I recently had the displeasure of watching Wanda Sykes give a speech at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington, D.C.

I, of course, did not watch the entire address because I had better things to do, but I did happen to hear her bloviate about her hatred for Rush Limbaugh for a few minutes.

In case you haven't heard about this (hard to do considering the media's obsession with this story), Sykes is upset because Rush Limbaugh said during his radio show that he hoped Obama would fail in implementing the Democratic Party’s agenda.

Sykes's attacks on Limbaugh's patriotism were humorous not because she said anything funny (she didn't), but rather because of how hypocritical her statements were. I'm not going to watch hundreds of old Wanda Sykes videos looking for the direct quote I need so I'll just go out on a limb on this one: I'm willing to wager that Ms. Sykes wanted President Bush to fail when he tried to partially privatize social security in 2005.

But disregard the blatant hypocrisy, that is not the issue.

What is important is that someone is being demonized for trying to stop the increase in size of the federal government. The fact is that for its 230-year-long history, the federal government has displayed complete ineptitude in solving domestic policy issues. Interventionist domestic policy has shown itself to be an inefficient, wasteful and contradictory failure.

But don't take my word for it, the best way to analyze the effectiveness of policy is to look at results.

People's exhibit one: The "war on poverty."

America has been fighting a "war on poverty" for a little over 40 years now. Since that time, close to 10 trillion dollars has been spent trying to eradicate the problem in this country.

The results? Nonexistent.

The poverty rate was 12.8 percent in 1968 and 12.5 percent in 2008. To further illustrate how wasteful the federal largess can be, take 2006 as a case study. In that year $477 billion was spent on a myriad of programs directed at reducing the number of people in poverty (who numbered 37 million). Some quick math reveals that in that year the feds spent $13,000 for every person below the poverty line. Now for the good part. In 2006, the definition of poverty as determine d by the U.S. Census Bureau was a yearly income of less than $12,294 per individual.

That's right.

If the government simply took the $477 billion and divided it among those living in poverty, there would be no more poverty. Breathtaking isn't it?

Somehow, Washington is able to spend an amount of money that is enough to eradicate a problem in such a fashion that it doesn't even come close to fulfilling its intended purpose.

Now that is what I call waste.

Other exhibits of federal incompetence are not hard to find.

Take the Washington D.C. school system, which simultaneously has the third highest per pupil spending average and one of the lowest average test scores in the nation. Take the department of agriculture, which funnels farm subsidies to millionaires and employees one bureaucrat for every twenty-seven farmers. Or perhaps Amtrak, which receives billions of dollars in subsidies every year despite the promises of policy makers in 1971 that it would be self-sufficient.

The list could go on and on.

So when Rush Limbaugh stands against spending more money that we don’t have, he is not being unpatriotic. Quite the opposite. He knows that President Obama's policies will do nothing more than steal from our grandchildren in the future to pay bureaucrats in the present.

Government is not the solution and it never has been. The solution lies in the creativity and hard work of the American people. Unfortunately, those abilities that built this country are being shackled by an over-taxing, over-regulating, and over-reaching federal government.

The great columnist George Will likes to say that the government ought to "deliver the mail, defend the shores, and get out of the way."

Sounds good to me.

-Elijah Lavicky is a finance senior.