I don’t think I’m alone when I say I don’t want to see this country’s newfound hopes for a transformative government fall apart – at least not for a good long while.
It’s easy to poke fun or seriously criticize the government’s ability to administer large projects, especially those involving building and maintaining physical assets or infrastructure. But the specter of the proverbial ‘government job’ haunts me when I think about the mammoth outlay of money involved in Obama’s stimulus plans.
As many have said, including our President-elect, this is an amazing time. There’s an unusually broad consensus about the need for our Federal government to spend money now. But how well will it be managed?
We’ve all seen, heard or read about how crazy, literally crazy, large government projects can be. Because of special interests, their lobbyists, and for a variety of reasons, spending on even the simplest things can be fantastically overblown while mission critical needs are overlooked.
My hope is that we can do it better this time, and I think Barack Obama will be the kind of president to attempt to do just that. But I also hope this topic becomes a higher-level concern for the American people. I know it’s REALLY BORING to talk nuts and bolts administration. As Kurt Vonnegut said in his novel, ‘Hocus Pocus’,
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
But unless the media and the public focuses on this as well, there may not be enough ground level pressure pushing us in that direction; there’s probably only so much the President can do once these huge beasts of spending are set free.
Today, NPR broadcast an opinion piece concerning this very subject in their Marketplace segment, ‘Robert Reich’s three rules for Obama’s stimulus plan’.
Yay!
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I too, love the Vonnegut quote. I have a copy of Palm Sunday on my shelf waiting to be read.
Lisa – I agree. I think that 1st rule Reich mentions about transparency and using the internet is a good one. Obama’s team already likes posting on the internet; if spending priorities and the competitive bidding process (winning/losing bids for contracts) were posted for all to see, it’d go a long way toward the babysitting you’re talking about.
Cathy – Yes! Maintenance! Source of long-life and lasting value. In the 21st century, there are easy ways to automate a lot of this necessary process. We’ll just have to see if some of the money is spent wisely enough to accomplish that – in other words @the head-end with upgrades and efficiency improvements. Just like it’s been proposed for the health-care system...
Hmm. I’m not bashing government’s Medicare program at all. That’s a fairly good one. And I’m not comparing it to the private sector – apples and oranges.
I’m only talking about the kind of government waste that’s commonly understood to exist and which was discussed at length by both democrats and republicans during this past election season (can you call it a season if it lasted 2-years?). As Reich said, “The real political challenge will be to avoid pork-barrel projects and corporate welfare. Yet Washington lobbyists and trade associations are already salivating. What can be done to keep them at bay? Follow three simple rules…”
I wouldn’t want to tackle creating a list of all the areas where government could be made more efficient and less wasteful. The GAO (US Government Accountability Office) put out a report this past November that included lots of detail on that. But I’m specifically referring to the large sums of money that will be put into assets and infrastructure. As Reich mentions, allowing those bills to be amended with earmarks or special allocations to state or local governments would be a mistake. Not only would it waste taxpayer dollars, but it would also give ammunition to Republicans looking for an in. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think Obama’s team is headed the wrong way; I just wanted to bring up this rather boring topic since we all, I think, want to see these plans succeed.
For the sake of brevity, I may have reduced the issue you bring up (in one paragraph) to something glib, and I might be guilty of not giving the proper weight to the good side of government projects. But even if the ‘conservative’ talking points, knowledge of wasteful spending and the ‘government job’ joke were all born on the right, there is still enough evidence of bad politics, inefficiency and waste (the kind that you mention as well) to warrant attention. The issue was part of both parties’ dialogue during the campaigns.
In the end, I was just trying to highlight what I think are invaluable ideas from Robert Reich about how to better legislate and manage the huge projects that are coming.
And BTW – any discussion I’ve ever had with a variety of people about what can be done to make government more efficient has never included the idea of lowering the wages of valuable employees. In my world, that only makes things worse. If anything, my impression is that government job pay structures are probably too regimented in ways that don’t easily allow for increases for valuable employees – the ones that are needed in order to manage effectively.
And Vonnegut was pretty seminal for me. Though I don’t consider myself a writer, I’ve always loved semicolons. So I had to laugh especially hard when I read his words in ‘A Man Without A Country’:
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
oh, yes, rated and befriended. and i have a new post about being a baby screenwriter in L.A., feeling great, despite competing with Perfect Blonds, and being kind of a 'ho. I've love you to take a look at it since you are in the Industry.
love and gratitude,
teddy and the wonderpups
My feeling, of course, is that people should get saddled with the maintenance of the things they create. One of the reasons I find the software industry so frustrating is not just that it's become harder and harder to get a job creating, but that the reason is that the jobs are all in maintaining the messes others have created. It often seems like the stupider the idea is, or sometimes the implementation, the more people it employs cleaning up the mess.
It's sort of like the issue of planned obsolescence, where it makes more money to sell a lightbulb that doesn't work (over and over) than one that does work and lasts.