7 ms·

If you read this article and you were surprised (dismayed, I hope), then you should examine your news sources. This problem has been floating around for years.

by crusso 13y ago

If you read this article and you were surprised (dismayed, I hope), then you should examine your news sources. This problem has been floating around for years. Worse, this is just the tip of the iceberg. A building that has been empty for decades is an obvious waste, but there are many wastes that far outstrip this one. There are hundreds of billions of dollars out there that could be put toward paying down our debt and securing programs that are going bankrupt like Medicare and Social Security. That's why when I hear Pelosi and others say that they can't cut a dime out of the budget. She said, "The cupboard is bare." I feel disgusted.

Kalium 13y ago
The funny thing is, a lot of these costs are so high because of previous attempts to save money. For example, contractors are used heavily at just about every level of government. We're hellishly expensive. You know why this happens? In no small part it's because the government general schedule pay scale is a vow of poverty for any skilled and educated professional. So those people go to contractors to get paid reasonably and the contractor happily applies a markup and sells their services back to the government. Behold, "cost cutting measures" in action.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  That problem comes from interpreting a requirement to reduce costs as "do the same things with less" but never as "do less".
  - untog 13y ago
    And that problem comes from a requirement to reduce costs that does not specify what services will be cut at the same time.
  - Kalium 13y ago
    That's because in government, you're aren't allowed to choose to do less on your own. That's a choice made above you, and always a difficult one. As a result, the requirement is almost always "do the same with less".
- araes 13y ago
  Where I'm at, the ratio's currently at ~3:1, with about 90% of the actual dollars going towards contracts. Admittedly, we're also one of the higher agency ratio's in the gov. Frankly, a lot of this isn't driven by cost cutting though. In the case I can speak to, and IMO, budget has trended more and more towards contract vs civil due to the irregularity of the budget process, and to some degree, due to the perceived inflexibility & cost (real or not) of a civil job vs a contract. At a basic level, its easier to swap a contractor if you suddenly find that you need a widget maker rather than a sprocket aligner. At some level, there is also the feeder and lobbying ecosystem that is most obvious within the military industrial complex, but is present through all agencies, pushing for more and bigger contracts.
runako 13y ago
It's easy to denigrate obvious waste like empty buildings. But context matters: even waving a wand and disposing of all of these buildings would improve the federal budget by ~0.0119%. Put another way, we'd get roughly the same impact by reducing our order of Littoral Combat Ships by 1 boat. If you profile your code, you don't go after the line item that's < .1% until everything else is fixed; I'd argue that our representatives have more substantive budget fixes they can target.
- exelius 13y ago
  Congressional budgets are really complex and can't be evaluated like code. That $3 billion subsidy for farmers in Nebraska? The people of Nebraska really, really want that. So much so that if their senators can't push it through, they'll likely vote them out of office. So those senators trade every favor they have to get it through, which usually means voting for keeping a military base open in Colorado, funding road work and pipelines in Texas, building a new airport in Oklahoma, etc. That's how we get such a bloated federal budget. It's why Congress wants to build a whole bunch of tanks for the Army that they have said they don't need. It's really more of a tragedy of the commons situation than inefficiency. IMO the question shouldn't be "how can we lower our tax burden", it should be "how do we get more value out of our tax dollars." That may mean increasing the tax burden. There's a sweet spot between socialism and capitalism, and IMO we're swinging a bit far towards capitalism right now. I'm not saying we should go full-on welfare state, but our infrastructure is crumbling and people are losing faith in the American dream, yet companies are more profitable than ever. It's also important to recognize that government accounting is substantially different from normal corporate accounting. Governments can literally print money if they need to do so to cover debts (and thus shift the burden of debt repayment onto all holders of their currency). The flip side of that is that governments have such a massive scale, they tend to absorb a lot of economy-scale losses (such as building vacancies) that businesses wouldn't have to, so their balance sheets look awful.
- jeffdavis 13y ago
  That's the problem with central planning. When you look from the top down, every gain seems tiny. But small businesses would know if a chair was underutilized, and it would be sold in 10 minutes; let alone a whole building. Taken over the whole economy, these efficiencies are a big deal, and arguably account for the success of market economy over centrally-planned economies.
rayiner 13y ago
Are there actually "hundreds of billions of dollars" out there? Or is this another red herring like earmarks that amounts to a few billion here and there?
- crusso 13y ago
  Yes. That's my point about news sources. If you're surprised at this building waste and unaware of many others, then you might want to branch out in your reading. Or is this another red herring like earmarks that amounts to a few billion here and there? I'm not sure if you're just trolling me here, but I'll bite. The problem with earmarks isn't the total that they add as a broken-out line item. It's the corruption of a system that creates you-scratch-my-back incentives for passing unnecessary legislation. The cost of earmarks isn't the line item. It's the cost of the entire boondoggle law that wouldn't have been passed without the back room incentives.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    > Yes. That's my point about news sources. If you're surprised at this building waste and unaware of many others, then you might want to branch out in your reading. I'd love to see a source that shows "hundreds of billions" in actual waste, in an itemized fashion. > The cost of earmarks isn't the line item. It's the cost of the entire boondoggle law that wouldn't have been passed without the back room incentives. The idea of earmarks is to attach them to a law that was going to pass anyway.
    - crusso 13y ago
      > I'd love to see a source that shows "hundreds of billions" in actual waste, in an itemized fashion. This is again my point. You're waiting for me to show up with links at your front doorstep showing you a perfectly digested and itemized list for information that you should be seeing all the time if you have a healthy list of news sources. So where I see this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2012/05/31/medicare-and-medicaid-fraud-is-costing-taxpayers-billions/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2012/05/31/medic... Even though it references Eric Holder's mentioning that fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid is probably between $120 - $180 billion, that's not an itemized list. In your mind, I'm sure you think that crusso provided no evidence whatsoever that there's plenty of waste in the budget. My guess is that your world view just doesn't include the possibility that the government could be tragically wasteful of money. I'm sure that if you looked around at the Heritage Foundation, they probably have itemized lists, but you'd disregard that because of the source, I'd suspect. Really, the only groups you trust to tell you that there was hundreds of billions of dollars in waste wouldn't dare do that kind of research in the first place. The idea of earmarks is to attach them to a law that was going to pass anyway. That makes absolutely no sense. Why would they include earmarks in a bill if they were superfluous. They're there to grease the wheels. They're incentives to get congressional votes. They're bribes, but legal.
kaonashi 13y ago
Why on Earth would we want to do a foolish thing like confiscating all outstanding bonds (which you euphemize as paying down the debt)? Medicare and Social Security cannot "go bankrupt".

