When I came to my current job, one of the first things I did in order to justify the expenditure of an additional employee was look at ways to cut costs. Not everything I did worked as well as I planned, but it freed up money for the most part to spend on other budgetary concerns where fundage shortfalls existed and taught me how much I could save without adverse effects. Factor in that I am a government employee who cares about SAVING money, and it should impress you more.
Typical government budgets expand without limits. People will buy things they don't need in order to secure similar levels of future funding. Recent shortfalls in the Nevada state budget led to a request for millions in spending cuts from the governor's office. Even though my efforts did nothing to lower our budget, my plan enabled us to do more with the same amount of money without requesting an increase.
My last job came to depend on my giving 130% performance as "normal". One day when I suffered from huge problems with diarhhea, I informed my manager that I could only give 95% of average. Other people saw me "slacking" and followed suit, forcing me to pick up the slack towards afternoon as the work piled up without any sign of alleviation for our situation. Since I set a precedence, the company knew they didn't need to hire any more people as long as they could count on my giving 130% of average.
The liberal solution by contrast in most cases involves throwing more and more resources at things. They claim we need more money for schools, more teachers, more roads, more social programs, more government control of healthcare, ad infinitum, and requisitely exact more money from our wallets to pay for things we "need". Throwing more resources at fighting poverty, illiteracy, and disease has done little to reduce in any degree any of those problems. In the interest of of protecting the nation, however, they ought to cut back.
At my last job, nobody expected me on day one to give 130%, and I received zilch in addendum compensation in gratitude for my sacrifice. I decided a long time ago to take the scouting principles seriously and always do my best. My employer by contrast made concession after concession for the weakest of our crewmembers who eventually earned pinkslips not for performance but for other issues such as excessive tardiness, profanity, and equipment/product damage.
If you want to boost productivity and quality of life whether in the home, the workplace or in social endeavors, you must foster the prosperity of those who get the job done. I left my last employer because they refused to offer me incentives to remain. If you want to help the economy, let people keep more of their money which they will spend, save or invest. Regardless, those three options put their money out into the general coffers to enable expansion of industry, availability of goods/services and capital, or encourages businesses to operate. If you want to boost education, stop giving tenure to professors/teachers and reward teachers for superior performance. Those who train up students that earn good scores ought be paid commensurate with the degree to which they prepare the students. If you want healthcare or gas to be affordable, remove restrictions on the business activities of those industries. When you unfetter their hands, they will compete to provide goods and services at competitive prices; if you keep them restricted, costs will continue to mount.
The only thing I can think of that grows if you throw money at it is a pile of money.
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