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Assume massive Kenyesian Spending

trapdoor

Governor
Is making a profit a goal of any government? Is getting the most bang for the buck a better way of evaluating government spending? Success for government is not a profit margin, an IPO, a market share calculation. So your entire premise comparing one with the other is based upon totally different ideas of what success is. This is what conservatives get wrong.

Tell me again. What is success in Government? How do you measure it? Your simple answer will be that you cannot because they will never succeed at anything. Tell me the intelligent answer though....

Success in government lies in doing the things a government does without violating the rights of the individuals served by that government, and without breaking the laws that limit the government.

The way our government is organized does not lead to fiscal efficiency -- if you work for a government agency and you manage the money in that agency well, and instead of spending every dime you get this year, you return 10 percent of your budget to the general fund, what happens is instead of being rewarded your budget for the next years is cut by 10 percent. As such an annual cut isn't possible for most entities, instead of being efficient in saving money they try to spend every dime allotted to them so as to preserve their budget for future operations. It's an inefficient system, almost by design.
 
I did not know that. Have you read that book? I think though that your attempt to say that anything the government could fund would be more inefficient than Bell Labs is really a stretch even for you. If Bell Labs does exist today, where does it get the funding? From ALU? That would be a French Multi-national if true. I really cannot understand thinking people such as yourself who instinctively dismiss nationally funded think tanks, labs, research and so on. I am in NM this week. Do you think GE should fund Sandia or Los Alamos? Who gives JPL funding? What about the NIH? NASA? Pure research has no commercial value, it is pure research for research's sake. Sure private interests such as Bell Labs or Xerox or Kodak or IBM or some chemical giant do research but they do it with a commercial purpose, they don't spend billions tryng to find a higgs boson or teflon..
 

DefeatObama

Council Member
Let's not talk about anything but a blank check here just as an exercise in thinking. Let us ask ourselves a simple question:

If all of a sudden we had 3 trillion dollars a year to spend every year for the next 10 years on the most critical national interests and we simply ignored the debt incurred, what would be the wisest use of this investment for the nation?

Before everyone starts in on whether or not this is practical or even doable, lets just go through some possible ways to spend this money that would provide us with a new nation at the end of this period of time that could somehow pay it all back and not impact our ability to prosper down the road. In the following list, I posit some very needed expenditures that would likely provide benefits for our nation for years to come and would make us stronger financially, competitively and provide a more efficient and useful society for the next generation to inhabit.

1. Massive investments in long haul mass transit along the East Coast, West Coast and along Interstates 10 and 80.
2. Massive investments in urban transportation systems making the use of cars non-essential on a daily basis.
3. Massive investments in smart power, renewable energies, efficiency and in the way we heat and cool buildings.
4. Massive investment in solar technology for every building in the nation exposed to sunlight.
5. Massive investment in space technology.
6. Massive investment in preventive health measures and in a healthy lifestyle.
7. Education for both college bound and trade school bound kids.
8. National standards for intelligent building construction to allow for high speed networking to be the standard model everywhere.
9. Fiber buildout for every home in the USA within 20 miles of an urban center of 5000 people or more.
10. Urban planning standards for maximum quality of life while impacting the land as little as possible.
11. Protection and stewardship of our remaining national parks and forests.
12. Upgrades of all federal, state and local election systems to form one national standard that was impeachable and trustworthy.
13. National database of health information.
14. National database of SS numbers for valid authentication of working status.
15. Upgrades of all bridges, roads, damns and highways.
16. Carbon scrubbing devices on every coal burning system in the nation.
17. Science funding for genetics, batteries, cancer, fuel cells, propulsion systems, computer science and so on.


