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How much activity do you expect from a party whose organizing principle is to shrink government small enough to be drowned in a bathtub?
by rhizome 6y ago
How much activity do you expect from a party whose organizing principle is to shrink government small enough to be drowned in a bathtub?
- bluGill 6y agoMaybe shrink government? You might not agree with the principle, but given they haven't done much shrinking you cannot call it their principle.
- krapp 6y agoIt is their principle, they just prefer to shrink the parts of government they disagree with ideologically. Which is why we have the biggest, most powerful and most expensive military in human history but our healthcare and education systems are a joke.
- rbanffy 6y agoInterestingly, shrinking the government doesn't seem to affect the military...
- rayiner 6y agoFirst, it has: https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/dod_chart.jpg https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/dod_cha.... As a fraction of the economy, military spending is a little over one-third of what it was the year I was born. It’s actually pretty much the only part of government that has shrunk. Second, the military is one of the few aspects of government that’s clearly supposed to be done at a federal level. Why do you think there is anything inconsistent about conservatives not cutting back government uniformly?
- Supermancho 6y ago> Why do you think there is anything inconsistent about conservatives not cutting back government uniformly? There are 2 things that are not being taken into account. First, historic trends are not reversed by relatively recent changes in allocation to the US military. Second relatively recent changes in military utility of manpower vs aircraft vs cruise missile has made certain kinds of spending obsolete. A modern, effective military does not require the same logistics anymore, so of course spending has gone down. There is nothing inconsistent about conservatives (Republicans) expanding military spending, as they always have and will continue to do so within the bounds of recommendations from the industrial military complex.
- sangnoir 6y agoWithout knowing your age - I'm guessing you were born during the cold war/before the fall of the Berlin Wall (or at some point in the immediate aftermath). That event alone (and not some small government principle) was responsible for less military money allocated to counteracting the specter of a Soviet world order
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago> Second, the military is one of the few aspects of government that’s clearly supposed to be done at a federal level. According to the 18th-century conception, the army indeed becomes a federal concern in wartime, but on an everyday peacetime basis, the training of soldiers was supposed to be done within militias regulated by the states.
- rayiner 6y agoOn education, we spend among the most per student in absolute terms on K-12 and right at the OECD average as a fraction of the economy: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/figures/images/figure-cmd-3.svg https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/figures/images/figure-cmd-3... As a portion of the economy, just our public spending on healthcare is higher than the OECD average public spending: https://www.oecd.org/media/oecdorg/satellitesites/newsroom/48294761hd2011fr.png https://www.oecd.org/media/oecdorg/satellitesites/newsroom/4...
- rhizome 6y agoNow weight those rankings with each country's military spending.
- brandmeyer 6y agoThis is a great example of the flaw of using averages in an unbalanced society. Some wealthy districts spend far above the OECD average, while many poor districts are grossly under-funded (and under-achieving).
- s1artibartfast 6y agoSure, but that is not evidence that republicans have shrunk educational spending. Instead, it is evidence that there is bipartisan support for educational spending, but with uneven beneficiaries. This is a different issue and the solutions to the first problem are not the solutions to the second. Last, this isn't really a partisan federal issue. Most school spending is determined the state or local level and the same inequality is present in predominantly red and blue states.
- evan_ 6y agoJokes are supposed to be funny, our health care and education are tragedies
- rhizome 6y agoI don't know how you're reading all of that into my comment, but my point is that the members of a political party dedicated to shrinking government to nothing isn't going to do much work. That's the shrinking.
- jki275 6y agoRepublicans don't want to shrink the government any more than Democrats do. They just want to spend the money that doesn't exist on different things.
- rhizome 6y agoDo you know who Grover Norquist is? I don't mean to be curt, but there are specific Republican projects here that have been operating for decades.
- jki275 6y agoNo one really cares who Grover Norquist is. He has no influence on anything.
- rhizome 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist#Taxpayer_Protection_Pledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist#Taxpayer_Prote... Humility is a virtue.
- jki275 6y agoThanks for posting a Wikipedia article. I'm well aware of who he is. What he wants doesn't actually get done, no matter how many pledges people sign. It's a fantasy.
- rudolph9 6y agoI wish people could take a step back from the “shrink government” debate and focus on making laws more effective and efficient. I could write a piece of code that adds two numbers but takes two days and all available memory to compute the result. A lot of laws are on all levels of government from both sides of the isle are well intentioned but the costs surrounding the laws are prohibitive. That doesn’t imply we need less laws, that doesn’t imply we don’t have enough laws, it means we need to take a hard look at where the bottlenecks are and streamline the process and to achieve the desired result.