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Tech CEOs Tell US Gov't How To Cut Deficit By $1 Trillion
alphadogg writes "The US government can save more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years by consolidating its IT infrastructure, reducing its energy use and moving to more Web-based citizen services, a group of tech CEOs said in a report released Wednesday. The Technology CEO Council's report, delivered to President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also recommends that the US government streamline its supply chains and move agencies to shared services for mission-support activities. 'America's growing national debt is undermining our global competitiveness,' said the council, chaired by IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano. 'How we choose to confront and address this challenge will determine our future environment for growth and innovation.' If the cash-strapped US government enacted all the recommendations in the advocacy group's report, it could save between $920 billion and $1.2 trillion by 2020, the group said. The federal government could also reduce IT energy consumption by 25 percent, and it could save $200 billion over 10 years by using advanced analytics to stop improper payments, the report said."
And they'll happily provide consultation and hardware... should be about $500 Billion by 2020.
Because 1) CEOs proposed it and everyone knows they're all evil 2) The outcry of lobbyists in the industries that depend on the government wastefulness to pad their bottom line will put out the message that this is "killing private business and costing citizens their jobs."
Or they could just start another war.
You'll save $1.1 trillion dollars, and it'll only cost you $900B in investment! Please make check payable to IBM in capital expense dollars, not the operating expense savings that we're showing you.
It's funny how such studies show fantastic savings, but you can't actually buy the solution with those purported savings. You can't point the finger and say "these are the people you'll fire, and these are the systems that will get turned off". And the companies offering such a solution won't accept payment with the funny money savings either.
the government is already in the process of doing.
real forward thinking, dumb ass~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Fewer lawyers, fewer inmates, fewer LEO, happier population. For bonus points, get rid of excessively generous government employee pensions.
Just get rid of all of the polticians. What use are they anyway?
Should we be suspicious when the IBM CEO thinks the U.S. needs a massive IT overhaul? I guess you could say he is qualified to know whether it can be done or not, but it would no doubt steer a lot of money to large IT corporations, such as IBM, that are large enough to handle such a large undertaking.
..tach CEOs are disinterested third parties with no ulterior motive. They're not after some ludicrously expensive contract for several years, combined with building a new terrible legacy and network effects which basically cause a lock-in for long after the original contract. Finally someone you can trust!
[squints at monitor]
Hey waitaminute. These are the guys who run companies that only make tachometers, right?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Being inefficient means that the politicians can easily hide what they're spending our money on. I seriously doubt this will gain any traction within the government. Then again, with potential cost over-runs and kick-backs to implement such a plan, who know? Political greed seems to get some things done.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
It's too bad that none of those businesses are Minority or Women owned, otherwise they would get the contracts for sure. Because in the world of Government, it is
Sorry, but those puny savings simply won't matter when the banks demand their next round of trillion dollar bailouts in the next ten years. Penny wise and pound foolish doesn't make anybody rich....
can save
Yep.
If the cash-strapped U.S. government enacted
Uh huh.
it could save
Probably.
could also reduce
Most likely.
the report said.
It sure did. It said nothing of substance is currently being done. I am being a cynical ass (nothing new under the sun), but I don't believe this report will change the bloat.
At least they are considering hypotheticals!
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
the 13 acres of hell this country went through, kicking and screaming, just to get to digital television.
Just because every CEO present for this sales pitch owns an iPhone 4, does not mean the grinding poverty of Appalachia, the intellectual bankruptcy of the deep south, or the budgetless west coast are even remotely capable of turning this page. As long as we all have grandmothers and relatives printing out taxes and mailing them with saliva greased postage stamps, the trillion dollars is about as real as the 21st century flying car i was promised.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The last thing I want to see is an efficient government. In the words of Will Rogers, "Thank heaven we don't get all the government we pay for."
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/comment-page-2/
That summary seemed to be full of buzzwords.
Unfortunately, part of what is keeping our country propped up is the inefficiency of bureaucracy and that it allows a lot of otherwise useless people to remain employed. If you go through and wipe out a ton of government positions there won't be anywhere else for those people to go. Though, I suppose with all those savings we could just give everyone microloans that allow them to try and at least be productive at something they are interested in.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The only way to reduce the national debt is by selling more stuff to other nations than you buy from them. Aside from energy savings (which I bet won't be anywhere close to $1T), I don't see how to switch to e-government or any of the rest of this stuff will make any difference.
Its not that they are generous, its just that they are guaranteed.
You know it's ironic, the savings they are proposing over the next 10 years almost exactly match the cost of the wars we've been fighting for the last 10 years.
Cut accumulated debt, cut defecit*s*, or something else? The defecit is a yearly thing, and I don't think they mean to make the entire cut in a single year.
Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also recommends that the U.S. government streamline its supply chains and move agencies to shared services for mission-support activities
Sounds just like... well... all the other consultants. You know, the people who come in and say "Hey, we haven't ever worked in this organization but this seems inefficient, make it better and you'll get massive savings! What? No, we haven't bothered to find out whether there is actual some reason why you are doing it in the inefficient-seeming way in the first place. If we did find that out, we couldn't make this fancy recommendations..."
I think that the first thing where government should save is this: Stop forming entities like "Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform". Any entity with such a grand name can only come up with grand suggestions that don't relate to the real world in any meaningful way. The actual improvements stem from lower levels of organizations, occur over time and resemble babysteps towards the ideal solution. Massive remakes suggested by people from outside the organizations tend to fail miserably.
just take $1 trillion from the people who shipped all of our jobs overseas.
Oh wait, it's these guys!
easy fix, kill the federal reserve, stop paying them interest, (your income taxes) and get the government to issue it's own money, interest free.
And income through taxes.
Dilbert RSS feed
"The U.S. government can save more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years by spending more on high tech, a group of tech CEOs said in a report released Wednesday."
If you know anything about government bureaucracy, it would cost 10x that in reality for them to actually implement. Government is flat out incapable of operating efficiently, like a real business which has to compete does.
Seconded. I'll also add this:
Fine countries for each citizen found illegally residing in our country, *10 for repeat offenders.
Open our governments R&D dept to beyond defense and license the tech out to the private sector to pay for our infrastructure, and help create a real need for scientists.
