About 10 years back a friend of mine told me about an entrepreneur who was starting a business in the Chicago area. This man was an inventor and had started and sold several businesses before his current project. At the time the state of Illinois was offering some type of financial incentives for new businesses so this entrepreneur spoke to the state about his business project. A couple of weeks later two union officials showed up at his office and advised him that he should use unionized workers for his project. This business is now located in Wisconsin where it employs about 35 workers.
That's a feature, not a bug, here. The local pols have no interest in a thriving "non-union" ecosystem, because it doesn't support the Democrat funding/voting machine. They are perfectly content with this business moving to Wisconsin.
The reason is that they have never suffered the consequences of a revenue fall-out and having to reverse decades of bad policy. We were getting there until the Covid government bailouts made the government flush for several years and pumped billions into local businesses that were doing fine. It just pushed the day of reckoning back a few years.
The game here is all about kicking the can as far ahead as you can, so that your name is not in the news when everything hits the fan. The pols here don't care about long-term fiscal responsibility or attracting businesses.
Fair to say that when the gov't gets involved the outcomes are diminished and the money is distributed to cronies. This is really true today on all the CRT/DIE/EGS stuff. Huge amounts of money spread around to the usual suspects.
I wonder how something like DARPA fits into this? I am no expert on DARPA, but I do have a sense they are producing far more tech "good" than they are consuming.
The Univ of Texas has a huge research facility -- JJ Jake Pickle Research -- and all major universities see themselves as research bastions. They have an office of "commercialization" that turns promising research loose to be exploited commercially with UT retaining a stake. This has been quite successful.
BTW, these research facilities are one of the favorite Chinese targets for infiltration and espionage through their Confucian Institutes.
There are a few little supportive tax benefits related to startups such as QSBS (qualified small business stock capital gains exclusion) that are supportive.
I didn't name names. Here is one organization that is not grifting and it comes to mind because you bring up research universities. Illini Angels was started by a venture fund in Champaign that got it's start via the university. The person that runs it is a 2x successful entrepreneur. Virtually every university that does research has AUTUM and an entire workforce dedicated to monetizing research done in the University.
Some orgs start okay, but they transition into the grift. They are shells of themselves. Hyde Park Angels is like that.
I am not sure DARPA fits. But, an organization like 1871 or Matter in Chicago does.
Unfortunately, that is just one more subset in the vast wasteland of government throw away money that finds it so easy to dispense with taxpayer dollars because they look at it as a never-ending flow. Rarely has impression been more important than results and despite that being continually proven, they insist on doing so.
I lived for 4 decades in Austin By God Texas which has good winter weather so it attracts lots of traveling homeless.
The had a "no camping" ordinance they enacted, then cancelled, and then re-enacted.
If you provide homeless shelter, you get a lot more homeless.
With all the empty large box stores (talking to you, Walmart) we should be able to solve this problem, but it just keeps growing.
As an Army brat kid, I lived in subdivided WWII wooden barracks with a design life of 4 years into the 1960s. They are still in use some 84 years later.
I find over and over that government and public-private stuff ends up being some kind of money laundering grift. Kind of explains your grandchildren’s missing $34,000,000,0000,000…
True. I often wonder what happened to the founders of Solyndra, the green company helmed by the husband of an Obama staffer. Company went belly up, of course.
Government is the easiest mark around. Everyone takes advantage, from both for-profit and non-profit sectors. One of the easiest examples to see is how Chicago has spent crazy amounts of money on the migrant situation. The city tried to build a shelter on a site that had hazardous waste. A food contract is being moved from a well-run food pantry to a connected business. Even the lefty aldermen are frustrated with the level of incompetence.
My #1 change in attitude towards government is to stop believing in outsourcing as a generally good thing to do. Outsourcing is hard and just as easy to screw up as doing a bad job in-house. See: Boeing. And outsourcing is generally more expensive when the buyer, government, is such a schizophrenic and an easy mark.
Brining work in-house would be a very tough transition. It would require smart, well-paid people with authority to do their jobs. The antithesis of so many current government jobs. The payoff from better management and processes could be really meaningful to private entrepreneurs and society overall. This is a pretty good article:
Reinsdorf and the McCaskey family are putting their hands out. The dumb pols can't even see what's in their own back yard in Wrigleyville. The Bears thing is kind of mystifying to me. I thought they saw others in the NFL who didn't ask for subsidies and were going to follow the lead. I speculate that someone got to them and said the pols are willing to play with big enough $.
