In the recent election campaign, lacking anything positive to say about their record, when Democrats were not making personal attacks on their opponents one of their diversions was to taunt their opponent by saying, “Oh yeah, what specifically would you cut from the federal government, and don’t say waste and fraud.”

Ah, yes, what to cut?  While pondering that the other day, I came across an article in the New York Times titled, “For Federal Employees, a Feeling of Being Targets in the Budget Wars.” In reading the article, I came up with the perfect formula on how to prepare the list of possible cuts. 

Identify every federal employee that makes more than the median income and if they also belong to a union, put them on the list.  Have everyone on the list write a one page description of how their contribution exceeds in value what they are being paid.  Sort the list in order of credibility, and start cutting.  Stop when you have balanced the budget.

Incoming!

I can detect the missiles being fired in my direction, so let me state my case.  The aforementioned article begins with the story of Iyauta Moore, a woman with a master’s degree in public administration from American University and who makes over $100,000.  In 2008, $113,799 put you in the 90^th percentile of income earners in the United States. To put it another way, you made more than 9 out of 10 Americans.  The clincher was the statement that Ms. Moore was a member of the American Federation of Government Employees.  What the hell does a person making six figures need a union for?  Perhaps we need to revisit how unions came about in this country.

Unions

As the economy transformed from agrarian to industrial, the factories needed many workers to do relatively simple jobs.  These were mostly unskilled or semi-skilled jobs where an individual could be easily replaced with next to no cost to the factory owner.  If the owner didn’t like a worker for any reason, he could fire him on the spot, walk to the gate of the factory and pick another man out of the crowd, escort him to his place on the assembly line and say something like, “You stand here. You take two of these nuts out of this bin. You put the two nuts on those two bolts as the assembly travels by.  You then take this wrench and tighten the two bolts. Repeat. Any questions?”  Total elapsed time, maybe fifteen minutes.  Cost of the interruption to production? Pennies.  Thus the factory owner had all the power and the worker had none.  The worker lived in constant fear of losing his job and never getting a raise.  Unions solved this problem.

Individually, a worker’s value was trivial to the factory owner.  As a group, all of the workers had enormous value to the factory owner.  The union was the glue that bound the individual workers into a large economic force.  Now back to our story.

It’s About Value

Where was I? Oh, yes, what the hell does a person making six figures need a union for?  Does she not provide value as an individual?  Is not her education something worth compensating her for?  Would it be difficult or costly to go through the process of replacing her? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, why does she have to tie her fortune to others for her economic well being?  Perhaps this tells the story.

“She bristles at the notion that she is just another overpaid, underworked, cosseted bureaucrat. What I do here involves creating something that doesn’t exist,” she said of her job at the Department of Education, where she is establishing a group to help oversee all of the department’s grants, “That’s not pushing paper.”

“We’re out and we’re making a difference in the community. And I don’t really think you can put a dollar figure on that.”

Uh, Ms. Moore, you just did put a dollar figure on that and it’s zero.  If you can’t put a dollar figure on it, it has no value.  The job is spending government money in an agency that shouldn’t exist in the first place.  Providing for education is nowhere in the Constitution.  That is a function of local government not the federal government.  Since its inception the Department of Education has spent over one trillion dollars and we all know how much it has improved education in the United States and our standing in the world.  Ms. Moore cannot seem to describe what she does that is worth her six figure salary. “creating something that doesn’t exist…help oversee  the department’s grants…making a difference in the community.”  Creating what?  What is the purpose of the grants that you oversee?  What is the difference you are making in the community?  Shut it down.

Extortion

“I think federal employees are definitely getting a bad rap and definitely become political punching bags,” said William R. Dougan, the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees.  Wow, that’s surprising he would say that, don’t you think? The main problem with public sector unions is the relationship between unions and politicians.  Unions work furiously to help elect politicians and then the politicians negotiate the labor contracts with the unions and hand the bill to the taxpayers.  It is extortion.  Public sector unions should be prohibited from any political activity as a conflict of interest.

The next case is of Mathew Kolodzie a Department of Defense firefighter.  I think very highly of firefighters and I also think it takes a lot to train them, making them highly skilled in what they do.  If so, why do they need to be cogs in a union machine?

If Mathew is a good firefighter, Mathew has value and he should be paid accordingly.  If he is underpaid, he can threaten to leave to find a higher paying job elsewhere.  The Department of Defense would then be faced with the decision of finding another qualified candidate and going through the expense of training them and if the replacement is not satisfied with the pay, risk losing them and repeating the cycle.  That’s how it works in the free market in the private sector.  An employer knows it costs about five times as much to hire a new employee than to keep an existing one.  So the employer has to weigh his expenses against paying his people enough to keep them from leaving. 

