In my days of flying regional jets, if we pulled up to a terminal with a jet bridge (saving customers a trip down the airstair door of our CRJ), one of the more colorful captains would always say “Just like a real airline”. I’m wondering if when we hear about the way that the U.S. government does things, we should say “Just like a rich country.”
I had this reaction when I learned that we spend about $1 billion per year on occasional helicopter service for the President. Then I had it again tonight reading a New York Times article mentioning the cost of running the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay: $150 million per year. The BBC says that there are 215 inmates in the camp, so that works out to $700,000 per detainee per year. We’re spending approximately $2000 per person per day. Just like a rich country…
You know what our government needs, a couple good old FP&A folks from the corporate world to trim the budget. Now I’m not talking about the overpaid “CFO’s” who sit in an office, what we need are the actually people who know how to use Excel who know how to build budgets and forecast.
I bet you first pass you could cut at least 15% out of wasted government projects without breaking a sweat. Does the President really need a new helicopter, or a new plane, or so many vacations? Maybe we should have a law that says we can’t fight a war if our economy is in the tank…
It kills me to see this type of waste at our government level, its kills me even more when I read about CEO’s getting bonus and then laying off people or shut down locations…
Duane: Ronald Reagan more or less did what you suggest with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stockman . The Reagan Administration came up with a set of tax cuts and matching spending cuts. The spending cuts were determined after going through every federal agency and evaluating whether they truly needed to be doing what they were doing in the way that they were doing it. Significant cuts were identified and proposed. Congress enacted the tax cuts, but was unwilling to enact the spending cuts. This created what at the time was considered a huge deficit ($175 million in 1984, for example; the deficit was more than $1.4 trillion in 2009).
It may be the case that we’ve set up a form of government in which Congress, to win reelection, simply must every dime that it can get its hands on, starting with tax dollars and ending with borrowed or printed money.
Another way to slice it:
If we could agree there are perhaps 50,000 hardline jihadist potential murderers out there, and our wars so far have cost a $trillion, that’s $20 million per terrorist, before even counting Homeland Security and its offspring in other agencies. Exactly who is winning here? 19 nutcases with box cutters + expenses = about $1 million. Now thats asymmetric war.
@Philg: Carter before him tried a “zero based” budgeting system where you weren’t looking at adding or subtracting to an existing budget but justifying it completely every time. Unfortunately it went over as well as nearly anything thrown into a bunch of lawyers by an engineer, but it’s still an appealing idea.
What gets neglected in all of this is the basic economics; who gets paid either monetarily or careerwise. Follow the money and phone calls. If congress or the president allocates a sum of money to a government program, it then gets spent on people who provide goods and services and in turn those people are particularly generous to the allocator. On a small scale or done by amateurs this is called a kickback, but on a much larger scale it’s simply lobbying or “campaign contributions”, much of which is effectively personal income. Here in Illinois it’s called “Business as Usual”, but I digress. For the people who run Guantanamo, both military and civilian, there is a lot at stake both in terms of career advancement and support services.
This is not limited to the ludicrous costs (and limited benefits) of Gitmo. Bail out banks and $300+ million heads to Washington lobbyists and onward from there. Keep the inane and failed “war on drugs” afloat and you keep law enforcement bureaucracies staffed, funded and quite appreciative.
And so it goes…
> The BBC says that there are 215 inmates in the camp, so that works out to $700,000 per detainee per year. We’re spending approximately $2000 per person per day.
But we have to! If we let them out, they would kill us all. It’s really a bargain if you look at it right.