It was Pogo who told us, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Now POGO has come along to essentially confirm this.

The Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog, reports that the federal government isn’t saving money by contracting out work. In fact, the government could cut spending significantly if it returned those tasks to its own workers.

This, of course, subverts the conventional wisdom that by outsourcing work to the private sector the government is being frugal. Competition, we’re told, drives costs down. But as far as we know – and we don’t know the whole story because the feds do a lousy job of keeping track – what private-sector workers earn versus what private contractors charge the government is widely divergent.

The “contracting out” movement began when studies showed that in many areas federal employees have higher salaries than their private sector counterparts. However, this hasn’t precluded private contractors from charging a lot more.

POGO looked at 35 employee classifications and in only two of them did the feds save money by contracting out. In the rest, the government got worked over. On average, contractors charged the government twice what it pays federal workers, the New York Times reported. For example, in the computer engineering field, the average federal worker makes $136,456 annually. But private sector workers under a government contract cleared $268,653.

The feds spend $320 billion annually on contracted services. The POGO study suggests that by keeping the work in house, the government could save huge sums. By comparison, last year’s total for earmarks – the popular symbol of waste – was $15.9 billion.

So, perhaps taxpayers should guard their purses and wallets when they hear, “I’m with the private sector and I’m here to help.”

They have no answer. It isn’t surprising that a tea-party-sponsored debate among Republican presidential candidates would include this question: “What would you do to remove the illegal immigrants from our country?” After all, 72 percent of self-described tea party supporters believe we should deport all of them, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll.

It also isn’t surprising that the designated respondent to this question, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, ducked it with a diversion that is typical of immigration panderers: “I believe that we need to secure the border using technology and more personnel. And until we build that border, we should neither have storm troopers come in and throw people out of the country nor should we provide amnesty.”

In saying that a 1,200-mile fence must be built before any discussion can begin on a path to removal, politicians are cleverly constructing a barrier between their “solutions” and the voters. So, I’ll open the question to readers: How do you identify illegal immigrants without some sort of amnesty and how do you oust 12 million people?

This dodge on how to remove illegal immigrants reminds me of the push to repeal health care reform without offering a replacement plan. Sorry, say the repeal mavens, can’t spend precious time on a better plan. We’ll do that later, preferably after the next election.

You’re getting warmer. It sure is easy addressing energy dependence when you think global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the scientific community. It’s like pretending we have no enemies and then calling for huge defense spending cuts. Could we produce more energy in the United States if we gutted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, chalked up those BP-like oil spills to the cost of doing business and cut off grants to those pesky climate scientists?

Sure could.

Next problem! Newt Gingrich is often called the big thinker of the Republican Party, and he didn’t disappoint at the tea party debate. Here’s the first part of his two-part solution to Social Security: “The first is, you get back to a full-employment economy, and at 4 percent unemployment you have such a huge increase in funding that you change every single out year of projection in a positive way.”

Well, there you have it. Dramatically cut the jobless rate. Why hasn’t anyone else thought of that? Reminds me of the old Steve Martin joke on how to become a millionaire.

“First, you get a million dollars.”