Is That Really Necessary?

I didn't really pay much attention to the news tonight and what I saw showed me little to really complain about.  So I think I will complain about something that I see every morning when walking from my car to work.  We are in a situation where the federal government needs to cut costs.  Once you are done reading this short one, you may agree that there are a ton of little ways in which they could save money.


I work in downtown Syracuse near the Federal building.  The Federal building takes up an entire block though it isn't the same size block that you would find in some larger cities.  Every morning since I started working at this location in late March I hear a gas powered leaf blower.  Rain hasn't stopped this Federal employee from spending a couple of hours a day running the leaf blower to clear the sidewalks.  Yep, every day, Monday through Friday he spends a couple of hours running a gas powered leaf blower to clear the sidewalks.  Just last week I saw him using it to clear the sidewalk of a puddle.  Let's assume that this thing is a efficient and only uses 2 gallons of gas per day.  That is 10 gallons per week, or roughly $40 per week (including the oil added since it is a 2-cycle engine).  He has been doing this since March and I'll assume he will continue until early November.  That makes for about 35 weeks which calculates to roughly $1400 per year just for the gas to run this.  That doesn't include the wages that this person is being paid.  I think it would be safe to say he is making at least $20 per hour and that this takes him 2 hours per day.  This gives us a cost of $40 per day, $200 per week, and $7000 per year.  You might say that isn't much but think about the fact that every city that has a Federal building is wasting this same $8400 per year.  Let's just assume that there are at least 2 Federal buildings per state that puts the cost at $16800 per year per state, and $840000 for the country!  Sure that may seem like a drop in the hat compared to the trillions of dollars that our country is in debt but the 2 building per state is a very conservative estimate considering that there is at least 5 in New York that I can think of!  Imagine if there were at least 5 in each state, that pushes the cost up to $42000 per state and $2100000 ($2.1 million)!  All just to keep the sidewalks pristine.

I'm not sure about you but if I can see how to save that much without even analyzing things in depth it should be easy to reduce the national budget.  I'm sure there are a lot of other things like this that seem small but are huge when scaled to the whole country.  I personally believe that my numbers are conservative.  In particular, the number of buildings and the hourly wage of this person.