What phrase describes "having same outcome in spite of having better resources"?

A person gains a 20% salary hike, but becomes looser with his purse-strings and experiences no improvement in quality of life. Or, a manager who gets his employees to work 16 hours a day from 8, but slowly moves to a process that is half as effective, cancelling any gain in productivity.

In both cases, the person gains substantially, but becomes careless/complacent and thus regresses to their old state. What phrase describes what he is doing?

Solution 1:

I'd recommend "no net gain", as in:

The salary raise led to increased expenditures, and thus no net gain.

or

Overtime was accompanied by mismanagement of resources, resulting in zero productivity net gain.

Net gain: The overall improvement observed in some measure after all positive and negative influences have been fully accounted for.

Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/net-gain.html#ixzz3uIw1imc5

Solution 2:

There are two cases here, rather than just one.

If you are putting in more effort, but getting the same results, you've reached the point of diminishing returns. In your example, that would be about 45-50 hours a week, per person. At 80 hours a week, beating a dead horse might be a better phrase.

If you have access to more resources, but are wasteful because of it, you're penny wise, and pound foolish. Even in the USA, were you'd expect "penny wise, and dollar foolish", it's still "pound". It's an old phrase.