Those are some ideas which would employ millions and could pay off in the future if we had the funds or desire to borrow to get them done. We don't want to do this anymore it seems. If any of you have been to Europe, imagine if the founders of modern Paris did not make giant investments over hundreds of years to create that glorious city we now enjoy. What if Rome had been built in a day and looked like a typical American city with stucco buildings, strip malls and parking lots. Now, we could do all these things and put millions to work doing it if we actually thought long term. But we don't. And this is why the Chinese are going to kick our asses because they do think long term.
but seriously.

I reject your premise.

expanding government is wrong. bad. inefficient. anti-american....

20% across the board cuts in government.

reform the 100 TRILLION IN unfunded entitlement obligations

repeal obamacare.

eliminate congressional pay until the debt is paid off

cut HUD, DOE

Eliminate the capital gains tax for 5 years.

eliminate all tax deductions and two rates. 28% and 10%. everyone pays.

make congress part time. (if you consider a 3 day work week 30 weeks a year, full time)
 

degsme

Council Member
but seriously.

I reject your premise.
Then don't respond.

expanding government is wrong. bad. inefficient. anti-american....
You can offer ZERO evidence to support ANY of these claims.

The Constitution was an INTENTIONAL Expansion of Government over the Articles of Confederation and yet is held as a hallmark of Americanism
The 13th Amendment banning slavery wa an INTENTIONAL EXPANSION of Governemnt power - and yet is a clear hallmark of Americanism and righteousness and goodness
The data on fiscal multipliers for things like Child Care services funding and public vs. private education and public vs. for profit Healthcare insurance ALL show Government as MORE EFFICIENT than private sector

FACTS MATTER



And if you want to go spout inanities you cannot back up. Start your own thread.
 

degsme

Council Member
Success in government lies in doing the things a government does without violating the rights of the individuals served by that government, and without breaking the laws that limit the government.

The way our government is organized does not lead to fiscal efficiency
That is true to some extent. We COULD improve fiscal efficiency by reducing the amount of oversight and accounting that needs to get done... NOTE that most of this over-regulation comes from the GOP side on programs they don't like. Kinda-like Issa's investigations into Planned Parenthood.

-- if you work for a government agency and you manage the money in that agency well, and instead of spending every dime you get this year, you return 10 percent of your budget to the general fund, what happens is instead of being rewarded your budget for the next years is cut by 10 percent.
That's true of the private sector as well... No difference

The main difference though between private and public sectors is that in the public sector THE ONLY measure that matters is "Customer Satisfaction/$$ spent". Whereas in the private sector Customer Satisfaction ONLY matters to the extent that it affects $$ Earned/$$ Spent.

So in any sort of service delivery business, government has an incentive TO BE MORE EFFICIENT, since it has no incentive to reduce services to the customer and pocket the difference.

As for actual measures of efficiency we can look both anecdotally (the $800k spent on the GSA binge is less than what an equiv private sector company would spend ANNUALLY on their REGIONAL sales blowout). Or we can look at Fiscal Multipliers (which for less efficient expenditures is lower) which show that in sectors like education, social safetynet, and other SERVICE related businesses, FMs meet or exceed Private Sector FMs.

Nor is the difference that in the private sector such a "sales blowout" is spent "with their own/companies money". That money being spent is just as "forcibly" being "extracted" from the shareholders of the company. Yet the determination made is that this is an EFFECTIVE USE OF COMPENSATION FUNDS. Your logic would require that EITHER

  • the Fair Market does not work in labor (ie government can attract workers of equal talent and skill with less compensation)
    or
  • Private sector is wrong in saying that employee morale and compensation to lift morale is important
    or
  • government workers are too stupid to recognize they can be compensated better in the private sector
    or
  • Working for The Government should be like entering a monastary - take a vow of poverty
of course we know that The government competes for workers in the same marketplace as the private sector. And thus the idea that it is reasonalbe to treat government workers worse than private sector is simply stupid

Compared to? Compared to the private sector... it is not true. At least not in sectors like infrastructure construction or healthcare services or eductaion.


