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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (302189)	9/4/2006 9:09:43 AM
From: 10K a day	Respond to of 1573092

>Oh, and mortality rates in these plans are 40 percent higher than those of elderly veterans covered by the V.A.< Yes and NOW you know the TrueAdvantage of Domestic Spying....

To: Road Walker who wrote (302189)	9/14/2006 5:42:45 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573092

How much more efficient is the private sector Not very, if you listen to various advocacy groups, which are fond of promoting programmes they like by claiming that their administrative costs are much lower than those in the private sector. You often hear this comparison made between Medicare and private health insurance, with advocates claiming that Medicare only has administrative costs of 2%. Now Ampersand of Alas, a Blog, offers the same justification of government transfer programmes versus private charity. Accounting is so boring no one wants to talk about it, and yet it's crucial to get it right. And in cases like these, the studies are generally getting it very wrong. Comparing government numbers to private sector numbers isn't even apples to oranges; it's apples to fruitflies. For starters, the private sector--whether they be charities or corporations--has to collect and track the money they spend. So does the government--but unlike the private sector, that figure doesn't get charged off against, say, Medicare; it gets charged to the auditor's office, the IRS, the Treasury, the justice department, and so forth. (Social security does track the money you send them, but the IRS, not their legal department, is the enforcer.) Also, it is often very, very hard to tell what something costs a government agency. They don't pay cash prices for a lot of the services they get, and they don't do normal corporate things like accruing their pension liabilities, so it's hard to know what their true compensation costs are. Government agencies also--obviously--don't have big finance sections to tell them how much they need to pay in taxes. That doesn't mean they're more efficient at delivering services; it just means that they don't pay taxes. We could achieve the same "efficiency"--and many others besides--by eliminating the corporate income tax. Apparently (I haven't read the studies myself) when you add in those sorts of costs, the government's administrative costs are higher than the private sector's. That won't suprise anyone who's ever spent time in line at the DMV. Posted by Jane Galt at August 31, 2006 12:42 PM \| TrackBack \| Technorati inbound links"); ?> Comments Another "neat" thing about government agencies is that they don't have to comply with many of the regulations that they impose on the private sector. Add the same regulatory burden to government agencies, and make them account for it properly, and the myth of "greater government efficiency" would quickly fade away. Posted by: Tom Anger on August 31, 2006 1:49 PM janegalt.net Also see Message 22712043