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This current administration must be like living in a mirror reality for long time government workers. The EPA, FCC, CFPB, DOE and other regulatory agencies have

This current administration must be like living in a mirror reality for long time government workers. The EPA, FCC, CFPB, DOE and other regulatory agencies have had appointed leaders who explicit mandate is to tear them apart. Even the state department has been severely reduced (Did you know that we don't have an ambassador to South Korea???). It seems like only Homeland Security and DoD have had leaders who alight with their vision. There is tons of waste in government and oversight is needed in many facets but destroying our agencies is not the way forward. I wish voters where more aware of how many services government agencies provide, it seems like most of America is for smaller government until something like a shutdown slaps them awake for a brief period of time.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
Shuttering most of the Federal Government has been GOP platform since 1994 Contract With America.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Reagan’s whole schtick was that government is inherently useless. e.g. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I'm here to help.’” “One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.” “Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.” etc., and unfortunately this rhetoric was very effective as advertising/propaganda, noticeably shifting public attitudes. His platform was largely about cutting taxes, deregulation, privatizing public institutions and infrastructure, reducing or eliminating government services, ...
  - username223 9y ago
    > "Government is like a baby..." ... so let's starve it to death, because that's what you normally do with babies. I always knew that Reagan was a dementia victim, but not that he was so bad at metaphors.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      The whole “starve it until it can be drowned in a bathtub” thing is from Grover Norquist, whose anti-tax pledge has been signed by almost all Republican lawmakers for decades. Norquist was a Reaganite though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reagan,_Abramoff,_Norquist.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reagan,_Abramoff,_Norquis...
  - hodgesrm 9y ago
    Not sure you can blame the rhetoric alone as such sayings have been around for a long time. viz. Mark Twain: "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." p.s., As far as I can tell he actually wrote this, which is somewhat unusual for such things.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Reagan’s policies were aligned with this rhetoric... or at least, the rhetoric was used as justification for the policies, which e.g. shifted the tax burden from the rich toward the middle class by cutting taxes on income (in particular slashing the top marginal rates) and inheritance, hiking payroll taxes, and using Social Security money to pay for general federal expenditures.
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    > “One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.” This is hilarious. A rehash of Friedmans' if the state had monopoly of the sahara, it would run out of sand in 5 years. On the case in hand, equifax is a not a poster case for advocating for more regulation.
    - r00fus 9y ago
      > On the case in hand, equifax is a not a poster case for advocating for more regulation. Not following. Why not?
      - conanbatt 9y ago
        Equifax is not the result of a free market or lack of regulation, its a company that subsists in an artificial high barrier to entry space, where strange things happen like equifax is not liable for the mistakes it makes (which are grotesque and frequent). Equifax receives government protection, not scrutiny, so more regulation means more protection..
        Slansitartop 9y ago
        In what world would more competition and less regulation cause Equifax (or a company like it) to do a better job securing Americans data? Few, if any, of its important customers were harmed.
        conanbatt 9y ago
        Equifax has had a terrible rep as a service long before the hack. Even john oliver had a segment on it before the hack happened, on how an egregious number of reports are grossly innacurate (like 40%, i cant remember). That has to be bad even for the banks: bad credit reports equals bad loans. Regulation tends to decrease the number of players and increase the size of the incumbents, particularly because it puts requirements that can only be done with big bucks.
  - MisterBastahrd 9y ago
    That was a man who cried incessantly about the evils of government spending while wiping his tears with the money before throwing it down a black hole. One of the greatest bullshit artists in the history of American politics.
- DFHippie 9y ago
  Yes, the old Contract On America is finally bearing fruit.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Better understood as the "Contract on America" (complete with crosshairs). What do you expect after giving the CIA decades of experience to kneecap other countries democracies and economies - they'll put that valuable knowhow to use internally eventually for their own profit.
tootie 9y ago
"There is tons of waste in government" There's tons of waste in all human endeavor but I haven't seen any evidence that government is particularly good or bad.
- kodablah 9y ago
  That waste exists elsewhere matters not. There is no good or bad waste, waste is a pejorative term on its own. Ones with the power to should attempt to stamp it out when able (i.e. when said stamping costs don't outweigh the benefits).
- dmux 9y ago
  >There's tons of waste in all human endeavor I believe the argument stems from the difference between wasting your own money vs. wasting tax payer money. >but I haven't seen any evidence that government is particularly good or bad There's plenty of examples out there of the latter (you'll often see more criticism than praise on govt spending). For example, [1]. [1] https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/50-examples-government-waste https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/50-examp...
dustinblake 9y ago
That government is wasteful has been a rallying cry from Reagan onward. Republicans have gleefully been cutting waste since then, so we’ve had nearly four decades of intense scrutiny of government waste. There is very little left! While each new finding of any waste is trumpeted from the hilltops, no mention is made of the numerous agencies and offices which are operating on shoestring budgets and, in many cases, operating at low efficiency because they are too starved of cash to do their jobs effectively. This is the two-pronged attack, a maniacally evil strategy from the brains of the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers and their minion ‘think’ tanks, and Grover Norquist. They wish to institute their libertarian paradise, but what gets in their way is that most Americans don’t actually share their desires. Most Americans tend to favor the kind of smart policies that balance the needs of enterprise with the needs of society - laws that harness the engine of capitalism to work broadly in service of everyone. Only by driving a wedge in between the American populace and government, and between the non-union worker and the union worker, and between the middle class and the poor, and between the poor and the immigrant - to the point that everyone is now against everyone else - could they succeed in creating such visceral hatred so wide and so deep in the populace that we would have no sense of society left. When we cease to feel like we’re all in this together, we cease to feel a responsibility for the common good, when we show no concern for the pillaging of the commons, we laugh haughtily at the misfortune of others, we joke about the failure of our institutions and collectively we stick our heads in the sand and turn to salve our sorrows with the solace of drugs or numb ourselves with our mindless entertainment, we step closer to the now-inevitable collapse of our great experiment in democracy, our once powerful leadership fallen to depths of ridicule and our empire crumbled. Those rich men who directed our demise might initially celebrate the arrival of their libertarian paradise, but with a limping husk of a state left, even a minimal order won’t last for long, and their wealth - in money that has little lingering value won’t shield them from the pains of society collapsed. Their land is only theirs if recognized by a government, and if property rights are respected. I suspect that it won’t be long until all are consumed in anarchy, followed by formation of groups of violent masses, led by ideologues who commandeer what bits of military hardware they can grab.
- refurb 9y ago
  Judging by the public's belief in the effectiveness of Congress (e.g. approval ratings), I'd say the feeling that gov't is wasteful and ineffective is pretty widespread.

