Pocshy2.0 wrote:
Jay wrote:
People don't want to see their taxes increased because the money is invariably squandered or just used to pay for government employee raises or pensions. Yes, I'm bitter. So are most people. I think most people would gladly pay higher taxes if the government was actually effective.
See, this is the mentality I don't get after having worked some time in government.
1.) government workers make less than private sector workers doing the same work at the same level of education. We actually have huge talent retention problems because of it. Try getting a P. Eng. to advise of the building code for 60k CAD a year.
b.) we're slow because our management structure is necessarily more complex than the private sector's. What companies do you know of where a new moron from the general public can lead the organization every 4 years with no continuity of thought? We need lengthy approvals processes to make sure that no one bad manager can scuttle the ship.
4.) we don't get to fail. If a private company goes belly up, there's 10 others making the same widget that will fill the gap. Government fails? Riots in the streets. Sure, there are minor failures, but fundamentally you need to understand that government is not a business and never should be. Government is motivated by such a different set of goals and drivers that it is completely moronic to believe that the public sector and private sector should be measured by the same yardstick.
Really I just think people who dislike government for its very existence are complete retards. Want to see what extremely limited government regulation looks like? Visit China.
I have no doubt that you and your coworkers mean well. In my experience with government agencies they seem to be staffed with a scattering of young idealists, an overwhelming number of immigrants, and old burnt out time servers. Ambition tends to be low and office politics and back biting reign supreme. This is just what I've seen, your mileage may vary.
The biggest problem I have is that there's no accountability. I see money thrown around willy nilly because it's not theirs and no one is getting fired if they go wildly over budget. I've seen two million dollar change orders shrugged off. Two million on a ten million dollar project. This is funny money territory. But if you break it down, that project is costing the average family of four city taxpayers $6 instead of $5. Big deal, right? But how many other projects and programs are there? It adds up quickly.
The political class should be the ones actually protecting us from stuff like this, but your average politician despises the voters. We're just whiners that don't want to pay for stuff. We stand between them and utopia, if only they could extract just a bit more...