If on the other hand, there isn’t a higher paying job for Mathew elsewhere, and there is a waiting list of people to take Mathew’s place because they think the pay is just swell, then he is probably paid appropriately.  The only reason, then for joining a union is to extort more compensation and benefits than the free market would provide.  Now, if that is a bargain that a private company and a private union want to engage in, have at it.  But public employees are paid by taxpayers and the more the public employees are paid the more the citizens are taxed to pay for it.  It’s a pretty tough sell to tell someone struggling to make ends meet that their taxes have to be raised to pay some government employee six figures.

The Times article tries to make Mr. Dougan a sympathetic figure because his schedule calls for him working two days on and three days off and that requires him to work a minimum of 144 hours over a two week period.  Wow!  That’s a 72 hour work week minimum!  That is, of course, until to look more closely.  Like many professional firefighters, they “live” at the firehouse while on duty so they are with the equipment and can respond to a fire twenty-four hours per day.  If there is no rash of fires raging, then they have time to sleep each day so subtract 48 hours from that two week figure (six nights at eight hours per night), now that 72 hour week is down to 48 hours.  Subtract time for meals and breaks and you have a forty hour workweek, like most everyone else.

I Could Do Better Elsewhere

Then we have the case of Carl Houtman a research chemical engineer for the Forest Service, he too make around $100,000 per year.  He says his job is like a university professor, but a typical professor makes around $150,000 and in private industry he could double his salary.  So, why don’t you Carl?  I think I have a solution for you.  Whatever it is that Carl does for the Forest Service, why don’t we contract that out?  Carl could get that private industry salary he talks about, and we would pay for the services provided and not get stuck paying Carl a rich government pension for the rest of his life.  Everybody wins.  If we find out we really don’t need to continue with what Carl is doing, we can let the contract lapse when it comes up for renewal.

Pay for Performance

The article says that some lament that there are fewer performance incentives in government.  You don’t say!  “Once you’re past your probationary year, there’s basically no reward for performance.”  Isn’t that the definition of a union?  Unions don’t like high performers, they make the rest of the union look bad.  They want middle of the road plodders.  They hold back those who have drive and ambition and protect those who are marginal.  Just ask Lance Hamann.

Lance is a purchasing agent for the Department of Agriculture (why do we need a Department of Agriculture with less than 3% of the workforce working in agriculture?).  He makes a bit more than $40,000 but he is also the president of Local 1840 of the federal employees’ federation.  “To me, there’s a rhyme and reason to all the red tape the government does have, “ he said, “so I try my best to be patient with the red tape, knowing it’s just how the government runs.” I couldn’t have said it better myself, Lance.  Axe, please.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please share your comments below.

Do you remember the scene in the movie “Saving Private Ryan” where after storming a machine gun nest and losing their medic, the Americans have to deal with how to handle a prisoner they captured?  Some say shoot him on the spot others disagree.  They know they can’t take him with them as he will slow them down.  After much vigorous debate Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) decides to untie him, point him toward the American line and tell him to keep walking, with the hope that he will be captured by the advancing American forces. 

Later in the movie as Miller’s unit is in a pitched battle to the last man, the released German prisoner is among those killing Miller’s men.  After reinforcements arrive to turn the battle in the Americans favor and the remaining Germans surrender, the former prisoner smiles and nods to the soldier in Miller’s unit that acted as translator and argued for sparing him as if to say, “Hey, how’s it goin’ pal?”  The soldier lowers his rifle and kills the German.

I am reminded of this by the current situation with Yemen.  Started under President Bush was the insane idea of releasing enemy combatants where they can find their way back to the battlefield.  This stupid policy was, until recently, going to be accelerated under President Obama.  Either we are at war or we are not.  You can’t fight a war with half measures.  Either you fight it to win or let the enemy have their way.  If we are in a war and we capture the enemy they stay captured until the war is over.  We don’t need a bunch of lawyers standing on the sidelines tapping their foot and their watches and saying, “how much longer are you going to hold these people without charging them?”  Answer: until the war ends or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.

 Is It a War Yet Mr. President?

 Backed into a corner, on his fifth (?) try to explain what his administration is doing on the War on Terror (am I allowed to call it that?), he actually called it a war, at least against Al Qaida.  He has spent the better part of his first year in office giving the back of his hand to the Bush administration.  But after seven years of Bush keeping us safe and two terrorist attacks on our soil this year with Obama at the helm and his poll numbers sinking, he has come to the realization that he owns this now.

