I'm surprised Democrats haven't picked up on this more as it is evident in many other areas as well, particularly in health care.

Paul Krugman's column this morning describes how the preposterous approach to the prescription drug benefit has made that part of Medicare spectacularly inefficient compared to the rest of Medicare:

In the case of the drug benefit, the private drug plans add an extra, costly layer of bureaucracy. Worse yet, they have much less ability to bargain for lower drug prices than government programs like Medicaid and the Veterans Health Administration. Reasonable estimates suggest that if Congress had eliminated the middlemen, it could have created a much better drug plan — one without the notorious “doughnut hole,” the gap in coverage once your annual expenses exceed $2,400 per year — at no higher cost.

Krugman has been making the same point about health care in general.  Not only is single-payer health care better from the standpoint of extending coverage to the whole population, but it is also vastly more efficient.

The image of bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy is etched in the mind of Americans.  It's time to press the point that cronyism and conservative ideological rigidity during the Bush years are responsible for more of it.

Republicans: more bloat

Democrats: less bloat

What is needed is a mathematician to compute the number of potential contacts this equals, when you take the 417 on the one side and the 30 on the other. This, I believe, comes out to an astronomical number!

Get that number and put it everywhere! I bet it adds up to millions and millions of potential contacts!

Of course it isn't just bureaucracy as such. The point of the limited contacts under Clinton was (I assume) to prevent undue political influence (or the appearance thereof); the massive number of contacts between the White House and DOJ is obviously designed to guarantee maximum political influence over even the most trivial aspects of the DOJ's work.

Similarly, the expansion of political appointments isn't so much an expansion of the bureaucracy as an expansion of political power within the bureaucracy. Given the number of career civil service positions, and the limited ability to fire them, the Bush administration had to increase the number of political appointments in order to guarantee their domination of the system.

Where's the surprise?

The big-spender, big-government types have always been the conservatives while liberals have been wrongly been affixed with the label.

Takes a lot of government to try to hang on to power and privilege, to hold back time.

Best, Terry

Hmm.  That makes for a lot of time spend deleting emails from RNC servers....

If we're talking about bilateral contacts between WH and DOJ, it adds up to "only" 12,510 contacts. When you expand that to three-way conversations, you get 5,566,950 potential discussions about the relative merits of the USAs.

(417 X 30 = 12510. If you add a third person to each of those conversations, you take 12,510 and multiply that by 416+29(=445), which is the total number of additional people who aren't already part of the conversation. This yields 5,566,950. To add a fourth person, multiply again by 444 (2,471,725,800); keep doing this, subtracting one person each time from the additional multiplicand).

Jan, 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000
is right on the money! How did you do that so fast?

;)

While I agree with the gist of this post, that the Bush administration has done something undesirable to the federal government, I think the specific accusation and language only further damages government.  "Mindless bureaucratization" is right wing propaganda talk in the first place.  Government employees work hard to get useful things done.

What you are pointing to is hierarchical control by political ideologues.  This is a very undesirable development, but has little to do with bureaucracies.  Please, keep the attack on the right people (right wing political ideologues) and stop attacking ordinary public employees.

The largest government bureaucracy in the United States is the Post Office.  The largest government bureaucracy in your local community is your school system.  When you start blathering on about government bureaucracies as if they are inherently bad, you are slandering your neighbors, the teachers, postal workers, police officers, etc.

These people are not evil.  Starting off in this frame concedes far to much to the right wing.

If you are prepared to slander the people who work hard to extend your life expectancy 30 years (that is the result of maintaining public sewage systems), educate your children, or protect public safety, then please do not associate yourself with the progressive wing of the Democratic party.

Honest hard working people deserve more respect than that.

The problem raised in this thread is political manipulation of government, not the existence of government service.  I get damn tired of seeing slurs against people who really do preform tremendous public service for modest reward. 

If you are prepared to slander the people who work hard to extend your life...

Oh for heaven's sake this ex-bureaucrat who has worked for the post office among other things knows bureaucracy well as does this ex-entrepreneur know a bit about the rigors of competition.

This is nonsensical crap like those who have always worked on salary talking up the marvels of capitalism that they never ventured to risk.

Big is bad. The bigger the badder. Just a fact of life.

I insist that using the power of government to intrude and control people's life is the main problem with conservatives. That does not make cops bad people though some would make them out to be by nature and certainly there are bad cops.

You are for big, bad government to control, imprison and punish people?

Or would you prefer government serve people and protect their liberties?

That is the divide between right and left rather than who is more efficient.

Best, Terry

Along with the route and delay tactics what we're really seeing here is the Republican patronage system at work. Patronage jobs galore. Conservative Republicans hate civil service. It's just that plain.

The cumbersome process used to delay regulatory activity is a Republican goal as well as damaging civil service.

I worked for the State of Michigan for 28 years. The last 12 under a conservative Republican Governor and Legislature.

During that period the number and authority of civil servants declined. The number of appointed positions increased along with the number of very costly private contracted positions.

