The private sector does it worse and more expensive.

[white_wolf]

Someone on another forum posted an NYT article that really destroys the right wing lie of "the private sector does it cheaper and better." Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/us/13contractor.html?_r=2

[bighart]

1. That article tells me there isn't enough oversight in governemnt contracts

The fact that goods and services cost more when outsourced is as much a result of lack of accountability and oversight as it is anything else.

[Mr Deltoid]

5. Efficiency is not possible with a profit motive

AND what we learned in Iraq is that privatization leads to contracts leads to bribery and cronyism. Most of the contracts were not filled because it was too dangerous, but the contractors kept the money anyway.

[Selatius]

8. Even if there were accountability and oversight, it would still be more expensive to outsource work.

Government agencies typically do not exist to generate a profit but to serve the public first and foremost. Now, private contractors can do many of the same operations a government agency can, but the difference is they tack a profit mark-up on the final cost. They exist first to make a profit like any private entity with shareholders who want profits. Government agencies don't have that fiduciary responsibility unlike a private corporation. They can simply operate at-cost. A private corporation can't do that.

[patrice]

11. This is a necessary but not sufficient element. Quantitative measures can institutionalize qualities

averse to the goods and services that people are paying for and the difference between government and private quantitative measures is the fact that WE have total oversight and power over government accountability (if we choose to exercise it) and NOTHING but the highly derivative effects of INSTITUTIONALIZED markets over private accountabilities.

[ThomCat]

15. It is also a necessary result of giving the work to companies

that are going to add a profit markup, and an overhead markup, to everything. They have to if they are going to be able to stay in business and make a profit, and pay their investors.

The idea that for-profit companies can do anything cheaper than the government could do it itself with career civil service employees, or cheaper than the military could do it with all of those low-paid volunteer recruits is simply ridiculous.

It defies all logic. It always did.

The original idea was supposed to be that those outsource companies specialized in what they did, so they had very special knowledge, and very highly skilled staff, and this allowed them to do very specialized work better and cheaper. But that doesn't work when you're trying to outsource every possible kind of work. Including work for standard clerical staff, and standard cafeteria staff, and standard motor-pool staff, and standard security staff, and standard everyone else. This is all routine types of work that requires either little training, or a moderate amount of training and experience, or even if it requires more training and experience, it still isn't so difficult and specialized that the government and the military didn't have thousands of qualified people available to do it in-house already.

The only places where out-sourcing made any sense might have been someplace like NASA, or in the intelligence agencies, but when those agencies use people (engineers, scientists, consultants, etc.) from outside agencies they keep a very close eye on them and know very specifically what each person has been individually hired to do because of his/her expertise. That's very different from mass-outsourcing of everything simply because of a dogmatic belief that the government can't do anything right, and corporations must be hired to do it all instead.

Mass-outsourcing was a ploy from the very beginning to drain the treasury. Democrats in office knew it, and participated in the whole ploy because corporate lobbyists kept giving them checks, and made it worth their while to participate. They cannibalized our government for donations.

With the big push for free trade agreements, they're still doing it. x(

[bighart]

17. Outsourcing is not always a lower cost option.

But it doesn't always cost more either. There is no simple answer to this equation.
The government is charged $300.00 for a hammer because they will pay $300.00 for a hammer.
Itemized billing is only effective if the payer is willing to take the time and make the effort
to scrutinize and challenge the billing when necessary. Of course that takes time and resources that
cost money as well so a cost/benefit analysis has to be conducted to determine if the benefit to doing all
the work to scrutinize is greater than the cost of not doing it.

[ThomCat]

18. That's a ridiculous non-answer.

The military paid $300 for a hammer because once you reach a certain size, bureaucratic inefficiency is inevitable.

It is impossible to combine cost reduction benefits of economies of scale, with the supervision benefits of small offices and networks of sites. The military went big, and paid for it.

Outsourcing alone does not address the conflicts of this dichotomy, especially when the outsourcing is done only on large scales with large corporations.

