State of our State

A bureaucrat rises in position not by moving up through the narrowing channels of management, but by adding employees below them and therefore increasing their department size and weight within the organization.  Compare the number of HR staff with actual production workers in many small and medium companies and you will be shocked. But at least the marketplace exhibits competitive pressure while the government bureaucrat relies primarily upon propaganda.  And please remember that the privilege of a government agency to use our tax dollars to lobby for its continued existence plus expansion was an innovation of FDR.

While I receive my retirement healthcare from CALPERS, my pension lies elsewhere. But CALPERS continually sends me pension booklets as part of “the CALPERS family” that are irrelevant and trashed.  My CALPERS healthcare also sends me booklets that contain such “startling” new information as regular exercise and eating fresh fruits and vegetables contribute to health. This waste is created by people inventing a need for themselves with likely justification by consultants with rows of PhD’s.

Some years ago a co-worker of mine, a retired corporate executive and a master at corporate/government paperwork, was closing out the affairs of his recently deceased mother.  He sent the appropriate paperwork to Social Security and quickly received a case closed reply. But a California bureaucrat suspected fraud with his filling to end a small state pension. My friend was raked over the coals for months until resolution. But our Sacramento parasite was probably rewarded for suspecting and pursuing possible hanky panky.

Many years ago my partners and I decided to liquidate a corporation we had. The proper documents were sent in sufficiently before the annual deadline. But we never heard back until the following year. The Department of Corporations wrote back that we were late and therefore owned them another fee to exist in the current year to process the dissolution filing. Our lawyer fired back by saying you withheld the filing intentionally and that if you did this to us you are doing this to others. Would you like a class action suit to prove our contention? We then received an apology saying they had made a clerical error and we didn’t owe the fee. But departments and agencies that produce revenue maintain a certain shine.

As deadly as the growth of California’s government has been, it now appears to have accelerated from an arithmetic rate to a geometric rate. Newsom equals oblivion.

Copyright 2019, Mark L. Bennett