Oh please. Infrastructure construction? Visit an Air Force Base some time.
Again, I can find as many cases of misspending in a private contractor company as you can in public sector. So what matters is the broad econometric data. And the econometric data says that you'd be better off at Walter Reed than at the Mayo Clinic in terms of your likelihood of a positive outcome.

As for education, no the best schools are not "all private". In K-12, Scarsdale, Bellevue, Chappaqua, Thomas Jefferson in VA, Chevy Chase, Bronx Science etc. have all consisently ranked as good as if not better than the best private schools. Furthermore if you normalize for socioeconomic status - public schools do MUCH BETTER on a $ spent/pupil basis than private schools. For example in any jurisdiction in the USA where the parochial schools outperform the local public schools, the parochial schools OUTSPEND the public school by 50% on a per student basis.

The data is clear, and the plural of anecdote is NOT data. You only offer anecdotes. Never data. why is that?
No econometric evidence to support such a claim.


Private sector has to be efficient enough to make a profit [q/uote]
Not true and not econometric evidence. Private sector simply has to make a profit. Whether it does so by efficiency, corruption or externalizing of costs doesn't matter to the corporation. In Government corruption and inefficiency eventually cost pols their jobs.
Not even remotely close. Even if we ignore the fact that the government owns the printing presses, Fiscal Multipliers in excess of the tax rate refute this. And in various sectors the Government Fiscal Multipliers ARE in excess of the tax rates. Not in all sectors but all it takes is for it to be true in one for your claim to be proven the bogousity it is.
Every single dime the government legitimately spends is a comes from tax revenue -- it has no other legitimate source for funding
Well actually that's not true. Pringint money is a completely legitimate source of funding. so is the licensing of patents, the selling of assets (oil leases) etc. Sorry you are wrong on the taxation piece. Secondly that "dime" is no more "removed from the taxpayers pocket" than the dime used to buy a Bazooka Bubble Gum is. They are both parts of the economy and both transactions and subsequent re-expenditures are also parts of the economy. And we can AND DO measure the economic efficiency associated with such transactions.

AND the private sector is better at somethings. and the PUblic sector is better at others.

Thats the economics of it. you don't like that and define it away IDEOLOGICALLY, but that's not an econometric arguement.
 

trapdoor

Governor
I did not know that. Have you read that book? I think though that your attempt to say that anything the government could fund would be more inefficient than Bell Labs is really a stretch even for you. If Bell Labs does exist today, where does it get the funding? From ALU? That would be a French Multi-national if true. I really cannot understand thinking people such as yourself who instinctively dismiss nationally funded think tanks, labs, research and so on. I am in NM this week. Do you think GE should fund Sandia or Los Alamos? Who gives JPL funding? What about the NIH? NASA? Pure research has no commercial value, it is pure research for research's sake. Sure private interests such as Bell Labs or Xerox or Kodak or IBM or some chemical giant do research but they do it with a commercial purpose, they don't spend billions tryng to find a higgs boson or teflon..

I haven't yet read the book. I saw the author interviewed on the Sunday version of Good Morning America about a month ago -- and they went into the current version of the lab. The research performed there is currently funded by Lucent Technologies, one of hte firms spun off at the time of the ATT divestiture.

JPL started as a private endeavor, a part of Lockheed (from memory, could be another company). The Lockheed "Skunk Works" is still largely a private endeavor -- since WWII it has created: the P-38 Lightning fighter plan; the U-2 reconniassance aircraft; the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft; and the F-117 Stealth attack aircraft.



Sandia and Los Alamos do highly classified weapons research. It's an open question if they shoudl be funded by government or not. Certainly the original program at Los Alamos was critical and it was funded via federal means. I don't think ALL

I don't agree that pure research has no commercial value. "Pure research" with no commercial value (and done, by the way, in private labs) gave us the laser -- and the laser is used in everything from your boss's white-screen pointer to the scanner you use when you check out of a grocery store. What it is more accurate to say is that pure research has no immediate commercial value -- but frequently its products have commercial applications.