Create regulations to stop the salary collusion that goes on in every executive board room, bring back excess taxes to discourage excessive greed.
Reform our tax structure to pay from the bottom up, instead of top down. Make my city pay to my state, who pays to the feds.
Or do more of the same for yourselves rich fuckers, eventually enough of us little guys will be pushed so far we won't care to make it better for ourselves. Our focus will be on how bad we can make it for you.
You cut those huge sums of money and you are inviting unemployment among folks in our growing population.
Where's the memo on outsourcing everything to India and China?
Having just spent a good chunk of change today to pay the title transfer tax on my new car, I want to say that it's tempting to fire all the bureaucrats and replace them with machines. The lady that took my money at the local courthouse tried so hard to make me go away and fill out the transfer form "without mistakes", which would necessitate me harassing the seller of my car (not a dealership, but an individual).
So human sadism made her fuck with me.
But also I was able to appear to her humanity with subtle language and facial gestures which motivated her to "see if she could work around it" and appeal to her boss and such.
So I'm not sure which is worse, humans or machines.
expandfairuse.org
Hmm, so by their example. We should outsource the government to China.
@Anonymous Coward retire after 20 years with full salary? sounds #generous to me!
Reform our tax structure to pay from the bottom up, instead of top down. Make my city pay to my state, who pays to the feds.
Or do more of the same for yourselves rich fuckers, eventually enough of us little guys will be pushed so far we won't care to make it better for ourselves. Our focus will be on how bad we can make it for you.
"Earn a dollar, pay a dime. Invest that dollar, pay 9 cents. No exceptions whatsoever."
--
.nosig
After some confusion on whether or not I paid owed taxes, I agree with how awful the US Gov can be. The fact that I was charged three times, had my account locked and overdrawn, and lost filing/transaction fees on refunds because Federal and State agencies are fast to levy debts but not clear them is proof of that. They are even allowed to do so because they are allowed more than a full business week(I think it was 10 days) to provide the other with information regarding the account. So, they continued to each bill me for the same amount, that was only said to be owed to one agency, for several weeks. After informing them of their errors, they agreed to refunds which took quite a while to get back and were subject to third party transaction fees by a company they use to directly debit your account.
While I can understand some legality issues for having allowances of time, to take so much time and charge me for their mistakes in this day and age is pretty pathetic.
The funniest part was not one of them could even enlighten me to who the transaction money went to. They played pass the buck as they had me doing call circles to the Fed, State, and Treasury office. After finally requesting a supervisor, who put me on speaker phone without consent, I was told that there was nothing they could or would do and it happens all the time. He even divulged to me that it happens all the time to the tune of a lot of money. But, he still held his ground that it was my fault and within their legal right to bill me like they did.
Since the deficit is the annual difference between expenditures and revenues, reducing spending by ~$1 trillion between now and 2020 doesn't reduce the deficit by ~$1 trillion, it reduces the deficit by ~$100 billion.
Of course, this ignores the question of whether the money would actually be saved; one should be rather sceptical from a recommendation from an industry group saying that amounts to "if the government spent more money on our services, it would save money overall".
To quote Adam Smith on the attitude that should be applied to proposals of government action from groups engaged in a particular area of trade: "The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." (An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 11, emphasis added.)
No, that's how you generate a trade surplus. There is a difference between a trade surplus/deficit and a budget surplus/deficit (the former is exports vs. imports, the latter is government revenue vs. government expenditures.) You reduce the national debt by generating a budget surplus (and you reduce the debt as compared to an alternative policy even by generating a smaller budget deficit), to which the balance of trade is orthogonal.
That's what you get for going against the hivemind. GNU World Order!
Years ago the employer asked techs a 2nd time to save money.
Of course we did not even get a christmas card for the first time.
Ultimate Savings:
1) Turn off the lights
2) Hire the blind
3) gazillions of profit
... they could budget within the money that they actually have, and stick to that budget. The whole idea of 'deficit' means they are spending more than they have, which, let's face it, if they were ever actually right about how much growth they were going to get, they wouldn't have a debt in the first place. So they could start fixing the problem by not trying to predict the future (which they've proven they can't do anyways) and budget with the money they actually have right now, which is how most intelligent people manage their money anyways.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How many billions has Treasury spent trying to update computer systems? DoJ (FBI, etc.)? Military (how long did RPAS get kicked around sucking up $$s)? The plain fact is government has a horrible track record with IT spending boondoggles.
This sounds like another one; massive cash outlays today to buy illusory future savings.
Wait a minute...that sounds like most government programs period... :-(
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
If you compare the salary of anyone who works for the government to someone with the same educational level you will easily see they get the shaft in terms of equal pay. In order to give people incentive to work for good old Uncle Sam, you have to make up for the shit pay, this is done though things like pensions and some of the other fringe benefits. If you take that away, you will drive away whatever talent is actually working at the federal, state, or local level.
It is a commonplace that gov't is "wastefull" and "inefficient" and full of overpaid hacks,etc etc /. and dilbert ? /., is the gov't more wastefull the MS ? doesn't anyone remember the thread where there were some number of people >10 on the MS committee to figure out what was on the vista start menu ? not to implement it or anything like that, but just the list of what was on teh default menu....
But doesn't this describe most private biz, at least viewed in the eyes of
why is private jets for CEOs no less wasteful then anything the gov't does ?
You could go a long way with this, but I think it is a Myth that large publicly traded companies are, on avg, more efficient then the gov't and there is a lot of evidence to support the opposite posistion, eg look at he amt spent on admin in the social sec administration.
To give an example: I work in a biotech lab. The other day, a guy comes in with a 400 dollar piece of equipment, "free". What gives ? well, "they" through out a whole pallet (maybe 50) of these jobbers cause the name of the company changed, and they didn't want to bother changing the logo on the equipment....
yet it is gov't that gets blamed for being wasteful.
I mean come on, this is
If you compare the salary of anyone who works for the government to someone with the same educational level you will easily see they get the shaft in terms of equal pay. In order to give people incentive to work for good old Uncle Sam, you have to make up for the shit pay, this is done though things like pensions and some of the other fringe benefits. If you take that away, you will drive away whatever talent is actually working at the federal, state, or local level.
