Plunging Towards Gomorrah
Posts tagged Waste
Climate Change Program Manager
Feb 26th
The job market is difficult these days, but it’s not a bad time to look for government jobs. While companies lay off employees left and right the government only adds and keeps jobs. Great, right? Club Soda forwarded me this job for the National Park Service. The position is for a Climate Change Program Manager.
The Climate Change Program Manager provides overall leadership and management of National Park Service responsibilities, policies, and interests in climate change programs in within the National Park System. The Climate Change office coordinates acquisition and application of broad-based scientific and planning expertise and technologies to support climate change and associated programs.
This job pays between $103,000 to $155,000 per year. Does this sound like a position that is useful? I won’t even go into the whole tired climate change nonsense. The National Park Service has been one of the most poorly run departments in the United States. It’s a shame because 50 years ago it was one of the best departments. Thanks to a growing bureaucracy full of clueless do-gooders it has become a terrible waste of taxpayer dollars.
The Department of the Interior needs to be downsized and broken into smaller departments. Smaller groups are more effective at allocating resources. When a bloated bureaucracy gets involved useless positions like a Climate Change Program Manager are invented to push a political agenda. The amount of wasted money in these government departments is staggering.
The Cost of Goverment
Feb 9th
Government work is good if you can get it. Carpe Diem has a nice looking graph that shows that government employees makes 45% more on average than private sector employees.
As I was saying a few days ago. There’s a lot of fat in government than can be cut but no one in Washington is serious about it. I’m not exactly sure what the President is doing. I’m starting to fear that Obama is just completely in over his head. Presidents can either lead or they can’t. For all their faults Bush and Clinton were able to get things done. Americans are growing weary of Obama’s long speeches and inability to accomplish anything popular.
Obama’s biggest problem is that his ideas are not popular. The President must realize that he was elected because people were fed up with Bush, not because we were ready for big government solutions. Many on the left haven’t learned this lesson. Have the Republicans learned anything after being tossed out? I won’t hold my breath.
What Would I Do: The Economy
Feb 5th
If I was in charge I would push for enormous changes to fix the economy. Here is what I would do.
- Abolish several departments. Agriculture, Education, and Homeland Security do not need entire departments. These departments are either too big, obsolete, or just useless. I’m sure there are other departments that can go as well. One of Bush’s biggest mistakes was creating the Department of Homeland Security.
- Reduce the number of government employees, reduce wages, and reduce pensions. Government employees’ wages have been going up the past two years. It’s time these people start sacrificing like the rest of us. Federal and State pensions are absurd. We’re basically paying able bodied people not to work.
- Raise the entitlement age for Medicare and Social Security. Don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen. If there’s one thing elderly people do well, it’s vote.
- Temporarily cut the payroll tax. This would be much more beneficial for the average American than the stimulus package.
- Halt the stimulus package. Use the allotted funds to help pay for the shortfall in payroll receipts.
That’s just a short list of things to do. I could think of others, but this would be a step in the right direction. I don’t expect Obama to take up any of these ideas any time soon. Politicians love to talk about reducing waste, but they lack the courage to do it.
more high speed rail nonsense
Apr 16th
Today President Obama unveiled his $13 billion plan to enhance passenger rail service. Last month I wrote about why rail transit doesn’t work. The nation is in desperate need for infrastructure funding, but high speed rail is just a waste of money. It’s not really suprising that Obama would be in favor of rail, but he should know better.
Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110- to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take fewcars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future.
Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by amere 0.7 to1.5 percent–but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions.
The Randal O’Toole study has a lot more information about the fallacies of high speed rail. Richard Nadler over at The Corner has a couple of points on this topic as well.
1) Genuine high-speed rail — 150-to-200 miles-per-hour, as found in Japan and parts of Europe — requires separate rights of way: broad curves, very shallow grades, and no 60-mile-per-hour freight sharing the track. It is VERY expensive to engineer and maintain.
2) If you cut corners, as Obama implied, by using existing infrastructure, you come out with a system that will do 90-mph max, and will gum up existing freight traffic, which is much slower.
As I’ve mentioned before I’ve come a long way on this topic. Until I did the research I thought high speed rail was a great idea. The facts tell a different story. I think part of the problem on this topic is that it’s a very populist idea. People go to Europe and fall in love with the system there but never really look at the problems. It’s kind of like those old communist press junkets. From the right perspective Soviet Russia looked like a successful experiment. The devil was in the details. Spending on rail is a waste. There’s a reason why Amtrak isn’t successful. We need to concentrate on roads.