I thought the McCaskey's wouldn't. Perhaps if they were treated fairly on property taxes with the Arlington Hts purchase, they wouldn't have. Staying in the city, they can see how bad the city wants it. Bears/Sox/Bulls are some of the worst run pro sports organizations.
There is one element of the US gov't that is actually quite good at its job: the US Army Corps of Engineers.
When the world was in the midst of the Pandemic Panic, the Corps converted the NYC Jacob Javits Center into a 3200 bed intensive care hospital in 3 days. This was an impressive feat of project management and logistics.
I was a Corps of Engineers officer (combat engineers) and went to VMI, a school that produced a disproportionate number of Chiefs of Engineers as it is a much better school of engineering than West Point. A school mate of mine was the Chief.
The only chance for "right sizing" the mammoth US gov't is to walk the cat backwards and eliminate the most recently created gov't departments. We could live without Energy and Education as a beginning. Let the states run those programs.
When DHS was formed, it was sold as being more efficient and that the head count would actually go DOWN. Alas, not so.
There is also merit to locating gov't departments outside of DC and in the field where their work is actually undertaken. The physical centralization of gov't feeds on itself.
Too bad they're part of the Army. The Pentagon is as dysfunctional as any government agency. Way beyond any of the cultural baloney. The Air Force and the Navy don't know how to cost effectively build the next generation planes and ships. Partially due to over-reliance on activities outsourced to defense contractors. Not to mention any financial accountability systems.
There is the Army and then there are the actual combat units. I served in some very good infantry divisions and combat engineers that are completely removed from the Pentagon, the Puzzle Palace.
Military procurement of weapons systems is a huge corrupt endeavor, but we have some incredible weapons such as the HIMARS and the Patriot. We are getting a real world Spanish Civil War test of our systems v the Russians and ours are simply better.
We have more generals today with a 440K active component than we had in WWII with a 13.5MM active component. That is insane and gives rise to men and women making stars without active service in combat units.
When I was in no general had a PR guy. Yikes!
The tooth to tail ratio is approximately 1:10 meaning for each warrior there are 10 supporters.
When I was in, the Army was quite a meritocracy because of the natural selection of the Vietnam War. I saw a lot of good company grade officers being selected "below the zone" for advancement to major.
We are having a horrible failure at recruiting because we are unable to appeal to the emotional power of patriotism and service. This cannot continue.
Re: recruiting: The teachers and social warriors have taught a full generation of kids now that the U.S. is irredeemably racist, corrupt and imperialistic. When you grow up thinking that your country is evil, how excited is anyone going to be to defend it?
I think that the teachers and social warriors are not aware of how successful they have been in this endeavor. I think some did it to enact "change" but didn't realize that they poisoned the entire supply of children to accomplish utopian progressives ideals that will never be.
They have tried to overcome the worst of human nature by appealing to the worst of it.
We have to hope that the pendulum will begin to swing back, and soon.
WWII - 95% of inductees passed their pre-induction physical and physical fitness test
Vietnam War - 65%
Currently - 15%
We -- our youth -- have become soft, lazy, and complacent. If you can't become a lumberjack physically, then guess what? You do not pursue lumberjacking.
We need to return to a curriculum of history that teaches from whence our country came, who made it happen, the challenges we overcame, and re-instill the noble values of patriotism and service.
I got much more out of my military service than the Army got out of me.
I learned to command men, how to set out an order so it would be followed, how to take care of my troops, how to form teams, how to motivate and inspire soldiers (many times draftees), how to absorb a mistake, how to train a team to do dangerous things, how to effectively delegate, and how to be in charge of a large number of men.
Coupled with a degree in civil engineering and an MBA in finance, that leadership training was essential to any entrepreneurial success I had.
We should create a requirement for national service -- not just military.
The drone defense issue is real. The Navy is using multi-million $ missiles to shoot down $10K drones in the Red Sea. It's not a sustainable situation. There are lots of lessons to learn from the Ukraine war.
Every war introduces some tactical or weapon oriented innovation that changes the way war is made.
