As my e-mail in-box fills with pleas to write my legislators in support of continued funding for many if not every publicly funded undertaking imaginable, I find some common issues and solutions suggest themselves. Rather than write several dozen issue-specific pleas, I thought maybe a single unfocused diatribe might be easier, if less helpful. Frankly I am just as pissed off as a wet hen, and would like to get a couple things off my chest…to whit:
Our national and state budgets are in the tank, and the current state of American political leadership of every stripe is, I think, incapable of addressing this problem rationally. At the most simplistic level, the way out of the woods is clear. We set our priorities, compromising among various opinions to satisfy a majority and making sure we don’t destroy the fabric of our communities, then we spend less and increase our income until things come into balance. Everything is on the table, and nothing is beyond consideration. This is how households get themselves out of debt, and at a larger and more complicated level, it’s how countries and states do it too.
Any politician who says they will never raise taxes or pledges never to cut some portion of public expenditures is either lying or an idiot. Taking any or all tax increases (or “revenue enhancements” for Chrissakes) and any or all public expenditures off the table is irrational.
Period.
Our current crop of political leaders, who are beholden to contributors of various stripes to finance their campaign war chests and keep their un-term limited butts in their various seats, are not, in my opinion, up to the job. Let’s face it; these guys can’t even cobble together a compromise that deals with the simple stuff like education, environmental regulation, and transportation. How in the name of merciful heaven could we expect them to deal with stuff like defense and entitlements like Medicare? Voting for “change” won’t work if the new folks are exposed to the same lobbying money and the same need to get re-elected.
Until our elected representatives are term limited and until we get all that private money out of DC and the various state capitols, our legislators simply cannot legislate in the interests of their voters, their state, and their country without regard to their long-term electability.
Some of the newest legislative crop appear to espouse a political philosophy that finds all public sector undertakings, all labor unions, and all taxes as inherently “evil” and all private sector doings, all business owners, and all public budget cuts “good”. A lot of them support term limits, but frankly are too inflexible and simple minded to pour piss out of a boot, much less rationally address a huge and complicated budget crisis. Last week I watched one of the geniuses who helped vote in some of these Einsteins railing against the Wisconsin Public Employee Unions because he didn’t “…have health care or a pension or any guarantee of a job…” apparently missing the point that he deserves these things himself as a basic human right, and could do with some union representation. People in my parent’s generation stood out on picket lines and got their heads beaten in by goons working for the predecessors of the Koch brothers to win collective bargaining rights. That wasn’t so long ago.
Even in states where the legislative majority and the governor are from the same party, compromise among disparate opinions will be necessary to put together a rational response to fiscal problems. At the federal level where one house is Republican and the other Democratic with a D President holding a veto card, compromise is essential to doing anything at all. Holding your breath until you turn blue in defense of your “principles” doesn’t even work for kids.
Before I climb off this soapbox, there is a second related issue that I don’t see anyone reporting on in the media I’d like to raise. Last year, mostly because nobody in the organization I work for noticed (yes, public sector, but the same thing happens at businesses), several of us grunts were able to implement a program that saved our agency a quarter million dollars. Essentially, for very small projects, we hired a seasonal employee and a couple interns, and replaced contracted services with these young folks, supervising them ourselves. The projects they worked on wound up costing around 2300 bucks. A cost/benefit analysis employing five years worth of data demonstrated that the same projects, done by consultants, averaged (no shit) 23,000 bucks!
Now the real money in government is, of course, in the defense budget. How much money? Have a look at this!
Two young friends of mine are military truck drivers soon bound for their second deployment in Iraq. When I asked them where all the money is going over there, they laughed, then explained that in a given military convoy, only 30% of the trucks are actually military. The rest are contractors, and the drivers are pulling down 100K tax free each plus incentives. My young friends aren’t paid anything like that. They went on to note that the army cooks assigned to their units are not allowed to cook anything. That is done by a contractor. The base they stay at was erected and is maintained by contractors, and some of the showers those contractors have erected have electrocuted a few folks. These two young soldiers aren’t too surprised by the size of the military budget, and they know what to do to reduce it without undue losses in our security. Not that anyone will ever ask them…
Please understand, I’m not at all down on consultants and contractors (having worked as one). My point is, there are projects and situations where public employees are the way to go, and other projects and situations where consultants make sense. In general, undertakings that are large in scale and have a limited life span are good candidates for using a contractor (e.g. building a bridge), while smaller projects that happen all the time are best done in-house (e.g. patching potholes on the bridge). Public and private employees and enterprises are neither inherently good nor bad. They are just different tools that have different uses. A hammer is great for driving nails, not so good for removing bolts. The decision on whether to use a contractor or a public employee should be based on the demands of the job at hand and on costs to the taxpayers, not on somebody’s half-assed political philosophy nor on who has made the largest political contributions lately.
In government, the people who know how things work are beat cops, the guy that drives the snowplow, the classroom teacher, the administrative assistant, the Private First Class truck driver in Iraq, the pay grade 2 bookkeeper, the firefighter/EMT. I have worked in government service for many years now. Nobody in upper management of the several agencies I’ve worked for has ever asked me how we could save some money from the operations budget in my division. Ever.
There…I feel much better now having exercised my first amendment rights. I look forward to your reactions!
