Inefficient bureaucracy can really pay off

It's more than a month past California's deadline for a 2008-09 budget and if there's one thing California does not have, it's a 2008-09 budget.

For some reason, the governator doesn't think that's a good idea, so he's pushing the state to lay off all temporary and part-time employees and - and this is where it starts to piss me off - reduce the salaries of all full-time employees to the federal minimum wage, which is now set at a totally-reasonable-for-living-in-California $6.55 per hour. (The state would issue checks for back pay once the budget is resolved, but, uh...)

Anyway, the fly in the gubernatorial (almost as good an adjective as "avuncular," right?) ointment is that California's state government is so ass-backwards that the computer system is still running on COBOL, which I think is what computer science students studied in the 80s. The 1880s.

So making the adjustments to all of those paychecks - I think they'd have to do it by having mice run on treadmills - would take months, by which time, surely those geniuses will agree on a budget. Or not. Why bother, really? Not like having a budget helped save the state from facing a $15 billion deficit.

I especially liked the state controller's quote, which so beautifully illuminated the oustanding efficiency and decision-making abilities of our elected officials: “In 2003, my office tried to see if we could reconfigure our system to do such a task. And after 12 months, we stopped without a feasible solution.”