To a small businessman or a taxpayer, these are the most feared words in the English Language:
"I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."
Why?
Because most people with any life experience know that regardless of intent, the government is too unwieldly, too inept, too inertia bound to help anyone.
Take one of the O-man's most touted portions of the stimulus: Weatherization.
The idea seemed like a good one: Spend some of the stimulus money and put some people to work weatherizing taxpayers homes.
That would create energy savings, in turn lessening dependence on foreign oil, and create employment in the battered construction industry.
And, it was work deemed to be immediately "shovel ready".
Nobody could imagine any reason why such work couldn't we started imediately.
After all, the homes were there waiting, there were workers laid off from construction who had the training and the ability, and there was no new technology involved.
Congress specified that funding for weatherization under the 2009 stimulus legislation rise to $5 billion over a three-year period from $450 million the previous year, so certainly the money was going to be there.
So by now, a year after Congress acted, we should have a whole passel of weatherized, energy efficient houses, right?
Not exactly.
The program so far has borne little fruit, with many of the biggest states meeting less than 2 percent of their goals to date.
Gregory H. Friedman, the Department of Energy’s inspector general, in a report issued Tuesday, called the lack of progress “alarming."
"Far into the nation’s winter heating season, the program for the most part has neither saved energy nor put people to work" he wrote.
“The job creation impact of what was considered to be one of the department’s most ‘shovel ready’ projects has not materialized.”
What the heck went wrong here?
I mean, how hard can it be?
Well, if you're the government, it seems you can create obstacles at every turn, without regard to logic or common sense.
"Quick action on weatherization was doomed by bureaucratic delays and by the recession itself" the inspector general’s report said, as spending cuts caused by the economic downturn forced states to trim personnel expenses.
Many states either furloughed the state employees who would administer such programs or instituted hiring freezes that prevented state offices from processing additional work — even though the federal government would have eventually paid the additional salaries, the report found.
Seems the states didn't exactly trust the Feds when it came to busting their own bdgets, and chose instead to wait until the funding was actually in place.
But wait, there's more.
One nationwide stumbling block was a decision by Congress to require contractors on the weatherization jobs to pay prevailing wages.
That was a "gimme" to unions, ensuring that nobody could do the work for what the unions would have charged, even though using actual local wages would have save millions.
In fact, almost nobody knew what actual "prevailing wages" were.
Because the housing downturn and the economic slump had totally skewed the payscales around the country.
So the Labor Department undertook a survey to determine what those salary levels were.
A survey that as of today, about a year later, still isn't complete.
The Energy Department instructed states to go ahead and put people to work in the meantime and to keep records so the federal government could make retroactive payments if necessary.
But "most simply are choosing not to begin hiring till the wage question is resolved", the report said.
See, states have been burned before by the Feds when it comes to "promised funding".
Just ask Arnold of California.
As a result, as of mid-February, one year into the stimulus plan, only 8 percent of the funds had been disbursed.
New York State, for example, had a goal of weatherizing 45,400 units over three years but by December had accomplished only 280, a completion rate of 0.62 percent.
Progress in Pennsylvania, which weatherized 1.28 percent of the houses and apartments it had intended to, was slowed by a deadlock over the state budget.
Illinois wanted to hire 21 workers to oversee nearly work on 27,000 homes; it hired none because of a spending freeze, and completed only 331, or 1.23 percent of its three-year target.
Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Texas and Wyoming had not weatherized any units by Feb. 16, the report said.
A year after passage of the first fiscal stimulus bill that created the weatherization program, Congress is trying to move toward passing a second bill meant to stimulate employment.
Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over whether last year’s legislation made enough of a difference to justify its cost and whether the second will add enough jobs in time to help jumpstart the economy.
The Energy Department's report says it hasn't.
How about before we do a second stimulus, we make the first one work?
That would be one way the government could help us all.
"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency." ---- Eugene McCarthy
“I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.” ---- Theodore Roosevelt
