On 10 Oct 2006 17:21:37 -0700, "
wrote:


wrote:
......................
I think it is simply yet another bureaucracy run amok, and since most
folks (or those that vote, anyway) either do or think they will get
something out of it, there is much more momentum carrying it forward
than attempting to stop it from lurching along like a hippopotamus, on
four too many Martinis and all dolled up in some Paris-Hilton-does-Tokyo
goofball getup...or blotzed on mango-and-squid-ink half-vodka, half-ouzo
Rob Roys, if one prefers...


A heck of a lot of large human organizations are bureaucracies run
amok, including General Motors, Enron, the US military, the Catholic
church (at least when it came to shuffling priests around so that
they'd have fresh supplies of young boys to bugger), the UAW, and
various gov't agencies at all levels of gov't. I'm not sure, though,
to what extent the SSA falls into that category or the one, shared
with the IRS, of responding to congressional mandates driven by
various interests. On the other hand, SS is the biggest accounting
scam of all time by a very wide margin.

Er, no - you are confusing at least three different type of entities.
General Motors, the Catholic Church (buggery or otherwise), and the UAW
are for-profit organizations (regardless of US taxation status - meaning
that they expect, even demand, that the purse, regardless of "the
books," show more at the end of year than at the start). Enron ain't
anything. And any military is arguably, by definition, "run amok"
because you really can't politely or cheaply kill people and break their
**** according to nice little formulas - the budget is subject to wild
swings (and no, I'm not defending _all_ expenditures). The
aforementioned, with the exception of militaries, might have or have had
bureaucracies, but at the end of the day, there has got to be some
semblance of making money.

OTOH, neither the IRS or the SSA really has to even pretend to answer
the same questions or the same produce "profit" such as public
corporations or a military force.

As to the IRS compared to the SSA, it makes the SSA look like a bunch of
pickpockets in a diamond mine.

TC,
R