Paying the bills

[--Pete]

Hi,

I've been having fun reading this discussion and find some interesting ideas coming from both you and Jester.

The answer also lies in shrinking services to only those who truly need them, . . .

This is a very idealistic statement. How does the government know "those who truly need them"? Only by doing a careful, and expensive, investigation. So the money is wasted in a different way. Now, consider, most of the people who are on some form of welfare actually 'need' it. So most of those proposed investigations would be a waste of money. What's the trade off? Is more money wasted by doing useless investigations or by paying benefits to the few people who get them by fraud? I'm not familar with the welfare systems, so cannot comment. But I am familiar with government, especially defense, contracts. And in the case of those contracts, thanks largely to politically motivated crap like the Golden Fleece Awards, much more is wasted preventing waste than would be wasted by taking a more reasonable attitude.

To put it in terms of commerce: if a business loses $10k a year to shoplifting, it can afford to spend some for measures (such as magnetic tags and detectors at doors) to lower the loss. It cannot reasonably hire full time security people since the cost would be much greater than the potential savings. I fear that the investigation of "those who truly need them" would be analagous, for the government, to the businessman establishing a security division.

And therein lies the charm of the debate. The principles might be clear, but the applications to the morass of a real society are anything but.

Thanks, to both of you, for a good read.

--Pete