This war has taught us:
1. the importance of missiles and their ability to broaden the battlefield,
2. the vulnerability of tanks versus the capabilities of ATGMs of all kind,
3. the power of drones to see over the tree line and to deliver deadly force, and,
4. the ability to develop an almost comprehensive intelligence appreciation of where the enemy is using real time satellites, drones, sigint, humint, and AI, whereafter longer range weapons like HIMARS can destroy them.
Keep your eye on Palantir and its ability to integrate all this data in real time.
This is all happening in real time and the days of an armored attack blowing through a line of resistance are over. The tanks will be destroyed in their marshalling areas.
The cost v benefit ratio of drones is at the top of the list of innovations. These are, literally, $10K systems that can be produced in a couple of days that can destroy weapons systems that cost $15MM+.
Recently -- within the last 48 hours -- the Ukrainians flew 3 FPV (first person view) drones -- drones that can find targets with the assistance of high flying drones using GPS that can vector them to a target and then fly to the target and actually view their approach to impact -- inside Russian warehouses wherein maintenance was underway on a dozen pieces of gear that they destroyed.
The Ukrainians flew FPV drones inside a Russian warehouse and picked their targets with vision. Boom!
These drones are being built from readily available components -- motors, GPS, weapons, communication -- and are far less vulnerable to jamming as they can fly by sight.
Want to solve the issue with the Houthis? Bomb the Iranian factories that are making the naval missiles. These naval missiles are substantially more expensive than FPVs, but way less expensive than a ship.
Imagine if when they created an agency or department they limited both the budget AND the headcount in perpetuity, or to some sub-inflation and sub-population level of growth to cover the positive impact of productivity gains and per-capita economies of scale.
Wait, am I just thinking like a business person and this is wholly inappropriate?
Starve the beast has not worked. All the gov't does is hire contractors instead of employees. Read the article I posted. The scope of activities needs to be changed and that is a legislative issue.
About 10 years back a friend of mine told me about an entrepreneur who was starting a business in the Chicago area. This man was an inventor and had started and sold several businesses before his current project. At the time the state of Illinois was offering some type of financial incentives for new businesses so this entrepreneur spoke to the state about his business project. A couple of weeks later two union officials showed up at his office and advised him that he should use unionized workers for his project. This business is now located in Wisconsin where it employs about 35 workers.
That's a feature, not a bug, here. The local pols have no interest in a thriving "non-union" ecosystem, because it doesn't support the Democrat funding/voting machine. They are perfectly content with this business moving to Wisconsin.
The reason is that they have never suffered the consequences of a revenue fall-out and having to reverse decades of bad policy. We were getting there until the Covid government bailouts made the government flush for several years and pumped billions into local businesses that were doing fine. It just pushed the day of reckoning back a few years.
The game here is all about kicking the can as far ahead as you can, so that your name is not in the news when everything hits the fan. The pols here don't care about long-term fiscal responsibility or attracting businesses.
Fair to say that when the gov't gets involved the outcomes are diminished and the money is distributed to cronies. This is really true today on all the CRT/DIE/EGS stuff. Huge amounts of money spread around to the usual suspects.
I wonder how something like DARPA fits into this? I am no expert on DARPA, but I do have a sense they are producing far more tech "good" than they are consuming.
The Univ of Texas has a huge research facility -- JJ Jake Pickle Research -- and all major universities see themselves as research bastions. They have an office of "commercialization" that turns promising research loose to be exploited commercially with UT retaining a stake. This has been quite successful.
BTW, these research facilities are one of the favorite Chinese targets for infiltration and espionage through their Confucian Institutes.
There are a few little supportive tax benefits related to startups such as QSBS (qualified small business stock capital gains exclusion) that are supportive.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
I didn't name names. Here is one organization that is not grifting and it comes to mind because you bring up research universities. Illini Angels was started by a venture fund in Champaign that got it's start via the university. The person that runs it is a 2x successful entrepreneur. Virtually every university that does research has AUTUM and an entire workforce dedicated to monetizing research done in the University.
Some orgs start okay, but they transition into the grift. They are shells of themselves. Hyde Park Angels is like that.
I am not sure DARPA fits. But, an organization like 1871 or Matter in Chicago does.
