You could’ve wrote this one before the hurricane even showed up…

How many contractors does it take to haul a pile of tree branches? If it’s government work, at least four: a contractor, his subcontractor, the subcontractor’s subcontractor, and finally, the local man with a truck and chainsaw.

If the job is patching a leaking roof, the answer may be five contractors, or even six. At the bottom tier is a Spanish-speaking crew earning less than 10 cents for every square foot of blue tarp installed. At the top, the prime contractor bills the government 15 times as much for the same job.

One of many examples of why people shouldn’t bother with government: their impersonal nature encourages Endless Middlemen Syndrome. Rather than go directly to the source, as a normal person would do themself, government buerecrats think the more delegation involved in a task the more effectively it gets done — the exact opposite of common sense. This is how you get huge bills for what amounts to having a crew of illegal immigrants do it for peanuts while some guy watches & counts his money.

One more thing:

…each week, many more millions are paid to contractors who get a cut of the profits from a job performed by someone else. In instances reviewed by The Washington Post, the difference between the job’s actual price and the fee charged to taxpayers ranged from 40 percent to as high as 1,700 percent.

Consider the task of cleaning up storm debris. Just after the hurricane, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded contracts for removing 62 million cubic yards of debris to four companies: Ashbritt Inc., Ceres Environmental Services Inc., Environmental Chemical Corp. and Phillips and Jordan Inc.

Anyone want to guess who those companies are associated with?

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