You find it in the most unlikely places.
Remember, government does not create anything of value in the marketplace.
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CCD » Explosive GrowthBy lex, on February 6th, 2010
February 6th, 2010 | Tags: silliness | Category: Gratuitous slap
16 comments to Explosive Growth |
Targets of Opportunityblog advertising is good for you Credo"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra" "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche "A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier "Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas "Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex Amazon AssociateFor the Effort!Winnar! Subscribe CategoriesPagesTagsacademy
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The Government needs a good lesson in “indirect” vs “Direct” revenue.
Simple – It is defended by 10,100 Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more AND the 1,690 Transportation Department employees earning a salary of $170,000 or more -
They obviously have a high number of the 100 Senators & 435 House Reps in their personal circle of friends…That’s the only way you GET a job like that -
Not that a retired US Navy Seabee combat Veteran can get offered a good paying job at home – after 5 months of unemployment and near loss of my home, I had to take a job in AFGHN for a private company to pay the bills….
Not that I am complaing as I get to hang with the warfighters and some of America’s finest…just hate to be away from home for the time i have to be here.
That is just criminal SK1 – and I know it happens more often than it doesn’t unfortunately.
YUP – The BOA holds my mortgage on the stately manse back in SE MASS and they are kinda particular about wanting their money on time…..
No worries – I am with a good bunch here in AFGHN and have been blessed as I have great family & friends….just want to finish up here in late 2010 and head back to Boston….my home.
My first thought is that there is something wrong with the idea that working for the government can bring such high pay (and don’t even get me started on the Fannie Mae / Freddy Mac bonus crimes). Of course, when you need good people with skills, you do have to pay a price to get them, right? Well, in the outside labor market you do.
Anyway, my second thought is: If we are going to pay that kind of money, should we not be entitled to expect and demand some damned good work product from these people — or else? Who sets the goals for them and what are they expected to accomplish? For that kind of money we should get some very real results or we should get someone new in there who can do the job, not some bureaucrat with no accountability.
Public service my a**. This is very suspect.
I suspect that some of the increased number of positions in DOD are from converting contractor billets to civil service billets but still – this is just BS plain and pure. Since the numbers go back to 2007 some of this is on Bush but the rate of increase in these positions is staggering. Maybe the Administration is so used to coddling the Wall Street guys that this seems like peanuts to them.
I guess what isn’t surprising but should be, is that this isn’t a topic of conversation on every news outlet and that every editorial writer in America isn’t calling this out.
Even if every single position is staffed by someone doing a bang up job and earning every penny it seems to me I haven’t noticed a marked improvement in the efficiency of the DOD or Transportation Department in the last two years begging the question, if we got along without them before, why we need these positions now?
OldT6, I’m not quite sure how to interpret the stats. An increase over 2 years from 1868 to 10100 people appears insane, but if we knew that in 2007, there were a lot of jobs paying $145k to $149.9k and they simply got a COLA, crossing the $150k bar could “look” a lot worse than comparing complete distributions. Do we know?
The USA article cites a number of factors but one, in the case of the FAA, was that a number of Senior Position’s compensation was tied to the pay of the Agency head. He got a big raise and 1,700 others got pushed beyond the $170K level.
The problem is the rules that control pay raises and such in the Government. In the private sector you see all sorts of pay scales for CEOs, etc. that seem to have little linkage to actual performance. Is like, “oh your company missed its numbers all 4 quarters, lost market share, and had to get a government bailout – your bonus will only be $10 million instead of 50 this year…” Meanwhile the rest of the workforce that manages to retain a job gets no raise or, more likely a cut.
In the government we see a raise given to an Agency hard and everyone gets a trigger whether deserved or not.
The problem with these kinds of stories is they lack context and I’m sure some of those who get that kind of jack work hard, make a difference, and are probably worth what they get. But not all of them for sure and the fact that, in this time of economic turmoil, we have a government that is blind, deaf, and dumb to the suffering that the majority are feeling and the appearance, if not the fact, of an obscene amount of waste being literally doled out to a few, a select even, but a heck of a lot more select few then just a couple of years back.
That is hard to justify in the whole even if, in some individual cases, it is deserved and makes sense. I had employees that merited raises, even bonuses this past year that didn’t receive either since I don’t have an endless stream of other peoples money to tap at will.
Maybe it’s just the tenor of the day, but color me pissed.
BIG government = BIG money, but nobody talks about it. Why isn’t this kind of thing on the front pages of the failing Grey Lady? More and more people in the government riding on the backs of the taxpayers!
Ma and Pa middle America need to know about this… they’re crying out to hear about this kind of waste and would act in even greater numbers than in Massachusetts if they knew. The waste in the F-22 vs F-35 battle is just one more example!
BillK has a good point, but by contrast an acquaintance of mine recently retired as an Army O-4E and stepped into a SES job created basically for him. To be fair, not many SOBs can do what he can so I don’t resent it, and it’s directly related to winning a certain war effort. On the flip side, win or lose, that SES position is never going away. The SES ranks do seem to be a growth industry.
I travel a good bit around the country and certainly in the last year hotel availability is way up and room rates way down – except for one place. You guessed it – in DC you often find hotels booked solid and room rates full price – everyone angling to get their hand in the till.
A Slow Day in Texas
Its a slow day in a little East Texas town.. The sun is beating down,
and the streets are deserted.
Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit..
On this particular day a rich tourist from back east is driving through
town.
He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants
to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.
As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs
next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt
to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the
supplier of feed and fuel.
The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt
to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has
had to offer her “services” on credit.
The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the
hotel owner.
The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the
rich traveler will not suspect anything.
At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100
bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money,
and leaves town.
No one produced anything. No one earned anything.
However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future
with a lot more optimism.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government
is conducting business today.
—–
Oh, I don’t know. The hotel owner produced rooms others could stay in, the butcher produced processed meat, the pig farmer produced hogs for the butcher, the feed and fuel guys produced a service supplying feed and fuel to the farmer, even the prostitute produced a smile of her customers.
Seems to me the only one not offering anything was the rich tourist. He consumed nothing, he paid for nothing, he contributed nothing in the end. But everybody else managed to live off the short-term loan he made.
There’s a real economics lesson to be learned in that.
– Max
And in neither case is anyone richer nor more productive because assets were taken to cancel debts, so the only things that have improved are feelings, not net worth.
The article makes things sound bad, but the average FedGov employee does not earn in 6 figures. I know at least 20 FedGov employees (non-military) and none are over $90K. Most are below $50K.
Still, the SES is really something of a rip-off. FedGov does produce something, but it’s little more than a load for the rest of the country to carry. As Lex points out, it’s nothing of value, just a burden. A burden for all of us.