I am sorry for two things as I sit down to my workbench today;
I have not posted in more than a week and I while I have said a good bit about
what I don’t like or don’t think is useful, I have not said anything about what
I’m for. I can’t do much about the
former, although you should be looking forward to my posts for last week (time
travel humor).
So here we go on what the complacent Republican of A Slight
Right thinks is a decent, and very modest framework for government, politics,
and society. The most general statement
of the slight-right position is that government should be limited, frugal, competent,
and honest. Let’s expand upon these
concepts a little.
The concept of government limited in any serious way in budget
went out the window pretty close to a century ago. The back-to-back crises of The Depression and
World War II put the broader conception of the role of government initiated by
the trustbusting, nature conserving presidents of 1901-1912 into
overdrive. These days, on-budget Federal
outlays are about twice the share of GDP as they were in the biggest spending
years of the New Deal.
A more galling sense of the refusal of government to be limited
in its ambit results from every agency putting no limits on its mission. My favorite test of whether someone
understands the no-limits attitude of even the well-intentioned is to show them
the map on page 64 of Older Americans 2020, a publication I consulted on, and
asking if they understand from that map why so much of the middle of America
sees the Federal government, in this case the Environmental Protection Agency (epa), as a pack of meddling fools with no
decent sense of their boundaries. Go to Older
Americans 2020: Key Indicators of Well-Being (agingstats.gov) and have at
it; no peeksies to next paragraph!
OK. You probably
noticed that from the wolf’s snout of Lake Superior west until Denver and
stretching from the Canadian border south into Oklahoma it’s pretty hard to
find a dark gold fill indicating a county with “poor air quality.” Heck, there aren’t all that many counties in
the light gold fill that denotes “other monitored counties.” And the unmonitored counties are areas epa doesn’t even bother to set up a monitoring
station in.
So far, not much in the way of problems; we have good clean
air out there in God’s country. But then
along comes epa’s Office of
Atmospheric Programs, “Methane is a greenhouse gas. The enteric fermentation [burps and farts] of
your cows and pigs and chickens are melting the icecaps. Repent and pay.” Another county stays red, even with the troop
of red-ass baboons currently incumbent.
The next attribute we should have in government is
frugality. Frugal government,
unfortunately, is an oxymoron. The fact
that there is a 42-page PowerPoint presentation on methane for me to draw upon
in the preceding paragraph should be proof enough, but let’s not forget the
$600 toilet seats and hammers that are still, somewhat unfairly, held up as
examples of government’s counter-frugal soul.
The seats and hammers examples are somewhat unfair because
they didn’t reflect the actual price of the items but their cost after overhead
was arbitrarily allocated to them. The
ridiculous allocation of overhead reflects that the purpose of government
accounting is “primarily concerned
with making sure money was spent as Congress directed-not with making sure it
was spent wisely.“ Spending as Congress directs is diametrically opposed to
frugality.
The competence of government, or at least whatever credit it
may ever have been given for competence, has inevitably taken a hit while a
tribe of baboons has appeared out from under rocks to become the scum on top of
the methane management pond of government.
If I had more imagination, I’d have mixed in more metaphors here. I just ran out of energy thinking about the
entire catastrophe.
The disaster wasn’t, I’m afraid, confined to the White House
or other corridors of political debauchery.
At least one agency, generally regarded as a gold standard of
competence, fell down under the incumbent administration’s management and
appointments policies. I always wondered
why my colleagues at one of the many centers that control and prevent disease
rolled their eyes when I proposed using what we call surveillance data from
other centers. Then I tried to follow the
progress of the Covid-19 pandemic from the surveillance center in Atlanta. Gave up and just went with the charts
published every day in the newspaper.
Even more disastrously, the center responsible for
developing the test kits that might have been useful for identifying and
isolating early cases of the disease also went mediocre and the test was found
to have flaws that made them unusable in a mass setting. Delays in correcting that problem and a slow
process for permitting the use of other tests let things get even farther out
of control than they were due to issues completely outside the agency’s
control. (Red China’s cover up and who’s craven acceptance of it cost weeks
of delay)
As far as honesty goes, there are increasingly frequent
reports that the incumbent president will issue pre-emptive pardons to the
members of his family that have were favored by his nepotism; and there are
even rumors that he may try the preemptive pardon on his own acts while in
office.
Enough is enough is enough said.
Notes
Cow methane Methane
Emissions in the United States: Sources, Solutions & Opportunities for
Reductions (epa.gov)
Even the nasa high
priests of science get in on the methane issue:
Which
is a bigger methane source: cow belching or cow flatulence? – Climate Change:
Vital Signs of the Planet (nasa.gov)
Government accounting:
The
myth of the $600 hammer - Government Executive (govexec.com)