Unfortunately, that is just one more subset in the vast wasteland of government throw away money that finds it so easy to dispense with taxpayer dollars because they look at it as a never-ending flow. Rarely has impression been more important than results and despite that being continually proven, they insist on doing so.
It is virtually impossible to find a "temporary" gov't funded program that has ever been terminated.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Next, the "temporary" homeless shelters and illegal migrant shelter will never close down.
I lived for 4 decades in Austin By God Texas which has good winter weather so it attracts lots of traveling homeless.
The had a "no camping" ordinance they enacted, then cancelled, and then re-enacted.
If you provide homeless shelter, you get a lot more homeless.
With all the empty large box stores (talking to you, Walmart) we should be able to solve this problem, but it just keeps growing.
As an Army brat kid, I lived in subdivided WWII wooden barracks with a design life of 4 years into the 1960s. They are still in use some 84 years later.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
I find over and over that government and public-private stuff ends up being some kind of money laundering grift. Kind of explains your grandchildren’s missing $34,000,000,0000,000…
True. I often wonder what happened to the founders of Solyndra, the green company helmed by the husband of an Obama staffer. Company went belly up, of course.
Well said Mr Carter! Love your commenters!
me too, love the commenters
Government is the easiest mark around. Everyone takes advantage, from both for-profit and non-profit sectors. One of the easiest examples to see is how Chicago has spent crazy amounts of money on the migrant situation. The city tried to build a shelter on a site that had hazardous waste. A food contract is being moved from a well-run food pantry to a connected business. Even the lefty aldermen are frustrated with the level of incompetence.
My #1 change in attitude towards government is to stop believing in outsourcing as a generally good thing to do. Outsourcing is hard and just as easy to screw up as doing a bad job in-house. See: Boeing. And outsourcing is generally more expensive when the buyer, government, is such a schizophrenic and an easy mark.
Brining work in-house would be a very tough transition. It would require smart, well-paid people with authority to do their jobs. The antithesis of so many current government jobs. The payoff from better management and processes could be really meaningful to private entrepreneurs and society overall. This is a pretty good article:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy
Doesn't the hair on the back of your neck stand up when you hear "public private partnership"? : )
Reinsdorf and the McCaskey family are putting their hands out. The dumb pols can't even see what's in their own back yard in Wrigleyville. The Bears thing is kind of mystifying to me. I thought they saw others in the NFL who didn't ask for subsidies and were going to follow the lead. I speculate that someone got to them and said the pols are willing to play with big enough $.
I thought the McCaskey's wouldn't. Perhaps if they were treated fairly on property taxes with the Arlington Hts purchase, they wouldn't have. Staying in the city, they can see how bad the city wants it. Bears/Sox/Bulls are some of the worst run pro sports organizations.
There is one element of the US gov't that is actually quite good at its job: the US Army Corps of Engineers.
When the world was in the midst of the Pandemic Panic, the Corps converted the NYC Jacob Javits Center into a 3200 bed intensive care hospital in 3 days. This was an impressive feat of project management and logistics.
I was a Corps of Engineers officer (combat engineers) and went to VMI, a school that produced a disproportionate number of Chiefs of Engineers as it is a much better school of engineering than West Point. A school mate of mine was the Chief.
The only chance for "right sizing" the mammoth US gov't is to walk the cat backwards and eliminate the most recently created gov't departments. We could live without Energy and Education as a beginning. Let the states run those programs.
When DHS was formed, it was sold as being more efficient and that the head count would actually go DOWN. Alas, not so.
There is also merit to locating gov't departments outside of DC and in the field where their work is actually undertaken. The physical centralization of gov't feeds on itself.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
If only we could"walk the cat back!" Great perspective Mr minch!
Too bad they're part of the Army. The Pentagon is as dysfunctional as any government agency. Way beyond any of the cultural baloney. The Air Force and the Navy don't know how to cost effectively build the next generation planes and ships. Partially due to over-reliance on activities outsourced to defense contractors. Not to mention any financial accountability systems.
There is the Army and then there are the actual combat units. I served in some very good infantry divisions and combat engineers that are completely removed from the Pentagon, the Puzzle Palace.
Military procurement of weapons systems is a huge corrupt endeavor, but we have some incredible weapons such as the HIMARS and the Patriot. We are getting a real world Spanish Civil War test of our systems v the Russians and ours are simply better.