Yup, I always find it funny when conservatives trot out the "look how much federal pay has increased compared to private sector pay in the past 30 years!" argument without fully considering the reasons for that. They want to insinuate that government pay is skyrocketing but the truth is much different. Ratios rise in magnitude whenever the numerator increases OR the denominator falls. The real reason for the increase in the ratio is that private sector wages have been demolished over the past 30 years(esp. if you look at the median and not the mean).
Monstar L
Who's gonna enforce that fine? Mexico is gonna laugh and laugh and laugh and probably start encouraging citizens to enter the USA illegally just to spite our hubris.
Blar.
I've been reading articles for years about failed IT streamlining projects, and they want to make me believe they're different?
Fine, offer to do it on fixed-price contracts instead of time and materials, and I may start to believe they're serious about fixing problems instead of their own balance sheets.
a.
20 years is usually 19 years, 6 months, and a day; and I'm guessing that half salary + benefits after 20 is more typical with full salary after 40.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
...by cutting our annual defense spending in half. We would still be spending $500 billion a year, more than any government any where ever (including the US just a few short years ago) so no one can argue we will be "less safe." Until tea par tiers get behind such a proposal their "anti-government" rhetoric is just that - hot air.
Fine countries for each citizen found illegally residing in our country, *10 for repeat offenders.
And how do you propose to enforce that? I'll let you in on a little secret, such arbitrary and capricious plans have started wars. After all, I know some illegal immigrants. In most cases, they have no papers, or false papers. Why? Because if you have no papers, they can't send you back. So what do you do when some Spanish speaking person is stopped at the US-Mexico border? The family of illegals (all citizens now) from El Salvador came over that way with fake Mexico papers. They were caught, sent to Mexico, and had a shorter trip back than if they had real papers. So we should be fining Mexico for letting people cross our border? If we cared, we'd make a fence or such to actually block people. We don't. The US economy would collapse hard, fast, and almost irreparably if we kicked out all illegals and no more came in. So we "let" them in, then bitch about it. That's easier than fixing the problems. The Democrats want them in for humanitarian reasons. The Republicans want them in for business reasons. And only a fringe are nationalistic/xenophobic enough to care.
Learn to love Alaska
If you compare the salary of anyone who works for the government to someone with the same educational level you will easily see they get the shaft in terms of equal pay
Compare people with high school educations or the less useful college degrees. Sure a systems administrator can make more in the real world, but someone without the fancy degree or experience would not. You also have to consider job stability. Government jobs (aside from the top positions which are filled by appointees) are far more stable than their private industry counterparts.
consolidating has big down sides for big multi offices setups.
Like have local techs / workers having to play phone tag / pass lots of papers to get easy stuff done
.
The consolidated tech / IT center have little idea about each office own setups / custom / in house software / legacy stuff. What about small offices with poor network links do you want to put them on some remote link that eats up lots of bandwidth it works fine at the big ones so lets push it out to all offices.
and if you where to get rid of the local techs and replace then with temps then it add even more layers from people on side geting to the consolidated admins.
Comcast tried to the consolidated network admin and did not work and they had to go back to local VP control of the networks.
Debt is how much you owe, like how much your credit card balance is.
Deficit is how much you're borrowing/losing/hemorrhaging in a given time, like how much your credit card balance increases in a year.
Cutting the deficit by 1 trillion dollars would save TEN TRILLION DOLLARS in ten years.
I guess, technically, the summary could be valid if we're talking about a ten-year budget, but the national budget is something that's settled upon on an annual basis. Cutting the deficit by "an average of 100 billion dollars per year" would be more accurate.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Fine countries for each citizen found illegally residing in our country, *10 for repeat offenders.
Not sure that would help anything. This study shows illegal immigrants cost the federal government at most 10 billion a year. Stopping that wouldn't save that much either, since as the article points out, a significant amount of that is actually going to their US born children. And how much do we spend on fighting illegal immigration? I couldn't find a figure after googling for 10 minutes, everything just kept coming up with estimates for how much illegal immigrants cost us, with the numbers varying wildly.
Plus I suspect if we told mexico to pay 10 billion or nearly anything, they'd tell us to fuck off, and also that we can deal with the drug smuggling barons directly since we're mostly funding the drug smuggling ourselves anyway.
Headline should actually read for more accuracy:
Tech CEOs Tell US Gov't How To Increase Their Profits By $1 Trillion
I used to work for a company (now one of Fortune magazine's fastest growing companies) that applied technology to stopping health care fraud. While there *was* real fraud out there, much of what we caught were data quality errors, NOT fraud. The CEOs and business-people would then overstate everything about "savings" that could be recovered to make a sale to the customer. It makes me wonder... how many other companies do exactly the same thing, so that by the end of the day, the purported "savings" is really a total and complete mis-representation of what could be achieved. That really bugs the hell out of me!
I was gonna say 'lawyers' instead. Or hey! Settle disputes both legal and political with marijuana and fire them all. Problem solved.
Disclaimer: I don't actually smoke marijuana, or practice law, or politics.
Double disclaimer: You probably don't want to set legal precedents, etc, while on mind-altering drugs.
Or genetically engineer people who are resistant to chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, or hypertension (and their sequelae, which BTW accounts for nearly half of health care spending in the USA). But that's not going to happen because society doesn't have the balls to accept that yet.
The real factor that underlies global competitiveness is the rate of advance of knowledge and technology. When biz is in hoard mode (as it is now, sitting on trillions in cash), govt can and should create debt-free money to fund the innovation that will continue to keep the US at the forefront of developing technology and scientific knowledge. Japan has a 180% debt-to-gdp ratio, China's state-owned banks have a 23% default rate, and yet Japan's currency is strong and China's economy is booming because they innovate and produce things others want. Precisely in a recession is when govt should spend. Then when biz crawls out of the rock it's currently in licking its wounds from its latest screw-up we can balance the budget and VC will fund innovation again like during the 90s.
Remember that article a couple of weeks ago about really old computers used at NASA?