The tough Harry Truman talk is nice (“The Buck Stops Here”), but it is just words until you actually do something with the buck that just stopped on your desk.  Why is the spectacularly incompetent Janet Napolitano still drawing a salary?  In Obama’s world it seems to be that what he means when he says the buck stops here is that he is the only one subject to firing and since we can’t fire him, everyone under him keeps on keeping on.  But who appointed these people?  It was Obama.  So he should recognize that he blundered and if the underlings don’t have enough sense to fall on their swords and resign, he should flat out fire them.

 Vacations are Important.  Anti-terrorism, Not So Much

 After the terror attack at Fort Hood, you would think that perhaps President Obama would be a little more responsive to another attempted attack, but hey, he was on an Hawaiian vacation.  Nobel Prize?  Chicago trying to win a bid for the Olympics?  President Obama will travel across the sea for that.  But an attempted attack on America?  Chill, baby, chill.  How about his director of National Counterterrorism, Michael Leiter, taking a ski vacation?  Just because stopping such an attack might be considered counterterrorism and just because that organization just failed miserably at stopping such an attack, and just because we didn’t know why it failed or if another attack might be on the way, why interrupt time with the family over that?  Family time is important, so said his boss. Don’t worry, Mike, we’ll wait.

Behind the Curve

It seems that with each attempt the enemy is one step ahead of us.  So discussions heated up about these new body scanners that can find anything, so it is claimed.  Don’t get me wrong, I am a big advocate of technology, but I guess the real problem is best summed up by one pundit comparing our methods to the Israelis:

“The Israelis look for terrorists, we look for tweezers.”

Instead of reading body scanners, perhaps we should be training the TSA agents in reading body language.  That’s what the Israelis do.  If you are a Palestinian, sorry, but you go in a different line and you get more closely screened and questioned.  You may pass, but you are going to be thoroughly checked out. We should do the same.  Where is your passport from?  What visa stamps do you have in your passport indicating where you have been?  Why don’t you have any luggage Mr. Abdulmutallab?  Why did you buy a one way ticket?  Who are you staying with in Detroit?  I see you paid cash for your ticket, how much cash do you have left for your trip after you land in Detroit?  Do you have a credit card?  No?  Hmmm…maybe you should wait over there, while we check further.

 No technology is foolproof.  Having worked in technology for over thirty years I can say that with some degree of confidence.  It only takes one failure of the technology for a disaster to strike.  But if we spend less time trying to find that box cutter, shampoo bottle, tweezers, jar of honey, etc., and spend more time spotting someone who doesn’t look like they are on a nice business trip or a visit to relatives or who otherwise fit the profile of a terrorist, that’s right I said it: profile, we could probably become a lot safer without having to lock the bathrooms for the last hour of the flight.  If we had pulled the young Abdulmutallab aside and questioned him, he probably would have cracked like an egg.  Does anyone think for a minute that this kid would have given off no body language signals if questioned by a trained professional?  The right combination of skilled human observers and questioners along with technology, is what we need to be safer.   Rather than this:  We”re the TSA and You Can Count on Us!

Intelligence Sprawl

We also need to collapse the intelligence arms of our government back into one and shut the others down.  Roll back Homeland Security into the Department of Defense, put the myriad intelligence gathering arms back into the CIA, make people accountable and lessen the need for a coordinating center to gather intelligence from a dozen agencies correlate it and send it back out to the dozen agencies.  All that does is create more fiefdoms that don’t want to talk to the dummies in that other agency who aren’t as smart as we are.  As the old saying goes, “When everyone’s responsible, no one is responsible.”  Government is neither nimble nor overly cooperative.  The fewer handoffs between agencies necessary to connect the dots, the better off we will all be.

If I asked you a simple question, what government organization works well, what would you say?  Let’s take a look at two government organizations and compare their effectiveness and motivation.

The Military

Whether you support our troops on the battlefield or want them to always stay home in their barracks, most Americans will say the military does a pretty good job.  Why? That is, why are they effective, not just why do people think so?  Well, they put a lot of investment in training and technology.  They seem to have solved the problem of integration, being based on merit rather than racial prejudice.  These are all important things, but I don’ t they get to the core of the issue.  The key question is, what happens if they don’t do their job?  They die…they die, the guy beside them dies, their buddies die, and depending on the size of the conflict, their families and country may eventually die.  With that kind of motivation, race is not even secondary.  If the guy next to me has got my back and I have his, I don’t care what color he or she is.  We do it right, we live;  we don’t, we die.

