Governance Reforms

I would like to see a requirement that any bill proposed be required to list all other existing laws it would affect and what changes it would make to those laws. Also included in each bill should be a clause that specifies where the money to implement it will come from.

Great idea! The politicians will hate it though. Actually having to think of the consequences of what they do....

biochem wrote:Great idea! The politicians will hate it though. Actually having to think of the consequences of what they do....

There you go again. Making the assumption that anyone in a Congressional office can in any way, shape or form think is beneath you. You should know better by now.

Politics is a dirty crooked business, rigged against the little guy IMHO. As a lady poker player noted on being informed the poker game in town was crooked, Well it's the only game in town," Ol' Will Rodgers put it best in the 1930s, "The United States has the best government money can buy, unfortunately we're all poor folks."

Poker

KNick wrote:I would like to see a requirement that any bill proposed be required to list all other existing laws it would affect and what changes it would make to those laws. Also included in each bill should be a clause that specifies where the money to implement it will come from.

That´s actually not a good thing. The govt here has been doing roughly that for over a decade now, and it´s causing waaay more problems than it solves, and it didn´t solve the problems it was supposed to solve.

It leads to exaggerated compartmentalisation and too much paperwork being thrown around. Sounds like a great idea, but doesn´t work well in practise.

pokermind wrote:Hi Daryl

US President Eisenhower left office warning of the danger of the Military-Industrial complex, his predecessor Truman had chaired the Senate committee investigating just such things, A republican and a democrat respectively. Note no one recently has investigated graft. Why? The hogs of all political stripes are getting too fat to move from swilling at the trough here. Does the same thing happen in your country?

Poker

If defence spending corruption reached even 10% of what´s normal in USA, it would make BIG headlines and scandals here. If the govt causing it was still in office, it would have serious problems, possibly get kicked out of office. And if a new govt has already replaced the culprit, without doing something about this, then some of it might very well get kicked out as well.

Even going overbudget far less has caused political rumblings.

Tenshinai wrote:That´s actually not a good thing. The govt here has been doing roughly that for over a decade now, and it´s causing waaay more problems than it solves, and it didn´t solve the problems it was supposed to solve.

It leads to exaggerated compartmentalisation and too much paperwork being thrown around. Sounds like a great idea, but doesn´t work well in practise.

Could you give some specific examples of what you mean? Not questioning the statement, so much as wondering how it goes wrong.

Just jumping back into the military bandwagon...

The economy, as I think we can all agree, is a very complicated engine. And while DoD spending is hard to monitor and probably as screwy as any other federal agency there are complications. (Aren't there always?)

The last figure I saw, two years ago, was that for every DoD dollar spent in a given area, 2.5. So for every dollar spent by the DoD, be it in purchasing toilet paper, a jet plane, or paying a soldier/sailor, the local economy beneifted $2.50. That was the national average at the time. Some places it is far higher, some it is a bit lower. But no place I heard of was less than a 1.5 multiplier.

So, quite directly, when you monkey with DoD spending, you're screwing around with the local and national economy.

Here's an example of some of the screwy purchase plans. And if you think about it, you see why this happens.

The Navy has a lovely new submarine, the Virgina. They draw up the plans in roughly 1995. With refrigerator model A being installed. So they get funding for the whole line of submarines, and start placing orders. There's 30 Virgina class subs planned, so they place orders for 30 model A refigerators.

2000 comes around, and they start building the first Virgina class submarine. 2004 it's commissioned. Yeah US Navy! A brand new toy. Go have fun! But in the meantime, well, we improved on the model A refrigerator. We have a model B now. Do you want it?

Of course we do.

So a new contract is drawn up to install the model B refrigerator on all Virgina class submarines. 30 of them. The problem is thus, the original contract for 30 model A refrigerator's didn't go away. The way the DoD contracts are written all 30 of the originally ordered model A refigerators must be built, purchased and installed on all 30 submarines. The submarines must then be brought back into the shipyards to have the model B's installed. This happens again and again over the course of building all the Virgina class subs as equipment is upgraded, replaced or no longer relevant.

Obviously it would be far cheaper to simply install the upgraded tech as you went along. But that is not how the contracts go. So millions, billions, of dollars are spent on installing each successive model to get up to the current generation. The reason they do not simply cancel the old contract is large penalties built into them. It is cheaper to simply spend the rest of the contract's money then to pay the penalties.

