It could have been worse?

There were a couple of news items this last week that are noteworthy.

First, an audit of the Texas Education Agency showed that it cannot be described as anything other than a bloated bureaucracy. The audit showed one manager per roughly three employees — the desired ratio is one to 11.

For those who like to point the finger at local school districts, who have independent audits every year, I’d say it may be time to get the log out of TEA’s eye, then see where local schools stand.

The second item was news that our national debt has hit $40 trillion. That’s about $117,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

I’ve heard lots of comparisons trying to explain how big $40 trillion is, but let’s face it — it’s too big a number for the human mind to comprehend.

That debt has grown more than 10 percent just since President Trump took office for his second term.

Besides itself, the trouble with a debt this size is that it keeps getting bigger, and finding ways to pay it off will be extremely difficult — we now spend more money in interest on the national debt than we spend on national defense, the largest discretionary item in the national budget.

So we’re spending a big ‘ol pile of money every year on the debt, but we’re not making it any smaller.

Both parties have run up the debt over the years, but the TEA situation and the latest boost to the debt have occurred under the leadership of “small-government, conservative” Republicans. Just imagine what they would be under big-spending liberals!