Morgan Warstler, Market Efficiency and Nice Bus' Able Ride Service

      Look, I like Morgan. I mean I get him, sort of. He seems almost cartoonish when you first meet him but there's an interesting guy in there I think.  His Guaranteed Income has actually garnered a good deal of interest even among the MMT types-and why not, his GI is not so different than their Job Guarantee (JG).

      Steve Waldman is probably right that the MMTers and the MMers are not so much enemies as frenemies. Even if neither of them wants to admit it.

      But since that bad jobs report on Friday Morgan's really been getting big for his britches. That's cause the GOP celebrates bad news as they think it's in their interests.  If Romney wins they really ought to send Merkel a fruit basket.  Here's Morgan dressing down Full Employment Hawk:

        "This shit won’t fly:

        “You are ignoring adverse selection. If you pay government workers less with fewer benefits, you get less qualified workers and therefore less services.” (He's quoting FEH here).

         "That is NOISE. REAL workers deliver 2-5% YOY Productivity gains and have a quit rate far higher. Please SHUT UP. End USPS. End it outright. Adopt my Guaranteed Income plan. Outsource the entire SSA. End Davis Bacon. End Seniority rules. End Guaranteed Benefit Pensions Just shut up.
If you want to be taken seriously you ahve to start with we could run the entire government with half as many public employees and no discernible loss in services. And the remaining 50% would be paid more, and would be the competent who come in from the private sector and steal the new high paying jobs from the bureaucrats lazy asses. We play real ball here, FEH, to save your precious government, you’re gonna have to thinking about it the way BAIN would."

         http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=14675&cpage=2#comment-161600

       Yeah, like I said I don't think Morgan's really such a bad guy but he is an acquired taste. But as you can see he's really gotten a big head after those weak job numbers. You have the Morgan Warstler Premise: you should elect Romney for full employment policies. True he and the rest of the GOP have been against them for four years but once they get back the White House that will change.

       As you can see there's nothing Morgan seems to believe more passionately than it's all because of these dirty hippies that work for the government. The government workers need to tighten their belts and deliver the sterling productivity of the private sector. If they don't they're just public parasites. Next he brings me into it:

      "Sax, you too. I’m making a very simple and unbeatable argument. Neither of you can keep your dignity intact and not answer it. The KIND OF PRESSURE applied in the private sector to drive costs lower, innovate and deliver more for less…The public sector WILL operate that way OR you are doomed. No one will like govt. until it pulls a Skype or Napster or Apple or Google or Amazon out of its ass."

       "The problem is YOU TWO and Obama don’t know how to think like this.. Clinton did, he just looked at welfare, said this is bad policy, shrugged and threw it on the fire to burn.
It doesn’t take genius, it just takes a complete willingness to upset the apple cart, you just have to be willing to say simple stuff like: "no public employee is worth $100K unless he makes other public employees redundant. or, lets shut down the Postal Service, you get the idea."

       "You dont have a messaging problem. EVERYONE knows the truth, so stop fighting it, admit it to yourselves, and focus on leading your side out of the friggin wilderness. Deliver more for less, every year, no matter what and crush anyone on your side who fights it."

       So there you go. Everyone knows the truth. What truth is that? Evidently that government jobs aren't real jobs that they're government handouts as they aren't as productive by half as private sector jobs. On what basis does Morgan claim this-how can he say categorically that all public sector jobs are unproductive? Partly no doubt because in theory if you think of a government job and you imagine the same job done in the private sector then in theory the private sector job pays X whereas the government sector job pays X+Y.

      To be sure productivity is not only derived from lower wages but this is Morgan's assumption. Interestingly enough in today's Newsday I read about another problem Veolia is having here on Long Island. They took over the public buses here on Long Island at the start of the year-prior to that they were run by the MTA.

      The Long Island Bus is now called Nice Bus-clever you have to admit. There obviously have been some concerns. Like are they going to cut routes and/or raise fares? Are they going to cut the workers pay-yes these workers are the kind that  a Morgan Warstler hates. They are-were-public employees in a poweful union.

