No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Archive for March 29th, 2008

A way to reduce the deficit with NO pain!

by @ 17:15. Filed under Miscellaneous.

But it will require some intelligence!

Saw this article today talking about an agency that was hired to provide assistance payments to Katrina victims.  

Now, other than a smarmy “You’re doing a great job Brownie!”, I won’t take the easy path and denigrate the stupidity of yet another bureaucracy.   Nor will I call into question their intelligence when they managed to pay the maximum payout of $150,000 to people who didn’t qualify at all for the program.   I also won’t cast aspersions on their integrity just because the only way this “leaked” out was that they had to put out a contract to hire a collection firm to help them get the money returned.

I will give them the benefit of the doubt because they had a

“sense of urgency in paying Road Home applicants, and ICF knew applicants might eventually have to return some money.”

Here however is the money line of the article:  

Brann pointed out that 5,000 collections cases would represent a 4-percent error rate for the Road Home that is “quite good for large federal programs.”

Let’s see, the current Federal budget is $3.1 trillion dollars.   If 4% of that is just “error”, we have $124 Billion we should be able to take out of the budget just by hiring a few people that are smarter than your average fifth grader!   Of course Brann thinks 4% is “quite good”, probably representing an “A” or “A-” in government speak.   If that’s so, the average error rate is probably more like 6% – 7% or around $200 Billion dollars.

The current budget deficit is estimated to be around $400 Billion. I think we’ve just found a way to cut that in half!

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