People seem infatuated with the “miracle” of government, and their infatuation grows if their government calls itself a “democracy.” As a result of their infatuation, people far too often believe romantic notions about its benevolence. In the United States, the last two years have seen high-profile examples of this. When the economy fell apart, many clamored for the government to “do something.” Similarly, a goodly number of people have been complaining that the health care system is not as good as it should be. Again, the call was for government to “do something.”

On the back of this notion that government should magically fix perceived problems, voters swept the Obama government into office on the basis that we needed “change we could believe in.” In other words, the old government needed to be reworked so the new government, with Obama at the head, could “do something.” It did. We got TARP and health care reform. Favored big business and big banks got billions from taxpayers, and taxpayers got a health care overhaul, the consequences of which are still not widely understood.

After two years of economic turmoil it seems that the message that governments are spending too much money is finally getting out. In fact, the crisis today is solely caused by government spending far too much, and doing so while pretending, Keynesian style, that the spending will actually fix the economy.

David Stockman, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan and who is working on a book about the financial crisis, is one of those who is now spreading the word that government deficit spending is at the root of the problem.

"The nation's public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion," he pointed out in an editorial for the New York Times. "That's a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product," he notes.

A scientist working at the University of Sheffield in the UK has discovered the largest star ever found.

The scientist, Paul Crowther, professor of astrophysics, led an international team of scientists using both the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to make the discovery.

What they found was a star, R136a1, located in the Tarantula Nebula within the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a small galaxy neighboring the Milky Way.

 

Despite efforts to stop them, criminal street gangs have been active inside the U.S. military. And, according to one recent report, the situation has gotten much worse.

In 2006, Jeffrey Stoleson, a sergeant in the Army Reserve then in Iraq, described an unbelievable scene to reporter Frank Main of the Chicago Sun-Times. Based on Stoleson's account, and the many pictures he had taken, Main wrote: "In a storage yard in Taji, about 18 miles north of Baghdad, dozens of tanks were vandalized with painted gang signs.... Much of the graffiti was by Chicago based gangs," according to Stoleson.

Since then, Congress has banned members of the military from being in street gangs, and the Defense Department put the ban in its rulebooks last November. But that hasn't slowed down the apparent growth of gang activity inside the military. According to Stoleson and others, it has only gotten worse.

Oil has stopped flowing into the Gulf in the wake of BP's installation of a new cap on its broken well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Earlier this week BP installed a new sealing cap on the well, starting the company's latest attempt to shut off the flow of oil that has disrupted economic activity and threatened the environment in the Gulf of Mexico since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and killed 11 people.

In a press release about the effort, BP warned that the cap was untried, and might not succeed. "The sealing cap system never before has been deployed at these depths or under these conditions, and its efficiency and ability to contain the oil and gas cannot be assured," the company warned in a July 12 release.

Years of big spending by politicians at all levels have left the nation vulnerable to economic turmoil. While at the federal level this is masked to a degree by manipulation and inflation of the money supply, among other factors, local and state governments have no such luxury, and many are struggling to find ways to pay increasingly high expenses. Increasingly, the onus is falling on taxpayers in the form of increased and burdensome taxes, and on public-sector employees who face reductions in benefits, and possibly layoffs.

New York City is a case in point. There, municipal employees are getting a sweet deal on the backs of taxpayers. For each dollar they put into their pensions, other taxpayers contribute an average of $8.60.

Moreover, the pain for the city's taxpayers has been increasing rapidly over recent years. According to the New York Post, taxpayers' share of pension costs in the city are up 900 percent in a decade.