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A striking but unrepresentative example of waste and vanity in Spanish public spending.
Archive for the ‘Public management’ Category
January 16th, 2012
January 13th, 2012
Category: Campaign 2012, Public management
Two days after Barack Obama was inaugurated, I gave him some political advice: In the run-up to the 2012 Election, President Obama should propose abolishing the [Department of Commerce]. It would be his equivalent of Bill Clinton’s support of school uniforms and V-Chip: small, symbolic gestures that send a sort of cultural signal. You can [...]
December 27th, 2011
Category: Public management
My family and I went to the VA hospital for Christmas services, during which the kindly chaplain said goodbye to the veterans to whom he had been ministering. Like a record number of federal government employees, he has decided to retire this year. Because the federal workforce is older than the general population, a certain [...]
December 9th, 2011
Category: Affordable Care Act, Public management
CMS administrator Don Berwick was forced out of office because of a Republican filibuster. He’s come out swinging about death panels, rationing, the need for universal access to care, quality improvement, and more. But here’s my question: Why now?
November 29th, 2011
This past Sunday, I flew home to Los Angeles from Thanksgiving with my relatives in Montreal (actually, it was a bat mitzvah since Canadian Thanksgiving occurred six weeks ago but you get the idea). The Sunday after Thanksgiving is the busiest flying day of the year, with millions of passengers criss-crossing the country. And I [...]
November 14th, 2011
Category: Public management
We are so eager, as a body politic, to eliminate the possibility that public servants will do anything wrong that we make it virtually impossible for them to do anything right. -Lisbeth Shorr When people in the private sector complain of federal government-imposed red tape, they should count themselves lucky: Nothing the government does to [...]
October 26th, 2011
Category: public health, Public management
The leading substance use-related cause of death in Mexico is smoking, which claims over 40,000 lives per year. But it is violent deaths, particularly among the young, which claim the most popular and media attention. We thus should be deeply concerned about the more than 24,000 violent deaths that happen each year in Mexico because [...]
October 25th, 2011
Category: Public management
I was born and reared in West Virginia but now live in California. The contrast between the economies of the two states could not be more stark. West Virginians (who thank God that Arkansas and Mississippi sometimes keep us from being 50th on lists of economic and social indicators) rank nearly dead last on median [...]
August 30th, 2011
Category: Public management
I was once the token scientist member of a team that was tasked with buying a research building for a government agency in Northern California. I know nothing about construction or real estate, but was there to describe how much space it takes to install a wet lab, what computer networks are needed for intensive [...]
