The Outstater
Trash Incompetence
AN EARLY STEVE MARTIN skit advised his audience on how to avoid paying taxes on a million dollars. “First, get a million dollars. But what do you say when the tax man asks why you didn’t pay your taxes? Two simple words, two simple words in the English language, ‘I forgot.'”
That’s how government handles mistakes. It “forgets” what went wrong and continues as if nothing happened.
Here is an example from — where better? — Washington, D.C. As the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” became apparent to both Democrats and Republicans, Patrick Moynihan was brought back to Washington from Harvard by Richard Nixon to fix things. He proposed a plan to incentivize work with limited income supplements. The historian Myron Magnet summarizes the realpolitik of that experience:
“As a wise ex-senator once explained to me when I suggested an improved replacement for an existing federal program that would cost no more than the old, I would in fact end up doubling the cost, since Washington never kills old programs but leaves them to run alongside new ones. So Moynihan and Nixon found. No one was willing to abolish Medicaid, housing subsidies and the like. The new program would just be a hugely costly add-on. In 1970, Moynihan fled back to Cambridge, his plan dead.”
The precept is now playing out on the front page of my hometown newspaper. Our mayor, with complicit leadership on Council and some help from the Legislature, entangled the city in an unworkable garbage-collection contract with a single citywide provider. The contract, in a purblind search for the lowest bidder, locked the winner into a rate of revenue short of that needed to meet shifting obligations in a Covid-Biden environment of both shortages and rising prices.
This resulted in the trash hauler declaring bankruptcy. And now, with lawyers involved, as many as 80,000 residents are without dependable trash pickup, some for more than a month, and the city is desperately leasing trash trucks and training city workers in an attempt to alleviate the bollix. And yes, that means the mayor is authorizing overtime pay, accruing pensions and health benefits, and leasing at exorbitant rates.
If you have read this far, you need to know that the city, or at least large parts of it, once was served by multiple trash companies contracting with individual housing associations. Such a system would have avoided the current situation.
An out-voted friend on Council, a former banker, laments the lost opportunity: “One of the beauties of the natural order, as opposed to arrangements coerced by the state, is the benefits that accrue in the way of ‘portfolio diversity of the whole, orchestrated by the particulars.'”
But rather than return to the way things were done before things came undone, the mayor is likely to sign a new citywide trash contract pretty much like the old contract with a new vendor at higher rates than those awarded the old vender — and much higher than those in individually negotiated contracts with association-based vendors.
To summarize, here is William Voegeli writing for the Claremont Review of Books on “Activist Government’s Crisis of Competence”:
“Any willingness (by government) to take stock and make fundamental changes is episodic, at best. Progressivism’s focus on the future works against revising past achievements and correcting old mistakes. It is hard and unpleasant enough to fashion policy kludges today that are backward compatible, adequately accounting for the accretion of previous initiatives and the compounding challenges they pose. It is even more difficult and unusual for today’s politicians and activists to be backward custodial, to evince any sense of responsibility for keeping the ramshackle contraption in working order, much less redesigning the beast to account for lessons learned since it was put on the road.”
And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut never tired of reminding us. — tcl
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