Posted on 03/29/2010 9:55:51 AM PDT by Poundstone
There is a basic assumption among many of us conservatives that bothers me. Basically, the assumption is that if a person is a government employee, then he or she is lazy and shiftless, a parasite just eating up tax dollars without doing anything.
"Bureaucrats" is what the sneering expression usually is.
To put it mildly, this is unfair and not even in the ballpark of what's true.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
What do you produce, create or make?
Damn straight!
Private sector jobs (with the exception of large corporations with unions) tend to weed out the losers and governmental organizations either ignore the losers or shove them off on some other department.
Someone slip Stein some Kool-aid?
As an ex-federal employee I can sort of agree with Stein, but regardless there are at least 100% more govt employees than the workloading can justify. This means lots of spare time and untasked workers. However if you are talking about rank-and-file employees his comments are acceptable. But he doesn’t address the critical problem with govt “managers”. Govt agencies have become so corrupted that one can say with little doubt that the managerial types are to a man stupid and incompetent with the highest grades, the SESes, being the most corrupt and incompetent of the bunch. Replace govt managers with cardboard cutouts and the situation would automatically improve as the workers wouldn’t be interfered with by morons constantly.
Another issue is internal offices like “quality control” or “program management” or “configurartion management” which are just pointless do nothing areas that serve absolutely no purpose except to provide good paying jobs for people who couldn’t serve french fries.
And still collect their pension for "doing the least amount of damage".
While I agree he’s right to not paint all Fed employees with the same brush, there is without a doubt validity to the statement that the government is bloated.
Too many people doing absolutely nothing.
Can you tell me what government jobs are getting that kind of pay? (100% pensions????)
The only ones I can think of are the ELECTED officials and their direct appointees!
“State and local government pensions have no relationship whatsoever with the federal government system. “
They do have one thing in common. They won’t be paid in the manner that you expect, as they are not affordable to the productive taxpayer.
Uh, right.
The fact is, the size of the bureaucracy is ridiculous. The monster needs to be shrunk.
I have a dear relative who used to be a bureaucrat. She was, like you I am sure, one who wisely used the taxpayer’s dollars.
But she agrees: the waste and fraud were rampant.
We can’t say EVERY SINGLE fed employee is a leech. But too many are—and enough that we need to cut back on their numbers.
As Margaret Thatcher asked when she assumed the Prime Ministership, “What is that we are doing with 566,000 that we can’t do with 500,000?”
(And even she couldn’t get rid of the NHS.)
“The minute they started pulling down 150k salaries and retiring at 55 with 100% pensions, they became parasites.
They are driving the rest of us broke with their power to tax and spend.”
This. End of thread.
“And learn to not get confused on your words in the future”
Mr Stein was referring to some examples of government workers, who are maligned by the term “bureaucrat.”
The state and local systems are mostly promises.
It's not just that the federales can print money to cover the problem, it is also the case that they pay up front.
It's Congress, not the employees in the federal government, who spend your tax dollars like drunken sailers.
If the federal government as a whole were required to be as conscientious with all of its financial responsibilities as OPM is required to be with employee retirement funds the US government would be running surpluses.
“there are at least 100% more govt employees than the workloading can justify.”
Exactly. Regardless of whether bureaucrats are “lazy and shiftless” the key is that they don’t face the performance incentives more common in the private sector. The same is true of those working for non-profit organizations. There’s ample empirical studies that compare performance of for-profit companies to their government counterparts and the former generally are more efficient—i.e., can deliver the same service at a lower cost (even after accounting for the profits made and taxes paid!). That’s because incentives matter. If they didn’t there wouldn’t be dime’s worth of difference between government agencies and for-profit firms.
I could not find any recent comparable numbers for the US but these seem to tell a tale:
“Staff working in the private sector took an average of 6.4 days off last year, down from 7.2 days the previous year, while absence rates among public workers only fell marginally, from 9.8 to 9.7 days.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5863545/Private-sector-workers-taking-fewer-sick-days.html
And there was another blow for public sector workers when it was revealed the average civil servant takes 11 sick days a year — almost double the rate of absence in the private sector.
The NHS was installed after the British people had been regimented for war for more than six years. Hard to realize how hard life was for them in 1946-47. Indeed, they were suffering more than the German people who had just “lost” the war, except that they still had their “own”government. Even Thatcher could not break their dependency on the State, and she was in the end rejected even by her own party.
The ones that I used to supervise were mostly lazy and stuck in molasses. Deadlines were constantly being shifted downstream. One or two diligent ones picked up the slack to make the place barely function.
It is also the case in public education, where, BTW, there is is one non-teaching supervisor for every ten classroom teacher. That is as high a ration as the number of officers to enlisted in the military, even though all teachers are college graduates.
We're both right - and wrong. It's actually 1% (not 3%) of your high three years, multiplied by years of service.
“The issue is not so much government employees, as it is unionized government employees, or in fact unionized employees of any sort. Unions take away the incentive to work because they make it impossible to fire unproductive employees. “
Partly. But my beef is with bureaucracies more than bureaucrats. No matter who staffs them, there is a relentless urge to expand turf and increase size. They are constantly looking for more things to do. As their mandate is usually to “help” me with more “useful” regulations and other interferences in my life, the relentless expansion of their turf both increases my taxes to pay for all the new helpful people they have to employ and the time I have to spend dealing with all their “useful” interference.
That’s why it doesn’t matter if the bureaucrats are “good” or “bad.” A bureaucracy has a dynamic all its own that is pernicious regardless who staffs it.
And that’s why cutting an agency’s budget does nothing. It just expands later. One has to eliminate the agency altogether so there is noone cheering to make it bigger and do more things to “help” ModelBreaker every year.
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