The Affordable Care Act is in one corner with $1.38 trillion in projected program costs over the life of the program of ten years. Ultimately it will deliver insurance to everyone in the country but it will use the same corrupt insurance corporations which broke medical coverage in the first place.
The Lockheed Martin F-35 is in the other corner with $1.5 trillion in projected program costs over the life of the program of 55 years. It will deliver, maybe, the aircraft which do largely the same thing as existing fighter aircraft and will come from the same corrupt defense contractors which have been bleeding the country for the last fifty or sixty years.
In neither case does any of the analysis ever go to the bureaucrats who are the biggest cost of either.
In the third corner, largely because no-one else wants her in their corner, is Kim Davis, the $80,000 do-nothing clerk in Kentucky.
There are three hundred million people in America so we will use five million for our estimation of the number of them filling government jobs, whether justifiably or not.
Five million times eighty thousand equals $400 billion (i.e. half a trillion) in annual costs. It doesn't matter what they are doing as all government programs are subject to the same weakness due to being endlessly populated with bureaucratic meat. As with the case of Kim Davis, it is almost impossible to fire for them for their rampaging incompetence, willful neglect or outright corruption, all of which are frequently demonstrated within this echelon of people.
For example, the Secretary of State for New Mexico (NM, R) recently embezzled large sums of money from campaign funds and is now facing quality time in the slammer. Presumably there is no question in anyone this type of corruption is rampant and is likely why the roster of Republican candidates looks like the lemming Woodstock ... but without the cool music or cool people.
As to the value of either program: not much.
As to the cost of them: radically higher than it should be due to the lack of effectiveness of the human systems which create them.
Affordable Care Act: even if it's 100% successful, it will only institutionalize the corruption of insurance companies which have proven multiple times in my life to be worthless and crooked. The response was typically, why don't you sue them. Thus, it's shown they're known to be corrupt by the people but these are the corporate savages with the suits and the money so nothing comes of any protest. Whether ACA or some other program drives customers to the insurance companies makes no difference since the corruption at the end is the same.
F-35 program: even if it's 100% successful, nothing much happens as it will eventually replace aircraft which aren't all that different and, as you can see from current times, aren't even used that much except for stupid stunts in photo ops with cruising Russian bombers.
America makes this ridiculously-expensive hardware and the rest of the countries try to keep up. Usually only Russia and China can afford the ante for the game. This is a pointless exercise which has never accomplished anything in my sixty-five years except working assiduously toward bankrupting what was arguably the greatest nation on the planet. America has done this the entire time and played the wounded victim of it throughout. To be involved with the defense department in any way shows a remarkable lack of concern about the perception of your masculinity ... or the lack of it. Those Russians made me do it, Mom!
Well, did they now.
However, it's my further observation that those doing the most toward bankrupting the country are hardly working at all and these are the government bureaucrats who ostensibly drive all these programs. The estimate of what it costs to pay their salaries is light if you add into that cops, firemen, air traffic controllers, and every other non-bureaucratic position on the government payroll. Some of them you need, most of them you don't.
The Lockheed Martin F-35 is in the other corner with $1.5 trillion in projected program costs over the life of the program of 55 years. It will deliver, maybe, the aircraft which do largely the same thing as existing fighter aircraft and will come from the same corrupt defense contractors which have been bleeding the country for the last fifty or sixty years.
In neither case does any of the analysis ever go to the bureaucrats who are the biggest cost of either.
In the third corner, largely because no-one else wants her in their corner, is Kim Davis, the $80,000 do-nothing clerk in Kentucky.
There are three hundred million people in America so we will use five million for our estimation of the number of them filling government jobs, whether justifiably or not.
Five million times eighty thousand equals $400 billion (i.e. half a trillion) in annual costs. It doesn't matter what they are doing as all government programs are subject to the same weakness due to being endlessly populated with bureaucratic meat. As with the case of Kim Davis, it is almost impossible to fire for them for their rampaging incompetence, willful neglect or outright corruption, all of which are frequently demonstrated within this echelon of people.
For example, the Secretary of State for New Mexico (NM, R) recently embezzled large sums of money from campaign funds and is now facing quality time in the slammer. Presumably there is no question in anyone this type of corruption is rampant and is likely why the roster of Republican candidates looks like the lemming Woodstock ... but without the cool music or cool people.
As to the value of either program: not much.
As to the cost of them: radically higher than it should be due to the lack of effectiveness of the human systems which create them.
