[geeks] geeks Digest, Vol 86, Issue 11

[Phil Stracchino]

On 01/20/10 20:12, Jonathan Patschke wrote:
> In order to answer your question, let me give you a concrete example from
> back when I worked for a state agency.  My agency had need for a large
> quantity of some supply, but did not need it for several months (a month
> into the next accounting period).  The vendor offered a per-unit price
> break in a quantity beyond what we could afford with the remaining budget
> in the current accounting period.  In order to keep the budget the same,
> we had to buy what we could afford and buy the rest later.  If we were
> permitted to save money across accounting periods, we could've stashed the
> cash until the next budget distribution, bought the larger quantity all at
> once, and ended up spending LESS money overall.

Ah, yes.  The failings of the government budgetary model.

I consider it utterly idiotic that we do not either (a) reward
government agencies for saving money instead of intentionally burning
through it all, or (b) allow government agencies to *BUDGET* a purchase
partially or completely out of currently existing funds, but then sit on
the allocated funds and defer the actual spending until a later budget
period when the purchase makes more fiscal or practical sense.

-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.