I don't know where you live, but if you drive a car you have a ready-made example of this. There was this hotrodder back in the mid-60s who kept blowing up donut gaskets in the exhausts of his car. He wrote to NASA asking what material they were using at that temperature and pressure. He bought a few sheets of the material and using scissors, started cutting out donut gaskets that didn't fail. Look up "Mr. Gasket" Corp. He founded it.

You're final example almost makes me laugh. PTFE (Teflon) was invented in 1938 by a man named Roy Plunkett -- he was working for the laboratory funded by DuPont, doing research into gasses used in refrigerants. The substance was the result of a private, for-profit, laboratory doing non-theoretical research for commercial purposes.
 
The teflon reference was one I grew up with as coming from NASA, looks like my memory is bad. Surely you are not arguing that NASA contributed nothing to our current technology. I looked up Bell Labs, its part of Alcatel who bought Lucent a few years back. I have met many former Bell Labs people in my industry. PHDs and CTOs most of them. I don't think the current version of it is even close to what it used to be in the hey day of the ATT monopoly which was government backed in many respects until the divestiture. I am just kind of astounded that you think pure research should only be done by private enterprise. The history of pure research is that of some grant given to some university or lab to do research for researchs sake. UCSB is near my home. It is filled to the brim with PHDs and graduate students doing pure research in everything from batteries to silicon to physics to chemistry to marine life. They get their funds from wherever they can including big philanthropy groups but also from the government. I got my first job at an offshoot of the lab there that started the Internet. Totally funded by DARPA. I just don't know how to respond to this type of just blatant ideology masking true history and progress. You want a privately funded system. I want a hybrid to get as much research funded in as many areas as possible. Other than pick apart my loosely referenced post, are you really for no public funding of any research at all? Amazing.
 
I personally spent over 500k on one sales meeting in Hong Kong when I was VP at Ericsson. Total blowout. The speaker was 15 grand plus a first class ticket from USA to HK. I was at a Presidents club event three years ago at the Four Seasons in Lanai. Our company was about 220 employees, we did about 90 million in sales that year. They had to charge me for the true expense of the trip due to Sarbanes. They also paid my taxes on it. It went straight to my W2 as a 29,000 dollar benefit. 20 of us went. Now tell me about the GSA deal again...
 

degsme

Council Member
I personally spent over 500k on one sales meeting in Hong Kong when I was VP at Ericsson. Total blowout. The speaker was 15 grand plus a first class ticket from USA to HK. I was at a Presidents club event three years ago at the Four Seasons in Lanai. Our company was about 220 employees, we did about 90 million in sales that year. They had to charge me for the true expense of the trip due to Sarbanes. They also paid my taxes on it. It went straight to my W2 as a 29,000 dollar benefit. 20 of us went. Now tell me about the GSA deal again...
Precisely... Just ONE sales division (Enterprise Sales) in one of the companies I worked at in the last decade, had an annual "sales challenge" that they called "celebrate the sun" or something like that. The winning team - about 100 folks in all, got to take themselves and their spouses ON THE comPANY DIME to an "all expenses" resortin Mexico for 5 days. That's about $500k. And that's just the ENTERPRISE sales team. The there is the Small Medium sales team, the OEM sales team, the Retail/Consumer sales teams.. And Then the Product Dev Teams associated with "greatest growth in sales"..

Meanwhile - at a time that my father was "head of division" - running a litigation practice of about $100 mill/yr for the DoJ - he

  • Could not fly business class EVER (my partner is allowed to fly B-class on any flight longer than 7 hrs)
  • had to turn over his Frequent Flyer miles back to The Feds
  • Could not take "frequent flyer" "automatic upgrades" without reporting them as income
This despite regularly having to travel to places like Jibuti, the Philipines and Okinawa.