The Bush gang, along with fouling up the process, uses patronage to reward party people and bind their efforts in electoral campaigns. Jeb Bush did similar activities in Florida.

It really all fits in with the 'small government' philosophy which ties in with the objective: Small government benefits only one class of people, the very rich and the fast money hustlers.

And, excuse me sphealey, Reagan did the same goddamn thing.

Like the Federalist Society of right-wing lawyers we could call the Republican Patronage hacks The Charles Guiteau Society.

You are welcome to insist on anything you want.  So far, you have provided nothing other than your emotional reaction as a reason to believe what you say.

Big is a consequence of scope, nothing else.  Is it dysfunctional?  Not as dysfunctional as not dealing with scope.  Perhaps you would like for every town to have it's own post office dispatching mail to other towns by whatever means it sees fit on whatever schedule it can afford? 

As dysfunctional as the US Post Office is, it is still the least expensive for delivering your piece of mail in the world and it has an amazing speed and accuracy rate.  This, despite having disgruntled people such as yourself working there.

In this country the word bureaucracy is used not for its functional meaning but as a slur against employees.  Despite the fact that some of the largest bureaucracies are in the private sector, we slur public employees with the word bureaucracy in most cases.

Apparently you have some special concern with prisons?  Not sure why?  In any case, we have been busy privatizing prisons for the last 25 years.  Are private prisons no longer bureaucracies?  Is it less bad when California or Texas or whatever state it is ships its prisoners to some other state half-way across the country to warehouse them?

Your dispute with a public policy is not a justification for slurring public employees in general or even those engaged in delivering that activity.  Work to change the public policy.  If we are imprisoning too many people (we are) change the criminal laws, don't slur the prison guards. 

Afraid to tell you, Jefferson was a conservative, not a liberal.  You need not take my word for it.  Just look around at what his biographers have to say.

You are now talking policy, I notice that you have given up slurring government employees.  That is a good first step.  As I mentioned before, the largest "bureaucracy" in your local area is your school system.  By the way, unless you live in a major city or the seat of a state government, the second largest bureaucracy in your local area is likely to be the trauma center.

Apparently, you were, earlier, unwilling to acknowledge the difference between policies and employees.  This is a common rightwing tactic, where effective execution of policies they dislike is called waste and the employees who perform them are disparaged.  This sort of mean spirited inhumane behavior reflects mostly on those who behave this way.  But in TeeVee culture, it is all too effective.

If you'll stop smearing public employees, I'll stop alluding to your lack of intelligence. 

I am sorry about your loss of intelligence.

There is, indeed, a reason why the Dems celebrate Jefferson-Jackson day.  He founded the party (although, he is more accurately thought of as the inspiration for the founders of the party).

Jefferson would make a pretty good libertarian, and I believe you will find him often cited by libertarians, not without reason.

While Jefferson believed in limited public support for higher education for elites and meritorious candidates among the rest, he did not use his substantial political standing to do anything about public education for the population at large.

There is nothing in his texts that would support public health care.

His limited government would be shockingly thin, even for republicans.

However, he did believe in the dominance of the legislature over the executive.

When you say that you "worry about Big Brother" you suggest that you are a libertarian, not a "liberal."  There is hardly anyone left in the country who calls himself a liberal.

What used to be called liberal is more frequently called "progressive" these days.  Progressives have some similar concerns with libertarians in the area of civil liberties.  Both we progressives and you libertarians are concerned about governmental intervention into our lives when there is no call for it.

The difference is this.  You libertarians have absolutely no other policy position.  You are also paranoid about it.  We progressives are do not see the world in simple black and white terms.  We consider the whole of the situation before making decisions.  We support public policies that produce public goods including redistribution of goods where the well being of the community as a whole seems to call for it.

I certainly agree with that.  I don't know the secret handshake.

Terry,

I have been posting here for over a year.  Most of the regulars know me.  You have been registered and posting here for 5 weeks.

Your slurs and distortions do not change the opinions of anyone here.  They know me.  They can see for themselves that you are making things up.

Your continued assertions about my views, which you are completely making up, are insulting.  Please discontinue responding to me.

Ellen and Good4America,

Rather than try to explain why I really am not trying to be cute, and why I don't think my argument plays into the hands of right-wing ideologues at all, see what you think of Digby's take here. The opportunity presented by the Bush administration's approach to public management -- which essentially amounts to doing the opposite of what good government advocates have recommended for years, and which the Clinton administration largely acted upon -- includes persuading centrists and even some old-time Republicans that conservatism has become a bankrupt ideology.  Because the right believes that government, bureacracies, and civil servants inherently can not serve the public interest, they have managed it in ways where those beliefs became self-fulfilling. You have to believe that government is part of the solution to lead it in ways where it will succeed. That includes valuing civil servants and implementing reforms like Gore's that demonstrably improved government performance and efficiency. --Greg      

Does that include fake libertarians like Tucker Carlson?

 Jan