Category Archives: political economy

How Many Bureaucrats?

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James Freeman asked this question in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, regarding the bureaucrats in the Federal government.

The government, and I [ahem], answered this question during an earlier Progressive-Democrat-led Federal government shutdown, and we’re about to get an empirical demonstration with the current Schumer Shutdown which began Wednesday morning. Here’s what that earlier shutdown demonstrated about the number of bureaucrats actually needed:

Office Per Cent Nonessential
White House 74
Treasury 82
Labor 82
Interior 81
EPA 94
NASA 97
Housing and Urban Development 96
Education 94
Commerce 87
Smithsonian 84

 

There are others, also, with a different per centage of nonessentials:

Office Per Cent Nonessential
U.S. Commission of Fine Arts 100
U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness 100
USDA Risk Management Agency 100
Federal Maritime Commission 100
Economic Development Administration 100
Minority Business Development Agency 100

There’s a more complete list over at Slate.

The short answer is: not many of the bureaucrats on the payroll are actually needed. The longer answer will be begun to be delivered with the RIF that the OMB has instructed Executive Branch Departments and Agencies to prepare lists for, with those lists beginning with programs and projects currently unfunded and that do not align with Presidential policy. The answer will be expanded on by all the Leftist and Civil Service union lawsuits objecting to the RIF, even to preparing for a RIF. Those lawsuits will prove the lack of need for those bureaucrats.

A Glittering Generality

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This one is from Republican candidate for Ohio Governor, Vivek Ramaswamy:

Instead of viewing AI as competition, the next generation should own a stake in improving America’s economic productivity. If every child has $10,000 invested in the S&P 500, every one of them would be a millionaire well before retirement.

From where would that initial $10k stake come? If it’s handed to “every child” from outside (vis., government), that child would have no skin in that game, and he would not find himself at pains to protect that stake by actively participating in improving our economic productivity—for instance, by getting a job and working to his employer’s goals or starting his own business and working to make it grow and prosper. The money would just be found money of no personal value.

On top of that, Ramaswamy did not address another aspect of this “plan:” what does he think the value would be of those millions of dollars in the child’s end game of retirement after a long and fruitful life of doing…something? An increase of all that nominal wealth without a concomitant increase in the supply of goods and services, will simply drive up the cost of those goods and services, which is otherwise known as inflation. Those millions of dollars may well wind up with the purchasing value of today’s thousands of dollars.

This is a plan that sounds good in its base outline, but it badly wants cold, clear-eyed fleshing out with facts; hard logic; and clear, publicly measurable steps to be taken. Especially, but not exclusively, the steps needed to keep productivity growth up with S&P 500 growth in an environment where today’s and lots of prior year’s S&P 500 growth—its price to earnings ratio—has been outstripping goods and services—productivity–growth.

Part of the Problem

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The Department of Defense, first under the Biden administration, but continuing under the Trump administration, is having far too much trouble deploying “AI weapons,” even figuring out how to use those it has deployed. An illustration of this is this:

The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.

This isn’t so much a software commonality or interoperability problem as it is a problem with bureaucrats giving too much weight to the desires of contractors and their lobbyists, each of whom insist on their own proprietary software. What’s needed here isn’t more money (although sometimes that helps), it’s an operational officer, one fresh in from a combatant command that’s facing current conflicts, being put in charge of AI development and programs. This officer, independent of the lobbyists, needs to write a better requirements document, one that specifies the standards of commonality (not merely interoperability—this is software, not hardware) that each contractor and contractor wannabe must meet in order for their AI package to be considered.

Beyond that, this AI OIC must open his Requests for Proposals far beyond the major contractors and take in RFPs from small businesses and startups—that’s where the ideas and agility exist—then push the development and acquisition pace, eliminating the layers of bureaucrats’ reviews.

Finally, this AI OIC must be willing to spend money on mistakes and dead ends rather than demanding (near) perfection at one stage before moving on to the next.

That’s just the development side. The AI OIC also must have four or five teams of operational officers—again, fresh in from combatant commands—working on tactics and strategies that make use of the four or five leading AI weapons candidates to investigate best uses for integrating these weapons into a combatant command unit’s (at all levels) existing suite of weapons. That tactics and strategies development effort should also lead to adjustments in those units’ existing tactics and those commands’ existing strategies, even their existing suites of weapons.

There’re just too much bureaucracy and too little operational consideration in the currently extant DoD. SecDef is making progress on the bureaucracy qua bureaucracy, but he’s got a long way to go. It’s time for him to zero in on lethality.

Second Verse Same as the First?

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The last time France tried a wealth tax, just a few years ago, it lost a lot of economic income, and the associated tax revenue on it, as the tax-targeted wealthy pulled up stakes and headed to other nations.

Now it looks like the French government is fixing to try that again.

France’s slide into political and fiscal dysfunction is generating a groundswell of support for a sweeping wealth tax that would represent a radical break from the pro-business agenda of President Emmanuel Macron.
The proposal is the work of French economist Gabriel Zucman, a former adviser to US Senators Bernie Sanders [I, VT] and Elizabeth Warren [D, MA]. He wants to impose a 2% tax on the assets of people with net wealth of 100 million euros, equivalent to $118 million, or more.

Here, though, it’s not just the politicians who have trouble even saying the words “cut spending.” The French unions continually demanding their cushy short work weeks and their even cushier pensions are actively aiding and abetting the government’s wastrelly profligate spending and those politicians who push that spending.

This is a tax that won’t end well for France.

Yeah, And?

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The headline says it:

The US Is Forfeiting the Clean-Energy Race to China

The article’s news writers then went on to decry the Trump administration’s decision to do away with “green” energy/renewable energy production subsidies and to push increased production of hydrocarbon-sourced energy.

They had no answers to oil, natural gas, and coal being far more reliable and lower cost than those renewable sources, sources which cannot compete in the market place without those subsidies. They mentioned the alternative, equally reliable nuclear energy production only as an afterthought.

But the argument over green vs hydrocarbon energy, while at the center of the debate, really is only a sideshow.

Why should we care about producing, or not, green energy? Aside from the fact that atmospheric CO2 is plant food rather than a pollutant, the whole underlying premise of human-caused global warming is false.

Earth has been warming since if was formed because the sun has been heating up since it lit off its fusion core.

Today, some 11,000 years after the last glaciation, we’re still cooler than that geologic warming trend. Some 6,000 years after the glaciers retreated, we were warmer than we are today.

Epochs of higher and temperatures than today and higher and lower atmospheric CO2 than today are unrelated to each other: life was lush during both higher temperatures and higher atmospheric CO2. In those times when higher atmospheric CO2 coincided with cooler-than-today temperatures, life suffered.

Ice cores reaching back 400,000 years indicate that atmospheric CO2 increases coincide with, or lag, planetary warming.

Too much national weal has been wasted on chasing the chimera of global disaster from warming already. Let the People’s Republic of China waste its treasure chasing renewables. It’s a foolish race that has no meaning and so can have no serious winner.

It’s time to knock it off.