How To Balance the Budget: the Republicans Modest Proposal

Via Kevin Drum, the info that Goldman Sachs changed their fiscal year begin date from Dec. 1 to Jan. 1.  They just happened to do it back in 2008, when they stuffed a lot of losses and bonuses into December, which then didn't count.

This triggers my suggestion.  Back in the days of old, the federal fiscal year began July 1.  But Congress started having more and more difficulty getting appropriations bills passed by that date.  So finally everyone agreed to move the fiscal year start date to Oct. 1, a date by which Congress surely would have no problem in passing appropriations. This all was in the late 70's or maybe early 80's.

It's a truth universally recognized that Congress no longer is capable of passing appropriations bills by Oct 1, so we have all the justification we need to move the start of the 2012 fiscal year to Jan 1, 2012.  As we do that, we'll move all the expenditures we can into the transition quarter, between Oct 1 2011 and Dec. 31.  That will enable us to balance the budget in FY 2012.  We can then run for reelection to Congress and our Presidential candidate can run on the basis that we did the impossible: balanced the budget without raising taxes.

True Sentence of the Day

From Yglesias: " But the fact of the matter is that it’s inherently difficult for a bunch of well-armed foreigners to obtain accurate information about what people think of the well-armed foreigner they’re talking to at the moment."

Pity the Generator Operators

That was my MOS (military occupational specialty) in my Army days: operating generators.  It was a good gig. First of all the generator sites were dispersed around the Saigon area.  So the enlisted men were out from under the company hierarchy;  there was very little control or leadership from on high--out of sight, out of mind.  Second, a generator is pretty fool proof; once you do regular maintenance there's not much else to do.  So there's plenty of time for pinochle games and napping. Third, electricity is vital, almost as vital as food and water.  So people don't mess with you. 

But sadly progress comes to all things, even the generator operators in Afghanistan according to this Grist piece.Solar panels are more reliable and they don't require an operator.

Inadvertent Effects of Change: Old Sick Feds and a Haircut

Sen. Collins has gotten some press over the issue of Federal employees who are getting workers comp payments under the Federal Employees Benefit Act, even though they're old, I mean really old, I mean older thn me even (a few). I haven't seen any discussion but I'd guess this is a side effect of the change many years ago eliminating mandatory retirement (used to be 70 if I recall). The issue is whether the employee is able to go back to work. It's obvious to us that no Federal employee is going to return to the office when he's 90, so he ought to be involuntarily retired and given his pension.  Of course, when I say it's obvious, it's not really obvious, because there are odd ball employees so dedicated they continue to work long after anyone else would retire.

Which brings me to my haircut.  Got one today.  A phone call came in from the shop owner saying he'd be back by 3:30.  My barber explained that the owner's mother, living in WV, had health issues.  She was 93, worked all her life in the local school cafeteria until they retired her at the age of 85, then went back on a volunteer basis.  While she's not a federal employee, she illustrates my point.  As does Bruno Mangum, the FSA employee who died in 2007 at the age of 90.

Having written all this, it makes sense to kick employees off the workers comp rolls when they're eligible for full retirement benefits.  And remembering an article in the NYTimes a while back on abuses of the workman's comp rules (Long Island RR maybe? I forget), it makes sense to audit the enforcement of the rules because they're easily abused.

Creeping (Grade) Inflation: Harvard and JFK

John Sides posts the grades in a Harvard government class, a class in 1940 with one JFKennedy earning a B-. (There's been a lot of Kennedy materials just released by the library.)  What's interesting is in a class of about 55 students, there's two grades above B+.

It's also interesting the professor's specialty was nationalism in Africa and Asia, according to wikipedia

Test of Civic Literacy

Report card from an interesting test of civic literacy is here (I owe a hat tip, probably to Monkey Cage).  I'm proud to say I did better than most people on the test, but then most people didn't pass the test. I'm not sure how seriously one should take the results, but it's good ammunition for jeremiads.

Mexico's Illegal Immigration Problem

RecoveringFed has a nice post pointing out Mexico's illegal immigration problem, about 190 years ago Americans crossing the Mexican border in search of a better life became a threat to Mexico's geographic integrity.

Bureaucrats Day: Civil Service

The Pendleton Act was signed Jan. 16, 1883. The purpose was to regulate and improve the civil service of the United States, partly by establishing the Civil Service Commission. The first use of the term "civil service" was in 1770 according to Merriam-Webster. "Military service" was first used around 1630.

When Headline Writers Get It Wrong

As in the headline for this Freakonomics post: "When Technology Isn't the Answer".  The post cites a doctor who wrote a Time article describing problems with health care software.  As the commenters make clear, the problem is poor system design and the learning curve for health care software.  It's rather like a headline in 1900 saying: "Why the Automobile Isn't the Answer".

A Problem of Terminology: Hollow "Agencies"

I think this is true: discussion of improving management in government, particularly IT, stumbles on a simple fact of terminology--much of the literature uses "agency" to mean "department" (because they also want to include the independent agencies, and "department-level" or similar wording seems too awkward).  See this discussion of IT management.  The problem is that it leads to the easy assumption that the "agency" is a cohesive unit, where the agency head and her CIO can control the operations of the agency's components.

For USDA, and I suspect at other government departments, the idea of the "agency" as being cohesive and under the direction of the Secretary and his CIO is laughable. Even after the reorganization of the department in the Clinton Administration, there's a bunch of agencies which do not snap to when the Secretary yells: "attention". Just ask ex-Secretary Glickman about his efforts to do some integration of NRCS and FSA.