fjsolwmv 9y ago

Shuttering most of the Federal Government has been GOP platform since 1994 Contract With America.

jacobolus 9y ago
Reagan’s whole schtick was that government is inherently useless. e.g. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I'm here to help.’” “One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.” “Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.” etc., and unfortunately this rhetoric was very effective as advertising/propaganda, noticeably shifting public attitudes. His platform was largely about cutting taxes, deregulation, privatizing public institutions and infrastructure, reducing or eliminating government services, ...
- username223 9y ago
  > "Government is like a baby..." ... so let's starve it to death, because that's what you normally do with babies. I always knew that Reagan was a dementia victim, but not that he was so bad at metaphors.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    The whole “starve it until it can be drowned in a bathtub” thing is from Grover Norquist, whose anti-tax pledge has been signed by almost all Republican lawmakers for decades. Norquist was a Reaganite though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reagan,_Abramoff,_Norquist.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reagan,_Abramoff,_Norquis...
- hodgesrm 9y ago
  Not sure you can blame the rhetoric alone as such sayings have been around for a long time. viz. Mark Twain: "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." p.s., As far as I can tell he actually wrote this, which is somewhat unusual for such things.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Reagan’s policies were aligned with this rhetoric... or at least, the rhetoric was used as justification for the policies, which e.g. shifted the tax burden from the rich toward the middle class by cutting taxes on income (in particular slashing the top marginal rates) and inheritance, hiking payroll taxes, and using Social Security money to pay for general federal expenditures.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  > “One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.” This is hilarious. A rehash of Friedmans' if the state had monopoly of the sahara, it would run out of sand in 5 years. On the case in hand, equifax is a not a poster case for advocating for more regulation.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    > On the case in hand, equifax is a not a poster case for advocating for more regulation. Not following. Why not?
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      Equifax is not the result of a free market or lack of regulation, its a company that subsists in an artificial high barrier to entry space, where strange things happen like equifax is not liable for the mistakes it makes (which are grotesque and frequent). Equifax receives government protection, not scrutiny, so more regulation means more protection..
      - Slansitartop 9y ago
        In what world would more competition and less regulation cause Equifax (or a company like it) to do a better job securing Americans data? Few, if any, of its important customers were harmed.
        conanbatt 9y ago
        Equifax has had a terrible rep as a service long before the hack. Even john oliver had a segment on it before the hack happened, on how an egregious number of reports are grossly innacurate (like 40%, i cant remember). That has to be bad even for the banks: bad credit reports equals bad loans. Regulation tends to decrease the number of players and increase the size of the incumbents, particularly because it puts requirements that can only be done with big bucks.
- MisterBastahrd 9y ago
  That was a man who cried incessantly about the evils of government spending while wiping his tears with the money before throwing it down a black hole. One of the greatest bullshit artists in the history of American politics.
DFHippie 9y ago
Yes, the old Contract On America is finally bearing fruit.
r00fus 9y ago
Better understood as the "Contract on America" (complete with crosshairs). What do you expect after giving the CIA decades of experience to kneecap other countries democracies and economies - they'll put that valuable knowhow to use internally eventually for their own profit.

