Re:David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a...
by robomartin on Sunday December 08, 2013 @07:19PM
(#6872209)
Yup. Pretty much my experience working with government agencies. They'll pay two to ten times more for half the product and the ability to shift blame elsewhere in case things go wrong. It's sad that making comments like these --which are factual-- are often met with comments characterizing the poster as a right wing extremist of some sort. Sad. Open your eyes folks. You have been so utterly brainwashed by the liberal machine you'll bend over backwards to justify the most ridiculous things and ignore the damage this ideology is doing our country. I find it really telling that someone, in response to my billion dollar claim regarding the obamacare website, came back with a number in the $150 million range. And that justifies supporting the incompetence, fraud and thievery this represents? In other words, it's OK they spent $150 million for something that should have cost one to five, at most, because these are "your people". Well, you know what, you pay for it with your money. Not my money. Yours. I don't want to pay for the product of incompetence and fraud. That's just me.
For the last year, I have been working with a team of 20+ to accomplish only half of a task that would have been absolutely trivial in comparison with my last job in the fully private sector. It could have been accomplished by one person working for 6 months, or perhaps 2 working for 4 months.
The government pays for 20 times the personnel, quadruple the required time, and gets a quarter the quality in return. And this team is rated very highly by the government's idiotic metrics.
Since the contractor companies also skim off the difference between what the government pays them for the labor and what they actually pay their employees, I can easily believe from my anecdotal experience that government is capable of wasting 99% of everything that it spends.
While waste does not disappear entirely from the economy, it is not directed into useful production, which is the basis of a healthy economy. What it does is build a human ecosystem around absolute fraud and purchasing political favors and influence.
That doesn't account at all for the things that government does to destroy the wealth-building activities of others, such as requiring barbers to spend thousands of dollars to get licensed to cut hair for $10 a pop, or demanding that 8-year-old kids selling lemonade buy business licenses.