The birthplace of democracy has a vision to share
While private sector productivity rises, governments and higher education bureaucracies are going the other way.Twice as many firemen responding to half as many fires, and that’s just the beginning.
In the University of California system, the number of senior administrators has grown four times faster than the number of teachers since 1993—to the point where the ratio is now one-to-one. Remember the Ross Perot joke about the USDA employee weeping at his desk because “his farmer died”?
What information revolution? In 1980, it took one Medicaid administrator to oversee five Medicaid cases. Today the same administrator oversees only half as many.
In 2008, a New York Times investigation found that 98% of retiring LIRR workers (many of them at age 50, after 20 years of service) immediately applied for and received disability benefits from the federal Railroad Retirement Board.
Two dozen [out of 1,500 fraudsters] have been indicted in the scam, including two doctors.
The number of employed Americans grew by 316,000 during the first 41 months of the Obama presidency. The number receiving Social Security disability benefits grew by 1,291,000.
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but the railroad industry suffered from all these problems for decades, and today it is a vibrant and profitable industry because the counter productive work rules and regulations were finally abolished. The same thing can happen on a national scale, but the problem must become much more acute before a political consensus for correction will prevail. We are a generation away from improvement. We will suffer with low growth, high unemployment, and a reduced standard of living for a long time as a result of Bush/Obama. And the guy who brought government administered health care to Massachuttes will not be a help.
On the other side, it’s like reading about the late Roman empire, where bureaucratic class lived well off the carcass the non-bureaucratic middle and lower classes right up until the barbarians rode in and threw them out, to the delight of everyone not a bureaucrat because tithing to the church and providing labor and a proportion of your crops to a proto-feudal lord was a LOT less than selling your children to pay the tax to “rome”
Also, “Barbarian” justice was a lot quicker, just and more effective.
I’m surprised by the number of people who have been able to get on SS disability. Twenty years ago it was so difficult to get on, it was nearly impossible.
It takes them off the unemployment rolls which in an election year ….
At the opposite end of the spectrum our tiny local rural electric co-op – which used to operate with 12 employees but ballooned to 17 employees who are receive at least 50% more than the local pay scale scale in pay and benefits – couldn’t possibly get by with a single less employee three years ago.
Now, after a members’ revolt that lead to a new board of directors and a new general manager, the staff is 20% smaller due to attrition and the electricity works just fine. They need to whack at least two more jobs and then they’ll be OK.
Same in education, not number of teachers, but numbers of everyone else up multiples of enrollment numbers.
Look at what the public education thieves are up to in California (and probably elsewhere). http://www.bubbleinfo.com/2012/08/07/exotic-financing-for-schools/
Creative bond sales, borrow $136M and pay back $1,25B, get the public to vote yes for the sale of the bonds by telling them it won’t raise taxes. Leave out the part that should have said “currently won’t raise taxes because we’re not going to start repaying these puppies for 20+ years but in 20 years, hoooo boy!”.