[oceanview]

give me a break, we have a relative that earns $76K per year working for the public school system buying school supplies. something any of us here could do with 1 hour of work per day on staples.com. waste is massive. sanitation workers who work 4 hours per day picking up trash are another example.

you need honest elected officials who hire administrators that run these agencies properly. or just flat out outsource them to the private sector. instead, they all tend to increase government staff endlessly and then howl when anyone tries to cut.

[Numbers Guy]

give me a break, we have a relative that earns $76K per year working for the public school system buying school supplies. something any of us here could do with 1 hour of work per day on staples.com. waste is massive. sanitation workers who work 4 hours per day picking up trash are another example.

I wasn't talking about public school employees. Re-read the thread and you'll see that the subject was welfare system employees, i.e. welfare caseworkers.

Those people deal with large caseloads, have to interact with welfare recipients day after day (or do protective services work with some pretty scary families), they have massive forms to fill out for each person (the forms are that large to prevent fraud, by the way), and the expectations for them are quite high. If you "save" money by eliminating a bunch of them, you'll see an increase in fraud and abuse.

This isn't someone sitting in an office ordering supplies. These people have to sit in an office day after day as one applicant after another, many of whom are trying to scam the system, comes up with a hand stuck out, seeking money from the taxpayers.

Now I'm not trying to make them sound like saints or anything, but the idea that most or even a significant portion of welfare spending goes to state employees is absolutely false. If we, as conservatives, are going to confront the issue of government waste, we need to identify where the waste is, not believe in myths that sound nice.