[Superman]

Lendaddy, your posts and mine are different because you get your data from summaries and radio shows. I know nothing about 'aggregate spending' or 'decrease in the level of increases." I will try to state my case in terms most folks can grasp, and I'll just have to assume that works for you. I was saying that, if you're going to have a regulation, there are three levels of costliness. The lowest cost is if you fund the program so that it barely can achieve its objective. The second lowest is if you fully fund the program so that it can do its job properly. These two are potentiall interchangeable. It might be more expensive to barely fund a program, but here I am assuming that's not the case. The the absolute MOST expensive way to run a regulatory program is to underfund it so that it cannot possibly do a good, or even passable, job. My case was a good illustration. I calculated wages that would serve as minimum wages on all state and local construction jobs. I had a budget that allowed me to perform cheap wage surveys, but did not allow me to fully edit and understand the data. So, the state saved a couple of thousand dollars each month by not providing me with staffing resources. Let's say I created a Laborer wage of $40, when the real number should have been $25. My state performs somewhere between $2 Billion and $4 Billion in construction each year, with Laborer as a principle construction occupation. The savings of a couple thousand per month would come NOWHERE NEAR enough to cover the added costs to our contractors and public agencies' budgets from an over-calculation. And that's not all. The fee, to administer this function, was charged to contractors, and 30% of those fees were siphoned off to the General Fund (schools). So, not only were we (probably) making mistakes costing contractors and public agencies millions of dollars, but the money that would have fixed the problem was already being paid by the contractors...just not applied in the right place.

So, you can go ahead and call me names. You can pretend like I'm an idiot. But you seem to me to be a long way from understanding your own public policy-making process and I have little respect for folks on the outside throwing rocks at the people who are trying to make it work....using phraseology from radio talk shows.

And your sources probably tell you nothing about the very popular strategy of starving specific government offices, to make things really look bad and get expensive, so that the law can become a better repeal target later. Please do not sadden me more by caricaturizing the name-calling that conservatives do when we liberals outline our position. It is my position that much of government works poorly because it never gets a chance to work at all. Lendaddy, here's a thousand dollars. Go get a car and be competitive in next year's Open Track Challenge. This is all you can spend. And you cannot just back away. That is the position that many governmetn office are in. They are mandated to do certain things, and the funding for those functions leaves NO HOPE of meeting the mandates. But not meeting them is not an option. So, the mandates get met, barely, poorly.

Again, I am tired of people who think they understand government, but all they really understand is that "government" is a bad thing. They don't know why, but they know it's a bad thing.

And here's something for the rest of you to understand about education and health care. Once upon a time, there were just two vocations generally open to women working outside the home. They could be teachers, or nurses. Even the very brightest and most energetic. They could be teachers and nurses. And since their husbands had the "family" jobs, there was no need to pay them competitively. Also, they had no mobility. Again, they could be teachers, or nurses. Lack of mobility, to a compensation analyst like myself, means that the market cannot bring the pay levels in those occupations to "equity." So, they were in some cases very talented (these were our brightest and most energetic women), and in all cases underpaid. I mean underpaid when you analyze the occupation and compare it to other occupations that have similar requirements/duties. Since that time women have been allowed to enter many other fields, and now our brightest women are attorneys, doctors, politicians, actuaries, you name it. But those occupations are still floating toward, but not yet arriving at, equity compared to other of our society's occupations. Nurses are moving more quickly, since they are commonly employed in the private sector. Teachers will take more time, largely because their pay rates are mandated by legislative fiat.

In my view, it might be fair to regard teachers and other public servants more highly than we do. I could argue that their functions are among the very most important in our society. But then, the reason they are not as respected as entrepeneurs is because they are not doing society the ultimate service of making the digital widgets that we will all need to buy to replace our analog widgets because, well, because those are the widgets you need in today's market.