The solution is to break the large bureaucracy into small units that supervise internally, instead of relying on large centralized supervision.

This does involve some repetition of functions, such as having accounting, telecom, IT, and other support staff decentralized throughout. But the benefit is improved accountability, and improved opportunities as people can transfer to other locations and share skills and experience. The organization grows a larger knowledge base in more locations that it can draw upon at any time, any place.

None of this has anything to do with deciding whether or not to outsource. The decision to outsource was still entirely a political decision. That decision was made entirely because of political pressures from politicians, who were getting pressured by lobbyists from defense contractors, who wanted the money that would be made available once they got those contracts. It's that simple.

[Newest Reality]

2. Anything run by a band of

profit-taking locusts will suck the fruits of labor and services into it and spit-out the dregs as leftovers for the people.

When profit, not benefit to life through cooperation, are the sole goal, what could we expect?

[patrice]

12. You said it more clearly than I did. nt

:hi:

[Newest Reality]

19. Thanks patrice!

I am just glad we are saying it in the best ways we can.

I hope we will all continue to say it, think it and do what we have to.

Let it be said in many ways by more people until it rises in volume and frequency like a carrier wave across the land. It is time for our common voice to rise above the moans of futility and transform into persistent demands for justice and action for all. I could imagine a voice of unity blaring like a klaxon of unstoppable change and swelling to the point of shaking the foundations of corruption and corporatism.

Not many of us will be able to thrive or even continue much longer in this political and economic stranglehold. It looks like we are edging towards a critical mass.

[aquart]

3. Duh!

Privatization has destroyed our economy.

[bklyncowgirl]

4. When you add administrative costs and profit that's not surprising.

Direct public hiring cuts out the middle man.

[Overseas]

6. Great article. The private sector costs a lot more and does worse.

One area I've thought about is military services.

When we did those jobs in-house, our soldiers got valuable job training for when they left the service. They learned how to cook for hundreds of people, how to do the electrical wiring on base, etc. So our tax dollars served a double purpose-- helping our military effort and providing job training.

Soldiers also had to be focused on quality control because they needed to answer to their supervising officers.

Therefore it was painful to read of privatized military contractors serving moldy food to our soldiers and electrocuting them in their showers with faulty wiring.

And there is so much profiteering in our military privatization. I remember when most of our legislators, Democrats included, were cleverly incited into screaming for the defunding of ACORN because of the right wing's theater of possible fraud. Alan Grayson and some others suggested that if our legislators were in favor of cutting ACORN off because of suspected fraud, they really should stop dealing with military contractors ALREADY convicted of fraud.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/whoops-anti-acorn-bill-ro_n_294949.html

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who's Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.

http://www.contractormisconduct.org/

[OHdem10]

7. Every time I hear Private Sector from the Republicans, all I can

think of is Enron, Lucite, Delphi (you know that long
list of companies who failed and left their workers
high and dry with no pensions).

Then I think of the Banksters and their gambling binge
which brought the Financial system to its knees.

Every day we hear of some company trying to do things
cheap and dirty by cutting corners.

And I am supposed to want to turn things over to them,
or give them more rope to hang themselves with deregulation.

No thanks.

[ThomCat]

16. I think you meant Lucent.

But, yes, I agree. You're right. The belief that companies necessary do anything better is nonsense, and always has been.

[blindpig]

9. Profit is the result of theft

How could it be otherwise?

[ProgressiveProfessor]

10. Be interesting to compare the GAO studies vice POGO

Some of the numbers cited in the article are clearly bogus, hopefully the actual POGO study was more honest.

[pnorman]

13. K&R

n/t

[Starry Messenger]

14. There's an article at Wall St. Journal today putting down gov't jobs programs

for being "wasteful". I just about bust a fucking gut.

[MadHound]

20. Not necessarily, at least not in all things

I would hate to go to a government run bar, or government run restaurant.

We do need a private sector, just as we need a public sector. The trouble is, the private sector wants to run everything.