4 ms·

Another option: Stop spending money on dumb stuff to free up money for important stuff. When the EPA is paying $5000/piece for office chairs, they have all the

Another option: Stop spending money on dumb stuff to free up money for important stuff. When the EPA is paying $5000/piece for office chairs, they have all the money they need to combat climate change. The need to run like a startup.

n42 5y ago
unfounded claims aside, $5000 on an office chair sounds like a startup to me :)
- exabrial 5y ago
  well played sir
notananthem 5y ago
Yes, we should gut our military spending which would fund all the important stuff
- sidhuko 5y ago
  Better learn chinese then.
- ericmay 5y ago
  I'm a big fan of really reducing our military in size/budget but I think this is an easy one to pick on but once you start peeling back layers it gets more and more difficult. Personally I'd rather phase out programs like Social Security that I'll never see a dime of yet have to pay for, and/or combine multiple programs into a UBI of sorts. But then once you start talking about these things (like hey let's get rid of the TSA or the military) you start to realize... they are jobs programs and what are you going to do with so many people out of work? Will they start tech companies? Beats me. At least the military enforces the Petrodollar system which benefits you (assuming you're an American) so it's not like it's just all sunk cost or something. Outside of the general "no" from some people w.r.t universal health care I think that's another reason the federal government has been so unproductive in just making it happen. You going to fire all of those people and completely re-tool the economy? It's not that easy. But also the military while a large portion of the budget isn't that crazy relative to what we're doing. Should we pull out of Germany, Japan, and South Korea? Only sell weapons? Should we pull forces out of the Pacific and let China conquer Taiwan (or unify depending on your perspective)? I think it starts to get very complicated, very quickly. -edit- A quick tangent unrelated to your comment is that we've been trained to assume that all government spending is "waste" which is kind of irritating. Items like the infrastructure bill (or at least components of it at a minimum) can be viewed as investments with ROI instead.
- adventured 5y ago
  Unfortunately it wouldn't remotely begin to scratch the surface of funding our spending issues. The US is facing perma trillion dollar annual budget deficits, even with tax hikes. You could reduce our military spending to a reasonable 2% of GDP - ~$450 billion - and the difference wouldn't even cover half of our debt interest per year at this point. The US probably needs to be spending $150-$200 billion on additional annual infrastructure spending at this point, for at least a decade. Entitlements or healthcare? Throwing an extra $100 billion at those per year is a drop in the bucket ($100b = ~2.6% of US healthcare spending per year). For 20 years spending growth has been far outpacing economic growth, it has been plainly unsustainable for a long time. Now we're putting everything on the global reserve USD credit card. You can't keep growing spending at 7-8% while your economy grows at half that rate or less - unless you're willing to go the currency debasement route, which is what they've chosen thus far.
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  That's about ten percent of spending. The social safety net (the important stuff) is already most spending: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57170 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57170 Cutting military spending to politicians usually means something else, like cutting benefits to warriors who've already served (thus not really military spending).
themitigating 5y ago
Can you provide proof they spent that on chairs?
- paxys 5y ago
  I'm assuming the "source" is something they saw on a Facebook group
  - the-dude 5y ago
    How is your assumption anything better than a FB group? I Ducked 'epa expensive office chairs' and got this : https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2015/10/01/epa-supersizes-furniture-cost-while-downsizing-2000-employees/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2015/10/01/epa...
    - handrous 5y ago
      Story's crap, see my post about the exact same piece, above. TL;DR the actual story is "EPA spent about $600 per employee per year on office furniture and moving and storage expenses related to office furniture, over 10 years" which is... not a story.
      - the-dude 5y ago
        Well, as far as I glanced it, it did cover multiple chairs of 4k+. Which is admittedly not 5k, but is not crap either. The fact you are spreading it over 10 years does not make the 4k chair suddenly cheap.
        handrous 5y ago
        The piece: "ZOMG that's a $6,000 office furnishing budget per employee!"; Also the piece: "Over 10 years, and that includes various moving and storage costs including things like emptying a building of all furniture before renovations begin, and that includes stuff like conference room tables and who knows what else, so it's not like employees personally got the benefit of anywhere near that $600/yr" (and yes, I checked, the $6,000 is the over-10-years figure, not per year, which would be way too much, plus they're dividing by a number of employees that's significantly lower than what they had for some of those years) Yes, some furniture pieces are very expensive. No, that's not always unjustifiable. Nice furniture that works well and will last continues to cost actual money—compare it to Ikea or Ashley Furniture or whatever, and it'll always look expensive. It's also possible they're under restrictions, explicit or implicit, about where they can spend that money—your budget-tier options are going to be limited or nonexistent if you're restricted to American companies, for instance. Given these figures, what they were not doing was giving any significant percentage of their employees insanely-nice furniture. I'm also curious how many of the top-end items the piece singles out were for political appointees' offices. That could be corruption, sure, but it's a very different kind of issue from the EPA itself having a spending problem. Meanwhile, $600/employee/yr seems well within the bounds of normal. Piece is bullshit. [EDIT] it's also—and this was the most credible-looking source I could find for this, mind you—some guy "reporting" on figures that an organization he heads came up with. Check the about-the-author bit at the bottom. So. There's that. [EDIT EDIT] I just checked Herman Miller's price book. That $15,000 conference room table the article calls out (inattentive reader: "Oh my god, my dining room table only cost $300 at Ikea, that's insane!")? Based on what I'm seeing, it must have been enormous. Think "20 feet long" enormous. Tables that big are expensive. Are there cheaper ones? Yes. Are 100% of tables that size—which are in limited demand—going to seem absurdly expensive when presented this way? Also yes.
rhacker 5y ago
As long as the $5000 is going to American hands only, that's probably a good thing. What we need to do is bolster companies that don't outsource the US $.
rmk 5y ago
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/24/golden-hammer-epas-fondness-for-high-end-furniture/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/24/golden-hamm... This is a painful read. $814 for a container for pencils? Really? Even more egregious is highly-paid (and I really mean, highly paid, even more than most SV people) employees who do not show up for work (the kicker: they also got bonuses, apparently)! But this is chump change compared to some of the excesses of last year. The Paycheck Protection Program was basically a huge stimulus program, with many loans being 'forgiven'. That's right, going concerns that anticipated difficulties in operating their businesses (note that they had not actually run into trouble) took out these loans that were later forgiven. This program was nearly a trillion. That's a Trillion. With a T. I'm sure some of this saved businesses from going under, tiding them over until they could recover, but in a highly inefficient, wasteful way. Of course, it will be cast as 'Stimulus' when fiscally-minded people ask for an accounting, and more taxes, such as this one, which lays hands on unrealized gains, will be proposed to fund such 'Stimulus' benders!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
trinovantes 5y ago
The problem of government budgets is that you either spend it or you lose it