Yes, the contracts could be written differently, without penalties or requiring the purchase of all 30 refrigerators. Then there'd be a higher cost per refrigerator, and the company that makes them wouldn't have a garunteed income that would let them hire on permanent employees. You see how that too will ripple out into the economy.

Cutting federal spending, especially in an arm of the Fed like the DoD is not a simple matter. More than that, some of the first things that go are soldier and sailor benefits. Tuition assitance, spouse support, day care for single parents, etc.

Back to the very first comment about things to change...

1. Reduced salaries and benefits for our illustrious Senate and Congress. The average salary is $175k. Before adding in benefits such as housing, food, expense accounts, etc.

2. Get rid of lifetime pensions after just five years of service. Our military risks life and limb and has to do 20 years of service. At the least, match them.

3. Re-evaluate where we send foreign aid. If the country doesn't like us or care for the US, cut off aid and support. They don't want us there, we won't lend a helping hand. These are dollars lost, with no return to the economy. And the political hay made in good will really doesn't seem to amount to all that much profit in the political arena.

KNick wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:That´s actually not a good thing. The govt here has been doing roughly that for over a decade now, and it´s causing waaay more problems than it solves, and it didn´t solve the problems it was supposed to solve.

It leads to exaggerated compartmentalisation and too much paperwork being thrown around. Sounds like a great idea, but doesn´t work well in practise.

Could you give some specific examples of what you mean? Not questioning the statement, so much as wondering how it goes wrong.

Well, for one thing, the national level taxbased health insurance is actually running at a clear surplus, but because of how that money is allocated(by utilisation or compensation), there´s still a bunch of hospitals, especially in low population areas that are having issues.
So, the money to have full hospital coverage is there, but because it falls under another budget, it´s starting to get real messed up in some places.

The system was implemented as a way to allow private competition on equal conditions in healthcare, but personally, I´d much rather go back to nationalised healthcare, specialists and special clinics etc had no real problems working privately then anyway.

There´s similar stories from other sections as well, where setting up expenditures with directly linked incomes or taxes to pay for it creates untenable or just silly situations.

In some cases, one part of a service is turning a profit, while another part of the same service is running a bad deficit, the surplus then goes back to either local or national level (through one extra layer of bureaucracy, that eats up too much of it), while the part with deficit is forced to enact cutbacks, even when that is a BAD thing to do(and not seldomly causes additional costs to a third part of the same service).

It´s also a way for those in charge to avoid taking responsibility, because hey, they just set the rules, they don´t decide how to run anything...
And those in charge of the daily running, they can show that THEIR part is running just fine and dandy thank you very much. Glossing over that the way they cut costs, is by letting another service take the hit.

An example of that could be how the regional healthcare here has been looking repeatedly at closing a local hospital and move the activity to the already larger hospital down south in the region, because that would save a lot of money for them in one place.

Ignoring, that there will automatically be a lot more traveling to and from the more distant hospital, which in many cases provides compensation for that, but from a different source of money.
And then there´s the fact that it adds a lot of ambulance trips, but since those are also paid from another place, that looks like a big saving until you look at what the total effect is.

The simple truth is that you can´t run a nation like a business company. Because the aims are mutually exclusive, you usually run a business for profit, but for a nation, profit is completely irrelevant as long as you´re not running at a deficit.

Basically, the last 2-3 decades of liberal conservative trend has been a dreadful screwup, where basically the only thing that worked out well, was cheap access to good internet connection, and THAT only came about because Sweden started that development with 3 separate nationwide fiber backbones, all built by different parts of the government because their needs differed.

So the telephone operator built one net with very good coverage, the railroad operator built another and the primary operator of powerlines and power stations built a lesser one, and all three interconnected in lots of locations, perfect setup when it was enforced that those operators had to lease out bandwidth on an equal basis. But all the money spent on that infrastructure was still based on nationwide taxes...
And that´s pretty much the ONLY successful privatisation(and indirectly because of that, compartmentalisation of services) here.

Standard operating procedure for current rightwing govt here seems to be to cut taxes, which requires cutbacks in services, up until the point where those are made worse enough that they´re not worth the taxes paid, and then they can proclaim how taxbased services are automatically bad and privatise.

The last figure I saw, two years ago, was that for every DoD dollar spent in a given area, 2.5. So for every dollar spent by the DoD, be it in purchasing toilet paper, a jet plane, or paying a soldier/sailor, the local economy beneifted $2.50. That was the national average at the time. Some places it is far higher, some it is a bit lower. But no place I heard of was less than a 1.5 multiplier.

