And Chevy Volt costs what? somethign like $140,000 and sells for $40K
And Welfare spends $100,000 to give away $30,000 in ‘benefits’ (or the equivalent of one full-time government worker making $70K for every family on welfare getting $30K)
now THAT’s good government!
“somewhere it seems, there is some overhead.”
Ronald Reagan in “the Speech” - “A Time for Choosing” about welfare circa 1964.
Oh heck! The entire context....
“We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they’re going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer—and they’ve had almost 30 years of it—shouldn’t we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?
But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we’re told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We’re spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you’ll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we’d be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.”
Ronald Reagan
Years ago, I spent time at the Pentagon documenting a multi-million dollar procurement deal (munitions fraud) involving armaments bought by the US Navy. Some of the players were major defense contractors listed on the NYSE. Before we got into it, the FBI had reported to the Congress that the deal in question was padded at least double, 100%, with ficticious costs, etc. We were retained to review the FBI report and dig deeper into what transpired. We reported to the same Congressional subcommittee, six months later. The deal was not padded 100%, but nearly 5000% i.e., for every dollar of real cost, the Navy was charged nearly $500.
When the subcommittee eventually reported on the fraud to the Congress, they used the FBI's dramatically lower figure of 100%, understating by hundreds of millions of dollars the waste and criminality on just this one contract in dollar terms. Apparently, someone took a call from the parties involved and our report was left on a desk in the anteroom.