View 682 Thursday July 7, 2011 – 2
There is a flurry of activity in Washington about the debt limit. We all know that the United States is not going to default on servicing the national debt. Even if the ceiling were not raised a nickel, there is plenty enough revenue coming into the Treasury to service the debt. What we can’t do is continue to spend at current rates while servicing this debt unless we borrow more money. We could instead choose to stop funding a bunch of things we don’t need, and cut back expenditures to match revenue. Of course that would involve hard choices.
Perfection is the enemy of the good. We cannot cut back expenditures to the point where we don’t need to borrow more money without making hard choices – so we don’t cut back at all, not even on easy choices. If the President and Congress would like some easy choices, let me suggest a few. Start with the Inspectors in the Department of Agriculture whose job is making sure that stage magicians who use rabbits in their performances have a federal license. We can dismiss all those people, dismiss their supervisors, dismiss the people in Personnel and Disbursement and other service employees needed to keep those inspectors employed. Sure, the result will only be ten million a year or so, but that’s ten million a year we won’t have to borrow, and all the interest on the borrowed money. A few million here and a few million there and it adds up to real money.
I can suggest off hand another: the Inspector General of the Department of Education has a SWAT team. We can do without those people, and do without all the service personnel needed to pay and supervise and represent in union negotiations and all the rest of it. I don’t know what that SWAT team costs, but I would be astonished if it were under $50 million a year and it might be more. Save that.
And I am certain that if some intelligent people were to sit down with the Budget of the United States we could, within a few hours, come up with a lot more easy choices. By easy choices I mean things that might or might no be a great idea when we have lots of money, but which very clearly are not worth borrowing money to do. Every department in the government has such tasks and task forces, and any competent manager knows about them. I would venture that a 5% across the board budget cut would result in finding a lot of such things; but it is cruel and unusual punishment to make a managerial GS 12 or above reduce his department size. It’s painful and it’s way against the Iron Law; so let us do it for them.
Of course that would mean finding things that are not so easy. Take the Head Start program as an example. There is probably not a more popular program in the Federal government. Everyone wants to give a head start to kids from poor families. Give them an educational break. Heck, it ought to pay for itself. If only one in a hundred ends up with an education and becomes a useful citizen when otherwise the kid would just go on to be a gangster or crook or welfare cheat, then it may even save money! The problem is that in decades of Head Start, with study after study conducted by people who love the program, not one properly conducted study has ever been able to find a dime’s worth of difference between those who went through Head Start and those of similar circumstances who did not. Not one study, and believe me the people doing the studies were trying to find ways to justify the program. Can’t find them. But that is a Hard Choice. We will probably go on funding Head Start because, well, because of all the things the Feds do, that’s the one many of us like the best whether it does any good at all. OK, so we leave in place the feel good programs. Those are the Hard Choices.
But how many want to stand up the the Education Department SWAT team? Or the Department of Agriculture Pet Rabbit Permit Inspectors? Who feels good about those?
Do the easy things first. Then we can look for hard choices.
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Paul C. Light n today’s Wall Street Journal notes that there are on average 18 layers of middle management “between, say, the secretary of agriculture and the forest ranger, or the secretary of the interior and the oil-rig inspector – up from seven layers in 1960.” There’s more, but you get the idea. C. Northcote Parkinson described the process in which bureaucracy expands without regard to the actual work done. It is all quite real. But is any of this in discussion in the Great Debt Ceiling Debate? I would be astonished if it were so.
This was published some time ago, and I must have missed it when it came out; I found it this morning, and it is spot on, as good a layman’s account of what happened to end the French rule in Viet Nam as any I have seen. As it happens, I was involved (ten years later) in analysis of Dien Bien Phu as part of a team to propose new “brushfire war” weapons systems for the Army and Air Force. Messenger has done this well. The original printed account – I just found it in piles of unread stuff – had some maps and photographs which were useful, but the account remains about as good as any I have ever seen.