by crusso 13y ago

Kalium 13y ago

The funny thing is, a lot of these costs are so high because of previous attempts to save money. For example, contractors are used heavily at just about every level of government. We're hellishly expensive. You know why this happens? In no small part it's because the government general schedule pay scale is a vow of poverty for any skilled and educated professional. So those people go to contractors to get paid reasonably and the contractor happily applies a markup and sells their services back to the government. Behold, "cost cutting measures" in action.

JoshTriplett 13y ago
That problem comes from interpreting a requirement to reduce costs as "do the same things with less" but never as "do less".
- untog 13y ago
  And that problem comes from a requirement to reduce costs that does not specify what services will be cut at the same time.
- Kalium 13y ago
  That's because in government, you're aren't allowed to choose to do less on your own. That's a choice made above you, and always a difficult one. As a result, the requirement is almost always "do the same with less".
araes 13y ago
Where I'm at, the ratio's currently at ~3:1, with about 90% of the actual dollars going towards contracts. Admittedly, we're also one of the higher agency ratio's in the gov. Frankly, a lot of this isn't driven by cost cutting though. In the case I can speak to, and IMO, budget has trended more and more towards contract vs civil due to the irregularity of the budget process, and to some degree, due to the perceived inflexibility & cost (real or not) of a civil job vs a contract. At a basic level, its easier to swap a contractor if you suddenly find that you need a widget maker rather than a sprocket aligner. At some level, there is also the feeder and lobbying ecosystem that is most obvious within the military industrial complex, but is present through all agencies, pushing for more and bigger contracts.

runako 13y ago

It's easy to denigrate obvious waste like empty buildings. But context matters: even waving a wand and disposing of all of these buildings would improve the federal budget by ~0.0119%. Put another way, we'd get roughly the same impact by reducing our order of Littoral Combat Ships by 1 boat. If you profile your code, you don't go after the line item that's < .1% until everything else is fixed; I'd argue that our representatives have more substantive budget fixes they can target.