Affordable Care Act: even if it's 100% successful, it will only institutionalize the corruption of insurance companies which have proven multiple times in my life to be worthless and crooked. The response was typically, why don't you sue them. Thus, it's shown they're known to be corrupt by the people but these are the corporate savages with the suits and the money so nothing comes of any protest. Whether ACA or some other program drives customers to the insurance companies makes no difference since the corruption at the end is the same.
F-35 program: even if it's 100% successful, nothing much happens as it will eventually replace aircraft which aren't all that different and, as you can see from current times, aren't even used that much except for stupid stunts in photo ops with cruising Russian bombers.
America makes this ridiculously-expensive hardware and the rest of the countries try to keep up. Usually only Russia and China can afford the ante for the game. This is a pointless exercise which has never accomplished anything in my sixty-five years except working assiduously toward bankrupting what was arguably the greatest nation on the planet. America has done this the entire time and played the wounded victim of it throughout. To be involved with the defense department in any way shows a remarkable lack of concern about the perception of your masculinity ... or the lack of it. Those Russians made me do it, Mom!
Well, did they now.
However, it's my further observation that those doing the most toward bankrupting the country are hardly working at all and these are the government bureaucrats who ostensibly drive all these programs. The estimate of what it costs to pay their salaries is light if you add into that cops, firemen, air traffic controllers, and every other non-bureaucratic position on the government payroll. Some of them you need, most of them you don't.
8 comments:
Even your elimination of 5m workers would not save the 400B you say. As there would be extensive severance packages involved.
It would also not balance the budget but would be a good start. As government jobs are by far the most unproductive as there is no accountability for each level.
Understood it won't balance the budget even if we chucked them all in the ocean for the good of humanity.
The general point is in polarized thinking which I don't see serving a good purpose because at the core of any program is the immense waste in running it. The reaction, generally, is, say, do away with Social Security because it sucks. The program has merits and demerits but what sucks it into a swamp is the immense apparatus running it. There's general thinking some immense apparatus in the private side could do the same job better but this has turned out to be magical thinking generally.
My own experience in the corporate world was fairly well-advanced and that perspective revealed all the mid-level management bloating and consequent staffing bloatage you could ever imagine for government bureaucracy, Terry Gilliam's Brazilian nightmare, or other. I've not seen evidence in my life the corporate world would do any better than the government. Another example is it took a year or more to effect a decision on a computer purchase. The expectation after that purchase would be it's up and running in, at most, three to six months. That kind of unrealistic and bloated management is not likely atypical as it was the fourth biggest bank in the country and this was operations central for it.
I disagree that private could not fo it better. I am sure that any private company could streamline the court process, DMV or any if the other licensing depts. The dept of education could be eliminated completely and all public school be privatized.
I pay less in yearly tuition for my granddaughter than the state does. But her class size is 11students per teacher. 1/3 the state ratio
Make me Boss I will change this shit
No one will like me til it is all over Then they would love me. But I balance my budget and know how to say no to spoiled brats.
That's where I'm not convinced as it wasn't my experience in a fairly hefty operation. What I saw was managers breed more managers and they do it relentlessly. When the American side merged with international crew, there wasn't a whole lot of change to staffing but there were managers crawling all over the place and expanding upward as if some cancerous beanstalk. Any management structure depends on that hierarchical nature but there's little to contain the lateral growth of them and that creates bloat like cholesterol powered by speed. Same deal with government as all run generally the same way.
Most of American business is set up on a pyramid of 8s. Since the most one can effectively manage is 8. 8 locations 8 managers etc. Your example of a merger us skewed as the end result has to be an elimination of duplication or the merger fails
Government never runs like that as you say the amount of lateral duplication is horrendous
I submit the biggest difference between government and private is government cannot fire the cock-a-roaches who either screw up or don't meet performance standards without grievances being filed for years, etc, etc. You can't get them out with an acetylene cutting torch. That low standard turns a good many government organizations into welfare offices rather than places of employment.
I would say the same us true for most union organizations.
Look at the teachers unions refusing to allow performance bases reviews
I need the same rules across the board as if it ain't fair then it ain't nothin'. Unions aren't exempted and may well be the most vulnerable to collapse from poor management because they usually have to develop that internally. It seems the nature of any human organization to grow to the point of choking itself but I'd need a lot of reading on that subject since I know there's a wealth of material on it.
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