France and Greece elections - Austerity fails?

[Lissa]

As an aside, computers being what they are today, it boggles my mind that the government has to rely on sampling surveys (of businesses) to measure unemployment.

That's kind of how I felt when the Census Bureau sent me the long form. I was like really? Y'all can pull 90% plus of this info off my tax return or public records. But let's pretend it is the nineteenth century and have people guess when their apartment complex was built.

There is a lot of waste in the US government. I'll give you one I'm most familiar with (because I now have 4 public trust clearances). When performing a clearance for someone, each department of the US government has to have their own seperate investigation on the individual even though the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is the primary care holder of doing all clearance investigations and has all the information on persons being investigated for clearances. Likewise, even if you have a higher clearance (like Top Secret with Polygraph), you'd still have to do a brand new investigation for getting a Public Trust clearance (the lowest clearance) for another department within the government. In my case, there has probably been thousands of dollars spent on investigations for my 4 PT clearances when they could have saved a bunch if they had just done it once and said it was transferable to other departments at that level.