“You’ve been takin’ a lotta heat for this cancellation of the White House tours. They get– the Secret Service says it’s costs about $74,000 a week. Was canceling them really necessary?”
“You know, I have to say this was not– a decision that went up to the White House.
Obama tells us that the White House doesn’t make decisions about the White House.
It is his home. Does he honestly think we are as stupid as the people who vote for him six times?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sqFX4AVoWkc]
Reblogged this on Gds44's Blog.
They still have more money than they did last year and nothing was cut, just the rate of increase. It’s like giving a 13% raise instead of 15% and saying the salary was cut. Why does he need 3 “Climate Advisors” at over $370,000 a year? Govt. is the only place where the Assistant to the Assistant to the Assistant has an Assistant. Everybody gets to hire somebody else to do their job. That’s why the Calligrapher has 2 assistants to do a job that a computer does better and at a tiny fraction of the cost.
Motivated (he claimed) by 2 “almost axiomatic statements”,
1) An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and
2) Officials make work for each other,
C. Northcote Parkinson (“Parkinson’s Law”, 1957) found an empirical mathematical formula for the yearly increase in personnel “in any public administrative department not actually at war” as
x = (2 K^m + L) / N
“k is the number of staff seeking promotion through the appoinment of subordinates; L represents the difference between the ages of appointment and retirement; m is the number of man-hours devoted to answering minutes within the department; and N is the number of effective units being administered. x will be the number of new staff required each year.”
Parkinson reported an average percentage increase of 5.75% per year, “invariably…between 5.17 per cent and 6.56 per cent, irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”
Parkinson was widely lauded by lay citizens, who can of course afford to laugh at those things they don’t understand (my own levity there; harrumph!). But he warned that his empirical discovery, “and the general principles upon which it is based”, had “no political value”. “Nor can it be sufficiently emphasized that Parkinson’s Law is a purely scientific discovery, inapplicable except in theory to the politics of the day,” he ended. “It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us how fast they grow.”
——————–
I presume science has been a serious business, among politicians, ever since.
That was a reply to gofer above.
“Does he honestly think we are as stupid as the people who vote for him six times?”
Yup. And he doesn’t care…
$74,000 per week for 37 Secret Service agents = over $100K per agent per year. Either the claim is exaggerated or they are paid far too much and should have their salaries cut.
The thing is they have to be there anyway!