The problem with tax money

Tax money is a never ending fountain of funding. "Never ending" is the problem.

Therefore, what is connected to the trough of public funding face intrinsic issues of accountability, relevance, and effectiveness.

As bad as business can get, generally in a capitalistic economy, the inefficient, the bloated, the ineffective, and the incompetent shrink and disappear. Funding, financing, and sales disappear. So does the product and the brand. (unless one is GM or Chrysler, or Citibank, etc.)

Government is different. Government is funded by taxes and taxes don't go away. So, over time, what does happen is government becomes less efficient, less responsive, less accountable, less relevant and less effective.

So the Texas legislature recently lowered the budgets for Texas agencies that feed at the trough of Texas taxpayers. In our agency's case, what is going to happen is that the meager services we were actually providing will go away. However, pending the renegotiating of a new contract, what will remain is a process and an unwieldy process at that. The process is simply documenting services that cannot be realistically provided but are contractually required so must be documented as being provided. (Wink! Wink!)

If that sounds confusing, you have not crossed over. If it sounds logical you have just crossed over into the world of the bureaucrat. If it is documented it happened. If it is not documented, it never happened.

So trust me, in the coming two years, the documents will show what is impractical, what is impossible, what is ridiculously unrealistic happened every day--however impractical, however impossible, however unrealistic and however ridiculous (Wink! Wink!) Because...