> Quoting Republican propaganda isn't a real argument, but you did it anyway.
I think you're missing the dichotomy:
> The Republican point of outsourcing has always been "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." (quoting Grover Norquist).
One of two things has to be true. Either their purpose in doing privatization is to cut government spending in order to cut taxes, which would imply that it actually does save money. Or, their purpose is something else, like diverting the same number of tax dollars to their cronies, in which case "in order to cut taxes" is an erroneous attribution of their purpose.
And by the evidence it's the second one, because they don't actually cut spending and yet they still want to do privatization for some reason. Meanwhile if it was the first one as you claim then we should actually want to do it because then it's more efficient and would provide more government services per tax dollar regardless of whether or not you want to cut taxes.
> This only works if the government has enough competent personnel to be able to oversee and evaluate "mess up". When you outsource everything, you no longer have that.
This doesn't require a large number of personnel and in particular it doesn't require the likes of bus drivers or construction workers to be direct government employees, because they're not going to be tasked with making managerial decisions either way.
The real problem is that the people who are tasked with those decisions get paid off (revolving door etc.) to make sure the government gets locked in to some specific contractor or otherwise takes no effective recourse when they come in late and over budget.
I think you're missing the dichotomy:
> The Republican point of outsourcing has always been "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." (quoting Grover Norquist).
One of two things has to be true. Either their purpose in doing privatization is to cut government spending in order to cut taxes, which would imply that it actually does save money. Or, their purpose is something else, like diverting the same number of tax dollars to their cronies, in which case "in order to cut taxes" is an erroneous attribution of their purpose.
And by the evidence it's the second one, because they don't actually cut spending and yet they still want to do privatization for some reason. Meanwhile if it was the first one as you claim then we should actually want to do it because then it's more efficient and would provide more government services per tax dollar regardless of whether or not you want to cut taxes.
> This only works if the government has enough competent personnel to be able to oversee and evaluate "mess up". When you outsource everything, you no longer have that.
This doesn't require a large number of personnel and in particular it doesn't require the likes of bus drivers or construction workers to be direct government employees, because they're not going to be tasked with making managerial decisions either way.
The real problem is that the people who are tasked with those decisions get paid off (revolving door etc.) to make sure the government gets locked in to some specific contractor or otherwise takes no effective recourse when they come in late and over budget.