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I guess I'm just not seeing the huge waste, or the fact that this is "a lot of money." Is government perfect? Of course not! But I've worked at almost all of FA

I guess I'm just not seeing the huge waste, or the fact that this is "a lot of money." Is government perfect? Of course not! But I've worked at almost all of FAANG and the amount of waste there is PHENOMENAL. And those are "some of the best" run companies in the world. Would any of this be a large percentage of people's income? Sure! But that doesn't have a relevance. E.g. you could give 10 people the entire budget of the CDC ($5.6B) and they have generational wealth. Would I expect them to do as much good as the CDC does? No.

repolfx 8y ago
I think the fact that you've spent so much time in the FAANG companies may explain why you can't see government waste. The Valley tech firms are frequently lauded as many positive things, but I've never seen anyone with a clue argue they're efficient. Innovative, competent at executing tech projects, impactful, concerned about social issues, whatever, but if anyone argued they didn't waste vast sums of money they'd need their heads examined. "Frugal" is not an adjective that has ever been associated with these firms not even in their pre-revenue startup days. Government waste is everywhere, although of course the definition of "waste" depends a lot on your perception of what it's legitimate for a government to be doing in the first place. Sometimes it's just incompetence. In the UK, it's been common in the past for local governments to do things like pay the same bills repeatedly without noticing they've done so, or they don't bother collecting taxes that are actually owed to them. I'm not sure if that's still a problem these days - I read about it during a previous anti-waste drive. Sometimes it's due to catastrophically over-optimistic ideas about what government can actually do. The UK runs an entirely nationalised, civil servant run health system. It's also the country responsible for the biggest failed IT project in history, an attempt to digitise the NHS. £13 billion flushed down the toilet and all they got for it was an email system. Is anyone really shocked that a vast government bureaucracy totally failed to implement an IT project yet spent unheard-of sums on failing? No, because government waste is everywhere. Sometimes it's due to trying to do things that governments shouldn't be doing in the first place. Like many countries the UK went through a "everyone should go to university" drive, a large scale and dubious social engineering project. The government guaranteed student debt and ... guess what ... huge numbers of students studied wasteful courses and built up debts they can never repay. The government has now admitted that if it did accounting like a company did it'd be entirely bankrupt, simply because it'd have been unable to move student debt off its books in the way it did so. The losses on these loans have been astronomical - directly wasted resources.

repolfx 8y ago

I think the fact that you've spent so much time in the FAANG companies may explain why you can't see government waste. The Valley tech firms are frequently lauded as many positive things, but I've never seen anyone with a clue argue they're efficient. Innovative, competent at executing tech projects, impactful, concerned about social issues, whatever, but if anyone argued they didn't waste vast sums of money they'd need their heads examined. "Frugal" is not an adjective that has ever been associated with these firms not even in their pre-revenue startup days. Government waste is everywhere, although of course the definition of "waste" depends a lot on your perception of what it's legitimate for a government to be doing in the first place. Sometimes it's just incompetence. In the UK, it's been common in the past for local governments to do things like pay the same bills repeatedly without noticing they've done so, or they don't bother collecting taxes that are actually owed to them. I'm not sure if that's still a problem these days - I read about it during a previous anti-waste drive. Sometimes it's due to catastrophically over-optimistic ideas about what government can actually do. The UK runs an entirely nationalised, civil servant run health system. It's also the country responsible for the biggest failed IT project in history, an attempt to digitise the NHS. £13 billion flushed down the toilet and all they got for it was an email system. Is anyone really shocked that a vast government bureaucracy totally failed to implement an IT project yet spent unheard-of sums on failing? No, because government waste is everywhere. Sometimes it's due to trying to do things that governments shouldn't be doing in the first place. Like many countries the UK went through a "everyone should go to university" drive, a large scale and dubious social engineering project. The government guaranteed student debt and ... guess what ... huge numbers of students studied wasteful courses and built up debts they can never repay. The government has now admitted that if it did accounting like a company did it'd be entirely bankrupt, simply because it'd have been unable to move student debt off its books in the way it did so. The losses on these loans have been astronomical - directly wasted resources.