Seriously?

I can't believe that it's really been over two years since I last posted here. Guess I've been pretty slack because there has been plenty in the news and such to rant about, and even more to ramble over for no reason other than to ramble .... I've written several in my head, I think I even typed a few out, but I guess I never got around to actually throwing them up here.

I'd like to say that I was busy with other work ... and late 2010 and through 2011 that was probably true, but 2012 was slow at best and I was unemployed for the beginning of 2013 ... and may be again if I don't manage to turn this contract into a full time position, or land another contract to extend it.

Having spent the last 3 months in the unemployment system I can see how completely screwed up that program has become.

It is a system that does little to nothing to assist an unemployed person in finding a job, and in certain respects discourages taking 'small jobs' while you're looking.

Leaving aside the benefit calculation and length of the benefit as both a confusing mess and for professional workers like myself, a grossly inadequate level of compensation ... if I take a job that earns less than my benefit ... my benefit is reduced by my pre-tax earnings .... so if I were to take a job where I earned less per week than my benefit ... I would be working for free. (Example the max benefit is $330 / Week (pre-tax) ... so if I were to take a temp job that earned me $230 (pre-tax) ... my benefit for the week would only be $100 to bring me to a total of $330 for the week. Since I could have earned $330 for the week without so much as getting out of bed(1), I worked the week for free.)

[(1) - Okay, not technically true as you have to be 'actively looking for a job' and turn in a work search report every week with at least 3 new job contacts ... but since emailing resumes or calling employers counts ... in this day that CAN be done from bed.]

The DoL (Department of Labor) does at least have a website that helps you find contacts .. kind of ... but I got better results using standard job search engines and good ole fashioned networking. And in fact it was networking that landed me the contract I have now. Going into the office, however, is less fruitful ... unless your goal was to waste most of your day to talk to someone that will a) give you a pamphlet that essentially tells you to do what you have already been doing, b) tell you to go to the website, c) give you paperwork that, when processed, will tell you what you already knew if you've gone to the website, and d) smile insincerely and encourage you to keep plugging away at it.

I could cut the DoL budget in about half by getting rid of most of the 'councelors' that don't do anything productive and just stop pretending to offer that at all. They already have a room full of computers so that people that don't have Internet access at home can use the website, and every time I went 60% of those weren't being used, and half of the ones that were were surfing facebook, not job hunting(2).

[(2) - I recognize that I didn't really do a count of the computers that were being used, or how they were being used. This was just the impression glancing around the room while sitting there with nothing else to do while waiting for the counselor to call me.]

The problem is, like so many other government handled programs, it has become a bureaucracy that is heavy on personnel and light on actual service. A bunch of people, pushing papers around, sending letters, emails, and the like. Many of whom may have even gone into the job with the desire to help people only to find themselves ground down by the bureaucratic machine and sheer number of people. Trust me ... for the most part it is not the individuals that I think are the problem.

Inefficiency is the nature of a bureaucracy as you tend to end up with a large number of people doing little more than overseeing people. The government school system is a great example of this often being very administration heavy with some districts having as many as 2 administrators for each teacher in the system. And those overseers are often pulling down hefty government salaries and benefits while having limited impact on the actual goal of the department. This in turn strangles the department budget leaving less and less money to actually go toward achieving the department's goal.

The governmental answer to this problem is usually to create more regulations and hire more administration to determine what the problem is and suggest a course of action to the committee in charge of the department that usually amounts to 'give us more money.'

Which brings us to the current problems with the Federal budget .... much of the problems of our budget could be solved by increasing the EFFICIENCY of the programs involved. Remember folks, it takes roughly 2 tax payers making the same salary (plus the taxes payed by the government employee) to pay the salary of each government employee ... it should be relatively obvious that the larger government grows the more and more impossible it becomes to maintain. This is why only $0.05 to $0.10 of every tax dollar collected actually makes it back out of the government in terms of benefits. Salaries and operational expenses are the biggest expenses that face our government ... and they aren't talking about any REAL long term cuts in those ... in fact they aren't really talking about cuts in anything ... they aren't cutting they're reducing planned increases ... so a department that got 100 million this year is only going to get 105 million next year instead of the 110 million that they were going to get under the previous budget projection. .... mind you we don't have enough money to pay for the 100 million they got THIS year and if we FROZE their budget at 100 million we wouldn't have that next year either so giving them 105 million is 5 more million dollars we have to borrow...

But let's just keep spending ... somewhere down the line I'm sure that money will just fall from the sky and solve our debt problems. Oh ... I know ... we'll find it collectively in between our sofa cushions. I'm sure that planning will work out very well for us in the future....