The regions debt is 27 billion euros, spending or saving 100.000 euros on tablets doesnt make any real difference.
Incredible that I'm getting downvoted for this. So if you have 100,000 $ student debt, you should stop sending holiday cards and use email instead, to save 40 cents?
In large organizations some costs are just to minuscule to warrant any mindspace. In this case the spending doesn't even seem evidently frivolous, why shouldn't every parliamentarian have a tablet? In the Netherlands they replaced paper with tablets and even managed to achieve cost savings.
Not really, no. That’s exactly the wrong focus. It distracts from the issue, it derails the conversation. That’s exactly the reason why conversations about revenue, spending and debt are always so tiring, pointless and unproductive.
If you want to reduce a 27 billion Euro deficit, it makes no sense at all to focus on the details of whether it’s a good idea for the state parliament to spend a few thousand additional Euros. Such spending or saving will neither increase nor decrease the debt in any sort of significant way. It’s a cheap talking point that clouds the issue and gives people hours of material to talk about the debt without coming even one millimeter closer to any sort of solution.
What are the biggest sources of income? Is there some way to increase them in such a way that paying off the debt in a realistic time-frame would be possible? What do we spend the most on? Is there some way to reduce what we spend on to reduce the debt in a meaningful time-frame? Those are the central questions.
How much do those tablets cost? Maybe 100,000 Euro every two years or so, so 50,000 Euro per year (and that’s a generous assumption). If the parliament wouldn’t pay for them (and assuming that the debt stays otherwise constant) the state would pay off its debt in half a million years. Even if you can find 100 similar small issues, paying off the debt would still take several thousand years. (Oh, and by the way, the debt isn’t constant, so at best you could hope to impact the growth of the debt some insignificant tiny bit.)
There is nothing wrong with arguing for or against whether the state should pay for tablets for members of parliament – but putting this discussion into the context of the debt is utterly ridiculous and pure cheap polemics. The important questions are: Do they need tablets to work, can they afford them themselves and what constitutes a fair and good payment of parliamentarians that produces the best outcomes (e.g. attracts competent people or allows even otherwise poorer people to participate in the parliamentary process). Again, talking about the debt in this context makes no sense.
The attitude that got them there was slinging a few billion here for an infrastructure deal, a few billion there for a bail-out. It takes more than a handful of iPads to add up to a billion, you know.
They probably spend more money on chairs in a year than they do on computers.
If an iPad allows them to be more effective, then it's probably a good thing to buy. It's false savings when your thriftiness gets in the way of productivity.
Given there's only so many hours in a day, I'd rather they focused on ways to shave energy costs by 10% than fret over which brand of Made in China pencils would save them a nickel per box.
An iPad would not even make a dent in the expense accounts of most politicians. Their photocopying bill would massively eclipse this, so anything that reduces the amount of paper required could save enormous amounts of money.
I'm guessing that, like in other Western countries, medical and retirement benefits are the large plurality/majority of the budget. Not purchases of electronics or other line items.
It's akin to a software company buying $400 Dells and a single monitor to work on to "save money."
Incredible that I'm getting downvoted for this. So if you have 100,000 $ student debt, you should stop sending holiday cards and use email instead, to save 40 cents?
In large organizations some costs are just to minuscule to warrant any mindspace. In this case the spending doesn't even seem evidently frivolous, why shouldn't every parliamentarian have a tablet? In the Netherlands they replaced paper with tablets and even managed to achieve cost savings.