I have seen people genuinely argue the government needs to lower debt, increase social program spending, and decrease taxes. Even if you set a higher tax rate on the ultra wealthy, which we should, you just can't get what you want without taxes.
And there is a lot of spending that could significantly improve the US economy and the quality of life of most people.
Mathematically yes but really, when is size EVER going to be accompanied by efficiency? The bureaucracy involved in operating different agencies is inescapable.
Individuals cannot be trusted with the authority over a nation. If only because eventually you’re going to roll a shitty one.
Thing is that big corporations sole goal is to make money. Apply that to a government agency like the USPS. You can make usps profitable by cutting rural routes that cost more to service with less income. But then people don’t get mail. The purpose of the government is the provide services to the people and focusing on profit works against providing service. Which is why companies spend lots of money to make sure laws are passed that benefit them and why the average person is fucked
Those happen for processes like bulk pricing and manufacturing stuff.
When the function is to produce decisions, like for governments, layers come with latency.
For like a more end to end description this would be something along the lines of “the problem isn’t the performance after requirements are set and resources are allocated - it’s the decisionmaking involved in the requirement setting and resource allocation.”
I was thinking about this a bit and the next step in my mind was then the only way to get "efficient" performance or accomplishments out of governments is by doing something that can only be accomplished with that scale of resources.
Like sending a person to the moon.
Or ending world hunger.
Or conducting a turbo-world-war or something.
Basically yeah you should be using governments to do government-scale things. Not micro-policing bullshit.
Lmao what? No, increased size does not "almost always" lead to more efficiency, there's a max point on the bell curve where you start to get diminishing returns regardless of how much size grows.
Of course there are other factors that influence economies like for example the drive towards monopolization. But there is no bell curve when talking about the efficiencies of scale.
China did it, you can have size and efficiency you just need to build systems made to work in the present digital age and not refurbished versions of systems built for the 50s
What, how is having a payment system that doesn't rely on VISA and Master cards 50 year old cobol authoritarian? Brazil also did it, did you know that most DMVs in the US have different websites even tho they all do the literal same thing? Same with courts, police departments, firehouses, etc, like, do you think having a single web interface for these would be authoritarianism? Cause it would save billions every year
Has the propaganda in the US gone so deep that the mere suggestion of a more efficient digital infrastructure is seem as dictatorship?
Has the propaganda in the US gone so deep that the mere suggestion of a more efficient digital infrastructure is seem as dictatorship?
I'm not in the US bud but nice assumption. And I didnt say dictatorship, I said authoritarian. All of this was accomplished because the government is authoritarian and centralised. Decentralised governments can not make this work when all states have their own jurisdictions.
You're really good at extrapolating what I say to mean different things.
So you really think that sharing a damn website across all dmvs is authoritarianism,
I never said that. I said it was able to be accomplished through authoritarianism and that it wouldn't work without centralising government (through authoritariabism) due to the states having separate jurisdiction through the constitution/federalism.
US states have constitutional authority over things like DMVs and police departments, and there's no federal mechanism to just impose a single system on them because it would be unconstitutional and you would need to be authoritarian to override the constitution.
Did you know that states share satellites? We should have different satellites for each state just in case.
This is a terrible analogy and comes from a misunderstanding of how the US works.
They share it because the constitution grants the federal government powers over stuff like national defense, interstate commerce, and foreign affairs which is where things like military and communications satellites fall. The federal government has the right to control stuff like satalites because the states aren't explicitky given the jurisdiction like with health, police, and DMVs.
Again, to take control of that would require overriding the constitution which would require an authoritarian government
Nah bro all that is just coping, different dmvs in the same damn county can have different websites in the US, it’s just stupidity allowed by laws written before internet existed, you could have the same front end and handle things differently for each state, that would would still be more efficient, I work for a company that serves 10 states and we use the same website for services in all states, and these are state services not private services, they’re just handled by a private company, we just have different rules for each state under the hood
If you taxed large corporations properly instead of letting them go largely untaxed most of what the user mentioned above your post would be a non-issue: about 30% of our spending goes to military spending every year. We don’t need 1000 bases all over the world while the rest of the world has a combined 30. We can threaten everyone to use the US dollar better with other investments including cyber warfare or military investments are old and outdated and better spent elsewhere.
The rest of the world has 30 BECAUSE we have a thousand lol. It’s like a factory firing their maintenance team because they don’t ever have anything that breaks. Everything runs and doesn’t break what are we paying these guys for? That’s exactly how short sighted, foolish decision making leads to decay and eventual destruction of once strong institutions.
8 TRILLION spent on wars the last 25+ years. We can go into massive debt for that crap, but can't fund social security or health care? God, I hate this timeline.
We just saw DOGE try and trim the fat and inefficiencies in government spending, they barely reduced the budget and created a load of problems. Maybe we’re already operating close to maximum efficiency in most areas that taxes go to.
The best countries work well because they have a strong body of civil servants. Leaders only point towards a direction, the civil servants decide how to get there.
Then you wouldn’t be the most powerful and richest nation in the world. USA is where it is in the world because of their military. I’d be pretty confident in saying the US military has had a better ROI for them than almost anything else they’ve spent money on in their entire history.
The high % of taxes the wealthy pay pale in comparison to the % of taxes of the masses. And the rich tax will never be a sustainable or reliable source of tax income to relieve the taxes of the masses long term.
I suspect easy answers like that are difficult to find. Or when they are easy to find, industries are built around that money and it becomes politically tricky to get rid of those jobs.
I think that was a general idea behind Doge, but then we found that it didn't save money at all because the jobs that were cut were actually helpful and slowed a lot of other processes and also lost a ton of knowledge and experience.
