government waste

I know there's a lot of competition in what is the worst reason to eliminate competition from the health care sector, but I think we have a winner.

Megan McArdle's piece on why she opposes national health care got deservedly wide coverage, and provoked some generally limp objections, such as this offering from Ezra Klein:

For all its waste, elevating the U.S. government to sole purchaser seems to ensure a much-higher rate of military technology innovation than if we left it to the private sector.

How does this remotely make any sense? The reason the government is the sole purchaser of laser-guided 500 lbs bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles is that we don't allow civilians to lob them around at each other. There is no private market for such military technology, unlike for Lipitor or Viagra. Utterly ridiculous

Is the argument the Left is now making is that we need to make civilian health care as cost-effective as Pentagon weapon procurement?  Hello, let's let the folks who gave us $700 hammers get into the bandage business.

 Indeed, one of the shills for socialized medicine once used the Pentagon as a poster child for waste.  And the Center for American Progress, one of Klein's soulmates,decried the program we've used to buy weapons.  So the same system that was utterly broken for the Pentagon prior to Obama is the way to reform health care under Obama? 

Hello? I'm a mick lawyer from deepest suburbia, not someone like Klein who is kingpin of Jornolist and part of the Beltway Brain Trust, but Talking Heads described this whole concept about the time Klein was born.    

Even if you thought these folks made sense before, they sure aren't now that they are in charge.

And Ezra, you know, most of the stuff in this movie happened about the time you were in utero or slurping down formula, and the Pentagon had nothing to do with it.   Innovation? No government bureaucracy to be found here.

Maybe in Klein's future the NEA will be distributing posters "Wouldn't be great if the schools got all the money they needed and they had a bake sale to buy an MRI machine"

You have to assume that when Team Obama announced that the President would convene his cabinet and challenge them to cut $100MM from their budgets, they were thinking people would be impressed. Government doing its bit, setting an example, showing that they can be good managers and not just spenders of OPM.

So they are probably surprised at the derision with which their announcement was met. People like me who've worked all their lives in what Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr has called "the dreaded private sector" have always suspected that government managers live in a different world, one where prices can be increased in bad times, where budget baselines ALWAYS grow, year over year, by at least 3-5%, where the consumer of your services -- the taxpayer -- can be treated with indifference, since they cannot bring their business to a competitor.

President Obama's laughable idea of managerial frugality only confirms our worst fears. We're laughing because we work in smaller organizations than the federal government that have been cutting, cutting, cutting -- way beyond 1/36,000 of our company's budget.

Corporate managers across America are used to getting challenged to cut costs every year. Just one example: One of the Silicon Valley's largest and most important concerns, Cisco, committed last year to cut its expenses by over $1 billion over the following year. By all accounts, they are getting there.

From what I hear, people are Webexing instead of flying, eating in rather than out, reducing everything down to cafe hours and office supplies. Cisco is a company of about 60,000 employees, with total revenues in excess of $50 billion. By any measure, the federal government is several orders of magnitude larger -- and yet Cisco's frugality measures are several orders of magnitude larger than the federal government's.

There are similar examples here in the Silicon Valley, but only one makes the point: The President's challenge to his top managers belies either an ignorance of what frugality is all about, or is a disingenuous PR announcement that shows contempt for people's intelligence.

A while ago on this blog, I suggested that the President challenge his cabinet to reduce their administrative budgets by a percentage -- say, 10% -- and that they implement a hiring freeze to stop the growth of the federal workforce, to ensure that stimulus dollars go to local communities, not growing DC bureaucracies. Do more with less -- that's what good organizational managers should always try to do.

Instead, we're told that one cabinet secretary figured out how to save a million or so buying office supplies in bulk from Staples. (Guess the Bushies never captured that low-hanging fruit!).

C'mon Mr. President, set the bar higher than that.

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: We need to win the battles over definitions, principles and policy when it comes to fiscal matters.

President Barack Obama has signed the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, and has broken yet another promise that he made during the campaign. Apparently, there was some debate in the Oval Office over what to do with the bill:

"White House aides said they debated whether the president should sign an omnibus spending bill that includes more than 8,500 pet projects worth $7.7 billion.

"White House counselor David Axelrod suggested a veto would send a strong signal that Mr. Obama's Washington really would represent change. But the president decided it wasn't worth adding a fight with his own party onto a plate that is already overly filled."

We can also surmise that Obama was too embarrassed to sign the bill in public. Check out these tweets from ABC News' Jake Tapper:

jaketapper: "Why are you not signing this bill in public?" the president was asked after he talked about earmark reforms he'd like to see. no answer.

jaketapper: president obama signed the omnibus spending bill...no photographs allowed.

I didn't think too much more about it until Patrick Ruffini, @thingsbreak and I had this short Twitter conversation:

PatrickRuffini: GOP should call for a total ban on earmarks in light of the economy and the deficit. Every day we don't do so we seal our irrelevance #tcot

alaskan: @PatrickRuffini Problem is that there's wasteful spending that aren't earmarks. Need to find a way to describe appropriate public goods.

thingsbreak: @PatrickRuffini But renouncing rather than reforming is political suicide. Earmarks are not intrinsically evil but abused. Agree/disagree?

