[mngran2]

We’re paying for the lazy useless bastards.

Lovely.

The gardener who mows the lawn at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a lazy useless bastard? The engineer who designs bridges for our interstate highway system is a lazy useless bastard? The spy who keeps tabs on Muslim extremists is a lazy useless bastard? Think for second before you type. These guys deserve a Merry Christmas more than you, I'd say.

[steve-b]

Precisely my point. By yoking these useful employees to the same one-size-fits-all system as the useless paper-pushers, the politicians get a chance to either shell out money to buy votes from the latter or use them as a target of cheap demagoguery. (Really slick politicians can do both.)

The ultimate result is that the Muslim extremists are monitored by the kinda-sorta-adequate spies (the brighter ones got jobs in corporate security, doing half the work for twice the pay). And the ultimate result of that... well, you can fill in the dots.