A Holiday in Honor of Government Waste

Mark your calendars! We've got a big holiday coming up this weekend.

This Sunday, July 15th, the nation can celebrate the "Cost of Government” day.

That's the point in the year when we've worked enough to pay for the spending and expensive regulations from the government -- federal, state and local.That means this year you'll have worked 197 days on behalf of the government. The date it falls on is a good measure for just how bloated the government has become. This is the fourth straight year "Cost of Government" day has fallen in July.

Until Obama took office, it was late June or earlier, and compared to just a decade ago, you now have to work an additional 29 days to cover your share of the nation's bureaucracy!

This all comes from the Americans for Tax Reform's annual report on the cost of government, and the details are a doozy.The biggest driver of these costs is, of course, spending.

This year you worked a full 88 days just for federal spending, and you worked another 40 for your state and local, but that's just the half of it.

A growing burden is the cost of government regulations. 69 days of the year goes to paying for that. Regulations like Dodd-Frank, or the reams of rules from the EPA, which are already bankrupting coal plants. But of course, July 15th is the just the national average.

Taxpayers in Connecticut will have to keep working until August 9th.

Tennessee gets off easier. If you live there, you've been free since June 28th.

Either way, when you're celebrating ask yourself this: Just what kind of government are we paying for?

One that thinks it's ok to spend $750K so detainees at Guantanamo Bay can have a new soccer field? A soccer field not for the soldiers; for the suspected terrorists!

Or how about the $175K to study the effect of cocaine on Japanese Quails. Specifically, whether or not it makes them engage in sexually risky behavior.

How about the $135K for "Layoff," the recession-themed video game? Sounds fun, right?

Then there’s a $30 million program to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangoes. And it gets even dumber. It was abandoned after one year, causing many of the farmers to go into default.

And of course this: $3 million to study shrimp mobility! We got some very highly trained crustaceans out of that one. I could watch this all day, but here's a sobering thought. If Taxmageddon hits - those massive tax hikes set to go off at the end year - then the cost of government day could be pushed back into August and beyond, permanently!

You know there's something seriously wrong when Independence Day is a whole month before you're done working on the government's behalf.