NFC does payroll for a large chunk of the federal government; their website says 140 federal organizations. The Interior Department has a similar organization that does similar stuff. There are others as well. As far as the savings, it’d be in the tens of millions.
Of course. I was not trying to defend the idea of outsourcing as some kind of magic bullet for the deficit; just that it’s a good idea as far as it goes.
If you want to indict Pawlenty for not addressing entitlement reform, tax reform, and military spending – the three big things that could make an impact of the deficit, I’m with you. But pretty much every politician in the country and 80% of the population aren’t.
Well, when you say entitlement reform, most of the Democrats tried to address that (remember something called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act?), and if by tax reform, you mean the kind that would reduce the deficit, well, pretty much all Democrats try for that, and if by military spending, you mean reducing it, that’s predominantly a Democratic issue, too. But if by “pretty much every politician in the country” you meant that pretty much every Republican is ignoring those issues, then I agree.
It seems to me that Pawlenty is terribly incapable of articulating this idea. “If you can find it in the Yellow Pages, the federal government shouldn’t provide it” makes sense as an idea, even if one doesn’t agree with it. “If you can Google it, cut it” makes no sense–are we supposed to derive from that phrase that because we can Google “Army” or “public highways”, the government shouldn’t provide those? Obviously this wasn’t Pawlenty’s intent, but it’s hard to figure out exactly what he did mean.
It’s a desperate attempt to provide a soundbite, and Pawlenty made it one in which the words have been reduced to absurdity.
So once you privatize all of these government functions, who oversees their peformance and what do we do when these private entities inevitably defraud the government? A private entity that operates on a national level is going to end up being too Big to Fail (heard that before?) and cannot be easily replaced, so they will be bailed out (heard that before?) and continue business as usual, to include a tidy EOY bonus (heard that before?).
And are these private entities going to sit on the sidelines and hope they get picked for a multi-billion dollar contract? Of course not! Money will freely flow over and under the table to secure these contracts, and to resecure them, and ensure the contracts are so lopsided on performance measures that just showing up at the office will meet it.
I think any savings one could find in privatization would be offset by the cost of oversight and inevitable bailouts (“Oh, we had no idea it would cost that much???”). There is a reason the government operates certain things–it works. It may not be perfect (nothing is) but it sure beats the alternative.
I can envision it now: The Office of Privatization Oversight. By reducing work in one area you will just create it in another.
Most of the Democrats seek to slash military spending?
Most of the Democrats seek to raise taxes on anyone except “the rich?”
Most of the Democrats seek to reform Social Security?
Most of the Democrats have actually supported changes to Medicare or Medicaid that reduced federal spending – not theoretical projections for 2019, but actual changes that have actually led to real savings?
No, they don’t. Nor do most pubs. Any politician in either party that has floated changes of the kind we need to make to get back to a surplus has gotten buried by the partisans. And logically so, because we the people are living in a fantasy, believing that if we raise taxes on millionaires and cut foreign aid (and do things like outsourcing HR), everything will be ok.
Why exclude the rich from tax increases? They’re the ones with the money-- You can’t get blood from a stone.
And the problem with entitlement programs is mostly that health care costs are rising too fast. We already know how to slash those costs in half: Everyone else in the world has it figured out. If we could get over our obsession with being “exceptional”, then we could do the same.
I said nothing about excluding them. But just taxing the rich, which is what most people (and most dem politicians) want, simply isn’t enough. The numbers don’t add up unless you either start hitting the middle-class as well or else massively cut spending far more than anyone will countenance.
It’s a problem, by no means the only one. Social Security is already running a deficit, and it will only get much worse. The issue there is pretty much sheer demographics.
All of which is off-topic from the OP, so I’ll stop.
The democrats I’ve talked to are perfectly happy to tax everybody except perhaps the very poor, but by and large feel that in the last decade or so the rich have been grossly over-benefitted by tax cuts, and that we want to go back to taxing the rich, too. And it doesn’t take anything but a history book to realize the the current tax burden is (historically speaking) absurdly low.
Heck, I was perfectly happy for the Bush tax cuts to expire and to take the tax increase caused by the elimination of the 10% bracket. I also wouldn’t mind paying a bit more in payroll taxes if they’d uncap the SS contribution while capping the max benefits (the cap can be higher than the current payout currently). It’s a welfare system, so can we please get rid of the fiction that the payroll taxes deducted from my paycheck today is the same money I’d get 40 years from now?
It’s a free country; Pawlenty is free to think, “government bad, private good.” But if the “government bad, private good” types take over the reins of government, what are “government good, private bad” types to do? Take over business? And do what exactly?
If only we had some sort of committee to oversee government agencies, one that was elected by & answerable to the general populace.
Yeah, once the government starts handing out contracts to for-profits, you lose the efficiency of a not-for-profit government office. I’m not sure the downward price pressure of competition is enough to make up for that, & any exclusive contract for a moderately long term will lose that pressure past some length of time.