White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough made the rounds of the Sunday TV talk shows defending President Obama's handling of the Islamic State terrorist threat. Part of the strategy the president outlined in a primetime TV speech was a coalition of countries willing to provide ground troops in Syria. Pressed to name them, McDonough passed the buck to Secretary of State John Kerry. But then he said, "that's not what we're looking for right now." Oh?

It's easy to find fault with the federal government, but it does one thing very well: collect taxes. In August tax revenues hit $2,663,426,000,000 -- a record for the first 11 months of the fiscal year. But the Treasury reports the government still ran a deficit of $589,185,000,000 during that time.

Here's a statistic to make taxpayers shudder. This summer the number of recipients of the government food stamp program reached 46,496,145. CNS News states that's enough to fill the Yankee Stadium 925 times.