Waste, fraud and abuse

Larry Gude

Strung Out
No such thing.

ANY gummint dollar spent is a dollar spent absent the controls, motivations and interests of a capitalist interest and, thereby and simply put, a dollar that will not do as much as efficiently and with as much return as a private dollar. All we're talking about is tolerance levels. I was a kid in the $400 hammer and toilet seat days and even then it made perfect sense to me for the government to be spending a LOT more money on toilet seats, hammers, janitors, engineers and so forth than the private sector because it was NOT a for profit enterprise. It is gummint and thus IS going to cost more. :shrug:
 

Gilligan

#*! boat!
PREMO Member
I'm just angry that I can't pull in a bunch of that "free money" that requires nothing tangible be provided in return. I could retire.
 

Larry Gude

Strung Out
I'm just angry that I can't pull in a bunch of that "free money" that requires nothing tangible be provided in return. I could retire.

Well, it's not free. There are people who will, happily, provide you with some of that dough but they need to get paid, too.
 

PeoplesElbow

Well-Known Member
No such thing.

ANY gummint dollar spent is a dollar spent absent the controls, motivations and interests of a capitalist interest and, thereby and simply put, a dollar that will not do as much as efficiently and with as much return as a private dollar. All we're talking about is tolerance levels. I was a kid in the $400 hammer and toilet seat days and even then it made perfect sense to me for the government to be spending a LOT more money on toilet seats, hammers, janitors, engineers and so forth than the private sector because it was NOT a for profit enterprise. It is gummint and thus IS going to cost more. :shrug:

Not always, infact many private companies get the folks in my small section of the "gummit" to come and do some specialized work for them because it is way cheaper than them developing the skills, putting the infrastructure in place, and hiring the people to do so. In fact we have been contracted out to Boeing, Airbus, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman....
 

SamSpade

Well-Known Member
I was a kid in the $400 hammer and toilet seat days

My dad, who was a federal employee with the Navy back in those days, told me a different story - he said the problem wasn't so much with cost as with accounting. It was more a case of damn, we have a 300% cost overrun, where do we stick the costs? So they often spread them out over purchases (because obviously they couldn't claim they spent it on salaries).

What, to me, is MORE scary is something he's often observed just with personal expenses - unless you're seriously anal about tracking costs, as much as 10-20% of your monthly costs can be - well, unknown. He once told me something I've often noticed in adulthood - at the end of each month, I can say - where the hell did a couple hundred *go*? Let's see I bought gas, and paid for a co-pay - damn, where did it go? And said government tracking of costs is like that - the little stuff piles up, they go way over budget and they MUST account for it.

So they went down a list of items and added x to all of them. It was never because a toilet seat cost that much, they just didn't know where to charge the money.

The other is - well sometimes an expensive wrench DID cost that much, but for a completely different reason. Sometimes, it was a tool made for exactly one reason - to fix a plane or ship whose specifications might be classified. Sometimes a completely new device that was basically a hammer had to be hand-crafted - but Craftsman was never going to have made one like it.

What I've never liked was the pattern of spend it or lose funding - you're budgeted a thousand, you spend 800, next year you get 800. So you encourage people to waste the 200 just to keep their budget at the level they think they might need next year. I know - I was in a section where every summer the boss came out and asked us to make wish lists of stuff we'd want - because if we did NOT, we'd get our budget CUT. Not so much GREED - but we knew they'd do it, and we knew next year we would NEED more training or more software or computers. I've seen policies that encourage saving - something along the line of, for every dollar you save, we will increase next year's budget by a fraction of the savings.
 

PeoplesElbow

Well-Known Member
There is also a lot of money spent to prove that the government got a good deal, put out a call for bids to give minority/women owned and small businesses a chance to supply whatever it was.

A naitive american company was supplying circuit cards, one of the requirements was that they were soldered on a wave machine it was quite obvious that they were hand soldered, and quite poorly I might add. Every time a bid went out this same company kept winning the bid, the cards were received and government technicians had to spend hundreds of hours fixing them. It is almost impossible to send something back if it is not acceptable and even harder to bar a company from winning a contract, especially if they fit into one of the preferred categories.
 
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