Budget and beuracracy

[drz-400]

The best paying jobs should go to experienced managers and really high-ranking officials. Entry level positions are pretty much blind labor; you have no idea, aside from references, how well they'll perform.

Thats true. Keep in mind they can and do still fire bad employees.

 

[drz-400]

they will also be resposible with their budget because if they do a bad job and a lot of farmers don't get their water, employees don't get paychecks, ect. they will piss off a lot of people and lose their job.

 

[middleagedgamer]

Why wouldn't they be though?

Are private companies owner's reviewed by judges?

Are those that decide the budget in private companies detached from the ones who decide how much they get to spend?

No. No no no. You're not listening to me.

When it comes to formulating a budget, Congress needs to set parameters on how much can be spent on what.

For example,

Entry-level beuracracy labor that does not require any education or training beyond a high school diploma gets the greater of $8 an hour.
Managers receive at least $48,000 a year ($4,000 a month).

Congress can give them an annual cost-of-living wage increase, proportional to the percentage that welfare recepients receive.

Any agency who pays their workers more than this maximum gets fined.

And, by doing that, the budget deficit goes WAY down!

 

[obvious Child]

Labor isn't the only thing that the government overspends on. Ever heard the stand-up joke about them spending $600 on a plunger?

Generally those are accounting issues. The government did not actually pay $600 for a plunger, $400 for a hammer and $1,000 for a toilet. When cost overruns for military projects cannot be allocated to their original budgets, the excess is doled out to unrelated projects to make things balance. So the government actually only paid market price for that hammer, but tacked on another $387 to pay for military projects. It's a flaw of the cost plus system, but there isn't a better way without increasing the budget for particular weapons.

As for the issue of pay, we complain because civil servants are paid too much...and then complain about poor government services. Now, if we lowered pay, doesn't that suggest that service would get worse? What are we willing to live with? Cheap servants with awful government or well paid servants with half decent government?

I don't see how people can expect good government with incentives to work that are below market wages.

 

[drz-400]

Ok sure, that could make sense in some cases. If the job was like mowing grass out on the front lawn I would agree. If it was an entry level laborer who will be helping repair a dam, maybe not so much.

I will agree with you, their are most likely some cases that the government could pay employees less for the type of work they do.

 

[phattonez]

because they only have so much money allocated to go into their budget

And there is leeway there. Also, private companies get no money allocated to go into their budget.

 

[Mach]

This happens all the time, it even happens in private business, it's not just a government problem.

Perhaps we need to have such institutions regulated by private industry. Government regulates private because they have a level of detachment, let private regulate government for the same reasons. It could have a two-fold effect. The trade-off is we have to pay these private comapnies to help streamline our government mucky-muck, but if they save more than they cost (as a good consultant should), we may net benefit. Maybe it could be a consortiom of experts from industry that develop best practice in general, but then also do reports for their assigned gov. agency and there are clear, written things that happen when they are not met or improved (agency leader has to resign an extreme example).

Secondly, if they drive down pensions and government padding on these jobs, and quality goes down, they may see a stronger incentive for innocation to improve service OR more incentive to privatize the industry altogether.

People, including me, laugh at academia some times as half-wits who can't hack it in the real world. However, there is something to be said structurally for a class of fairly well educated experts that based their ego/success on being correct, helping to provide input to government (and private) systems. Sure they can be corrupted like anyone else, the point is that being correct and making good, peer-reviewed progress, is rarely ever a relevant lever on government...and it's a lever we should see value in using.