Government Efficiency

I recently got back from a short vacation to Estes Park CO. On the way up there we had to take route co-66, which had road work being performed on it for a couple of miles at least. Get this- I stopped counting the number of people holding "Slow" signs at 10. Think about that. 10 people whose entire job is holding a sign for 8 hours.

How much do you think that costs Colorado taxpayers? The irony is that the entire stretch of road had large cones and safety tape. Why do you need 10 people holding signs when those signs could simply be mounted in the cones? Let's say the average hourly wage for them is $20/hr. 10 people working 8 hours gives us 80 hours times $20 for a grand total of $1600 in government salary that produced absolutely nothing for the entire day. The government will of course say that "safety" is a product, but couldn't that product be achieved much more efficiently? On that one stretch of road wre spending 8k a week, 32k a month. Multiply that out times the number of other public works project being done and you are looking at probably a loss in the hundreds of thousands.

These people are producing nothing and getting paid more than anyone else in the industry to do it. We the people are losing on every side, because they could be doing something else, moved to another project, working on this one, creating real results. So we lose on the front end and the back end. Any politician worth the name reformer would get on this, but even the republicans have become somewhat accustomed to massive amounts of waste- at our expense.