine waste* EPA chief: Colorado mine spill 'pains me'

The recent orange-yellow slush polluting the Animas River in Colorado - as if millions of bags of Cheetos had been dumped in it - was caused by the Environmental Protection Agency, the same agency responsible for protecting such rivers. Imagine for a moment if the millions of gallons of pollutants released into the water a week ago had been caused by a large corporation. Think of the BP spill. It would be hands down the biggest environmental scandal of 2016.

The EPA is saying little beyond that it continues to monitor the river.

"Collection, transportation and lab analysis of metals in water is complex and time-consuming," the agency said in a statement.

If such a statement asking for patience had been made by a Republican presidential administration - think of the Bush administration and Hurricane Katrina - there would be no end of the outcry.

Closer to home, the Chickamauga Dam new lock project has suffered from inefficiency in the way such projects are funded. Instead of the federal government appropriating the money for the project at a fixed cost and being built, it is appropriated a year at a time.

Then, after money was not appropriated in the budget for the new lock for several years in a row, costs to finish it skyrocketed, users found other ways to transport their goods and now a cost-benefit analysis by the federal Office of Management and Budget indicates finishing it may not be a fiscally smart thing to do.

The Inland Waterways Users Board said Tuesday that even though the project received $3 million this year from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to restart work on the lock, it is not included in the president's 2016 budget.

That doesn't mean money won't wind up there, but it does point up the inefficiency of the funding process.

Meanwhile, more than a year after the Veterans Administration was exposed for the long, possibly deadly wait times experienced by former military service members and the scandal's subsequent cover-up, the agency's inefficiency is still at issue.

On Monday, Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the United States House Veterans Affairs Committee, mentioned two of the problems to attendees at the national convention of the Disabled American Veterans in Denver. One is a bill - passed by the House - that would streamline the VA's process for firing problem workers. The other is the cost overrun at a VA medical center under construction near Denver.

Bill supporters want a faster process that will allow the VA to dismiss the likes of employees who were responsible for the cover-up and employees who were at fault for the medical center cost overruns.

The government worker-protective White House, per usual, is against such a speedier process and claims the bill would make it harder to recruit the best workers. How getting rid of bad employees would make it harder to recruit new ones was not detailed.

The cost of the new medical center in the meantime has tripled to $1.72 billion, and criminal prosecution is being mentioned if evidence of wrongdoing is uncovered.

While these problems continue to roll out, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination said she'd like to see the federal government spend $350 billion to get the federal government even more deeply in the funding and loan repayment involved in college education. Hillary Clinton's solution for the cost of her program is the vague, oft-used, sounds-good-until-it's-your-money phrase of "closing tax loopholes."

A recent Federal Reserve study showed that college tuition increases 55 to 65 cents for every dollar in federal "aid," a fact that wasn't lost on Neil McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

"Quite simply," he said, "when somebody else pays your bills, you are more likely to consume and less likely to think efficiently about what you are consuming. That's been the higher education problem for decades, and this plan would have someone else foot even more of the bill."

It's no wonder, then, that interest is increasing across the country for a national constitutional convention to pass a balanced budget amendment. Such an animal is not likely to see life since the nation's only other one was its first in 1787, but 27 states have endorsed the idea at one time or another over the past 40 years.

Obviously, the federal government must be involved in many aspects of our complex society today, but the light hand it should wield should be wielded far more efficiently.

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