Well, now imagine that there's also a group trying to tell you that you have to reduce your number of machines, and move them all to virtual machines. Oh, but we don't support your 10-15 year old OS, so you're going to have to port everything. What? The person who wrote the software's been gone for 8 years? Yeah, we're going to port software we don't know, and risk losing a satellite.
What about the webservers? Those are easy to consolidate ... you're just going to have to move it all to ColdFusion. And um ... okay, we'll support PHP, too. What? You're running custom CGIs? Oh, no, we don't support that. You need over 100TB of storage, as we can't NFS mount from the main data archive as it's behind a firewall? Oh, well, maybe it's best you keep running your own webserver.
And the sad thing is ... every time someone new gets in charge, they start the same thing all over again.
We are *not* all alike. Yes, there are some things that can be consolidated, and we're doing what we can, given the sysadmin time that's not tied up documenting security risk or whatever new paperwork's popped up this week that was due three weeks ago but we were never told about.
It's kinda like physicists encountering a new subject -- you see some patterns when you look at it from a distance, assume it's all the same, and that you can generalize everything ... and then fail horribly in delivering what they promise. (What percentage of IT projects fail? How many were because they didn't fully understand the problem, and made bad assumptions?) How many of the people involved in the report are trying to sell hardware, services or other 'solutions' to the government? They're not the ones fielding e-mail from pissed off people telling you how the government's wasting money because you can't keep the most important image ever up on your website for them to see whenever they want, and that one picture is the only reason that your agency should even exist ... nevermind that whole science thing.
um ... I think I'm starting to rant. I'm still pissed off about the whole great new 'one card' crap the US government went to, so it now takes *3 MONTHS* to get a replacement badge. And they want to force a requirement that we have to use it to log into machines? (so they force us to buy card readers for each desktop) That's great, 3 months that I can do my job the next time I lose my badge again.
Yep, definately ranting now.
You know how companies could save millions of dollars? Stop overpaying their CEOs who have no idea what the hell they're talking about.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I'll bite on this one because I'm actually a Project Manager for Northrop Grumman Information Services. My views are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my company, yadda, yadda, blah, blah.
First, you need to know (or remember) that huge corporations (be they defense contractor, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, whomever) are often a conglomeration of previously small companies. The company I've worked for has changed names four times as it was bought up repeatedly (twice in a three-month span one year) and is only most recently called "Northrop Grumman" but, for the most part, I still work with and for the same small group of people I hired on with nearly a decade ago. Yes, corporations add capabilities when they see opportunity. Who wouldn't?
Second, depending upon the work you do, adding all of the additional infrastructure required to meet the various regulatory requirements of a government contract is non-trivial - security clearances alone, if required, can be a nightmare. The company never says "Hey, I want to add more costs to my bottom-line and reduce my profits". Those bureaucratic requirements are driven by the government, not the contractor.
Third, often times the contracts awarded by the government require or strongly encourage the Bigs (like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.) to hire "Smalls" - smaller, perhaps more specialized corporations, that would not otherwise be able to get involved in these contracts. "Disadvantaged" small businesses, those run by minorities or other protected classes, are also highly sought after by the Bigs in order to meet various participatory quotas, etc. This type of thing allows the Big to address the regulatory and management issues while funneling funds to Smalls who might do much of the work. You learn after awhile, at least at Northrop Grumman, that you are an integrator first and a developer second - if you can reuse something someone else has built that is *much* better than building it yourself (you know, that whole "reuse" idea that we've all been chasing after for the past 50 years).
All of that aside, a huge amount of costs are associated with government bureaucracy. The profit margins on my contract, for example, are *limited* to 8.5%. No matter how much I spend, I'm only going to earn 8.5% - that profit margin is ridiculously tiny when you consider what a firm operating at commercial rates is going to make profits wise. "Oh...so you'll just drag it out so you make more money." Ha! Sure. The project drags out...but I can tell you from 15 years working with the US Government, it drags on and on not because I really want to keep working on the same stinkin' thing (redoing it over and over) for my own giggles and grins but because the US Government is a huge bureaucracy and it takes forever for them to make a decision on anything. Need clarification on a feature request? Well...first we have to work that through the Government Program Management Office (PMO) who oversees your project, then they need to potentially track down user-representatives, convene a meeting, possibly do a usability test and/or request a conference, get multiple disparate agencies who are going to use your tool to agree to put aside their differences and unique business processes, etc., etc., etc.
Meanwhile, the team is being held to an unrealistic schedule set for political reasons. To minimize risk of schedule slippage, you make a decision and press on accepting the fact that you may have to rework the feature you just developed. The government entities that are closest to you are just as frustrated as you are...and they know they can't let your team go onto other projects because then they lose the people who understand the project and its history - who have the requirements and design knowledge to meet the needs of the customer so they keep giving you money to keep your team together. You do your best to catch up on the copious amounts of documentation the government requires (for my 450K SLOC system
I'll dissolve the US government. Then it won't be spending any more money.
EVER!.
What do you mean I don't have the supreme authority to do that? I'm EMPEROR NORTON'S REINCARNATED HEIR!
That means I can do what I want. Or else.
My father is an engineer, and worked for a fairly well-known engineering company for a couple years while I was in junior high. The particular project he was working on was a contract for NASA, to build a new "Advanced Solid Rocket Motor" to lift the space shuttle. The project was started in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, to design a safer (and I believe cheaper, also) lift system. The company contracted to do the job was, so far as I know, hitting all the milestones, and NASA was, I believe, pleased with the results, but just about the 11th hour, when they had all the designs finished, and most of the tooling built and setup at the manufacturing facility, and were about to start producing them - after a couple Billion had been spent on the project, it was *cancelled* so the contract could go to another company in a different state, and that state's Senator had just become the head of a committee or something, and used his position to mothball the ASRM project, and start up a different rocket motor project. 2 Billion+ dollars down the flusher, as quick as that.
What company would kill a $2 Billion+ project at the 11th hour when they are about to deliver product, and start all over spending 2 or 3 billion more to another company to produce a different but more-or-less equivalent product?
That's government waste for you.
You think the lobbyists that work for Phillip Morris will ever let that happen?
Stop spending trillions of dollars on missiles and other weapons that stay dorment in silos, never to be used.
