It's hard out there for a Republican presidential candidate.
With so much news oxygen being sucked up by killer tornadoes, Arab revolutions, misbehaving politicians, not to mention the distinctive historiographical stylings of Sarah Palin, the GOP presidential contenders are having a tough time standing out from the din.
Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who is viewed as one of the more serious -- if little known -- GOP candidates, tried to pierce through the media racket on Tuesday, outlining a bold approach to streamlining government services and eliminating waste.
Speaking at the University of Chicago, Pawlenty proposed applying what he called "the Google test" to government services.
“If you can find a service or good available on Google or the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it,” said Pawlenty, in comments cited by The Christian Science Monitor. “The post office, the Government Printing Office, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, were all built for a time in our country when the private sector did not adequately provide those products. But that’s no longer the case.”
Set aside for the moment the fact that "there really is no private-sector alternative to some things the US Postal Service does, such as rural mail delivery," as The Monitor notes. "Or Amtrak, outside of its most-trafficked routes." And set aside that Pawlenty's "Google test" is really just an internet-era rehash of former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith's "yellow pages test," as Political Wire observes.
Pawlenty (pictured) was putting a new twist on a familiar argument, and it's no coincidence he did it at the University of Chicago, America's sacred temple of free-market economics. Republicans have long argued that the private sector is much more efficient and cost-effective than the federal government at providing services. And just about everyone agrees that in 2011, the federal government is a bloated behemoth full of waste, redundancy, and inefficiency. The debate centers on the reasonable limits of privatization, and the services for which no realistic alternative to the government exists.
In his speech, Pawlenty called for $2 trillion in new tax cuts, and trillions more in spending cuts over the next decade, according to The New York Times.
Using Pawlenty's "Google test," Wired.com examined a few of the candidates for privatization:
• Nuclear waste disposal: No need to spend billions on an ultimately doomed plan to store spent radiocative fuel inside a mountain in Nevada, 80 million away from Las Vegas. A simple Google search produces Energy Solutions, "a global leader in the safe recycling, processing and disposal of nuclear material." Let's let them handle nuclear waste disposal. Surely they can do it more cheaply and safely than the Department of Energy.
• Law Enforcement: There are over 900,000 sworn police officers on government payrolls in the United States, according to the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund. Talk about big government. A little Googling comes up with several "private police" companies, including Sentinel Group and Delta Company Police. By law, the power and jurisdiction of these companies is circumscribed to protecting private property, but that's nothing a little legislatin' couldn't solve.
• Prisons: The incarceration privatization train has long since left the station. There are hundreds of prisons housing tens of thousands of state and federal convicts in the U.S. Prominent national GOP figures like Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal have recently proposed selling more prisons to private companies, according to Mother Jones, which says the private corrections industry claims it can save taxpayers between 5 and 15 percent a year in cost. It sounds good in theory, except when it doesn't work in practice, like the time last year when three convicted murderers escaped from a private prison in Arizona using a pair of wire cutters. Of course, inmates escape from government prisons as well, so you really can't hold this against the private prison industry. Again, easily Googleable.
• The U.S. military: This one's a no-brainer. With nearly 3 million personnel (active and reserve), and an annual budget of $700 billion, the U.S. armed forces is one of the country's most expensive government services. And don't forget about those military pensions, health insurance, and the cost of treating and rehabilitating U.S. vets who return from the country's wars with traumatic brain injury or missing limbs. Far and away the world's top military spender, the U.S. shells out over six times what China spends on defense, and more than ten times what the major European countries spend. Who do these people think we are, some sort of global cop on the beat? Solution: Xe. Sure, it will take the company formerly known as Blackwater some time to scale up to a force several-hundred-thousand strong. And yes, the company has had some unfortunate incidents in the past, but with its new ethics chief, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Americans can be confident the company will abide by the very highest professional standards.
There are many other examples, including some creative ones via Salon.com, which suggests we consider replacing the National Institute of Standards and Technology with BoingBoing, HUD with Craigslist, and Congress with 4Chan.
Any other ideas?
Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
See Also:
