As a boss, we the people stink

by: Dvd Avins

Fri Jul 25, 2008 at 12:32:29 AM EDT

One of the people I was hanging out with on my vacation is an employee of the State of New Jersey. He spent the last few months working on an eleven page form for seniors to fill out so they could get some category of medical benefits.

He told me the form didn't really have to be eleven pages long, but the politicians didn't really want to give out all that money, so they directed the form be long enough so that there would be a whole lot of corrections and revisions needed before the forms could get approved.

But as I told him (and he came to agree) it's not the politicians who are ultimately at fault. It's him and me and the rest of us. We want the government to provide services, but we don't want to pay for them. If the politicians came up with a budget that actually did a good job of paying for what we say we want, we'd vote those politicians out and replace them with new politicians who'd do the same kind of corner-cutting we were lamenting.

Sure, getting rid of corruption (or reducing it to an aberration rather than a way of life) would free up money for real services. But so long as voters are trained to view taxes as inherently evil, we will never have good government. Every time we run into right-wing cries of politicians wasting our money, we must steer the conversation to getting our money's worth and away from twisted, Norquistic attempts to starve the government into ineptitude.

Dvd Avins :: As a boss, we the people stink

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As a boss, we the people stink | 3 comments

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I've also run into different effects of bad management by we the people in education. More on that tomorrow or soon.

by: Dvd Avins @ Thu Jul 24, 2008 at 23:35:47 PM CDT

My guess is it's not the politicians, either (0.00 / 0)

it's probably some middle manager getting pressure to stop spending money and decided the best way to do it was to screw seniors.

by: huntsu @ Fri Jul 25, 2008 at 06:01:20 AM CDT

But clearly... (0.00 / 0)

Our government isn't 'starved into ineptitude'.
Our government borrowed huge somes of money to satify various special interests, and continues to do so, I might add.
We are only in this current situation because we must now pay the debt back.
Is Pennsylvainia 'starved into inepititude'? More people, bigger state, smaller budget. I don't know that New Jersey has better services than PA either.
Our problems are pretty unique when NY/CT/PA don't seem to be facing quite the fiscal challenges we are in NJ.

-When Chuck Norris plays Monopoly, the real world economy is affected.

by: William Weber (WjcW) @ Fri Jul 25, 2008 at 07:57:39 AM CDT