Echidne tells us of The Magic of Privatization, wherein the Congress and this administration have decided that rather than hire the extra staff needed to collect delinquent tax accounts at a cost of 3¢ on the dollar, they would rather outsource the job to collection agencies charging 22¢ to 24¢ per dollar collected.
And this makes sense because?
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7 comments
Well, it makes sense about as much as anything else these days. That would be it makes no sense. Sometimes I wonder if they do dumb f*ck things on purpose or are they really that stupid.
Just wondering, does Halliburton have a collection agency under their umbrella of services?
Just wondering, does Halliburton have a collection agency under their umbrella of services? – PoP
I just googled on that, and found a lot of other people asking the same question… but no real answers. Halliburton or otherwise, it has to be some sort of cronyism.
I have a good friend, otherwise extremely bright, who is obsessed with the superiority of private enterprise over public works… in all circumstances whatsoever. I just don’t get it. I’m all for private business when it works better (and I’m rather fond of my own small bit of one-man free enterprise). But in a large number of areas, and this is one of them, the public interest can be better served by public institutions. Businesses are built specifically to benefit their owners; only government has the responsibility of serving the public. Some things need doing whether or not they are profitable; tax collection is one of them.
When people compare the private and public sector they generally forget that overhead costs in the public sector are usually lower because they are shared and they don’t include marketing or profit.
People seem to forget that the complaint you hear most often when the public sector intrudes on the “turf” of private companies is that private businesses can’t compete with the public sector because the government doesn’t have many of the expenses of the private sector.
Somebody’s campaign contributors are making money off of this, of that we can be sure.
It makes sense if your goal isn’t to save the taxpayers money, but to enrich your friends and campaign contributors in the private sector who want to get cushy government contracts to do all the things the government used to do cheaply and reasonably efficiently at far greater costs and with considerably less efficiency.
Well, Michael beat me to that one.
If someone has the courage to search a bit, they’ll find a big Republican donor behind the “winning bidder”.
Locally we have a school board trying to figure out how to pay for school transportation having privatized it three years ago, and now faced with a contract with a private contractor they can’t afford because of the built-in fuel adjustments.
All of the tools they once had are gone, because they are dealing with a corporation with no ties to the community and lawyers on staff. The company has no reason to make any changes to help the district out and every financial incentive not to.
A low-ball bid with clauses that jack the price after the first years or so when the school board can’t afford to forget the whole thing.
It flows from a lobbyist for the firms. The actual political contributions are probably coming from lobbyists laundering the money for the companies.