For my $47

Is it time to scream like a Colombian hooker?

Just thinking that a $47 dispute over a Colombian prostitute's fees unleashed a scandal on the US Secret Service (that will easily cost taxpayers millions to investigate and punish the guilty) makes you wonder, where was that cheap bastard when the Government Services Agency needed him counting pennies back in Las Vegas?

The GSA is under fire for spending lavishly (~$850,000) on a 300-employee morale-building event it put on at a posh resort in Las Vegas in 2010.  If only they had been guided in planning this circus by that parsimonious Secret Service agent, a certain mind reader hired to entertain the GSA bureaucrats might have been shorted her reported $3,100 fee and called the cops-- as apparently did a certain "working girl" in Cartagena after being shorted $47 for services rendered just before President Obama was due to there arrive for the Summit of the Americas.

On first glance there's no relation between these two scandals.  Mischief by officers in Cartagena sworn  to protect the US president and cavorting by once-faceless bureaucrats in Las Vegas have little in common except for the supreme embarrassment these incidents have caused.

But there is a common thread-- albeit thin and threadlike-- that in the public mind connects the vapid stupidity shown by these incidents:  When did public employees get so friggin arrogant?

The US economy is still in its worst rut since the Great Depression while the federal budget (annual deficits, national debt, unfunded obligations) have all mushroomed radically.  The shift of economic power from private sector productivity to public payrolls in the past decade is terrifying to most people who wake up each morning and go to work just to pay for local, state, and federal government employees-- not including so-called private sector jobs like defense contractors and road construction companies entirely dependent on state and federal spending.

In the last few years you can feel the tilt and almost see the US map tipping like a giant table-top towards Washington DC, where all the hard-earned money from across the country slides rapidly across into a giant hole.

In Wisconsin a kind of civil war is unfolding between the private and public employment sectors that began when their new governor and elected legislature decided to tilt the scales back in the direction of non-government workers by having the audacity to ask public employees to pay a larger share of their pension and health insurance premiums.  Governor Scott Walker's sense of fairness was deemed so offensive to public employee unions, they launched a recall campaign against him and several legislators-- a fight Walker is sure to win, thanks in no small part to the GSA spectacle of glowing contempt shown for the public that pays its way.

The Wisconsin saga is emblematic of the public's disgust with a deepening haves versus have-nots chasm between those who work to pay for government expenditures and those who live off the taxpayer at a higher standard of living with fewer worries.

Put another way, when us ordinary citizens no longer can receive simple fairness, say an extra $47 for spending the night getting screwed by our government, they will fight back like the hooker in Cartagena and unleash much more than a giant scandal.