I'm an IT Consultant, and I've had plenty of experience working with the Federal government. I can tell you first hand, the word consolidation is not something they like to hear. You see the Federal government employees I've worked with don't care about saving money, in fact I have seen just the opposite, they care about spending every last cent of their budget (but not going over). IT operations at the federal level are difficult to consolidate too because everyone has a very small change purse, rather than one large wallet. So they operate and purchase goods and services like a million little small businesses rather than consolidate into one IT Services purchasing power house. Finally you have the people angle, never mind the usual politics of fiefdoms and control, the mere mention of reducing head count upon completion of a consolidation project is very taboo.
So good on industry to try and show them the way to operational efficiency and savings but I would be shocked if it were actually implemented. A project like this would take a decade at least, or 2.5 terms, so I just don't see it.
Cut the defense budget. Because of the tough economy, people are lining up at recruitment offices. If you can walk and talk, you get a paycheck. A paycheck for building a better world? No, a paycheck for destroying things. Instead of paying people to destroy things, we should pay people to build things. The US military is the biggest WPA style welfare program in the history of mankind - but it's a force of destruction. If we funneled the same resources into our local economy, the US would be just fine. More than fine - we would kick everyone else's ass. Stupid redneck "patriots" have their patriotism completely ass-backwards.
"5 million ways to kill a CEO", the Coup ... You could throw a twenty in a vat 'o hot oil
When he jump in after it watch him boil
Toss a dollar in the river and when he jump in
If you can find he can swim
put lead boots on him and do it again!....
Wow.. What complete and utter rubbish your post is. Are you seriously suggesting that we pay countries not to piss us off so we start a war with them? That's like giving the playground bully money before he threatens you. I mean seriously, when has bribing countries ever worked longer then it took for them to want more money? I mean look at what it did for France- they have a complex history of this NEVER WORKING.
But hell, why look at some country full of frogs when you can look at Afghanistan itself. Yes, we were giving Afghanistan money before we invaded it. So why didn't your plan work there?
Yea, there is no such thing as free health care, no such thing as un-winnable wars, and no such thing as saving money while spending it on science and RnD, send man to Mars etc or free health care. You essentially took the rant of the day, a bunch of wishes from different parts of the public interests groups, conflated them without any thought to the relationships with each other and the point you attempted to make, and them spouted them as if it was something practically achievable or actually possible. You remind me of the Monday morning quarterbacks at the office that say their coaching strategy would have won the game and when you inquire what that was, they reply with make touchdowns as if they are clueless of the mechanics of the game. Perhaps you are, perhaps you are confused. Perhaps English isn't your first language and you didn't say anything remotely close to what you thought you were saying. But what you said was an epic failure in the least.
If they were really interested in saving money they would reduce defense spending by half. It would still be more than anyone else in the world.
What illegal immigration? Just call them Cuban instead of Mexican. Problem solved.
23% of US federal budget is spend on "defense", as in sending troops half-way around the world to destroy a country that has absolutely ZERO chance of attacking US on any meaningful scale.
23%.
Twenty-Three Percent
TWENTY-FUCKING-THREE PERCENT
Imagine your neighbor spend 23% of his income on "defense". This is nuts.
One thing I notice about centralization attempts in bureaucracies is that the needs of specific groups of users are often higher than the generic service offered by the central service, and the centralizers don't care. The central service will generally offer mediocre services: good enough to pass as usable, but barely.
If your particular job or group happens to depend heavily on that service and your group is not seen as "important" enough to get improvements for, then you are stuck with their C-grade service unless you reinvent the wheel to better fit your particular group or tasks. This is often what happens, resulting in redundancy. I've yet to see a magic way around this phenomenon.
There generally has to be competition to provide incentive, but competition is redundancy. Thus, there's a fundamental push-and-pull between redundancy and centralization.
Two or more groups doing the same thing is obviously going to be costly. The single group (centralizers) doing it may be cheaper, but they are also more likely to be lumbering and indifferent. The local reinvention I talk about above is just a different form of competition than formal competition in which the redundancy is intentionally created to foster competition.
The Soviets spent decades trying to find a solution, without success. It seems that intentional or organic competition (local reinvention) is going to have to happen one way or another. You force too much centralization and the system clogs up. You allow too much competition and then tax payers are paying for redundancy. We usually end up at a happy middle, or perhaps a begrudging middle more like.
Table-ized A.I.
Quit outsourcing the tech jobs (hardware and software) and then the feds are able to cut back on welfare, foodstamp, unemployment, and gain taxable income to boot.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
> That's like giving the playground bully money before he threatens you
No, it's rather like the playground bully giving you money instead of threatening you.
I think most of the residents of those countries would settle for bombs not falling on their houses.
In other news, my barber tells me I need a haircut.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
It's amazing other, more enlightened governments did not think of this before.
Good luck with that. They'll just find new ways to do you actually punish the companies involved, then they'll just re-incorporate in Dubai.
Plus you've got all the nutbars who think reducing taxes on the rich will result in more jobs (As far as I can figure out it works like this: 1. give the rich more money, 2. ????? 3. Jerbs).
You mean how the lieutenants pay the Capo and the Capo's pay the Don?
This system has too many flaws, it will just result in one side holding the other hostage. It's better that Income Tax is collected on a federal level then levies and fees for services (such as land tax) is collected on a state and local level. In AU, Lgov (local Government) pays for garbage collection, so they charge each land owner in their district a yearly fee for council services (not just garbage collection). State Gov pays for roads, so the state gov collects the fuel levies so they are not entirely dependent on Canberra for funds.
Good luck with that...
Say about 90% of the illegal in my nation are Visa over-stayers from first world nations, we normally fine them individually but if we can just send that bill to Washington... when can I collect my check.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Don't forget what NG did to Virginia! We just cleaned up the mess of consolidated resources supposedly saving us money but instead loss of service and massive cost overruns!
...and quit paying for the same thing.
I know someone who has a SECRET clearance. He's in the Marine Corps, has served as an Intelligence Analyst. In order to get his HAZMAT endorsement on his CDL, he had to go through a separate process of fingerprinting at a TSA-certified location, and a separate TSA background check...I guess the previous background check by the FBI and constant fingerprints for deployments aren't good enough to drive gasoline around.
