Governmental Profit Centers. Education, Police & Health

What Are Governmental Motives Concerning Caring For Citizens?

Looking at the news, I thought I’d like to find out why National Health Care is suddenly such an important issue. Is it that President Obama is concerned about our welfare? I thought I’d look at fiscal information in general and see what I could figure out. So I started by using a smaller image of the whole United States. I decided to use California in my example which will make the numbers easier to comprehend. And finally, I started with a news article published today.

Lawmakers: Calif. budget crisis resolved, for now
By JUDY LIN (AP) July 25, 2009

“Even state workers, long protected by powerful public employee unions, have been affected. Schwarzenegger has ordered them to take three days off a month without pay, equating to a 14 percent pay cut.”

I thought I should check the math. There are 21.67 work days per month. The calculation works like this. There are 52 weeks in a year with 5 working days each = 260 days. Divide that by 12 months and you get 21.67 days. Weekday Holidays are included in this figure so there are actually fewer work days than stated, but State workers are ALMOST ALWAYS paid for all holidays.
So 14% of 21.67 = 3.0338.

That’s where the number comes from and the news person, in this case, is correct as far as the math goes.

California Department of Finance (DOF) says California's population is 37.4 million people. Latest U.S. Government Employment Census says California has:
1. 334,432 Full Time Employees
2. 145,162 Part Time Employees
3. 387,168 FULL TIME EQUIVALENT EMPLOYEES

Here’s where they work:
FINANCIAL ADMINISTRATION 22,142
JUDICIAL AND LEGAL * 4,710
POLICE* 13,283
CORRECTIONS 55,710
HIGHWAYS CONST & MAINTENANCE 20,816
PUBLIC WELFARE 3,576
SOCIAL INSURANCE ADMINISTRATION 18,299
SOLID WASTE REMOVAL & MANAGEMENT 397
PARKS & RECREATION 3,370
HIGHER EDUCATION 144,257
ALL OTHER & UNALLOCABLE 27,826

* Los Angeles has a police department with over 10,000 police officers and 3,000 female staff members (that is 1 city), but they, like all other local and county police and court agencies, are not counted in this census. The total number of cops in California as of June 2009 is 97,331 (Whew! It's gonna be hard to get away when that many of them start loading you into the freight cars!) So if you were worried that there might not be enough police in California, you can relax now. If you'd like to verify the number here's the link http://www.post.ca.gov/employdata/le-employment-stats.pdf

Anyway the first thing I asked myself was why the sum of the parts (each individual category, comprising a total of 314,386 employees) does not equal the whole (the 387,168 that the Census indicates is the actual number of equivalent full time employees). I don’t know. I guess the 72,782 guys and girls that are missing are employed watching you or some other vital National Security Task and are therefore anonymous, just as their jobs are secret! Just kidding. I’m sure the State knows where the 72,782 people who are not itemized really work.

I then analyzed the tables, to see if I could make a few determinations, on my own. I tried to ask myself a couple of questions and here’s what I came up with:

1. Find out if the government is really interested in the health, happiness and welfare of the citizens who pay for their extravagant lifestyles.
2. See if I can figure out where we could save some tax money.

Well as I looked at the above chart, it looks like schools are full up with employees and top the list of tax revenue for the State and Federal Government. So what does that tell me? Here’s what I think it says:

1. Schools are a great place to employ large numbers of individuals who can’t do much to run amok.
2. Teachers are self perpetuating. They go to school, teach school, and then die. Then new ones start the cycle all over again.
3. It’s a job easy to heap praise on because after all, they are babysitting your kids.
4. It’s easy to justify spending lots and lots on teachers because a lot of people want their children to have a shot at a real education and will believe anything.
5. Last but not least, teachers are firmly in the system so you know their taxes will be paid and thus provide a huge and reliable profit center for the government.

So the obvious conclusion is the government cares so much about all of its citizens getting a good education, that it spends lots of money and hires lots of teachers and builds lots of schools. Well, that all sounds good, but what about reality?

