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[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

I have a feeling it won't ever be mentioned again, once someone with a 
"D" after his name is elected.

Once you find out that Social Security has to spend $600 billion just to 
distribute $400 billion, or something like that, it becomes clear what 
the root of the problem is.

Does anyone realize how ridiculous it is to have administrative costs 
over 50%?  Imagine a purely binary management tree where each supervisor 
supervises exactly _two_ other people, and everyone, including the last 
row of "workers", makes the same salary.  You would say that's 
ridiculous, since anyone could easily supervise ten (or more) other 
people.  Thanks, to a handy theorem from discrete mathematics, we can 
conclude that the total number of supervisors in this model is always 
one less than the number of workers; for instance, with 5 levels, we 
have 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 = 15 managers, and 16 workers.   So in other words, 
even with a management model that's this ridiculously inefficient, we 
should still never have to spend more than 50% on management.

Yet the California legislature had to pass a law to keep the community 
colleges in that state from doing just that!

Bill

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