Having a SECRET clearance, I'm sure the FBI, CIA, NSA, and obviously the Marine Corps has all this information on file. The TSA should just accept the other agency's background check, but no, they've got to do their own. Waste of time, resources, and money.
He did his background check at the same time as another guy, the other guy DIDN'T have a clearance, both came back in the same amount of time, so they obviously aren't sharing information.
Stop expensive services and see if anyone complains. If not, you just cut waste!
The real savings in switching to Linux - apart from not paying the cost of a low-end laptop for the OS alone - would be the improvement in security. Mount /home as noexec and the system will be invulnerable to viruses without a privilege escalation exploit (or exploiting a service running as root over the network, but that's usually only an issue on servers). Ubuntu already comes with AppArmor set up by default to contain any other potential damage to the user's home directory, with this change it would be very difficult for idiot users to run random executables on their systems. Drive-by exploits would be a thing of the past. The easiest way to get a virus on a system would be to make the user open a malicious installer package and make them enter their sudo password to install DancingBears.deb. How often do Windows users infect their systems with similar methods today? Probably less than 1/10th of infections overall are caused by users deliberately installing the virus themselves, and with Autorun/U3 out of the picture, removable storage won't be very useful as an infection vector. On office PCs where users have no superuser privileges, it would be impossible. In business environments, the only way to install unauthorized code would be via privilege escalation. And how do you get to that point? You attack a browser, PDF viewer, e-mail client, or something like that and hope AppArmor/SELinux doesn't get in the way.
Very few if any people would be able to make a living as a black hat.
Just as an idea, another way to get a virus on a Linux PC like this might be to "hijack" a legitimate application's functionality. Say you have a fancy office suite with highly advanced macro support. You could have it auto-load your special spreadsheet which runs a simple botnet client, and it would all seem legitimate. A browser plugin could be another example.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
When you sell hammers, all your problems look like nails.
Sure, IT people see better IT as the best way to save money. Public Health officials see better public health as the best way to save money. Envrionmentalists see Green Tech as the best way to save money. I could keep going down the list.
Really smart tech people stoop to balancing nominal bookkeeping numbers? beyond belief!!
What part of simple logic don't these people understand? My faith in tech CEOs is demolished.
Their efficiency tactics are all admirable, & to be encouraged - but their stated policy & goal reasoning is so naive it's embarrassing! .... no further comment).
We should be spared the shame of hearing them try to speak in public about fiscal policy (not that Obama or Geithner are any better, but
For god's sakes, someone PLEASE ask them to review the following links before EVER opening their mouths about fiscal policy again! PLEASE!
Sample references on basic monetary operations.
"Almost everybody talks about budget deficits. Almost everybody seems in principle to be against them. And almost no one, literally, knows what [they are] talking about."
http://books.google.com/books?id=jTSddYcGA6gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Robert+Eisner,+The+Misunderstood+Economy&source=bl&ots=nz6wJ-sCnK&sig=6Vli8JdSQLSwlg9K1rVcdnW2SIc&hl=en&ei=KeQx6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Public initiative and the beginning of US currency: A confused electorate can end up pretending to borrow it's own currency, instead of creating it? http://www.monetary.org/briefusmonetaryhistory.htm
Understanding Modern Money [a historical guide] http://books.google.com/books?id=6PMuExCtMe8C&pg=PA18&dq=Understanding+Modern+Money:+The+Key+to+Full+Employment+and+Price+Stability&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Fiscal sustainability 101, by Bill Mitchell http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=2943
Teaching the Fallacy of Composition: The Federal Budget Deficit, by Randy Wray http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/pn-pdf/PolicyNote2006-1.pdf
The 7 Deadly, Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, by Warren Mosler http://moslerforsenate.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/7DIF.pdf
"ECCLES: We [the Federal Reserve] created it.
PATMAN: Out of what?
ECCLES: Out of the right to issue credit money.
PATMAN: And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our government's credit?
ECCLES: That is what our money system is."
- Federal Reserve Board Governor Marriner Eccles in testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Currency in 1941, during questioning by Congressman Wright Patman about how the Fed got the money to purchase two billion dollars worth of government bonds in 1933. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Federal+Reserve+Board+Governor+Marriner+Eccles+in+testimony+before+the+House+Committee+on+Banking+and+Currency+in+1941
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriner_Stoddard_Eccles
“When our Federal Government, that has the exclusive power to create money, creates that money and then goes into the open market and borrows it and [pretends to pay]interest for the use of its own money, it occurs to me that that is going too far. I have never yet had anyone who could, t
...to outsource!
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
You must be entrenched in something, you're trying to add disclaimers to not be held responsible!
Don't worry it's only the internet!
Most of the budget is Defense, e.g. the military. This is fact. All this talk of 'waste' is a smoke screen to keep you from seeing the billions and billions handed off to defense contractors for free. What happened to rebuilding Iraq? Why is it after all these years their CAPITAL CITY still doesn't have electricity and running water for fsck's sake?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It just may happen... in california. Prop 19!
My page.
Celebrating saving $1 trillion over 10 years for the US government is like being on a 10-minute diet while you're in the bathroom and celebrating the tremendous accomplishment when looking at the scales.
Full of it. Since these CEOs don't have to directly deal with centralization, they only see the bottom line numbers which are entirely deceptive.
Centralization increases bureaucracy by putting all your eggs in one basket. This central authority will not care to do anything faster (because of overload, or by tenure sloth) and nothing you can do can threaten them to do move it. Been to the DMV, worked with SAP?
Also centralization makes it loose mobility and locality awareness/experience that it could use to optimize its processes. This is where secret Linux servers will pop up to work around all the centralized Windows server standardization. Forcing people to work outside the system to get things done is poor architecture.
Meantime, this also spells unemployment because it'll cut a lot of jobs in an economy that needs to keep people working. You can't cut your way into growth and success.
This is optimization of the pea next to the watermelon that is military spending.
This is small government, letting your house burn down:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/tennessee-firefighters-watch-home-burn/
Just scale it up, and imagine what a small USA government can't do. Welcome back to third-world agricultural, Dickens, industrialization-level America.
You gotta pay to be in first-class.
