Private versus Public Performance of Jobs

Dick Cheney is credited with promoting the practice of outside contractors doing jobs done by government, including our military.

Have you noticed however, that the Tea Party and the GOP aren't pushing for a reduction to the deficit by eliminating this wasteful practice, now that it has been demonstrated not to work?  How serious can the right really be about fiscal responsiblity?  The hypocrisy of this is staggering.

Remember those right wing politicos - Darrell Issa, Tim Pawlenty, are just a couple of examples - who are trying to privatize the Post Office, after it was sabotaged under the Republicans and George W. Bush?

Rarely have the savings promised by the private sector been realized, while instead the practice resulted in egregiously overpriced goods and services, no tracking or accountability or transparency compared to government performance of the same duties, and no bid contracts that amounted to a license to loot the federal governments assets.  There has been a lot of fraud, and no cost benefit or savings.

So far as I can see, there IS no upside.

So much for the promised savings from the private sector.  They don't exist.  They amount to payoffs to a select few, a form of 'crony capitalism'.

From POGO (see our blog roll for links), the Project on Government Oversight:

For years, conventional wisdom in Washington held that outsourcing work to the private sector was the way to go. Why keep work in-house when contractors could do it more efficiently?
Now, a new study by POGO has turned that idea on its head, and has found that the federal government is wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on overpriced service contracts.
We examined 35 different occupations—everything from the bookkeepers to the groundskeepers—and found that on average, the billing rate of a federal service contractor is 83 percent greater than the average annual compensation of a federal employee.
In other words, the government is paying service contractors nearly twice as much as it would cost a federal employee to do the same work.
Our study isn't the be-all, end-all—rather, we hope it spurs the government to ask why it’s paying a premium for work that could done for less by federal employees. We also hope these findings will resonate with the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction—which you can learn all about on our new Super Committee resource page—as it aims to identify at least $1.5 trillion in savings over the next decade. Fortunately, our ideas are starting to take hold. We've  seen editorials about our report everywhere from Atlanta to Minneapolis, and earlier this week, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson echoed our call for cuts to contract spending.
Want to find out more? Whether you prefer video, audio, the good old-fashioned written word or new-fangled infographics, we've got you covered:

• Two-minute video with the report's authors
• Podcast with a handful of POGO staffers discussing the report
• Blog post with reporting by POGO's Dana Liebelson
• Point-counterpoint: POGO's Scott Amey addresses industry mischaracterizations of our report
• Infographic by the folks at GOOD

And of course, you can read the full report, entitled Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors, here.

 Capital cronyism.

Remember that phrase.  Watch for examples of it.