So, quite directly, when you monkey with DoD spending, you're screwing around with the local and national economy.

Porkchop projects is one of the biggest parts of USAs PROBLEM, not the solution!
It is for example a big part of why USAs steel mills didn´t bother to modernise, because they knew they could count on support from their local politicians to funnel govt cash their.

And so, we got the almost tradewar during GW Bush, because the majority of USAs steelmills were producing poorer steel at a higher price, so GWB tried to "fix" that by subsidies on a scale that wasn´t even remotely legal internationally.
In the end, subsidies happened, but a lot of steelmills still shut down, AND ironically, the US steel mills who had been smart enough to modernise since WWII, made ridiculous amounts of money, because they also got the subsidies...
Money which mostly became stockholder and executive profit. And of course, the efficient steelmills made certain that many of the inefficient ones got shut down, because with both getting the same subsidies, no chance they could compete.

And inefficient military spending is NEVER a good idea, no matter what. It just teaches bureaucrats and politicians that they can get away with wasting money.

Here's an example of some of the screwy purchase plans. And if you think about it, you see why this happens.

The Navy has a lovely new submarine, the Virgina. They draw up the plans in roughly 1995. With refrigerator model A being installed. So they get funding for the whole line of submarines, and start placing orders. There's 30 Virgina class subs planned, so they place orders for 30 model A refigerators.

2000 comes around, and they start building the first Virgina class submarine. 2004 it's commissioned. Yeah US Navy! A brand new toy. Go have fun! But in the meantime, well, we improved on the model A refrigerator. We have a model B now. Do you want it?

Of course we do.

Other options are to prioritise. Or work smarter. You don´t buy those 30 model A before you´re building the subs for them, you build them at the same time.
When model B comes around and you find that you just HAVE to have it, you accept that the subs are going to be delayed, and you have the refrigerator maker switch to model B.
OR, you build all with model A, and then once it´s time for the first big overhaul of the sub, you start swapping for model Bs.

3. Re-evaluate where we send foreign aid. If the country doesn't like us or care for the US, cut off aid and support. They don't want us there, we won't lend a helping hand. These are dollars lost, with no return to the economy. And the political hay made in good will really doesn't seem to amount to all that much profit in the political arena.

Can you figure out why that statement is freaking hilarious?
Beyond the obvious that the amount of money saved would barely even be a drop in the ocean, that USA wouldn´t even notice.

You really need a realitycheck if you think #3 is even a relevant suggestion.

It´s like saying that because i have a submarine i want to have my monkey painted blue so they match colours. My reaction is simply *Syntax Error*.

Want a hint? The largest aid receivers, get military equipment at cut rates, that´s Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia by the way, is the biggest funder of extremeist islamic terrorism. It´s also vital to USAs economy as an oil supplier.

Then there´s of course the question about how do you figure out that a country like or care about USA?
How do you define that?

Tenshinai, I've got a classic government stovepipe problem to illustrate your point. Where I live we have large scale grain farming, a new mining boom, and two years ago had major floods (covered 60% of our state - about UK, France and Germany combined) that damaged infrastructure.
The government railway has concentrated on repairing and expanding the lines to the mines because that's where the money and political focus is. Meanwhile the lines to areas that produce massive amounts of grain haven't had a functional rail line since the floods. This means that the grain has to be shifted by road using what we call road trains (massive 100+ ton 4 semitrailers following a prime mover). Thus the roads in the area have been destroyed. The government is currently spending millions fixing these roads from our Main Roads Department. It would have been much cheaper to just repair the rail line in the first place

Daryl wrote:Tenshinai, I've got a classic government stovepipe problem to illustrate your point. Where I live we have large scale grain farming, a new mining boom, and two years ago had major floods (covered 60% of our state - about UK, France and Germany combined) that damaged infrastructure.
The government railway has concentrated on repairing and expanding the lines to the mines because that's where the money and political focus is. Meanwhile the lines to areas that produce massive amounts of grain haven't had a functional rail line since the floods. This means that the grain has to be shifted by road using what we call road trains (massive 100+ ton 4 semitrailers following a prime mover). Thus the roads in the area have been destroyed. The government is currently spending millions fixing these roads from our Main Roads Department. It would have been much cheaper to just repair the rail line in the first place

Oh yes, that´s just the kind of stuff i mean.
Like i said, forcing all expenses to be individually financed can sound really great, but creating a mess is what it´s best at.