Sorry GSA employees simply do much much more with less.
 

degsme

Council Member
The research performed there is currently funded by Lucent Technologies, one of hte firms spun off at the time of the ATT divestiture.
And it is not engaged in Basic Research. I've done some work with Lucent in the last 2 decades. It hasn't done real "basic research" in a long time

JPL started as a private endeavor, a part of Lockheed (from memory, could be another company).
Started as a private sector managed lab FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO DO BASIC RESEARCH VIA GRANTS

The Lockheed "Skunk Works" is still largely a private endeavor -- since WWII it has created: the P-38 Lightning fighter plan;
Not "basic researcH'... nor is it privately funded. It is "skunk works" in that it does secret prototype APPLIED RESEARCH that is in part funded by DARPA money and in in part backed by the company with essentially a contract in place that DARPA picks up the whole tab if certain "project goals" are met
Sandia and Los Alamos do highly classified weapons research.
And the vast majority of it is APPLIED not "basic" research. Even in places like Microsoft the vast majority of the research is.... APPLIED.

I don't agree that pure research has no commercial value. "Pure research" with no commercial value (and done, by the way, in private labs) gave us the laser
No The "basic research" was done by German, UK and US UNIVERSITY LABS funded by "GOVERNMENT" funds for theoretical physic research. This was honed at Columbia and in the USSR (ultimate government funding).

All of it was aimed at more secure military communications from the mid 1940s onwards. Bell labs simply refined it and applied the technique to lightwave spectrum as opposed to microwave spectrum. And from the outset the question was for information transmission.

Again you are makding things up about this "basic research".

Yes there are sometimes some radom discoveries outside of Governmental research, but invariably associated with fundamental government programs. Teflon - while useful - is not a "societal game changer" the way everything from lasers to ICs to microprocessors are. Again you are too vested in the "lone inventor" view of the world. It DON'T WORK THAT WAY.


-- and the laser is used in everything from your boss's white-screen pointer to the scanner you use when you check out of a grocery store. What it is more accurate to say is that pure research has no immediate commercial value -- but frequently its products have commercial applications.

I don't know where you live, but if you drive a car you have a ready-made example of this. There was this hotrodder back in the mid-60s who kept blowing up donut gaskets in the exhausts of his car. He wrote to NASA asking what material they were using at that temperature and pressure. He bought a few sheets of the material and using scissors, started cutting out donut gaskets that didn't fail. Look up "Mr. Gasket" Corp. He founded it.

You're final example almost makes me laugh. PTFE (Teflon) was invented in 1938 by a man named Roy Plunkett -- he was working for the laboratory funded by DuPont, doing research into gasses used in refrigerants. The substance was the result of a private, for-profit, laboratory doing non-theoretical research for commercial purposes.[/QUOTE]
 
I remember the guys from the NSA coming out on TDY money. They had hardly anything to spend and would beg us to take them to dinner so they could keep the 20 bucks allocated per day for food..
 

degsme

Council Member
I remember the guys from the NSA coming out on TDY money. They had hardly anything to spend and would beg us to take them to dinner so they could keep the 20 bucks allocated per day for food..
I remember one Vegas Comdex where we had to go to a really dinky italian restaurant WAYY off the strip - cuz that's all the Forestry Service IT guys could afford on their "per-diem" and they were too honest to allow us to pay for 3/4 of the meal....
 

justoffal

Senator
I like everything that I read in your suggestion list with the possible exception of number three. However I feel compelled to point out that Keynes would most likely not have approved of a blank check for entitlement since it offers no sense of future return except perhaps for moral and ethical certitude.

JO
 

justoffal

Senator
Never happen.

for the same reason that satellite will replace cable in the long run. The interconnecting routes are far too costly to build and massively consumptive on the maintenance end. The Rail system was killed off precisely because of Urban sprawl....the one does not work well with the other.

Rail is golden for commercial freight...but as a commuter solution it sucks.

