Vice President Joe Biden shows surprising humility when he describes this as better than expected. If I were Joe Biden, my personal expectations would remain pretty low as well, but this is patently ridiculous. By any fair and objective means of evaluation, this program has careened past Failure-Land; afar into the darkling plain of Clusterkfuc Morder!
Measuring the effects of stimulus against the same efficiency standards used to rate major defense contractors gives us a snapshot view of just how rapidly our stimulus dollars are going up in smoke. When the Defense Contract management Agency evaluates the cost effectiveness of a defense contractor, they look closely at how much the contract costs per hour of labor performed.
After subtracting off material costs, they look at the actual salary being paid to the worker, and then they look at the costs that have nothing to do with that salary. The percent of costs that have nothing to do with paying for labor performed are termed overhead. The total cost of labor per hour is called the fully-burdened labor rate. The percent of that cost that is for stuff other than salaries is termed in shorthand the wrap rate.
Assuming the stimulus plan isn’t buying wholesale lots of raw materials for industrial plants, the material costs are negligible. They’ve spent the $16Bn in question on hiring people and on other stuff that goes into the wrap rate. To put 30K to work at $16Bn implies approximately $500,000 in spending per individual hired. (I’m being nice this morning, the unrounded figure is less flattering.)
In 2007, the median US income tallied approximately $50,000. If the typical stimulus job is about at this salary, we get a wrap rate of 900%! Defense contractors will feel the wrath of Uncle Sam for rates over 300%. Our stimulus plan is performing three times worse than the level of contract performance that helps get weapon systems terminated.
Realistically, the programs in question probably gold-plate these salaries a wee-bit. A case where the average stimulus job pays $100,000 a year to people for not showing up in unemployment stats and making Congress look bad, would imply a wrap rate of only 400%. A contractor who knew Jim Moran or Jack Murtha would indubitably be allowed to continue “working” at that scale of waste, fraud and abuse.
Typically, the truth lands somewhere between the extremes. Nationwide, the median adjusted base pay for a federal government worker equals $60,000 in rough order of magnitude terms. Fedsmith.com gets more specific.
So, according to OPM, here is the median adjusted base pay for Executive branch (non-postal) employees as of March 2006:$60,636.
So we take the $500,000 figure apart and assume stimulus workers have my rough approximation of the median government salary. This gives us $60K in actual stimulus and $440K in overhead. Our overhead percent comes in at 733.33%. Keep in mind once Boeing or Martin-Marietta get over 300%; these guys are profiteering scumbags! Only in the magical kingdom of Joe Biden’s head could a 733.33% wrap-rate equal anything other than “what was my attorney’s phone number again?”
This vastly ineluctable kfuctitude befuddles your humble blogging correspondent’s pedestrian mind. It probably fries circuits on smarter models than Little, Old Moi. I’ve been a loyal Washington Redskins fan for decades and still can’t figure out how Biden's Boyoes managed to perform this poorly.
Yet, to read Thomas Friedman, to read Paul Krugman, and to read Robert Reich, we need more stimulus. We’d do better subsidizing Tony Montana from Scarface. That guy put people to work on every street corner. The turnover rate was high, the working conditions left much to be desired. However, the .45 Caliber Lean Six Sigma initiatives insured that his employees were good stewards of the company product.
What this stimulus program does is enshrine inefficiency as the officially approved American business model. Massive government largess is now how things don’t get done in business today. Absent a major electoral turnover, there will never be any penalty for doing twice as poorly at stewardship as a major defense contractor libel to be judged fraudulent or indolent by officially published standard.
Former Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis once proposed voting in an upcoming election based on competence; not ideology. I personally don’t have to go that route. I hate Barack Obama’s ideology as well as Joe Biden’s professional standards of negligence.
But if you straddle the fence on Lib Vs Con type stuff, ask yourself a very important question. How long can an organization of any type, on any scale, under any conditions expect to survive if it spends $25 to obtain $3 of useful value on a daily basis? People will argue contra that Rahm Emanuel and others of his ilk, are among the most competent sharks swimming in a vicious, primordial political ocean.
I remind these people that the authors of our government’s liability for negligence rules lumped waste, fraud and abuse in the same category for intelligent reasons. At the end of the day, they all have the same effect. It doesn’t matter how the Kansas City Chiefs got to 0-5. It doesn’t matter how people got roped into investing with Bernie Madoff.
Regardless of the causal vectors, the Obama Administration still spends $25 of stimulus money to get $3 of useful result. You don’t have really care whether Rush Limbaugh ever owns an NFL team to understand that this pathway leads to darkness. You don’t have to think Michael Steele is making the GOP all down wit’ it and fly to understand that the Democrats will never perform any better than $25 of stimulus spending to generate $3 of useful performance until reality kicks their rectums good and hard.
If this election isn’t about anything else. If we truly don’t care whether Iran gets the capability to burn Jerusalem off the face of the planet, this election is about what management model pervades American society. We cannot be as wasteful as General Motors and avert tragedy.
The Federal Government cannot continue to spend $25 and get back $3 in return. There is no Mommy around to make this all better when it blows up in our faces. DCMA has no authority to audit this terrible stimulus program or to reprimand the cretins who executed it with almost intentional lack of precision. We, the voters, have that power. In 2012 we must use it.
A wrap-rate of 733.33% is not just some abstruse statistic. It is a symptom of a nation dying in a state of ill-grace. A nation worthy of a one-way ticket to Hell. Redemption comes from firing these idiots. Redemption can come in 2012.
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