exelius 13y ago
Congressional budgets are really complex and can't be evaluated like code. That $3 billion subsidy for farmers in Nebraska? The people of Nebraska really, really want that. So much so that if their senators can't push it through, they'll likely vote them out of office. So those senators trade every favor they have to get it through, which usually means voting for keeping a military base open in Colorado, funding road work and pipelines in Texas, building a new airport in Oklahoma, etc. That's how we get such a bloated federal budget. It's why Congress wants to build a whole bunch of tanks for the Army that they have said they don't need. It's really more of a tragedy of the commons situation than inefficiency. IMO the question shouldn't be "how can we lower our tax burden", it should be "how do we get more value out of our tax dollars." That may mean increasing the tax burden. There's a sweet spot between socialism and capitalism, and IMO we're swinging a bit far towards capitalism right now. I'm not saying we should go full-on welfare state, but our infrastructure is crumbling and people are losing faith in the American dream, yet companies are more profitable than ever. It's also important to recognize that government accounting is substantially different from normal corporate accounting. Governments can literally print money if they need to do so to cover debts (and thus shift the burden of debt repayment onto all holders of their currency). The flip side of that is that governments have such a massive scale, they tend to absorb a lot of economy-scale losses (such as building vacancies) that businesses wouldn't have to, so their balance sheets look awful.
jeffdavis 13y ago
That's the problem with central planning. When you look from the top down, every gain seems tiny. But small businesses would know if a chair was underutilized, and it would be sold in 10 minutes; let alone a whole building. Taken over the whole economy, these efficiencies are a big deal, and arguably account for the success of market economy over centrally-planned economies.

rayiner 13y ago

Are there actually "hundreds of billions of dollars" out there? Or is this another red herring like earmarks that amounts to a few billion here and there?

crusso 13y ago
Yes. That's my point about news sources. If you're surprised at this building waste and unaware of many others, then you might want to branch out in your reading. Or is this another red herring like earmarks that amounts to a few billion here and there? I'm not sure if you're just trolling me here, but I'll bite. The problem with earmarks isn't the total that they add as a broken-out line item. It's the corruption of a system that creates you-scratch-my-back incentives for passing unnecessary legislation. The cost of earmarks isn't the line item. It's the cost of the entire boondoggle law that wouldn't have been passed without the back room incentives.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > Yes. That's my point about news sources. If you're surprised at this building waste and unaware of many others, then you might want to branch out in your reading. I'd love to see a source that shows "hundreds of billions" in actual waste, in an itemized fashion. > The cost of earmarks isn't the line item. It's the cost of the entire boondoggle law that wouldn't have been passed without the back room incentives. The idea of earmarks is to attach them to a law that was going to pass anyway.
  - crusso 13y ago
    > I'd love to see a source that shows "hundreds of billions" in actual waste, in an itemized fashion. This is again my point. You're waiting for me to show up with links at your front doorstep showing you a perfectly digested and itemized list for information that you should be seeing all the time if you have a healthy list of news sources. So where I see this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2012/05/31/medicare-and-medicaid-fraud-is-costing-taxpayers-billions/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2012/05/31/medic... Even though it references Eric Holder's mentioning that fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid is probably between $120 - $180 billion, that's not an itemized list. In your mind, I'm sure you think that crusso provided no evidence whatsoever that there's plenty of waste in the budget. My guess is that your world view just doesn't include the possibility that the government could be tragically wasteful of money. I'm sure that if you looked around at the Heritage Foundation, they probably have itemized lists, but you'd disregard that because of the source, I'd suspect. Really, the only groups you trust to tell you that there was hundreds of billions of dollars in waste wouldn't dare do that kind of research in the first place. The idea of earmarks is to attach them to a law that was going to pass anyway. That makes absolutely no sense. Why would they include earmarks in a bill if they were superfluous. They're there to grease the wheels. They're incentives to get congressional votes. They're bribes, but legal.

kaonashi 13y ago

Why on Earth would we want to do a foolish thing like confiscating all outstanding bonds (which you euphemize as paying down the debt)? Medicare and Social Security cannot "go bankrupt".