EXPLAINING GOP PRIVATIZATION AND DEREGULATION

Investigating government waste, fraud, and abuse was interesting. In several blogs, I had made the charge that Republicans were responsible for government over-spending. When I wrote these blog posts, I was thinking of spending during the George W. Bush and even back as far as the Ronald Reagan administrations and put the in the perspective of Republican inspired tax cuts with the conclusion that Republicans were responsible for our mounting debt. I went so far as to claim this was intentional to create crisis to force cutting of popular social safety net programs; a shock doctrine as described by Naomi Klein type crisis. The investigation was stimulated by the charge that I was blaming one party when I should have blamed both and should look at the subject of waste fraud and about on a Google web site. This was a fair charge and a way of investigating it.

What I found was that there is great fraud and abuse related to execution of government contracts. By reading a number of posted news articles and comments, it became clear that there were many instances but in every case, the government had discovered the problem and were investigating it or were in the process of prosecuting it. However, more to the point, every one if the abuses that I read about were due to private contractors.

Following politic as I do it is clear that the Republican Party insists on making the government smaller and are advocates of privatization. It dawned on me that what they and their party are asking for is to make government smaller to cut taxes but the cost of private contracts is higher than having civil servants do the work. Privatization cost taxpayers more money, which explains the mysterious increase in cost of government that coincided with the terms of republican presidents. The simple fact is that even if the same number of workers and with the same efficiency, the cost will be higher for the contractors because of profit—where is the saving in that? Obviously, established private contracts can do short term or single project work more cheaply because of start up costs, which justifies their existence in government work.  

As for my contention is correct that we should blame Republicans and not both parties for our debt. What the exercise proved to me is that the often-heard express ‘small government’ has a different meaning for Republicans than it has for Democrats, at least of this Democrat. In the past, I thought it related to nanny government verses rugged individualism: selfishness verses altruism. The difference really has to do with running taxpayer money through business hands, where they can take a handful now and again, which explains the Republican demand for deregulation; they just do not want to get caught—more opportunity and less risk. Who can blame them?

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