Bill

Nine percent of Americans have confidence in Congress. Sixty-seven percent have confidence in small business. That gap is the whole story, and it has nothing to do with left and right. Look at who Americans still trust. Small business at 67. The military at 61. The police at 45. Every one of them builds something or protects someone. A small business makes a product and dies if nobody wants it. A soldier defends a country. A cop shows up when you call. They get judged on whether the job actually got done. Now look at the bottom. Congress at 9. Television news at 14. Newspapers at 17. One defrauds you. The other lies to you about it. Neither builds anything. Neither protects anyone. And neither one is ever punished for being wrong. That is not an opinion. Here is what Congress presides over. The GAO estimates the federal government loses between 233 and 521 billion dollars every single year to fraud. Not waste. Fraud. Improper payments have hit roughly 3 trillion dollars since 2003. Last year alone was 186 billion. Congress has not balanced a budget since 2001. Nine percent is not cynicism. It is an accurate grade. Gallup started asking this question in 1973, during Watergate, with a president on his way to resigning. Congress scored 42 percent that year. In 2014 it hit 7, the lowest reading Gallup has ever recorded for any American institution. Watergate was a scandal. This is a business model. The press sits right next to them for the same reason. Thirty-four percent of Americans say they have no trust in the news media at all. Twenty-eight percent say they have a great deal or a fair amount. Americans have not lost faith in their country. They still trust the man who fixes the engine. The sergeant. The woman who owns the shop. They stopped trusting the people who take from them and lie about where it went. That is not cynicism. That is a country that can still tell the difference.