Weekly Editorial Recap

MONDAY

BONUSES JUST FOR SHOWING UP!

Welcome to the real life Lake Wobegon -- where everybody is "above average."

It's called the federal government.

According to recent reports, more than two-thirds of senior Washington bureaucrats received bonuses designed to reward high performance. Merit pay, if you will. ...

-- At the Office of Personnel Management, 97.2 percent of the senior executives received performance bonuses.

-- At the General Services Administration, the number was 97.1 percent.

-- The Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Labor and Defense awarded merit bonuses at a rate of 93.1, 91.7 and 91 percent respectively. ...

It's obvious that without proper oversight, allowing federal bureaucrats to hand each other "performance" bonuses is, with apologies to the great P.J. O'Rourke, akin to giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

"I think taxpayers would agree, this is not how this program was intended to work," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who has requested an investigation. "We need to figure out how it got so far off track and fix it."

But coming from lawmakers who brought us the recent farm bill, why are we not optimistic?

TUESDAY

ONE FOR YOU, 19 FOR ME ...

The House passed $16 billion in new taxes on oil companies. ... Meantime, to fund a grab bag of new benefits for "working families" ... Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards called July 26 for raising the capital gains tax rate from 15 percent to 28 percent -- punishing those who try to make money by investing after-tax earnings in the economy.

"Edwards would take additional steps beyond raising the capital gains rate," The Wall Street Journal reports. "He'd raise taxes on private-equity and hedge-fund executives. ... He'd roll back the Bush tax cuts for families earning more than $200,000 a year. And he'd 'declare war on tax havens' by empowering the IRS to investigate abuse of offshore tax breaks." ...

But we've actually been lucky, so far.

Democrats are currently on their best behavior, hoping to hang onto both houses of Congress and add the White House next year.

Should they achieve that, and no longer have to worry as much about nay-saying Republicans, imagine the kind of fiscal revenge and punishment they'll be able to mete out against their capitalist enemies then!

Don't ask them what they want it for, if you don't want to pay some more ... 'cause they're the taxmen.