n42 5y ago

unfounded claims aside, $5000 on an office chair sounds like a startup to me :)

exabrial 5y ago
well played sir

notananthem 5y ago

Yes, we should gut our military spending which would fund all the important stuff

sidhuko 5y ago
Better learn chinese then.
ericmay 5y ago
I'm a big fan of really reducing our military in size/budget but I think this is an easy one to pick on but once you start peeling back layers it gets more and more difficult. Personally I'd rather phase out programs like Social Security that I'll never see a dime of yet have to pay for, and/or combine multiple programs into a UBI of sorts. But then once you start talking about these things (like hey let's get rid of the TSA or the military) you start to realize... they are jobs programs and what are you going to do with so many people out of work? Will they start tech companies? Beats me. At least the military enforces the Petrodollar system which benefits you (assuming you're an American) so it's not like it's just all sunk cost or something. Outside of the general "no" from some people w.r.t universal health care I think that's another reason the federal government has been so unproductive in just making it happen. You going to fire all of those people and completely re-tool the economy? It's not that easy. But also the military while a large portion of the budget isn't that crazy relative to what we're doing. Should we pull out of Germany, Japan, and South Korea? Only sell weapons? Should we pull forces out of the Pacific and let China conquer Taiwan (or unify depending on your perspective)? I think it starts to get very complicated, very quickly. -edit- A quick tangent unrelated to your comment is that we've been trained to assume that all government spending is "waste" which is kind of irritating. Items like the infrastructure bill (or at least components of it at a minimum) can be viewed as investments with ROI instead.
adventured 5y ago
Unfortunately it wouldn't remotely begin to scratch the surface of funding our spending issues. The US is facing perma trillion dollar annual budget deficits, even with tax hikes. You could reduce our military spending to a reasonable 2% of GDP - ~$450 billion - and the difference wouldn't even cover half of our debt interest per year at this point. The US probably needs to be spending $150-$200 billion on additional annual infrastructure spending at this point, for at least a decade. Entitlements or healthcare? Throwing an extra $100 billion at those per year is a drop in the bucket ($100b = ~2.6% of US healthcare spending per year). For 20 years spending growth has been far outpacing economic growth, it has been plainly unsustainable for a long time. Now we're putting everything on the global reserve USD credit card. You can't keep growing spending at 7-8% while your economy grows at half that rate or less - unless you're willing to go the currency debasement route, which is what they've chosen thus far.
readflaggedcomm 5y ago
That's about ten percent of spending. The social safety net (the important stuff) is already most spending: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57170 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57170 Cutting military spending to politicians usually means something else, like cutting benefits to warriors who've already served (thus not really military spending).

