I don’t see how we don’t get it. I think it’s the best-case scenario in fact. If you offered me a lost decade right now I’d snap your hand off.
Have you ever even dealt with the private sector? A five person show can move quickly - a big company is very slow. It is a factor of size, not government versus private sector. As for the stimulus money, if they started throwing it at the states people would (rightly) complain that some of it would be wasted on fraud. Plus, it was designed to be stretched out over time, not all spent upfront. I’m actually surprised at the lack of problems.
As for government workers making more money in private industry - I know a guy who had a very high level appointed position in state government - high enough to be on TV all the time. When the administration changed he got a private sector job which paid twice as much for about a quarter of the work. If he had taken an equivalent job in the private sector he’d have been making $1 million a year easily. I assure he was no slacker and he was honest - he did get tempted and turned it down.
It bugs me when government leaders managing thousands of people and hundred million dollar budgets are accused of making too much when they don’t make much more than I do for sitting in an office being brilliant, with relatively little stress.
No, I did not know that. Maybe it’s because that is incorrect. The unemployment rate when Obama signed the stimulus bill was 8.1%. But you knew that, right?
http://www.ncsl.org/?tabid=13307
So, yes, it was slightly above 8% some time during the month that Obama signed the bill. But, the administration also threatened that unemployment would go ALL the way to 9% by 2010 without the stimulus. If only he had signed the bill before taking that long weekend maybe his predictions would have been correct.
That’s the problem. When times are fat more tax revenue enters the treasury and our politicians quickly find new ways to spend the windfall…and then some. Conversely, when times are lean, our politicians continue to spend the same amount as in the fat years resulting in larger and larger deficits.
“Just trust me.” Really? That’s what you’ve got? I’m pretty sure that is begging the question, but it is so bald-faced I’ve never seen it done so openly before. It might be true that the cost to me joe-public is less one way over the other, but I’ve got to see data for each.
In Dec 08 I had my open heart surgery done by two guys who do a lot of heart transplants and during 07 they didn’t lose a single heart transplant patient. At a public hospital. Their motivation wasn’t profit. Cost to my insurer was $25,000. Cost without insurance would have been $270,000. Homeless person off street in San Francisco gets it done free because it’s a public hospital. Not everybody is profit motivated. I’d say many people aren’t. Dogma that virtually all people are and profit is cheaper than non-profit isn’t supported by evidence except where it is. That is why I’m asking.
The claim that government entities are always inefficient is so wrong I just ignore it as more prattling by right-wingers so confident in their ideology that facts are irrelevant to them. (Did I see Blackwater mentioned upthread as an example of entrepreneurial security outperforming government military? Was that comment a parody?)
In California, I’ve heard only complimentary things about CalTrans. PG&E was so regulated as to be quasi-governmental and peformed excellent service; yet when electricity rates rose in California the right-wing noise machine prattled against PG&E rather than blaming the actual culprits: the capitalist criminals at Enron.
One reason for the poor performance of many government agencies is that right-wing Administrations have cut their budgets. Such budget cutting is regarded by the Right as Win-win-win: Underfinanced regulators can’t regulate: that’s a win for our corrupt business friends; the public is angered by poor regulation: that’s a win for politicians who preach “Hate government”; reduced budgets allow more tax cuts (silly since cutting Millions from regulators is disproportionate to the Billions in tax cuts we then give our rich friends.)
What about public transport? Bangkok’s expressways and urban trains are all operated privately. One operator tried to destroy a major overpass, forcing a traffic jam to encourage use of its toll road! Perhaps right-wingers would argue this is private entrepreneuralism at its best and cleverest.
Yes I have, I’ve been an exec at companies that worked in both sectors. As any woman will tell you, size does matter, but culture, incentives (gov has no P&L drivers, and little accountability), and structural stuff matters more.
And Joe Suckalooski in purchasing doesn’t get nearly slowed down by bureaucratic bullshit when doing procurements - if it doesn’t work, he gets whacked. That’s why the Gov sales cycle is over a year in some cases - too much red tape, regulation, the FAR, etc.