Tax like Eisenhower. Fight like Clinton. Problem solved.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
In the US this has played out in more subtle terms; but taxation and other structural elements in the economy have plainly shifted the balance away from labor towards capital. The tax code needs to be more progressive, and it won't kill the economy no matter how much the Republicans and TEA partiers scream. It just won't. Henry Ford was a huge honking capitalist, and he knew that the workers had to be able to afford the cars so he could make money.
Think about it--if one king had all the gold and silver, what would be the price of gold and silver? It wouldn't matter. People would abandon the metals and use something else. Same deal with dollars and any other currency. Of course, on the way to that extreme state, something else happens. The currency doesn't fall to zero, it just becomes worth less, and gets used less. That's what's happening with the dollar. The rich have more and more dollars, but the joke is kind of on them, because they're worth less and less. If you think buying gold will fix this problem, refer back to the beginning of this paragraph. Barter will take over, not gold, silver, or anything else that the working class doesn't also have.
Of course, we are nowhere near that point yet. There's still time. Just tax those who can afford it, and stop sending those who can't afford it off to pointless wars. It really is that simple.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Tech CEOs explain how government can spend more money on tech companies.
Wow.. What complete and utter rubbish your post is. Are you seriously suggesting that we pay countries not to piss us off so we start a war with them?
Actually, your Government does that already. Unfortunately, it's not very good at it, and the outcome is usually the opposite.
Of course, it's an absurdity to say that you pay a 'country'. A country is an intellectual construct, people who treat it as a thing are usually poor thinkers. No, you pay people, not countries, and those people may be the current government, if they are willing to do your country's bidding, or the soon-to-be-government-but-currently-terrorists-and-murderers in which case its more a case of supplying arms and intel.
Yes, we were giving Afghanistan money before we invaded it.
There you go again, confusing an intellectual construct with actual people. The USG has given money to many people in Afghanistan. First, they gave money to the Taliban so they could win the cold war for you, then they didn't like the Taliban any more so they gave money to the Northern Alliance, then they realized that there was no practical way to form a government without the support of the Pashtun majority, so they resumed aid to the Taliban, but not the bad Taliban, only the good Taliban, who are no longer called the Taliban because the Taliban are now bad/terrorists/Al Qaeda/something. Strange how the people who bomb civilians are the good guys, and the ones fighting them are the terrorists. It's a mad mad world. But I digress.
Yea, there is no such thing as free health care,
Not to society, but there is for the individual.
no such thing as un-winnable wars,
That depends on your definition of 'winning'. But if you were to nuke Iraq and Afghanistan until there was not one person left alive, I guess you could call that a 'win'. Might make it hard to get the oil from Iraq though.
and no such thing as saving money while spending it on science and RnD
You have no idea what you are talking about. RnD into resource efficiency usually has a 9 month payback period, after which it is all savings. Maybe this is why your country is in so much trouble right now.
- Nothing to see hear.
Oh yeah, come on with those fines... Just wait for the counter-fines when other countries look at all the ways in which the US is fucking them over, and decides they want to play the same game.
- These characters were randomly selected.
eom
Which sounds good, until you realize that there are times when deficit spending is legitimate and necessary for the good of all those that are concerned. It's just when you start wasting money on things like pointless wars and tax breaks for the rich that you start to run into trouble.
I would go even further: there is significant evidence that on average, deficit spending is a requirement for a well functioning economy in a fiat money system - where by well functioning I mean that there are no resources left to idle, in particular it means there is no waste in the form of idle production capacities and involuntary unemployment.
The key is to understand the basic mechanisms that underlie a modern monetary system, as that will forever change your understanding of the function of federal government debt. I recommend the book by economist Warren Mosler 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds for a start, it's not too long a read and really challenges your understanding of money in a good way. Once you're through with that, I recommend the blog of Australian economist Bill Mitchell, billy blog.
I wish I had mod points for you right now.
I would also add the following to what you wrote - it's not just innovation, but also demand that is key: The economic "experts" in the media are claiming all the time that government must make it easier for companies to get loans so that those companies can then invest. Well guess what? Companies on average don't want to invest in the current economic climate because there is not enough demand for their products and services.
Congress reigning in spending increases to less than 2% per year. Either way we can save lots of money. I doubt that if Republicans get the House and/or Senate they will do much about it, even if they did try they would be hounded by the Democrats for picking on the poor and the press who has been silent these two years would join in the smack down orgy.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
So pull out of the wars and halve the military. Biggest cut, least effect (you still have a bigger army than the next two biggest armies added together).
Funnily enough, those who want government to stop overspending DEMAND increase in military endeavours and spending...
Fine countries for each citizen found illegally residing in our country, *10 for repeat offenders.
How would that work? From the point of view of legal philosophy, on what basis could one sovereign nation decide to "fine" another sovereign nation? From the point of view of practicality, who would hand it down (read: who's the judge, who's the jury?), and how would you collect it?
I'm sorry, but your idea reeks of "we'll just make those foreigners pay our deficit for us - they can't vote, so we can safely ignore that they won't like that". Reality, alas, doesn't work that way.
Stop invading other countries!
Fewer lawyers, fewer inmates, fewer LEO, happier population.
For bonus points, get rid of excessively generous government employee pensions.
Cut government employee pensions? You've got to be kidding. How about cutting overly generous CEO pensions first?
I work for the Fed. WHERE OH WHERE do I sign up for the "excessively generous government employee pensions"? I really really want in on this. Just FYI, the CRS retirement system that you might think of as overly generous is GONE and has been for YEARS. No one hired now or in at least the last decade or two is part of it.
For bonus points, get rid of excessively generous government employee pensions.
Those are already phased out. I'm a Fed, and the retirement benefits are almost not worth it. There's an extremely small pension if you stay long enough, but most of your retirement comes from what is essentially a 401k (though the call it something else).
Except that, if you're a federal civilian employee (FERS), it's 1.1% * number of years.. So 22% of your salary after 20 years service. That's not all that special.
How about we start with excessive, generous government contracts! You no, these no bid contracts that cost the tax payer billions of dollars and don't deliver.
It's time for business to go back to the market and make their money there instead of suckling on Uncle Sams teet!