themitigating 5y ago

Can you provide proof they spent that on chairs?

paxys 5y ago
I'm assuming the "source" is something they saw on a Facebook group
- the-dude 5y ago
  How is your assumption anything better than a FB group? I Ducked 'epa expensive office chairs' and got this : https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2015/10/01/epa-supersizes-furniture-cost-while-downsizing-2000-employees/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2015/10/01/epa...
  - handrous 5y ago
    Story's crap, see my post about the exact same piece, above. TL;DR the actual story is "EPA spent about $600 per employee per year on office furniture and moving and storage expenses related to office furniture, over 10 years" which is... not a story.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      Well, as far as I glanced it, it did cover multiple chairs of 4k+. Which is admittedly not 5k, but is not crap either. The fact you are spreading it over 10 years does not make the 4k chair suddenly cheap.
      - handrous 5y ago
        The piece: "ZOMG that's a $6,000 office furnishing budget per employee!"; Also the piece: "Over 10 years, and that includes various moving and storage costs including things like emptying a building of all furniture before renovations begin, and that includes stuff like conference room tables and who knows what else, so it's not like employees personally got the benefit of anywhere near that $600/yr" (and yes, I checked, the $6,000 is the over-10-years figure, not per year, which would be way too much, plus they're dividing by a number of employees that's significantly lower than what they had for some of those years) Yes, some furniture pieces are very expensive. No, that's not always unjustifiable. Nice furniture that works well and will last continues to cost actual money—compare it to Ikea or Ashley Furniture or whatever, and it'll always look expensive. It's also possible they're under restrictions, explicit or implicit, about where they can spend that money—your budget-tier options are going to be limited or nonexistent if you're restricted to American companies, for instance. Given these figures, what they were not doing was giving any significant percentage of their employees insanely-nice furniture. I'm also curious how many of the top-end items the piece singles out were for political appointees' offices. That could be corruption, sure, but it's a very different kind of issue from the EPA itself having a spending problem. Meanwhile, $600/employee/yr seems well within the bounds of normal. Piece is bullshit. [EDIT] it's also—and this was the most credible-looking source I could find for this, mind you—some guy "reporting" on figures that an organization he heads came up with. Check the about-the-author bit at the bottom. So. There's that. [EDIT EDIT] I just checked Herman Miller's price book. That $15,000 conference room table the article calls out (inattentive reader: "Oh my god, my dining room table only cost $300 at Ikea, that's insane!")? Based on what I'm seeing, it must have been enormous. Think "20 feet long" enormous. Tables that big are expensive. Are there cheaper ones? Yes. Are 100% of tables that size—which are in limited demand—going to seem absurdly expensive when presented this way? Also yes.

rhacker 5y ago

As long as the $5000 is going to American hands only, that's probably a good thing. What we need to do is bolster companies that don't outsource the US $.

rmk 5y ago

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/24/golden-hammer-epas-fondness-for-high-end-furniture/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/24/golden-hamm... This is a painful read. $814 for a container for pencils? Really? Even more egregious is highly-paid (and I really mean, highly paid, even more than most SV people) employees who do not show up for work (the kicker: they also got bonuses, apparently)! But this is chump change compared to some of the excesses of last year. The Paycheck Protection Program was basically a huge stimulus program, with many loans being 'forgiven'. That's right, going concerns that anticipated difficulties in operating their businesses (note that they had not actually run into trouble) took out these loans that were later forgiven. This program was nearly a trillion. That's a Trillion. With a T. I'm sure some of this saved businesses from going under, tiding them over until they could recover, but in a highly inefficient, wasteful way. Of course, it will be cast as 'Stimulus' when fiscally-minded people ask for an accounting, and more taxes, such as this one, which lays hands on unrealized gains, will be proposed to fund such 'Stimulus' benders!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

trinovantes 5y ago

The problem of government budgets is that you either spend it or you lose it