Bugs me too. Government leaders are underpaid (SES, flags). Government bureaucrats are overpaid.
Well, I’m in the industry, and have been for decades. I know more about this subject than you, frankly, unless you want to pony up evidence of what your background is.
From the OP:
Ah…we’ve finally arrived at the true nature of politics. I’m right, whether or not you agree with me, and you’re wrong, whether or not you agree with me. And no matter what, I want the job more than you, so everything you do, have ever done, and ever will do is Bad For America.
It’s catty, petty, rude, and ignorant. The whole lot of it. And people still genuinely wonder, and sometimes get irritated, when I tell them I’m politically neutral. It’s like picking sides in a special olympics football game. In the end, somebody will indeed win…but I can’t see how the hell it matters.
Now people will say “Don’t you care about how X policy will affect YOUR life?”
My answer: “Nope. At least, not enough to get as riled up as some people do.”
I mean really…life is too short to be like that…to have all that unfounded vitriol rolling around in my head. In the future, when the armed guards show up at my door because Big Bad Government took over the world…then I’ll care. But I still won’t believe that I can do something about it by bitching and whining in the general direction of a system which is obviously defunct.
Some contractors are efficient, some aren’t, just like the government.
It actually sounds to me like it doesn’t matter how much experience you have, because your unwaivering and unnuanced statements indicate your experience is either very narrow or you’re experiencing confirmation bias. If you can’t see that the real answer is somewhere in between, you’re pushing a belief rather than looking at the real world.
The cost comparisons I’ve seen do compare total benefits/costs, not just core compensation. I mostly agree with the rest, particularly the part about avoiding risk rather than emphasizing achievement. On the other hand, avoiding risk is not always bad.
GAO: Soaring Use Of Contractors Puts DoD At Risk Of Fraud, Waste
No, private sector is not far more efficient. Blanket statements on this topic are ridiculous when you consider the number of jobs, agencies and varied duties across the federal government and contracting space. Some things are better to outsource than others while others should never be outsourced. A private company with 50 employees is much different and has much less bureaucracy than industry giants like General Dynamics with around 100,000 employees, Lockheed Martin with even more employees, or even larger companies that have areas of contracting like GE or Verizon. Generally speaking, those large companies have a lot of dead weight in their personnel just like the government. The smaller companies can’t carry the dead weight as easily, so tend to be better in that regard though they have other problems that can make them ill-suited to particular contracts.
By the way, no, not all government employees and contractors feel the way you do. Only the ones that feel that way feel that way. Conventional wisdom is often wrong. I suppose we should just trust you since you innately know you have more experience and are better informed on the topic than the rest of us.
Take care, and bundle up so you don’t catch a cold as we head into the fall and winter.
I’ve owned my own law firm since 1992 and and worked only for private law firms before that. Oh, wait, I volunteered to work with a judge for a few months. But my personal experiences and prejudices are irrelevant and so are yours. As we say at the SDMB, the plural of anecdote is not data. What do the best studies show? Trust you? No. Not because you are a bad guy, I have no idea, but because you haven’t got the evidence, the studies to show private enterprise is always better. Examples and counter-examples abound, but those aren’t studies.
Well, I agree that it could be set up better but that would require the sort of incentives that would make conservatives have epileptic seizures. As far as efficiency is concerned, there are at least some areas where th government is very very very good.
I disagree with your general slam on the “sort of people” government work attracts. You and i have had different interactions with government. most federal employees I deal with are lawyers and they tend to be reasonably good. The way I understand it the managers keep the misfits in some corner where they don’t get to do anything important or have any contact with the public. Sure we should be able to get rid of the dead wood but how do you do that without reducing the protections against the politicization of the bureaucracy.
