Clearly and obviously there’s going to be some arguing about exactly why this proposed military parade was cancelled. It might be that that’s just not the way America does things, could be that the Pentagon didn’t want to do it. Or the reason that Trump actually claims, that the bureaucracy was all over it and forcing costs up, might even be true. And the thing is, if the bureaucracy does swarm all over something then it does indeed become very expensive.
What would be nice, of course, is having a bureaucracy which didn’t make things expensive. Something that could happen if we cannot have nice things because of the expense of the current one:
The Department of Defense says the military parade originally scheduled for Veterans Day will be postponed.
“The Department of Defense and White House have been planning a parade to honor America’s military veterans and commemorate the centennial of World War I,” Defense Department spokesman Col. Rob Manning said in a statement Thursday. “We originally targeted November 10, 2018 for this event but have now agreed to explore opportunities in 2019.”
That does produce a little giggle among us Europeans, for America was three years late in WWI nd might only be one this time around. But as to the why, well, that’ll be politics, obviously. But who are we going to believe?
President Donald Trump said Friday that he had canceled a planned military parade this fall in the nation’s capital because of the “ridiculously high” price tag given by D.C. officials.
“The local politicians who run Washington, D.C. (poorly) know a windfall when they see it. When asked to give us a price for holding a great celebratory military parade, they wanted a number so ridiculously high that I cancelled it,” Trump tweeted.
It would appear that that cost was just what DC wanted for holding it. That’s maybe including the costs of getting the military there or their time.
Earlier this year, the White House budget director told Congress that the cost to taxpayers could be $10 million to $30 million. Those estimates were likely based on the cost of previous military parades, such as the one in the nation’s capital in 1991 celebrating the end of the first Gulf War, and factored in some additional increase for inflation.
So, it used to be possible to hold a parade for much less, it now costs this much more. So, hose costs of the bureaucracy are going up or own?
And to the really important point, something military parades aren’t. If this is the cost of doing something so simple then how much are those multitudinous layers of bureaucrats costing the economy a a whole? How much poorer are they making us? Now that this cost is revealed to us who is going to do something about it and when?
A lot. If half of bureaucrats were sacked, I doubt anyone would notice any difference..
You’d guarantee this outcome by not sacking every-other-one but following a deliberate strategy. Sack bureaucrats in the agencies mostly dedicated to racketeering: Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Labor — as Republicans have promised to do since Reagan, and on which they have made no progress in this biennium, Energy Secretary Perry even having second thoughts atop one of the three he promised in 2012 he’d shut down.
Secretary Pruitt was on track to sack half his bureaucrats (or more precisely, not fill vacated positions, reduce by attrition). That is why he had to become an ethics pariah.
Bureaucrats “studying” the cost of a military parade fall under my rule that there are no “studies” of anything in government: only sales pitches. Bureaucrats have a motive to prove that any Trump initiative is infeasible (even revoking the access to official secrets of an overt saboteur no longer even in the government’s employ). Bureaucrats are anxious to prove the infeasibility of a Trump initiative that will induce Americans to spend a day feeling good about the armed services (and about Trump, who abandoned many other promises including funding for a border wall, to secure more funding for the armed… Read more »
Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Trump simply ordered the military to march through Washington? They’d provide their own security.
How much of the purported costs are the wages of the soldiers taking part? Are we taking them from productive tasks?
(Soldiers don’t like losing their weekends to parades. They get no benefit from it, it’s a PITA.)
Soldiers don’t like it, either, when training exercises infringe into the weekend. But they do it, and don’t even Grieve with a union.
The military does a lot of things with no national-defense purpose but only that of glorifying military service, including participation in other people’s parades, flyovers at baseball games, color guards at our local amateur events, and a lot of charity work in cities.
Trump in this case did not rail against budgeteers at the Department of Defense but rather the adversarial mayor of Washington. I believe she invented astronomical “costs” for supporting his effort.
Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Trump simply ordered the military to march through Washington? They’d provide their own security.
Bureaucrats “studying” the cost of a military parade fall under my rule that there are no “studies” of anything in government: only sales pitches. Bureaucrats have a motive to prove that any Trump initiative is infeasible (even revoking the access to official secrets of an overt saboteur no longer even in the government’s employ). Bureaucrats are anxious to prove the infeasibility of a Trump initiative that will induce Americans to spend a day feeling good about the armed services (and about Trump, who abandoned many other promises including funding for a border wall, to secure more funding for the armed… Read more »
Maybe Trump could ask how much the Pride Parade costs then say he’s willing to contribute as much as the organisers of that did.
If nothing else isn’t a parade a useful logistics exercise, delivering large amounts of people and equipment to a defined are being a key military requirement after all
How much of the purported costs are the wages of the soldiers taking part? Are we taking them from productive tasks?
(Soldiers don’t like losing their weekends to parades. They get no benefit from it, it’s a PITA.)