      While it wasn't clear what would happen to the employees when Nice started, what ultimately happened is Nice has had to stick to the old contracts with the old MTA employees-at $28 an hour, however they've also hired new workers. These new workers only get $16 an hour.

      I've talked to some veteran bus drivers about whether they like the switch and some have ok or good things to say others think it's a travesty. One guy I got to know quite well thinks Nice doesn't know what they're doing and that within a year or so will have to give up the company.

     So anyway today's Newsday showed that Nice has been having real problems with the Able-Ride system-this is the service Long Island Bus always ran for disabled passengers.

      "Able-Ride provides door-to-door minibus service to disabled riders who make appointments in advance to get picked up. The service carries 1,130 customers a day."

      "As a condition of getting the bus contract, Veolia vowed not to cut service on Able-Ride for three years."

      http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/10724838/ny-able-ride-bus-arrives-hours-late-some-say

      "Recent cost-cutting measures by NICE Bus have resulted in some disabled riders being delayed by hours in getting to their destinations."

      "On May 1, the Nassau Inter County Express began a new effort to make its Able-Ride system more efficient by having riders share trips wherever possible. With passengers now waiting for fellow riders to get picked up and dropped off, trips have become far less direct, and much longer, riders said.
In a letter last month to NICE Bus, Nassau County Human Rights Commissioner Angela Davis said that her usual 20-minute commute from Garden City to Hempstead has recently taken as long as two hours -- a length of time she called "outrageous."

     "There has to be a better way to save money," wrote Davis, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair.

      "NICE Bus officials acknowledge that ride and wait times have been longer since the company started combining more trips a month ago, but said operations have steadily improved as they better understand scheduling."

       "The bus system "moved too quickly" in its new approach, chief executive Michael Setzer said, and has "pulled back" some by combining fewer trips. He said the agency will phase in its new ride-sharing policy more gradually and look for improvements in training and technology to avoid inordinately long trips and waits."

        "In January, Veolia Transportation took over Nassau's bus system, including Able-Ride. The county bus system was operated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for 38 years"

         "In a letter to Davis, Setzer wrote that the MTA's past practice of having separate Able-Ride vehicles make trips that were similar to each other was a "terrible waste of taxpayer dollars."

        "Combining customers' travel needs, using the shared-ride approach . . . produces efficiencies, but it also produces longer trips for individuals," Setzer wrote. "I don't think there is any way around that."

       "However, Setzer added, even with the recent delays, NICE Bus is still abiding by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which calls for paratransit trips to take about the same amount of time as it would door-to-door for a fixed bus route customer."

           Really? Does this sound like  the same amount of time?

          "David O'Donnell, who is blind and has multiple sclerosis, said he recently waited until 9:20 p.m. for a scheduled pickup at Levittown at 7:30 p.m. He didn't get to his Hempstead home until 10:45 that night."

        "These people don't understand that they're transporting disabled people and they have to be punctual," O'Donnell said. "The situation was bad already. Now it's twice as bad."

         See this is the problem with market fundamentalism-the doctrine that the market is always superior to the government in everything. Market efficiency means trying to find the cheapest way. However clearly Nice's service is not very efficient:

         "Therese Brzezinski, director of advocacy at the Long Island Center for Independent Living, has been working with NICE Bus officials to improve scheduling. She said she believes they have been responsive and sincere in trying to address concerns."

       "Folks understand this is new for them and that they're trying to get up to speed," Brzezinski said. "But it's been some time now and we expect that things would be running a little better than they are now."

       "Judy Jacobs (D-Woodbury) said that, with the county facing a budget deficit of more than $300 million, it can't afford to pay more, and NICE Bus needs to find efficiencies. But, she said, they should only go so far."

      "I don't believe efficiencies that make people wait three hours are really efficient," Jacobs said.

       Uh, you think? In fairness to Nice Bus:

      "Brzezinski said NICE Bus would not have to cut costs so deeply if it received more funding from Nassau County, which contributes $2.6 million a year to the bus system's $106 million annual operating budget."

        But here we have Morgan Warstler's efficient private sector not efficient enough due to a lack of enough of a government subsidy. So it turns out that they too need a handout.