As a strategic planner, one of my pet peeves is peoplecreating plans that don’t accomplish their objectives at all, waste resourcesand cause problems instead of solving them.

Government – does this a lot. We tend to get the mostexpensive options, that don’t solve the problem they are intended to solve –but cause an astonishing amount of collateral damage.

As a citizen -  I’mfurious about the collateral damage caused. Most of the time it is totallyunnecessary to cause that damage. It is literally the planner not caring at all if they cause harm or not. So they don’t plan to mitigate harm.

And honestly – that wouldn’t be so horrible IF theyaccomplished their stated objectives – but often – they don’t. So – we get a new expensive harm causing problem in addition to the original problem, which is still a problem. 

For example – goal: Reduce # elective abortions.

None of the anti abortion laws passed – do this. At. All. Peoplewho want elective abortions – can get them. They have time to travel or findalternative methods – because it’s elective. So – if they want an elective abortion, they can go get them.  

The only people the anti-abortion laws harm – are people inmedically precarious situations who don’t have time to shop around. Thosepeople now have fewer doctors to help them because lots of OBGYNs are nowjust GYNs because they don’t want to risk jail or expensive legal hassles justfor helping to keep their clients alive. Thosethat are able to find a obstetrical doctor may also have problems if they experience a medical emergency. For instance: the doctors at the emergency room have toconsider whether they will be charged with crimes if they save your life. Andmost aren’t willing to take that risk – so we now have women dying in hospitalparking lots because the doctors choose to stay out of jail instead of savingsomeone’s life.

My beef? The laws don’t stop elective abortions. They just cause unnecessary collateral damage. And it infuriates me!

Border security? Same thing. The border is still openbecause the courts ruled we can’t close them. Want to stop people from comingto the border? That requires conditions in the country of origin to be goodenough that people don’t want to leave. Want to deport people more quickly? That requires resources to beallocated to the deportation process. Something that the people who want todeport people have repeatedly, for decades, refused to allocate resources too.

It is infuriating me as a strategic planner. Not only isthe human toll of these bad policies intolerable, we are wasting huge sumsdoing things that don’t fix the problem!  

It would be cheaper to solve the problem. ButI think that is the point. As soon as we ask who benefits from this itbecomes clear.  By not solving theproblem and instead – paying huge sums to private contractors to do thingsthat don’t work, we are funneling our wealth to oligarchs. That is why thepeople who want to incarcerate and deport are so eager to do that. There is ahuge amount of money to be made causing human suffering. And if you fix the underlying problem, all that money will no longer flow to oligarchs.

So we can't fix the border, because to do so would be less expensive and the oligarch's wouldn't get their money. Our money. 

Let's discuss the oligarchy and the coming purge. One of the plans of the incoming administration is: to purge our government agencies and our military of anyone disloyal to the new president. 

According to project 2025, they plan to replace public servants with corporate consultants, which is again, a boon to oligarchs and the massive consulting firms who will win these contracts.

Here are the problems with this plan. 

Problem 1) you are replacing employees who work for the American people, with employees who work for an oligarch. They aren't going to be loyal to we the people. They won't even be loyal to the president. They are going to be loyal to the people who pay them, who are the oligarchs. This is insanely bad for we the people. 

2) Institutional expertise is purged – in purges. So instead of people who understand the problems and how to best solve them, you get people who don't know how to solve the problem. 

3) It’s is always more expensive to outsource employment that it is to employ people yourself. Why? Because privatization is a way to create a spoils system where some of the money that was supposed to go towards helping people is instead siphoned off for private profit.

Basically, we pay more, and get less and the workers aren't loyal to we the people. 

It's really really really annoying that this will be happening. We are going to have more suffering and it's going to cost us more to not fix our problems.  The least they could do - is fix the problems. They won't. There is too much money to be made.