To me it would seem that the US govt is hugely bloated… but then the US has more money to spend compared to others. I don’t think there exists a “efficiency” parameter for bureaucracies.
In the end I think the black hole of the US tax payer dollars is always the defense budget. All the pork barrel proposals are directed through it. Reforming the bureaucracy is nice… but will yield minimal savings compared to trimming the defense waste and avoiding bad spending that always happens there.
Kimstu, if the best you can do is post slash pieces from biased sources, and post a link on this board drowning in liberal group-think, you aren’t going to get 80% of anybody to agree with you.
Here’s an article with a different viewpoint from the “loyal opposition”. I’ll be honest enough to admit it is biased to the right, but it makes some interesting points.
I don’t disagree that defense spending is often wasteful but to a large extent it has to be to get what we want/need. The govt. is in the process now of splitting up a contract for rocket boosters between 2 companies so that they have more than one contractor building these things. This is hugely wasteful but it fulfills the percieved need. Thirty dollar screws and nuts will sold because the govt. wants $29 of paperwork to prove that the $1 screw meets specifications.
When I refer to bloat what I see is six people doing a job that one person could do because you can’t fire the incompetents. I think that defense has as much of that as any other part of the government.
I also agree that there’s no other government out there that is a paradigm for efficiency. I think that profit is the factor. Make a government that has to turn a profit and your on your way to efficient government.
I’ve got another one: The tax code should be junked and we should write a new one.
What? Whyever not? If there isn’t an “efficiency parameter” for bureaucracies there should be. Allowing for some variations in social and political circumstances, a given kind of agency does pretty much the same thing whatever country it’s serving. It should be possible to calculate whether OSHA is more or less efficient than its counterparts in France or Britain or Japan, by comparing the ratio of caseload to costs and personnel, etc. – and by comparing results on the ground.
PP: Here’s an article with a different viewpoint from the “loyal opposition”. I’ll be honest enough to admit it is biased to the right, but it makes some interesting points.
All your right-wing National Review article does is point out that Democrats have long been aware that Social Security is predicted to have a partial funding shortfall some decades in the future, which AFAIK nobody is trying to deny.
It does not necessarily follow that the projected shortfall needs major restructuring or benefit-slashing in order to fix it. Nor does it follow that the proposed privatization plans will actually produce better results than what we’ve got now.
I stand by my statement that if you want to make an informed assessment of the issue, you need to get into the actual numbers of the economic predictions and the details of the proposed modifications. Not just keep passing around propaganda yabbering vague generalizations like “Social Security is in crisis” or “Private investment accounts make more money.”
And I keep linking to the above-mentioned Social Security thread because, as I said, we ought to move this discussion there rather than continuing to hijack RM’s thread about bipartisan agreement, which we obviously haven’t got on this issue.
But I believe I can do a lot better if I take whatever amount of money is currently going toward SS retirement benefits and privately invest it elsewhere. The more money I can do that with, the better off I will be in retirement, especially since that is very likely another forty or fifty years away.
What is so wrong with me wanting the best possible retirement I can get?
There is. Although it does not quite measure what people stereotypically think of as bureaucratic efficiency.
http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/evans/bur&grow.html
I disagree. Profit motive is not good for government agencies. It can lead to their cutting curners on their core mission. USPTO anyone?
I know one thing that will force government bureaucracies to be more efficient and effective. A giant budget crisis! And I know at least one country where this has been proven to work. 
Link to Peter Evan’s full article (2.7 Mb PDF file)
Really interesting article. Link found on his web page.
catsix: But I believe I can do a lot better if I take whatever amount of money is currently going toward SS retirement benefits and privately invest it elsewhere.
If you can’t support this “belief” with specific quantitative evidence and explain what the forecasting assumptions are on which you based your calculations, there’s absolutely no reason why anybody, including you yourself, should take it seriously as a basis for evaluating government policy choices.
(Remember that your calculations also have to take into account transition costs for handling the temporary double expense of paying benefits to current retirees while diverting current payments to individual accounts for future retirees. And we’ve already mentioned the necessity to retain disability and survivor benefits for those who aren’t lucky enough to make it to retirement.)
A lot of people believe a lot of things about themselves that aren’t supported by the facts. For example, most people believe that they are better-than-average drivers, although of course that can’t possibly be true for more than half of all drivers. Many people believe that they make good investment decisions, although it has been repeatedly noted that the average individual investor drastically underperforms the market:
I certainly don’t mean to harsh on your laudable wish to save money for your own retirement, and you should definitely be doing that with part of your disposable income, which you probably are already. But before you assume that it would necessarily be better for you—not to mention for American workers as a group—to support shifting your SS payroll taxes into a personal investment account, it’s only common sense to recommend that you actually do the math.
Well, 401-K is not the only option for investing money. There are a lot of ways to make money make money, and it’s certainly possible to invest money in various areas, allow it to grow a bit, and then sock some of that away where it will remain for retirement.
It’s also not like I’m saying that I believe I can make every investment decision by myself. I shop around for a good financial advisor with a good track record, and let them give me lots of input.
I still disagree with mandatory payments into SS retirement. If you want to participate, that’s fine. But I don’t, and I shouldn’t be forced to.