Rewarding incompetence?

Question

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070503/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/veterans_care_bonuses

Getting tired of this yet?

Answer 1

I've been tired of this kind of things even before Proxmire instituted his "Golden Fleece Award" to call attention to it, and that's been the past 25 years.

It's nothing new. Glad you join us in not liking it, but don't think it was invented under Bush.

Answer 2

Yeah. For a little background, this is partially due to the Bush administrations big push to use private sector incentives for government work: bonuses are a good example of this, as are the "pay banding" and "pay for performance" systems he (through the Office of Management and Budget) has impletmented.

In theory, it sounds like a great idea: the private sector works better than the government, so let's copy them!

In practice, it doesn't work. Either the toadies and kiss asses get the bonuses, which defeats the purpose, or the management is too nice and gives everybody a little piece of the bonus pie, which also defeats the purpose. The system works in the private sector because 90% of all businesses fail, so the "toady rewarders"and the "too nice guys" go out of business quickly while the ones who use the system right stay in business.

In government, it takes years to shut down a single office, if ever, no matter how bad it is run. There is no market pressure to work for us. That is why the old General Schedule (GS) system was created in the first place. It kept everything relatively fair, and kept favoritism to a minimum. However, it doesn't fit the "free market" image the administration wanted to project, so they started to get rid of it. So far, the results have been extremely discouraging.

If only our MBA president had realized that putting a square peg into a round hole wouldn't work, we wouldn't have crap like this going on.

Answer 3

I've been tired of it ever since I first learned how it all works. Government policies vey strongly encourage reckless and irresponsible spending. If a government agency doesn't spend all of its allotment for the current year, it will get less next year, so they look for ways to spend all of the money whether they need to or not. If private businesses were run this way, they'd all go bankrupt, but the government routinely wastes our tax dollars this way.