…but now, more than ever. Repeal Davis-Bacon.
Like many “progressive” laws and impulses (such as gun control), its roots lie in racism.
2 thoughts on “Always A Good Idea”
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…but now, more than ever. Repeal Davis-Bacon.
Like many “progressive” laws and impulses (such as gun control), its roots lie in racism.
Comments are closed.
As someone who has to deal with D-B on a fairly regular basis, I’m all for it going away, too.
I didn’t see any links to the research about the potential savings from repealing it, but I know that the additional administrative costs associated with handling D-B are no small part of the picture, either, never mind the unfair competition it affords to unionised labor.
I don’t have direct knowledge of it, but I learned anecdotally, in a class on Grant Writing, about a small town in the rural part of a state who made it about half-way through a $1M library project before the Feds stepped in and told them they needed to follow D-B. The additional $1.5M cost overrun for wages (because it’s a state-wide wage, not a localised wage) had to come out of the town’s own pockets.
Plenty of other stories like that out there, but either way, there is nothing at all redeeming about D-B that I have been able to find.
It’s not just about unfair practices. That grant writing class probably showed you how many contracts are done on a fixed profit margin. If you know the customer isn’t motivated by the lowest possible bid and will pay a reasonable percentage over your costs, you hire the PhD instead of the fry cook.
I stopped writing NASA grant proposals when I leaned how this worked. There is something unclean about it even though I know it is meant to protect against gross profit margins on contracts.