China spent spent quite a bit in direct stimulus and it seemed to work pretty well. What the feds didn’t have was political will. The first stimulus pumped half its money into accelerated depreciation. Any tax lawyer will tell you that this is about the least effective form of stimulus that you could possibly come up with. But with that said, I think that youa re correct that much of the stimulus would have been better spent with a social security tax holiday.
Well our real estate bubble was not as bad as japan’s, our zombie banks and zombie companies are not in nearly as bad shape as japan’s were. I think we might make it. We need to fix our trade situation but there is still hope.
hrmm. I don’t know where I got that 9% figure from. Well, in any event, the unemplyment rate was already above 8% when Obama signed the bill not by much but how do you keep unemployemnt under 8% when its already over 8%?
Where are you getting the 9% number from?
What caused this problem was supply side economics (or at least what it became). All of a sudden there was a disconnect between taxing and spending. Democrats would increase spending but they would increase taxes to pay for it. this created real political pressure to reduce spending so that taxes would go down. Then along came supply side economics, which said that cutting taxes would actually increase the tax revenue so you could cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
If we increased taxes to balance the budget, I would bet that people would start to be very skeptical that some of these programs are worth what we pay for them.
My point is that the way to cut spending isn’t to cut taxes, and try to starve the beast. the way to cut spending is to balance the budget witht ax increases and THEN people will start to make the tough decisions about spending taht need to be made.
Like I said, I don’t know what part of the government you deal with but the part I deal with is paid FAR FAR less than what they would be paid in the private sector. I’m not talking about hypothetical pay based on job descriptions, I am talking about what these guys get paid when they do their private sector rotation to pay for their kid’s college education before they return to the public sector.
Same OP question applies to the bailout decryers…what would they have preferred, a complete collapse of the economic system? Yes, it sucked to have to bail out AIG and the rest, but look past the tip of your nose. Some of the financial institutions had become too big to fail without taking down the system. I guess if you’re cynical enough you believe Geithner and Paulson are rotten to the core and were bribed or taking care of some buddies in corporate America. And that congressional leaders were also part of the conspiracy. What’s been reported is that the potential economic collapse scenario presented to them was totally horrifying. Absolutely, the bailed out companies need to repay the money and reforms need to be made to prevent ‘too big to fail’ institutions and irresponsible investment practices going forward, but fortunately we didn’t drop completely into the abyss…thanks to the necessary bailouts.
I’m sure you were just rounding up for effect.
Saying unemployment was over 8% when Obama signed the bill doesn’t make sense. Unemployment was 7.6% for Jan and was 8.1% for Feb. Who knows what is was on the day Obama signed the bill. Furthermore, the administration knew it was not going to be able to get money out the door quickly enough to affect unemployment numbers in the first few months.
The 9% number comes from Christina Romer’s report on the job impact of the stimulus plan. See fig 1 on page 4.
We don’t know about the banks. Japan’s banks were only facing bad loan losses, they weren’t holding the quantities of toxic securities that US banks are. Japanese banks were still very cautious about lending money even to Japanese businesses even as late as the mid nineties, they were actually trying to do business with foreign borrowers and using that and the Yen carry trade to dig themselves out of insolvency. We really don’t know how bad the banking problem is yet, probably won’t know the full extent for a few years yet. Maybe Japan’s banks are in far better shape than ours are.
The problem with the trade deficit had been going on since the 1970s. We’ve been happy for the dollar to be overvalued because since we became a big oil importer we’ve only been importing inflation every time the dollar fell. So we can let the value of the dollar slide and exports will pick up, but then we have to face higher oil prices.
I seriously doubt that, especially when you monetize the value of pensions, health insurance, and job security. Since Stone et al are whining about studies, objective proof, etc, here’s a study for you
and before you say this is apples and oranges
Now, on to the Feds: Cato also did a pretty thorough analysis. And again, you cannot just look at the wage/salary as the sole determinant:
To answer your question, I deal with a broad cross section of govies, federal and civilian agencies, from GS-3 up to SES, Undersec, General Officer. Maybe what you say is true for lawyers, but not generally.