Want to See What Privatization Means? Check Florida and Jeb Bush

Privatization appears to follow governing members of the Bush family around like a low level infection. Texas has had its share of governing fiascoes that can be traced to privatization of functions that have historically been performed by government, but Florida may surpass even Texas.

Take for example Florida's efforts to privatize both prisons and care of juvenile offenders/delinquents and the like. The Palm Beach Post has done several pieces on the problems (as have other Florida papers), recently focusing on the juvenile justice aspect. Check out this quote from a couple of weeks ago:

When the state shut down its failed prison for teenage girls in suburban West Palm Beach, it moved inmates to a new program that soon had many of the same problems....The state shut that program down, too, only 17 months after opening it.
...
The 18 state-run residential programs, which pay youth-care workers thousands more a year on average than private companies, were less likely to be cited for incidents such as abuse and excessive force, according to rankings in the Department of Juvenile Justice's 2006 Residential Program Report Cards.

Among the many problems, apart physical abuse of the adults and children held in custody by order of the state, is the fact that the private prisons and youth facilities sign contracts specifying how many employees the private firms will maintain to do their jobs. They are paid based on the expectation that they will, in fact, hire those people.

You saw this one coming, right? Why hire all those people when you can skimp by with fewer workers and make more money (while doing a less than stellar job).

The source linked above also offers up this:

Florida Department of Juvenile Justice inspectors also found that the academy's for-profit management company, Diversified Behavioral Health Solutions Inc., had failed to fill dozens of positions required in its $5.4 million annual contract.
...
A monitor calculated in March 2006 that the state was paying at least $689,761 a year for positions the company had not filled.

Not all under staffing is deliberate--the for-profit facilities simply have a hell of a turnover problem and you don't have to be a genius to figure out why:

In 2005, private for-profit programs paid workers a median wage of $17,906 a year, compared with $19,881 at programs for teens managed by nonprofit contractors, the study found. State workers in comparable state-run residential programs made a median of $22,762 that year.

I'm guessing that benefits, including retirement, would also we way better for the state employees.


In another piece a week later, the same newspaper explicitly urged Make public the ripoffs from taking state private. That piece revealed that the state's contracts with private firms for such services as running prisons were so poorly written that the state often has no recourse when the private firm fails to live up to its obligations.

Did I mention that the privatization efforts have been undertaken largely under Jeb Bush's reign as Florida's Governor? Did I mention that?

Letting Tax Lawyers Write the Tax Rules is Like....Business as Usual for This Crowd

I really thought this might be a joke internet story, until I bought today's NY Times and discovered this piece:

I.R.S. Letting Tax Lawyers Write Rules
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
The Internal Revenue Service is asking tax lawyers and accountants who create tax shelters and exploit loopholes to take the lead in writing some of its new tax rules.

The pilot project represents a further expansion of the increasingly common federal government practice of asking outsiders to do more of its work, prompting academics and other critics to complain that the government is going too far.

They worry that having private lawyers and accountants draft tax rules could allow them to subtly skew them in favor of their clients.

“It’s not the fox guarding the hen house; it’s the fox designing the hen house,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of political science at New York University, who studies the federal work force.

Donald L. Korb, the I.R.S. general counsel, defended the plan, saying in an interview that he believed that the pilot project was “not changing this process one iota.”

“We are still getting comments; we are still having hearings,” he said, and I.R.S. lawyers will still review any new rules before they are final.

I love the idiotic "I.R.S. lawyers will still review any new rules before they are final." Yes, I'm sure they will make an effort to do that. But they will be reviewing complicated rules, each of which will affect multiple other rules, and they will be at one hell of a disadvantage in finding any potential disasters tucked away in this mass of barely readable stuff.

Which is a far cry from having the IRS guys write the original proposal, giving them a much firmer grip on what the rules intend to do, and letting the tax shelter guys poke around and criticize. And if you don't think that's a hell of a big difference, just wait until the tax lawyers have written a few new rules and see what the consequences are to the wealthier end of the American spectrum (not to mention the consequences to the public treasury).

But what the hell, this is Bushland Uber Alles, and business as usual, all in one. This is no worse than letting Securities firms write SEC rules, or having student loan companies write new student loan rules, or having energy companies write new energy and pollution rules, and so on. Which has been going on some time now.

And look at how well that has gone.