[quote=livinincali][quote=CA renter]Sorry, flu, but you’re wrong about the system being set up to be inefficient and lethargic, and also about nobody wanting to save money and reduce spending. The public sector gets a lot more done with less money than most private entities. Just because Fox News spews a lot of BS about the inefficiency of govt/efficiency of the private sector, it doesn’t make it true. If you compare apples to apples, you’ll see that a lot of government activities are carried out for a lot less money than what private companies could do it for, and they often handle more complex situations, and do it faster and better as well.
Yes, the government is top-heavy, and there is a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse (especially where private contractors and RE developers are concerned). But that tends to be concentrated at the political level, not at the ground level. When people compare things like the AAA vs the DMV, they often forget that the DMV processes far more transactions and also handles the most complex jobs.[/quote]
I’ve worked in both and I have to say that the private sector tends to be more efficient with it’s business processes. The problem with most government services is a convoluted set of business processes that slowly built up over time. The reason privatization doesn’t work that well is because the private sector isn’t allowed to change the business process I.e. the Red Tape that never goes away even when you try to privatize. A private company might have a really efficient way of processing water bills but they have no understanding of all the quirky business rules involved so the private sector gets bogged down with the funky rules and end up with cost overruns.
Say you privatized trash collection but forced the private company to pick up trash on the exact same routes/times even if they were extremely inefficient. Your private company might be able to design a route to pick up all the trash in 4 days with 20% less miles driving but if the government tells you can’t do that because the citizens are used to the old way and can’t be asked to change, then of course it’s going to cost more. That was my experience in working with the city. Too many egos with inefficient processes that they weren’t willing to change even if they was a better way to do things.
Of course when you’ve worked in that environment you either believe that your process is actually efficient or you just accept it because efforts to change it are met with too much resistance.[/quote]
I’ve also worked in both and can say that it depends entirely on which public or private entity we’re talking about. Some public agencies run a very tight ship, and some private entities do so as well. Some public agencies are truly horrible stewards of public money, and some private entities are every bit as bad.
As a taxpayer advocate, I worked diligently when in public service to preserve taxpayer money at every turn; and I still advocate for taxpayers, as a concerned and politically active citizen, to this day. Obviously, that’s not the case with every public employee, and I would never defend those people.
When I suggest that private entities are not necessarily any more efficient than public entities, I’m referring to stories like this:
“The U.S. government is wasting billions of dollars each year paying contractors to do work that could be done for nearly half the price by federal employees, according to a first-of-its-kind report released today by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).
The report, which analyzed 35 federal job classifications, debunks the myth promoted by industry that private contractors cost less than government employees. Instead, POGO’s study found that using contractors to perform services may actually increase, rather than decrease costs to taxpayers.”
“Introduction
Private sector healthcare delivery in low- and middle-income countries is sometimes argued to be more efficient, accountable, and sustainable than public sector delivery. Conversely, the public sector is often regarded as providing more equitable and evidence-based care. We performed a systematic review of research studies investigating the performance of private and public sector delivery in low- and middle-income countries.
…Conclusions
Studies evaluated in this systematic review do not support the claim that the private sector is usually more efficient, accountable, or medically effective than the public sector; however, the public sector appears frequently to lack timeliness and hospitality towards patients.”
“CNAC analysis indicates that the observed cost of the TCI contract
was virtually identical to the estimated cost of in-house operation by
government employees—based on practices observed at similar
BOP facilities.”
“CONCLUSION
The advantage of a meta-regression analysis is that it allows us to determine the
overall impact of phenomena across a wide range of studies. Previous narrative
meta-analyses of cost differences between public and private production
have reported mixed findings (Boyne, 1998; Hirsch, 1995; Hodge, 2000; Bel &
Warner, 2008). Our meta-regression analysis allows us to determine the impact of
certain variables that account for these differences across studies.
In the studies we examine, the average t-statistic for privatization is negative,
implying lower costs on average for private production. However, this result does
not hold up in the more rigorous meta-regression analysis once we have controlled
for sample size and other factors.”