Sorry, it still amazes me after what, a quarter century, that the Grace Commission report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grace_Commission was and has still been ignored. Yes, the government can save money in consolidating IT services and support but then again take a look at the poor Navy/USMC and HP (NMCI) deal that is costing us Billions and isn't delivering any real value.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/
Our Government wastes billions of dollars!
Never mind that the same vendor(s) have been found guilty of fraud, we'll still do business with them. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/26/2046216/BSkyB-Wins-pound709m-Lawsuit-Against-HP-EDS
http://www.outlookseries.com/N8/Services/3992_HP_$3B_US_Navy_Continuity_Services_Contract_CoSC.htm
It doesn't matter which department, which project, they all waste money. It's a big, lumbering, inefficient system and as long as there's no restructuring of the way government works, this set of recommendations will fail.
Do we have the will to correct things? Not as long as people can still get their IPADs from China and still download ITunes..
On the IT front, the root cause of the problem is how all of this is funded and as long as appropriations are siloed, IT solutions will be siloed. The Navy will have their stuff. The Air Force, theirs and they won't inter-operate, share resources nor information. Yes, hooray, another report on how we can cut waste and do things better but does anybody really believe it will become reality? Politicians have a limited shelf life but beauracrats live forever and in DC, it's all about the appropriations and siloed funding. When you can fix Congress, you can fix the siloed appropriations mentality. Yeah, I know, like that will never happen.
If you want to save a Trillion dollars, don't spend it in the first place. Set a debt ceiling and start eliminating programs that don't add value! Start addressing the problem at the root. If you don't have the money, don't spend it. Shit, raise my taxes 5-10% if it means you will stop the endless borrowing!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
They got rid of generous government employee pensions in 1986. Anyone hired since then gets benefits that aren't much better than what they'd get in the private sector (probably less overall, if you take into account investing difference of the higher salary most private sector employees get).
I would take any advice from Palmisanio with a pinch of salt.
I worked in IBM for 10 years. It is a bureaucratic, process-bound hell-hole. One thing IBM certainly is not is efficient.
I also take great umbrage at being offered advice on efficiency by a man who pays himself $21M per year and indulges in personal use of the company jet whilst denying pay raises to the bulk of his workforce.
I'm sure that the US government could be more efficient, but IBM and Palmisano are NOT the organization or the person from whom to seek advice.
Medicare/Medicaid fraud is far more rampant than they would like you to believe. Part of it is the mandatory short timelines, part of it is the sheer number of claims, but the BIGGEST reason of all is that they don't behave like any private company would and protect their (OUR, the PUBLICs) assets responsibly. A big part of this is risk analysis, and pattern detection, watching out for and stopping fraudulent payments before they're made, not after.
And? What the hell is Mexico (the main offender) going to do, drive over the border with armed drug gangs? Use the Mexican army? We're talking about a nation that still flies the F-5. I've been praying that things get bad enough on the border that they'll end up rotating a couple of Marine Corp MEUs fresh from Iraq right onto the southern border.
No, what we do is create large hard labor prisons and have the bastards earn their keep under armed guard while growing their own food and stamping such items as license plates. A year for the first offense sounds about right, and then take retina and DNA samples to identify repeat offenders for enhanced penalties.
You're pulling this out of your ass, and you know it. What it means is that farmers would be forced to pay a living wage to our citizens, complete with OSHA protection. In the end we'd all pay more for food, which is the way it should be since everything in this fucking country is artificially cheap due to everything from subsidies to currency distortion.
This reminds me of the bugaboo of calling somebody anti-Semitic and how it's lost its effectiveness: hello jerkoff, some of us do care, and it's not "the fringe". I'm a centrist who gives a damned. I give a shit about other legal citizens of this nation, whether they're black, white, Latino, native American, what have you. Cunts like you are what have made the nation gutless and ineffective.
Love your comment. Free-marketeers always wave Adam Smith, saying, "See! The invisible hand will fix market malfunctions faster and better than governments can." Of course, then they rarely read past the early chapter that talks about the invisible hand to the parts where Smith addresses how those with wealth game the system, which is the behavior that the free-marketeers really want to indulge in. And they never read to the final chapters where Smith says that the free market produces evils that only governments can fix. Karl Marx, sadly, only read the final chapters and built his whole argument upon the evils of the free market.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
>And? What the hell is Mexico (the main offender) going to do
Nationalize all the foreign-owned industrial assets that are operating in their country, and convert them into military production infrastructure, as a first step.
That's what I would do.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You are responding to someone with a right-wing reality assumption that the current administration isn't enforcing immigration laws, when the truth is that the current administration has done significantly more deportations than any other in history, and not only that, the deportations have had a much higher rate of including violent criminals.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Not in the way the parent was suggesting. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it strongly appears that he thinks that when we are about to go to war with some country, we stop and give them money instead. That's IMHO just retarded.
I don't really disagree except that time and time again, paying someone for peace has proved to have peace that lasted until they wanted more. This was true when the french paid of the vikings, and when they attempted to become Hitlers buddies so it isn't some new concept either.
As you stated previously, the government is a construct composed of people who run the thing. When you give something to the government, you are essentially giving it to the people running the government. I'm sorry that confuses you and you think it means others are poor thinkers, but it's only a logical extension and obvious statement.
First you accuse me of being a poor thinker then you make a stupid statement like this? I mean seriously, any simple google search would have shown you that the Taliban was not around when the US was funding the mujaheddin when Russia was at war with them and the mujaheddin is absolutely not the taliban. Perhaps you should stop and think about this yourself, maybe even learn about what in the hell you are talking about.
The taliban was not even a word in any vocabulary until 1995 and the US stopped funding what became the northern alliance after the soviets pulled out because we were afraid of Russian turning on us. What you just said there is either a complete fabrication, or the idiotic ranting of someone who can't follow a time line.
You should digress. Your statement means nothing in reality without your fallacy supporting it.
Nope, not then either. Someone is paying for it as we do not live in some communist utopia where money or compensation for your efforts are unnecessary.
Iraq probably should have been turned into a glass parking lot a long time ago. But you seem to be suffering from a major flaw here. You are assuming that the wars are about oil when only those apposed to the wars have made that claim. Perh