Thought this was interesting, too. I guess “privatization” doesn’t really save money, after all. Gee, who would’ve guessed?
Looks like a lot of our financial problems are tied to privatization and war (and domestic spying, IMHO). Things the “leftists,” who are often blamed for expanding govt costs, are largely opposed to.
….
[from the above-linked article]:
“Peak Washington of the early 2010s, many economists believe, got its start during the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Reagan’s messianic push to get government out of the way of private-sector growth famously led to lower taxes and reduced regulation. It also led to a subtle change in the way government did business. Hiring became secondary to contracting, and more and more public projects were outsourced to private firms.
Washington’s economy did well under Reagan (added military spending gave it a boost), but the move to contract out more and more government work proved to be a crucial long-term change. In 1993, Bill Clinton announced a “reinventing government” initiative, which ultimately included cutting the federal work force by about 250,000 positions. The agencies winnowed their rolls, but over the course of the Clinton years, their budgets expanded, and in many cases, the work just went to contractors. Those contractors often came at a bloated cost, too. In a study released in 2011, the Project on Government Oversight found that using contractors can cost the federal government about twice as much as federal employees for comparable work. According to the study, the salary for a federally employed computer engineer would be about $135,000; a contractor might bill the government around $270,000 for similar work.
It was not until the Bush years, though, that this increasingly wealthy not-federal-but-still-government work force truly metastasized. The amorphous war on terror and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security — plus the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — bloated the country’s spending by about $1 trillion. The contracting dollars that were pumped into the local economy, Fuller says, more than doubled between 2000 and 2010, when it reached $80 billion a year. This, in turn, created hundreds of thousand of desk jobs and fostered a sprawl of nameless, faceless office parks lining the roads out to Dulles Airport.”
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Lobbyists, lawyers, defense contractors, and Wall Street bankers — people who are largely responsible for the mess in govt, and who’ve benefited the most from the massive expansion in spending, but have managed to shed all the blame by casting it onto others.
The supply-side argument about lowering taxes, reducing regulations, and increasing govt spending (flow more money to “private sector” contractors and lobbyists) doesn’t seem to be working, now does it?
