Hacker News Reader

Comment by htek | Hacker News Reader

You know the White House isn't personally building these charging stations, yes? The money is available and awarded to state entities that have to approve and bid out contracts, which come with their own set of local legislation that slow down the process. The Biden administration claims the process will advance faster now that states are enacting their own legislation and rules regarding charging stations. And you can guess that some states, operating on partisan lines, might not want to do anything that benefits the Biden administration--why care about their constituents' interest in the future when you can deny the opposition a win now?

View on HN

You're describing inefficiency and corruption.

Also, Washington State is completely controlled by the Democrats - all three branches of the state government. Where are the charging stations? What about the other Democrat run states?

Do you know of any private company that moves that slowly?

I don't think it took years and $45 billion for Musk to install a national network of charging stations. Heck, even the local supermarket put in their own charging station.

Honeywell, for one, with whom I worked for eight years. It's incomprehensible, the wasted money I saw, easily reaching to billions over the same time frame. The difference is that you hear about large gov't spending initiatives, but not about those from Fortune 100s, whose incentives are to hide such inefficiencies and waste in their required reporting.

Enron. Boeing Starliner. Coke wasting $2B on a failed rollout of SAP. There are endless examples of huge piles of money pissed away in the private sector through inefficiency and incompetence, or outright theft.

However, we were discussing corruption, not inefficiency, and your example of Biden's EV program included no evidence of actual corruption. Can you think of a concrete example?

The pandemic relief funds come to mind.

https://www.gao.gov/blog/more-fraud-has-been-found-federal-c...

Googling for "corruption us government" provides endless examples. I remember reading about the disappearance of vast sums of government money sent to help the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Your example is fraud, not corruption, meaning parties external to the gov't are the guilty parties, not gov't employees. Corruption is carried out by insiders.

I'm not saying there's no corruption in the public sector. I'm saying it's not a given that it's greater than in the private sector, and asking for comparative data.

https://www.amazon.com/Corruption-Government-Causes-Conseque...

Does Rose-Ackerman argue that corruption is more prevalent in the public sector than the private sector? I've already said that I don't believe the public sector is free of corruption. Most of the hoops my employer jumps through with gov't bids has to do with anti-corruption processes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com