We have more generals today with a 440K active component than we had in WWII with a 13.5MM active component. That is insane and gives rise to men and women making stars without active service in combat units.
When I was in no general had a PR guy. Yikes!
The tooth to tail ratio is approximately 1:10 meaning for each warrior there are 10 supporters.
When I was in, the Army was quite a meritocracy because of the natural selection of the Vietnam War. I saw a lot of good company grade officers being selected "below the zone" for advancement to major.
We are having a horrible failure at recruiting because we are unable to appeal to the emotional power of patriotism and service. This cannot continue.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Re: recruiting: The teachers and social warriors have taught a full generation of kids now that the U.S. is irredeemably racist, corrupt and imperialistic. When you grow up thinking that your country is evil, how excited is anyone going to be to defend it?
I think that the teachers and social warriors are not aware of how successful they have been in this endeavor. I think some did it to enact "change" but didn't realize that they poisoned the entire supply of children to accomplish utopian progressives ideals that will never be.
They have tried to overcome the worst of human nature by appealing to the worst of it.
We have to hope that the pendulum will begin to swing back, and soon.
Huuuuuuuge problem and challenge.
Part of it is fundamental.
WWII - 95% of inductees passed their pre-induction physical and physical fitness test
Vietnam War - 65%
Currently - 15%
We -- our youth -- have become soft, lazy, and complacent. If you can't become a lumberjack physically, then guess what? You do not pursue lumberjacking.
We need to return to a curriculum of history that teaches from whence our country came, who made it happen, the challenges we overcame, and re-instill the noble values of patriotism and service.
I got much more out of my military service than the Army got out of me.
I learned to command men, how to set out an order so it would be followed, how to take care of my troops, how to form teams, how to motivate and inspire soldiers (many times draftees), how to absorb a mistake, how to train a team to do dangerous things, how to effectively delegate, and how to be in charge of a large number of men.
Coupled with a degree in civil engineering and an MBA in finance, that leadership training was essential to any entrepreneurial success I had.
We should create a requirement for national service -- not just military.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
The drone defense issue is real. The Navy is using multi-million $ missiles to shoot down $10K drones in the Red Sea. It's not a sustainable situation. There are lots of lessons to learn from the Ukraine war.
Every war introduces some tactical or weapon oriented innovation that changes the way war is made.
This war has taught us:
1. the importance of missiles and their ability to broaden the battlefield,
2. the vulnerability of tanks versus the capabilities of ATGMs of all kind,
3. the power of drones to see over the tree line and to deliver deadly force, and,
4. the ability to develop an almost comprehensive intelligence appreciation of where the enemy is using real time satellites, drones, sigint, humint, and AI, whereafter longer range weapons like HIMARS can destroy them.
Keep your eye on Palantir and its ability to integrate all this data in real time.
This is all happening in real time and the days of an armored attack blowing through a line of resistance are over. The tanks will be destroyed in their marshalling areas.
The cost v benefit ratio of drones is at the top of the list of innovations. These are, literally, $10K systems that can be produced in a couple of days that can destroy weapons systems that cost $15MM+.
Recently -- within the last 48 hours -- the Ukrainians flew 3 FPV (first person view) drones -- drones that can find targets with the assistance of high flying drones using GPS that can vector them to a target and then fly to the target and actually view their approach to impact -- inside Russian warehouses wherein maintenance was underway on a dozen pieces of gear that they destroyed.
The Ukrainians flew FPV drones inside a Russian warehouse and picked their targets with vision. Boom!
These drones are being built from readily available components -- motors, GPS, weapons, communication -- and are far less vulnerable to jamming as they can fly by sight.
Want to solve the issue with the Houthis? Bomb the Iranian factories that are making the naval missiles. These naval missiles are substantially more expensive than FPVs, but way less expensive than a ship.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Imagine if when they created an agency or department they limited both the budget AND the headcount in perpetuity, or to some sub-inflation and sub-population level of growth to cover the positive impact of productivity gains and per-capita economies of scale.
Wait, am I just thinking like a business person and this is wholly inappropriate?
Starve the beast has not worked. All the gov't does is hire contractors instead of employees. Read the article I posted. The scope of activities needs to be changed and that is a legislative issue.