Why is it that in this age of mass electronic communication so much money is wasted by both government and business in moving executives around the world constantly? Why can't these people just use the internet, fancy conference-calling cell phones, and other high-tech crap to save money? How much does it cost us to move around the president and all those congressmen in a year? How much could be used for cost-cuts or raises by companies if they quit sending their executives all over the place for what could be done with a simple phone call?

Thats bureaucracy for you. Where ever there is wealth and prosperity there will be bureaucrats wasting it.

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It's the difference between suicide and slow capitulation... - Jim Morrison

As best I can tell, the federal travel budget is about $9 billion.

There are roughly 2 million federal employees, not counting the military (1.5 million), military reserves (884,000) and people whose livelihood relies on federal government contracts, grants or mandates (another 12.7 million, directly and indirectly).
http://govexec.com/features/0199/0199s1.htm

That works out to $4,500 a year per employee. Between airfare, lodging, food and incidental expenses, you could hit that total with 3 or 4 trips.

Not everyone would travel that much, of course. But most people would travel at least a bit -- to training seminars or conventions, if nothing else -- and some would travel quite a lot.

Your point about "is it necessary?" is a good one that should be pursued. But in the scheme of things the savings would be relatively tiny.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

I have come to realize that every little bit helps. If we could trim all these little inefficiencies from government perhaps we could both improve our social programs and lower taxes. Little things add up quick over time and in great numbers and I'm certain travel expenses aren't the only ridiculous excess in government.

Agreed. Excess, however small, should be resisted.

Of course, one person's excess is another person's necessary expense....

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

This topic should be referring to every single government program that exists. Education was one of the first to come to my mind. The more trust you put in the government to use our money the more corrupt they become.

These travel expenses are nothing compared to the waste that occurs in our spending programs.

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Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness ~Thomas Paine

I think its a function of the times we live in. Nothing is done unless it is well over-done, and every facet of daily living is tempered to some degree, by a quality of excess. Travel and eating, working and play - excess encroaches on our every endeavour, swelling each fat, insubstantive moment in an increasingly fat world. I dont think we can blame the politicians for this one - they merely mirror the world around them in this regard.

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

it didn't work at our company. We bought into the whole "replace face to face meetings with teleconferences" movement. However, we found that it resulted in deteriorating relationships, us not knowing our customer as well as we should, communication misunderstandings, etc. Meetings are a necessary part of doing business. Add in training and seminars to that as well as raytri said. There may be fat that can be trimmed, but I wouldn't call all or even much of it waste.

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JMS gets another English lesson:

Quote:

there is no "mostly unique;" thats like saying "sometimes always," its an oxymoron - its either one or the other.

The result:

Quote:

By the mid-19th century unique had developed a wider meaning, “not typical, unusual,” and it is in this wider sense that it is compared. The comparison of so-called absolutes in senses that are not absolute is standard in all varieties of speech and writing.