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

To: Elroy who wrote (313159)	12/3/2006 8:29:49 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1573069

Rather than raise taxes on the very wealthy, how about downsizing the headcount of every government department by 20%? That would probably go a long way to balancing the budget. That assumes the 20% you cut out are not doing anything of consequence. How do you know that's true? 1. Publicly traded companies restructure and cut 10%-20% of their workforce all the time. Since the companies are probably more efficient than the government to begin with, the same "fat, non-productive" positions are probably in the government somewhere. The mandate of a publicly traded company is different than that of gov't. The understood committment to the shareholder is to provide the very best return on their investment. If that means cutting out an operation that does very little for the company's margins so be it. However, gov't can't afford to cut out trash collection even if its a real drain on city resources. Thes best they can do is try to find a way to reduce the costs. 2. It's the nature of government agencies to want to grow, not to save costs. Every manager wants to be the head of a 30 person division, not a two person division, so they are constantly campaigning for more budget funds. It happens in all large organizations. Its the nature of every bureacracy, both public and private, to want to grow. However, having worked on both sides, it tends to be much easier to hire staff in a private corporation than it is in gov't. That doesn't mean there isn't fat in gov't....there is but in my experience there tends to be more fat in corporations. Of course, with corporations its much easier to lay off or fire people than in gov't. Of course, you don't want to cut the 20% that are actually doing something of consequence and leave the workers that are doing nothing of consequence untouched, if that's your point. But I'm pretty sure you could send some management consultants that specialize in downsizing into government and they could easily tell you how to remove 20% of staff and get the same (or better) job done. Problem is that there is no politicians that benefit from firing their fellow government employees, so it will never get done. All I am saying is that an arbitrary cutting of 20% of gov't workers may or may not be appropriate. In my experience, most gov't workers work fairly hard......maybe not as hard as their private counterparts but then the financial rewards on the private side are much greater. To cut out an arbitrary number simply for the sake of cutting may be very self defeating.