Are government employees efficient?

This is a straight forward bean counting trip.

I keep hearing from the right that government functions would be better turned over to private for profit enterprise. I have my doubts,and think the real motive is that a big corporation wants to get a huge pile of money and not provide any services to anyone.

So bean counter that I am I looked up the list of the largest corporations in the World and eliminated those that are not headquartered in the USA. I simply added up the corporations revenues until that revenue equaled the Federal Government Budget for the year.

Simple: Federal Government 3.767 Trillion. Including the Post Office, which by the way is just .067 Trillion and pays its own way on stamp revenue.

It took the top 33 corporations on the list to equal 3.765 Trillion in Revenue, a scary thing in and of itself.

Those 33 corporations employ 7,509,540 people. That means for each $484,300 of revenue the big efficient corporations employ one person.

On the other hand the highly wastful Federal Government which employs:
2,230,000 people to run a nation of 300,000,000 people
584,000 people to keep the mail moving
1,600,000 in the armed service fighting multiple wars and protecting all the corporations
800,000 reservists also now spending a lot of time fighting wars.

The federal government then has 5,213,900 employees for an much more efficient use of its revenues, that works out to $722,500 per employee.

So 33 corporations, do a shit load of retailing, move a lot of oil around, conglomerate a bunch of companies and hoard wealth, overcharge us for banking, and make our phones and computers work, make a bunch of crappy cars.

The government merely keeps the whole system going and fights wars mostly to benefit the corporations and does it 33% more efficiently dollar for dollar.

So using the right corporate logic more corporate functions should be taken over by the government as it would be more rationally efficient in the free market system.

The private corporation wants to take over the government function precisely in that they see that they could take that 33%


This bean counting revealed an interesting fact. Four of the largest corporations on the list are Health insurance companies. These health insurance companies have the highest revenue per employee of any except a few oil companies. How in a fair economic system could a health insurance company employing 18,000 people have a revenue per employee of 7.5 Million dollars???

The companies:
Retail:
Wal Mart
CVS
Kroger
Costco
Wallgreen
Home Depot
Target

Oil
Exxon MObil
CHevron
Conoco Phillips
Valero

Conglomerate
GE
Berkshire Hathaway
Koch Industries
Proctor and Gamble

Telecom and Tech
Hewlett Packard
AT &T
Verizon
IBM

Banks
Bank of America
AIG
Wells Fargo
Citigroup
State Farm
JP Morgan

Manufacture
GM
Ford
Boeing

Health Insurance
McKesson
Cardinal
United Health
Amerisource

Agriculture
Cargill