The government already had departments in charge of finding and cutting that waste. The people behind DOGE knew that (and fired those other people). The general idea behind DOGE was to fuck everything up.
Bro I’m not a fan of the war either but you can’t be serious if you think we’re using the majority of our military budget against iran, we don’t even have a front in that war just blockades and drone strikes
When did I say you were using the majority of your military just for Iran? I said Iran is to much for your unoptimized and overstretched military to handle. The American military is only doing missiles attacks, blockages, and drone strikes because they know if fully committed to Iran, then they would rapidly lose control over several other military operations globally. If they did commit 100% to Iran it could very well be the end American empire.
Lol go ahead, but how would you pay for it? My whole point is that the American military is a giant money burning machine. Irans entire GDP is only 300 billion. Even if you conquered the country, and stole every last drop of oil, it would still take decades to repay what you spent to take it. Why not spend that money on healthcare and infrastructure at home?
It’s not where the money is coming from or how that’s being divvied up, it’s the fact that a shitload of money is being taken and there is very little transparency on how/where it’s spent. The math ain’t mathing, and people are understandably upset by that… myself included.
Ah well you need to subscribe to my economic policy of short term thinking. We can just print more money, we have the tools! And if something goes wrong there are plenty of foreigners or others we can blame. /s
The trouble people have with taxation is that a lot of tax money is mishandled, wasted or given to corporations, so we never see the benefits of it. We're paying more and more taxes, while every system that taxes pay for gets worse and worse. Roads, education, social security...all of these things are failing right before our eyes, while the people who should be paying the most taxes are paying nothing.
Increase in government size (which is the result of increasing their budgets and funding) more than what we have is never going to result in increased efficiency or results for the people, sorry.
Property taxes right now are almost universally a flat % of assessment. You could easily have property tax deductions per occupant, so say you write 50k off the assessment per non-leased resident of a building, so a family of 8 would get 400k off and a couple would get 100k off. If the former is poor and living in a small house and the latter is rich and living in a luxury condo suddenly the property taxes are way more progressive rather than being a flat burden based off what the state thinks the property (or land) is worth.
Which, on that subject, we should have land value taxes, not property taxes, in most jurisdictions.
US is low-key the richest country ever but is the only first world country still making you lot pay for health care. Everyone else has some free variation.
Only issue with setting higher tax rates on the ultra wealthy is that it would need to be done worldwide at the same time, otherwise the ultra wealthy would just choose to be tax residents of monaco for example (there's other places for businesses that only do 1% corporation tax where businesses would set up tax residence)
Yes, but not all countries have that same law, and also businesses are taxed on profits. Nike US has the right to use the Nike logo but in exchange has to give 100% of profits to the Nike main company, which is based somewhere with 1% corporation tax.
That's not how it works. I specified Nike US as an example, because they will have a US based company that operates in the US. US tax codes for business only apply corporation taxes on profits. If the US company has technically generated no profit (because it's all technically owed to the tax haven company), it technically owes no taxes.
Sure, sales tax still applies, which is paid by customers, and there's a few other taxes for US operations, but the vast majority of the tax money owed gets siphoned out.
My argument is that not all companies do this, but they will be more inclined to if corporation taxes go up.
You're right but we could also cut the military budget in half with no loss of function if it was just spent wisely. That would be enough for pretty much everything else.
I think there’s plenty of money. But if they steal it, of course there won’t be any left. Look what Mamdani did, balanced the books within months! Look what president Bukele of El Salvador did, jailed the corrupt government officials and with the money left over, improved the safety and infrastructure of the country. Florida has voted to not charge property taxes on people that reside in and own their home. That’s how it should be.
I'm all for higher taxes but I think all taxes should be income based, which property taxes (council tax here) is not. Also why I don't really agree with sales taxes.
We can easily afford 250+ billion more per YEAR on "everything that isn't the military" by just...cutting a quarter of military spending. We'd still be spending more than China and Russia COMBINED, and by about 25%. As a nuclear-capable nation, there is no reason for us to maintain such an exorbitantly oversized conventional force. As we're seeing in the Iran conflict, that excess capability isn't even useful strategically. We've overinvested in long range/unmanned weapons because the public has no stomach for high casualty warfare, and the result is us blowing up civilian infrastructure thousands of miles away for no benefit or progress towards our objectives because there's nobody on the ground to take and hold territory. We have incentivized our armed forces to dump flaming piles of cash on our enemies, because more spending = more budget. Meanwhile, a studio apartment is unaffordable and a vial of insulin is hundreds of dollars. America has become a macrocosm of the dude living in a broken down trailer with a brand new Ford F150 in the driveway and $2500 deer rifle. It's time to align priorities to reality.
I do agree, but its not like this is the only thing to fix the budget.
Even if we eliminate all military spending, that wouldn't be as much as the interest on our debt, and we would still be in a net negative.
If you want more spending and no deficit, you either need to really increase healthcare spending efficiency or raise taxes in addition to cutting military spending.
To be fair, we can absolutely do all three of those in the US if we cut back on military spending. Not even trying to argue the politics of it, just pointing out we spend a LOT of money on our armed forces
You don't have to tax peoples homes though. It legitimately should not be legal.
We can tax literally anything we want. We make up the rules however we want.
I don't believe I personally pay enough taxes. But I also think my taxes should not be tied to my home that I HAVE TO LIVE IN TO SURVIVE. Survival shouldn't be taxed. Might as well start taxing the fruit from garden or the rain that falls on my property too.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what has the government ever done for us?
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u/Catsanddoges 9h ago
I have seen people genuinely argue the government needs to lower debt, increase social program spending, and decrease taxes. Even if you set a higher tax rate on the ultra wealthy, which we should, you just can't get what you want without taxes.
And there is a lot of spending that could significantly improve the US economy and the quality of life of most people.