Management Featherbedding

Pretty typically, our bureaucrats have reacted to the sequester by punishing those who threaten their featherbed. All in an effort to shift the pain somewhere else and at the same time continue their cushy work situations.

Our local school board was famous for forcing ever increased school budgets in the face of declining enrollment and a shrinking physical plant, on our hapless landowning taxpayers. The ruse was simple. By state law, any proposed budget that didn't pass the electorate would immediately have to be replaced by an "austerity" budget (not very much less than the proposed one) which was drawn up as a backup in case the real budget didn't pass. The kicker was that if the school board's budget didn't pass the austerity budget was so designed as to inflict the greatest pain on the electorate. This was done by eliminating busing for anyone closer than 1 mile from his or her school. If you had five children going to five different schools, the threat of your having to carpool or drive your kids to and from each school was enough to reduce the electorate to a catatonic state and of course the proposed budget, or one very similar to it, would pass on the second try. The irony of all this is that 90% of the cost of busing was paid for by the state and so the local school board didn't have much skin in the game anyway. This worked until the state law was changed to make things more even handed,

I though of this when the predicted delays at airports took place, supposedly because of the sequester. The sequester didn't tell the bureaucrats to lay off the air traffic controllers (who do the actual work) but, of course, if the middle and top managers would have to take on 15% more work, the public wouldn't notice it and the managers would have a less cushy and privileged life.

We need the sequester and it's time the public asked the bureaucrats, how much of the sequester is being applied to non-direct labor.

Possibly Pink

So I've been griped at for not writing for a while. All justly deserved. I appreciate that you all are still checking, though.

I will recount a story for your reading pleasure.

I was having a discussion with  Boo about how you say different colors in Hebrew. She said that pink had a particular definition, and I was unsure, so we decided to ask Bug, who had spent over a year in Israel as a student, and had many opportunities to speak Hebrew ( but, I believe, he eschewed most of them).

So we asked this veteran of the Israeli streets, who managed to navigate through the stores and restaurants of a foreign country, how one says pink in Hebrew.

He sat in thought and deep contemplation for a moment, looked at Boo and said, with great authority.


How should I know? I never ordered a pink felafel!