PatrickRuffini: @alaskan @thingsbreak Earmarks are the most visible and easiest to fix symbol of how Republicans have lost their way

I agree with Patrick that earmarks are the most visible symbol. But that's exactly the problem. I don't agree that it's enough for Republicans to fix "symbols" of how we've lost our way. I don't agree that we need to focus on symbols. Yes, we need to fix the abuse of the earmark process by reforming it. But the fact is that not all earmarks can be construed as wasteful spending and not all wasteful spending are in earmarks.

At the Heritage Foundation's Conservative Bloggers Briefing, I mentioned this to Congressman Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, and asked him how we can move away from discussing earmarks and move towards discussing wasteful spending. Price went on to talk about the growing deficit and debt, and said that we have to communicate these large numbers to the American people. I don't think this is quite enough.

It's easy to come up with rhetoric denouncing "the evils of earmarks," but what we should be focusing on substantively is wasteful spending. Republicans should take three concrete steps to revive conservatism in sound fiscal policy: (1) defining public goods and wasteful spending, (2) reformulate principles that voters can connect with, and (3) promoting new fiscal processes and policies that can achieve less spending, more transparency and better prioritization.

(For details on these steps, read below the fold.)

As the father of a young-ish boy, I have had some Disney videos permanently hardwired into my conciousness. Ironically, the more attention I pay to current events in Washington and Wall Street, the more applicable they become.

I noticed this little gem of spending tucked into the House "stimulus package"

Let's see :$88 million to build new schools in a city with 15 vacant schools and declining enrollment But this is what liberals do. They start programs that will never end, even after the initial problem they were meant to address has long since passed., or in the case of Milwaukee, simply assume from hundreds of miles away the city needs new schools even if the locals have no need for them. This classic cartoon explains what happens when liberals start spending money, and the Obama plan is just the latest and most monumental example.  Yes, long after the well is filled the liberal "brooms" keep filling it with water. And in our case, the "water" is paid for with borrowed money from Beijing which future taxpayers will need to pay back with interest.

Senator McCain sent an email to supporters explaining his opposition to the current emergency economic stimulus package stating that...

Yesterday, the Senate began debate on an economic stimulus package that is intended to get our economy back on track and help Americans who are suffering through these difficult times. Unfortunately, the proposal on the table is big on the giveaways for the special interests and corporate high rollers, yet short on help for ordinary working Americans. I cannot and do not support the package on the table from the Democrats and the Obama Administration. Our country does not need just another spending bill, particularly not one that will load future generations with the burden of massive debt. We need a short term stimulus bill that will directly help people, create jobs, and provide a jolt to our economy.

He further explains the myriad of problems with this bloated stimulus package and asks for people to sign a petition to voice their disapproval of this bill.

Sign Vote No On The Stimulus Package Petition

John McCain Sponsors Petition Protesting Bloated Stimulus Plan

The U.S. Senate has decided we all need four more months to go out and prepare for digital television...which will cost the average TV viewer, what...$40/set before coupon

Meanwhile, the President and Congress can;t spend four weeks figuring how to spend a trillion dollars, and perhaps, actually trying to figure out the best way to fix the economy. Which might mean NOT spending the trillion dollars.

  There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper

Yes, America, our government truly has reached the "Outer Limits".

Here's a look at the brave new old world of make work taxpayer funded pork barrel projects.

The lobbying group for CT municipalities has amassed a wish list of over $2.8 billion in "shovel-ready" projects it claims would be worthy recipients of President-elect Obama's largesse.

Get your nostrils ready for a pungent smell test .

http://ccm-ct.org/advocacy/2007-2008/ready_to_go_121108.pdf

Darien--perhaps the state's richest town--- "needs" $17 million for a new police station.

Clinton--population 15,000---thinks it has a variety of ways to spend a mere $74 million; including dredging a pond. 

East Hartford thinks a new senior center ought to cost $30 million

New Fairfield--which has virtually no pedestrian traffic---needs to finish its "downtown' sidewalks

New Haven has a mere $506 million in wishes, including this cryptic $20 million item . "Prospect/Trumbull area for CSO in conjunction with GNHWPCA" Thankfully, its Mayor was not elected Governor in 2006 or the state would have already filed for Chapter  9 (the municipal version of Chapter 11).    

Newtown has $132 million in needs; although one wonders if the design and bid for the high school at $40 million is a bit duplicative of the $42 million for the high school addition. Double counting?

Portland needs $1.5 million for a public boat launch. Guess this beats floating a bond, eh?

Putnam must have $13 million for a community center with a swimming pool. 

Stamford---run by the other Democrat who wanted Jodi Rell's job in 2006--needs only $478 million. This list includes $4 million for an "absorbsion chiller"; $48,000 for foreign language classes for officers, and $164,000 to train K-9's. Who said our economy is going to the dogs?

Westport is looking for $7.2 million. including $200,000 for the Longshore Golf Club halfway house. Is this for golfers in rehab? Guess financial times there are tough since Martha moved away? 

Wethersfield has among its $4.175 million in urgent needs building a "gateway entrance" at the north end of town. Trust me, You don't need to spend a dime to know when you've left the City of Hartford.

Woodbury needs another $2.5 million for a salt shed. Guess global warming isn;t here yet.

Folks, we are going to be treated to the biggest pork fest in human history under President Obama. My suggestion is to watch in awe and try not to get in front of the trough.