tootie 9y ago

"There is tons of waste in government" There's tons of waste in all human endeavor but I haven't seen any evidence that government is particularly good or bad.

kodablah 9y ago
That waste exists elsewhere matters not. There is no good or bad waste, waste is a pejorative term on its own. Ones with the power to should attempt to stamp it out when able (i.e. when said stamping costs don't outweigh the benefits).
dmux 9y ago
>There's tons of waste in all human endeavor I believe the argument stems from the difference between wasting your own money vs. wasting tax payer money. >but I haven't seen any evidence that government is particularly good or bad There's plenty of examples out there of the latter (you'll often see more criticism than praise on govt spending). For example, [1]. [1] https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/50-examples-government-waste https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/50-examp...

dustinblake 9y ago

That government is wasteful has been a rallying cry from Reagan onward. Republicans have gleefully been cutting waste since then, so we’ve had nearly four decades of intense scrutiny of government waste. There is very little left! While each new finding of any waste is trumpeted from the hilltops, no mention is made of the numerous agencies and offices which are operating on shoestring budgets and, in many cases, operating at low efficiency because they are too starved of cash to do their jobs effectively. This is the two-pronged attack, a maniacally evil strategy from the brains of the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers and their minion ‘think’ tanks, and Grover Norquist. They wish to institute their libertarian paradise, but what gets in their way is that most Americans don’t actually share their desires. Most Americans tend to favor the kind of smart policies that balance the needs of enterprise with the needs of society - laws that harness the engine of capitalism to work broadly in service of everyone. Only by driving a wedge in between the American populace and government, and between the non-union worker and the union worker, and between the middle class and the poor, and between the poor and the immigrant - to the point that everyone is now against everyone else - could they succeed in creating such visceral hatred so wide and so deep in the populace that we would have no sense of society left. When we cease to feel like we’re all in this together, we cease to feel a responsibility for the common good, when we show no concern for the pillaging of the commons, we laugh haughtily at the misfortune of others, we joke about the failure of our institutions and collectively we stick our heads in the sand and turn to salve our sorrows with the solace of drugs or numb ourselves with our mindless entertainment, we step closer to the now-inevitable collapse of our great experiment in democracy, our once powerful leadership fallen to depths of ridicule and our empire crumbled. Those rich men who directed our demise might initially celebrate the arrival of their libertarian paradise, but with a limping husk of a state left, even a minimal order won’t last for long, and their wealth - in money that has little lingering value won’t shield them from the pains of society collapsed. Their land is only theirs if recognized by a government, and if property rights are respected. I suspect that it won’t be long until all are consumed in anarchy, followed by formation of groups of violent masses, led by ideologues who commandeer what bits of military hardware they can grab.

refurb 9y ago
Judging by the public's belief in the effectiveness of Congress (e.g. approval ratings), I'd say the feeling that gov't is wasteful and ineffective is pretty widespread.