The reality of the mater is, that in a study released this year, by the Jones Education Company and Marketing and Research Resources Inc., indicates the following:

1. 78.9 % of high school juniors and seniors intend to go on to college
2. Of the 2.6 million high school graduates each year only 61.9 % enroll in college
3. Of the 1.694 million enrolled only roughly 28% graduate or about 448,000 per year.

I think the above statistics tell us that the government/higher education is doing a good job of selling their product. Those same statistics also tell us that their product is not worth the paper they use to advertise it.

Of the 775,000 who enroll but don’t graduate, almost all owe money that they don’t have, and have no way of making. Many have spent their parent’s retirement on a hopeless dream that could never come true and was over rated to begin with. And the government and higher education continue to beat the drum to attend college.

So, is the government looking out for you or are they taking advantage of you? Seems like higher education is more interested in your money than they are in your kids. Hey! What about a “if you don’t graduate, we won’t charge you for wasting your time” kind of plan? No chance you say? Well you are probably right and I rest my case. The government and higher education both get a big fat “F” in the caring and effective category. However higher education is, undeniably, a great way to generate tax revenue that supports an even greater number of failures in higher education. I guess nobody cares where this is going, least of all, those who send their kids to private school.

Oh, by the way, before we leave education and somebody says “public schools are every bit as good as private schools”, I’ll leave you with one last, current statistic:

1. Private school students are more than twice as likely to graduate from college as public school students.
2. Students from the lowest quartile of socioeconomic status are four (4) times more likely to graduate from college if they had attended a private school rather than a public school. 24.4% of the attendees of private school graduated from college while only 6.6 of the public school attendees graduated from collage.

I think that covers it. Private schools are better if you want your kid to graduate from college and not just run up a $100,000.00 bill for nothing. And, if you are poor, I mean really poor, you had better find the money to send your kid to private school or their chances of graduating from college are so low we can’t talk about it in a meaningful way.

So, moving on to Corrections (you know prisons). They are a strong second as a repository for State employees, and they have big room to grow (National Security and all that. We’ve got to keep locking up those crazy dopers also and the marijuana smokers are destroying this country. AND they don’t pay taxes).

The police, courts and corrections plan for profit has been flawlessly executed. Arresting and incarcerating only people who are not paying taxes or paying only small amounts of taxes was a brilliant idea! After they arrest the low/no tax payers, they then they get to charge those of us that are paying taxes, for warehousing those who are not. Clever buggers! (Yes, I’m saying the cops are not racists in the sense of ethnicity. They don’t care what color you are, if you are not paying taxes, i.e. you are a poor person. If that’s the case they want you in jail. That’s where they can make some money on you. Apparently it just so happens that there must be a lot more black poor people than white or latin poor people so there are a lot more blacks in jail. From the cops and the courts points of view, it’s a perfect storm of profit!)

Well I’ve finally arrived at Insurance. I think that’s what I wanted to know about to begin with, but the examples with the education system and the justice system have given me an idea of how things work and have been helpful. So I am now going to try to see if those same money making principals work with insurance.

I’m looking at the Social Insurance Administration above. It’s got a galaxy worth of room to grow and that’s where Obama’s Health Care is going…..at least in California!

Now I get it and it’s not going to take me all day to explain it to myself. It’s just like education and public safety. Sounds good till you look close and then it really starts to stink!

National Health Insurance is NOT ABOUT CARING FOR THE HEALTH NEEDS OF CITIZENS. It is about creating Federal and State jobs by the hundreds of thousands all over this land. Plain and Simple. It’s just another tax to support more government employees who will exploit the citizens they are supposed to serve in order to fill their own pockets. To bad. I really liked Obama. I guess the party is over.



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Many police and court agencies are NOT State or Federal thus the low number of police and courts. The fact is that Los Angeles has a Police Department with 10,000 police officers and over 3000 female staff members if that gives you any idea of how many people really get paid by taxes. And the number of police would be geometrically greater for the state if local and county agencies were counted in this census, which they were not. Same for the court system, which is huge in California.