Really? Wrong again, sweetie.

http://nyjobsource.com/largestemployers.html

 

I must have missed something somewhere. Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the United States @ 1.4m employees.

http://walmartstores.com/pressroom/news/9751.aspx

 

Here is a little trivia for you;

Big Government Gets Bigger

Study Counts More Employees, Cites Increase in Contractors



By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 6, 2006

The federal government keeps getting bigger.
The Republican Party's oft-stated affinity for smaller government has not applied during the Bush administration. According to a recent study, not only is the number of federal civil servants on the rise, but so are the numbers of employees working for government-funded contractors and for organizations that receive government grants.
Roll all of those together -- and mix in the numbers of postal workers and military personnel on the federal payroll -- and the "true size" of the federal government stands at 14.6 million employees, said Paul C. Light, the study's author and a government professor at New York University.
That compares with 12.1 million employees in 2002, said Light, who has tracked the growth of government for years and has data for as far back as 1990. The latest increase is almost entirely due to contractors, whose ranks swelled by 2.5 million since 2002, Light wrote in his 10-page research brief.


"This time, almost all of the growth can be attributed from the war on terrorism, which boosted Defense spending for both goods and services systems and covered the continued cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," he wrote.
"The rest of the hidden workforce held steady at roughly 2.9 million grantees, while civil service employment inched up and postal employment fell."
Light calls the 10.5 million federal contractors and grantees the government's "hidden workforce" because politicians tend not to mention them when discussing the size of the federal bureaucracy. Yet such workers absorbed nearly $400 billion in federal contracting funds and $100 billion in federal grants in 2005. They often performed vital work such as researching new vaccines, running federal computer systems and making body armor, weapons and meals for the military.
The number of civil servants is increasing, too, up 54,000 since 2002 to 1.9 million workers. That is still fewer than the 2.2 million civil servants on the federal payroll in 1990, at the end of the Cold War.
Light acknowledges that his numbers of contractors and grantee employees are estimates from federal procurement and grant data, and are harder to nail down than the number of civil servants. But the trend is clear, he said.
Politicians who focus on the size of the civil service and fail to acknowledge the hidden workforce "encourage the public into believing that it truly can get more for less," Light said. And the heavy reliance on such workers, while sometimes necessary, makes it more difficult to figure out who is accountable when things go wrong, he said.
"The federal government often uses contractors and grantees to provide talent it cannot recruit, specialized services it cannot produce, competition it cannot generate among its own organizations, and equipment that it cannot and should not build itself," Light wrote.
"t hardly matters who produces the goods and services as long as the federal government is honest with the public about the true cost of delivering on the promises it makes."









And Obama wants to make the government larger, with more power.

 

No.,..according to the last issued number the IRS employes 123,000 people...not including contract employees and temps.The list given in the link only includes private employers.It doesnt adress federal state or local employees.A 2004 press release on IRS.gov put the number at 115,000. That was several years ago and they have had the highest hiring numbers of any entity public or private in the last 18 months...altho...that information comes from Fox so take it for what its worth.

 

For reasons that can only be understood psychologically, those on the right think your attitudes are consistent with patriotism.

 

I have never understood the right wings aversion to taxes...how the hell do they expect to pay for all those tanks and bombers and aircraft carriers they want?Trident submarines cost a metric fuckton of cash too...how should we pay for them?

 

Ronald Reagan told those idiots that they could have the government they wanted without paying for it. They believed him. They still do.

 

Yeah, but...you said the IRS was the largest employer in the U.S. next to the military, and that isn't true, as my link demonstrates. There are many private employers that are larger than the IRS (in terms of the number of employees).

During the debate on health care, several commentators (I can't remember if they were on Fox News or not) kept saying that the bill was going to require the hiring of 100,000 IRS agents to collect the "hidden taxes" in the bill. That seems rather far-fetched given that the IRS only requires 100,000+ employees to do everything else....and most of those are not "agents". Just more BS from the right.

 

They hope that by cutting taxes, and by intimidating people into supporting every single dollar of defense spending (or even increasing it), we'll be forced eventually to abandon all those entitlement programs they hate. That's the Grover Norquist "drown the government in the bathtub" mantra.

 

I have lived by this quote for many years....

Famous Judge Learned Hand Quote

"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as
possible;

he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the
treasury.

There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.

Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands"

 

Actually, the idea here is something along the lines of: "If we keep the government from collecting too much, then we should be able to keep Congress from spending too much."

Unfortunately, it's turning out that irrationality and political motivations are fucking up The Plan™. The spenders are so insidious that they've infiltrated and taken over both parties as well. If you're really believe that W., and the current Republican party, are fiscally conservative, I don't know what to tell you. There haven't been and Regan Republicans in office since after H. W. Bush left office (and, incidentally... that's why. He lost the White House).

oh yea, again: I'm not "on the right". The only reason you think so is because of your skewed viewpoint.

 

When I talk about people cheating on their taxes, I'm not talking about those who use legal methods to minimize what they owe.

In 2007, the IRS estimated that it was owed $354 billion more than it collected. As a taxpayer, I can't view that as a good thing.

 

humm... we might be talking past one another, slightly. I can understand what you're saying, I think, but having a fucking IRS auditor climbing through your finances... if there's a better way to non-sexually rape someone I'm not sure what it is. The problem is, the IRS has too much power (authority). That they can actually throw you in prison is just wrong. There are few other Federal institutions that can act as judge and jury like that, you know (the FCC is actually similar, but they're focus is on some companies)?

 

Once more, with feeling. THAT'S THE WAY THE LAW IS WRITTEN. You're still directing your anger at the wrong people.

 

I have been there and being audited by the IRS isw no fun, especially when they can freeze your bank accounts, vehicles, where you can't drive your cars, and there is nothing you can do about it!

 

That's a rather large number, isn't it? How did they come up with it? That's not questioning, just curious. Because if they can tell where it isn't coming from, then the should also know who and thus be able to go after the actual fraud.

Of course, I still want to see the scene from Executive Orders get played out, where they pile all the tax codes onto a single table. Can't help but wonder if it would really break...

Personally, I'd like to see the tax code get broken down into a set "Staircase". Something like 0% lowest 20% income/poverty line, 5% for the next bracket, 10% for the next bracket, 20% for the fourth bracket, 30% for the final bracket. Something flat, paid once at the end of the year, not taken out piece by piece over a thousand different transactions that then require another hundred man hours of filling out paperwork to see whether or not someone screwed up. Keep It Simple, Stupid (Congresscritters)!

 

Sure there is. I see their ads all the time on TV. They'll settle your debt for pennies on the dollar, and make the IRS "treat you with respect".

 

I have no idea where they got the number, but I have a feeling that a large chunk of it is income from small businesses that is never reported. But I don't know how they assign a value to that.

 

I have been in a divorce like that.......

 

So, in other words, they guessed. Probably used some numbers, but still a guess. Gee, wonder why people don't trust the government...?