Americans have a great distaste for letting somebody else spend their money -- however they are very generous with giving it away to their favorite charities. As an example of waste of money spent by the government -- my friend has a computer on her desk -- in 20 years, she has never been trained to use it, and she is not computer savy -- so she has never learned to use more than one window at a time, and she has never learned even the most basic style based formatting of a document... the amount of time she wastes just making sure each paragraph of a document is styled properly is unbelievable. And she has to push documents out every day. When she brings a computer home so she can "work" on a business trip -- 1/2 the time, she can't get it to work the way she's used to because the state gov't has not implemented any IT standards, there's no knowing what she'll get when she checks out an office computer for a trip. And probably most of the 80,000 other people in the state gov't she works for have never been trained either. I think the culture of "it's good enough for now" that permeates my friends office wouldn't last for 1 day in private industry. At least not in the private industry I used to work for. The only "common good" coming out of the state government, is a juicy retirement plan -- those people will definitely have a great retirement, compared to the many senior citizens that live in poverty... common good??? No -- just a great retirement plan for the ones that can bear to stick out for 20 years in those conditions.