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To: Solon who wrote (12597)	5/10/2002 1:35:02 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Telling me that you worked in a department where you were able to act a bit like millions of private employees does not make the case that all firefighters are unproductive or that all employees of Enron or Mcdonalds were, or are. No one was trying to make that case. To say that government employees on the whole do less useful work per resources expended on that work does not mean that there are not examples, even many examples, of government employees that are many times more productive then some private employees. Tim

To: Solon who wrote (12597)	5/10/2002 2:16:39 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Although your example about the french translation does not fit the dispute. I disagree. It's an excellent example. I have no way to evaluate the quality of the translator since no one at the meeting other than the translator spoke French. I assume she was good at her job. The point was that the translation slowed the meeting and interrupted the flow of discussion at critical moments. A better agreement might have been reached without the constant interruptions. It certainly would have been faster. Yes, avoiding a civil war is a good idea and pointless translation may be a small price to pay, but it is a price, it's overhead, it's inefficient. Productivity, you may recall, was the issue being discussed. I do not claim any expertise with private bureaucracies or with state and local government services. I do have a profound understanding of how the US Federal bureaucracy works. For most of my thirty year stint, that's what they paid me for, and I earned my pay. I have oodles of war stories. Way too much of what is done is stupid and wasteful. That's just the way the system works. We have laws that never go away; we just compound them with more laws, some of which do the opposite of the old laws. Despite efforts at results-based performance systems, very few functions have any way to define let alone measure results, and budgeting has little to do results anyway. The snarl of required procedures, not quite as stupid as translating when no translation is needed, but almost so, adds enormous amounts to the costs of doing the simplest things. And then there's the pork, which never gets cut--earmarked line items are exempt from across the board budget cuts and ar fully funded, forcing deeper cuts in more useful programs. And, of course, there are the idiot political appointees that show up every four years and take the first three years to learn their job and the last year to land a new one in the private sector. It's ugly. Which is not the same as saying that employees are "layabouts." The civil service certainly has it's share of those, but there are plenty of talented and hard working people in the civil service, doing their best to get the most benefit for the country out of what they have to work with. The US Federal bureaucracy is inherently unproductive. It's that simple. Which is not to say that it doesn't accomplish anything. All I'm saying is that productivity is lousy.