JO
 

justoffal

Senator
We have however hit a few technical walls that will take decades to overcome at this point. 64 bit programming for instance....too time consuming for one human lifetime and yet we have on deck the hardware to run 128, 256...and so on. Until computers can effectively write the programming we are stuck at the technological bottleneck. Of course it is possible that we will find a way to double or triple our lifespans.

JO
 

DefeatObama

Council Member
Then don't respond.
the captain of the high school debate team only chimes in on post's he agrees with


You can offer ZERO evidence to support ANY of these claims.

The Constitution was an INTENTIONAL Expansion of Government over the Articles of Confederation and yet is held as a hallmark of Americanism
and now....17 TRILLION DOLLARS, er, zero evidence, later.........


The 13th Amendment banning slavery wa an INTENTIONAL EXPANSION of Governemnt power - and yet is a clear hallmark of Americanism and righteousness and goodness
lol...yea... and now the republicans want to reinstitute slavery,eh?... the dems.... even had robert c. byrd, KKK , killed to support the premise.. (which you probably don't agree with and thus, don't need to respond to)


The data on fiscal multipliers for things like Child Care services funding and public vs. private education and public vs. for profit Healthcare insurance ALL show Government as MORE EFFICIENT than private sector
yes nancy, the era of the permanent unemployment check, stimulating the economy

FACTS MATTER

LOOK..... THE CAPTAIN OF THE HIGH SCHOOL DEBATE TEAM, DEGSIE(Cheerleader outfit donned) has revealed the following:

FACTS MATTER

file under S for no Shit sherlock

And if you want to go spout inanities you cannot back up. Start your own thread.
thanks for the advice hon. you may have noticed I've started one or two.
 

DefeatObama

Council Member
And it is not engaged in Basic Research. I've done some work with Lucent in the last 2 decades. It hasn't done real "basic research" in a long time

oh look. the CAPTAIN OF THE HIGH SCHOOL DEBATE team is now a freaking expert on LUCENT, because he's 'done some work with Lucent in the last 2 decades'....

who'd ya fetch coffee for degsie?


the cheerleader reinforcing his theory that Bill Gates happened to be standing where they erected microsoft's corporate headquarters
 

DefeatObama

Council Member
Precisely... Just ONE sales division (Enterprise Sales) in one of the companies I worked at in the last decade, had an annual "sales challenge" that they called "celebrate the sun" or something like that. The winning team - about 100 folks in all, got to take themselves and their spouses ON THE comPANY DIME to an "all expenses" resortin Mexico for 5 days. That's about $500k. And that's just the ENTERPRISE sales team. The there is the Small Medium sales team, the OEM sales team, the Retail/Consumer sales teams.. And Then the Product Dev Teams associated with "greatest growth in sales"..

Meanwhile - at a time that my father was "head of division" - running a litigation practice of about $100 mill/yr for the DoJ - he

  • Could not fly business class EVER (my partner is allowed to fly B-class on any flight longer than 7 hrs)
  • had to turn over his Frequent Flyer miles back to The Feds
  • Could not take "frequent flyer" "automatic upgrades" without reporting them as income
This despite regularly having to travel to places like Jibuti, the Philipines and Okinawa.

Sorry GSA employees simply do much much more with less.
so you grew up in a household where daddy was sucking from the teet... that explains alot... and the poor soul was persecuted to boot.... it's almost like he had to work for a living ....

but leave it to you to be bitter toward the producers in the one of the companies over your storied past who your graced with your presence, for bonus' they received... we're grappling with the difference between a private company and the gubmint, or was that particular corporate entitity who again, was graced with your presence, in fact 100% gubmint funded ?
 

DefeatObama

Council Member
That is true to some extent. We COULD improve fiscal efficiency by reducing the amount of oversight and accounting that needs to get done... NOTE that most of this over-regulation comes from the GOP side on programs they don't like. Kinda-like Issa's investigations into Planned Parenthood.
quite a red herring ya hauled in their captain....
 
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