The K-12 Teacher

K-12 education comes under fire in this country, and rightly so, for failing to produce an educated workforce.  In New York, for example we spend over $14,000 per student, per year on education, far above the national average of around $9,000.  Are students in New York 50% smarter than the country in general?  Hardly.  Is the nation as a whole turning out well educated students?  Sadly, no.

Our K-12 public schools are a government run monopoly.  So what happens to a K-12 teacher if they fail to do their job?  If they have been in the job long enough to get tenure, nothing.  They will get a raise like everyone else.  So what motivates them to turn out outstanding students?  I’ll wait.

Let me be clear that I don’t want to lump all teachers together.  They are many teachers who, by having what  I suppose is a strong moral streak,  do a great job because they want to teach.  Okay, so let’s look at the teaching profession where there is a group that does their best because they get satisfaction from doing a good job.  Now, some studies come out that say the way to improve results is smaller classroom size.  The teachers’ unions get behind it and eventually push it through.  So what does that mean?  If you cut the size of the class in half, you double the number of classes.  If you double the number of classes, you have to double the number of teachers and thus have to go deeper into the labor pool to find them.  Before you took this step, we can probably assume that all the self-motivated teachers were already on the job.  So the additional teachers are motivated by what?

Co -conspirators

That brings us back to the teachers’ unions.  When government’s come under pressure to cut educational expenses, the airwaves are soon flooded with the heart wrenching commercials pleading to restore the funding “for the children’s sake.”  What you don’t hear is the trailer that says, “This commercial paid for by the PTA,” or “This commercial paid for by the Association of Concerned Parents.”  No, what you typically hear is, “This commercial paid for by the X Teacher’s union, Joe Blow, President.”

Who do the unions really represent…really? The students? or the teachers?  They want the funds restored so that their membership is not hurt and their dues are not curtailed.  If their true concern was for the students, why not support school vouchers and charter schools?  They fight the former with a vengeance and the latter, if it is not union organized.

Let’s Not Pick on K-12 Education

Let’s look at other government areas.  Government is the only area where union membership is growing.  How many people relish going to their Department of Motor Vehicles?  How efficient is the Post Office?  Amtrak?  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a bonus compensation plan, which is a step in the right direction unless it leads to cooking the books and making extremely risky loans that lead to the near collapse of our economy.  How can we get this under control?

Controlling the Uncontrollable

Our government is trying to install a massive health care program that will cost a trillion dollars.  At the same time, tens of billions of dollars are stolen from Medicare every year and they can’t stop it.  Early this year, the Obama Administration passed a $787 billion stimulus package, spent $18 million to build a website to track it, and put Joe Biden in the role of watch dog.  How is that working out?  A recent report from ABC News, of all places, found that credit for creating jobs was given on the web site to Congressional Districts that do not exist.  A $1,000 grant was purported to have created 50 jobs.  The New York Times investigated and found that the $1,000 went to purchase a lawn mower.  It took from the time of the founding of the Republic until about the mid 1990s to accumulate $6 trillion in debt.  It has doubled since then, and it is projected to go from $12 trillion to $14 trillion by next year!

It cannot be controlled.  It is impossible to control.  The only solution is to cut the federal government down to size.  Take out the Constitution and read what the true functions of government are supposed to be.  The military, absolutely;  the Post Office, yes it’s in there; coin money; establish patents and copyrights; establish the courts; control the District of Columbia; regulate interstate commerce; make treaties; give the State of the Union address.  That pretty much sums it up and everything else should be left to the states and local government or the people.

We should jettison all the rest and cut this government down to size and get out of debt.  Department of Labor–gone;  Department of Health and Human Services–gone; Department ment of Housing and Urban Development–gone; Department of Transportation–gone; Department of Energy–gone; Depatrment of Education–gone; Department of Veterans Affairs–gone, rolled into the Department of Defense;  Department of Homeland Security–gone, rolled into the Department of Defense; Department of the Interior–gone; Department of Agriculture–gone.

The amount of money saved would be enormous.  Selling all the real estate and buildings would bring in more money.  We could then cut taxes to jump start the economy and run a surplus to cut the debt.  The next step would be to make it illegal for unions to organize government workers without a referendum approved by all the voters.  Side benefits would be less campaign money because there would be less government to influence.  Government would be more accountable to the people because it would be closer to the people, that is, at the state level or local level.  We can do this proactively, or wait until the government is bankrupt and we have to sell off the parts to the Chinese.