8 ms·

The bigger problem is a fear of public spending because of perceived incompetence. The stigma comes from a time when only governments had run big bureaucratic s

• AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  Well, fix government oversight of public bureaucracies and then we can have a discussion. As it is now, it's pretty clear that elected officials have little control and oversight into the bureaucracies that they nominally control and direct. Make bureaucrats firable. End Chevron deference. Bring back political appointments from the top to the bottom of the bureaucracy.
  • mistrial9 3y ago
    this is exactly true in nearby large counties, US West
  • macintux 3y ago
    > Bring back political appointments from the top to the bottom of the bureaucracy. Good heavens no. Turn over the bureaucracy every few years, bringing in political sycophants to replace people who actually understand the system (and, by and large, follow the law instead of kowtowing to the current demagogue-in-charge)?
    • AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
      [dead]
• fifticon 3y ago
  I see a lot of propaganda expended on convincing the voting public of this "public incompentence", almost as if someone is paying to maintain this status quo.
  • Rzor 3y ago
    The history of the idea is quite interesting. It all start in the post-WWII period, right after the RAND Corporation was created to retain talent amid the US armed forces demobilization. Shortly after, a bunch of government agencies were being created and there was no abstraction defined to impose constraints on how they should operate and be funded, after some initial success with RAND's economists' policy analysis during the Kennedy administration, it began to spread to newly formed agencies and thus the language of efficiency gained weight. Then the Chicago school comes in, eventually antitrust starts to be dismantled with arguments like "if they raise prices too much, then competitors will come and eat their lunch", yadda yadda, completely ignoring entry barriers and today due to the flexibility of the language you have actors using government ineptness as a basis to decrease or halt any public spending when it suits them. It's a powerful way of assessing resource allocation, but it can't be the only one.
  • zo1 3y ago
    It's all marketing at the end of the day. But tbf, after a decade of a many public sector projects, I have first-hand seen really incompetent and wasteful actions on huge scales. Perhaps there should he a whistle blower program for reporting such things?
    • JKCalhoun 3y ago
      > incompetent and wasteful actions on huge scales As others have pointed out, this is independent of whether we're talking about the government or private sector. Regardless, when I see workers on a road crew standing around I don't think "wasted tax dollars", I think "money going back into the economy." Of course in my view of a fair society it would be a preponderance of idle, wealthy money that is going back into the economy.
      • dantheman 3y ago
        There is a fundamental difference between public and private and that is one of consent. We have no consent when it comes to government actions. Look at the amount of money wasted on the the war on drugs. Where do you think wealthy money is if not in the economy?
• brigadier132 3y ago
  Can you actually give examples of competent public spending? The military is considered one of the competent parts of the US government and the amount of waste is staggering. On any given night 4000 people are sleeping on San Francisco's streets and the government can't solve that with a $636 million a year budget? The US spends more per student than any other nation and somehow we have worse educational outcomes?
  • dhbradshaw 3y ago
    Libraries, roads, firefighters, police, utilities, national parks, local parks.
    • brigadier132 3y ago
      Taxes don't pay for utilities, I can't personally use libraries anymore because they've become defacto homeless shelters, the police suck. So now we are left with firefighters, national parks and local parks which I guess are not good targets for power hungry and incompetent politicians.
      • afavour 3y ago
        > I can't personally use libraries anymore because they've become defacto homeless shelters I’m sorry, I can’t take any of this seriously. I use my neighbourhood library regularly, take my kids there, it’s a wonderful place. I’m sorry you’ve had bad experiences (have you? Or did you just read online that libraries are full of homeless people?) but don’t extrapolate your experience out to a universal one.
        • prepend 3y ago
          For me libraries vary substantially. My local library in the burbs was nice, but they decided to close every Sunday and only open from 12-5 on Saturday. And oddly, 4 libraries about 10 miles apart from each other all closed after a storm due to rain damage. Even though they are different buildings build many years apart in different styles. It seems odd they wild all have water damage. And while they are closed to the public, the employees are still working, they are just working from home. Every week. So their plan is to have remote workers doing library work on Sunday. But when they are open, they are very nice places. But drive 30 minutes into the major city and it’s not a nice place. There are many homeless inside so it is messy and not a very safe place, if you don’t want someone yelling at your kid. I think it’s appropriate to use our own experiences with libraries to form judgements. I’m glad you (and I) have good experiences, but should we extrapolate our experiences into universal ones? What makes you think all libraries are great like yours?
• tommiegannert 3y ago
  The big difference is that I can choose not to pay a company I don't like, and that's fine. Governments will happily make my life crap if I don't pay taxes. I dislike greed as much as the next person, but the monopolized incarceration powers of governments are not to be forgotten. For some services, collective funding makes sense, like having hospitals that can stop the spread of diseases, or forcing pooling of money to locally maintain an even standard of infrastructure.
  • makeitdouble 3y ago
    > The big difference is that I can choose not to pay a company I don't like, and that's fine. Which phone company do you positively like ? Which internet operator are you paying because you want them to thrive ? How do you feel about Qualcomm and feeding them money ?
    • JKCalhoun 3y ago
      Which for-profit prison company are you willing to pay for? Which private military contractors do you want your tax dollars going to? (Comment is meant to be added on to yours, not contradict you.)
    • seanp2k2 3y ago
      And which power company? PG&E has made it almost not worth it to harness the free power of the sun on my roof with their NEM 3.0 rules, that they passed just before holiday break after delaying for so long and against mass public outrage. They also snuck in a rename to “net billing tariff” (NBT), also called “solar billing plan” in some contexts. https://aurorasolar.com/blog/cpuc-voted-californias-net-billing-tariff-nem3-is-now-final/ https://aurorasolar.com/blog/cpuc-voted-californias-net-bill... Has a decent overview of the changes for the curious.
    • tommiegannert 3y ago
      > Which phone company do you positively like ? Digitech Mobile is great so far. I think that particular question is very regional. In Switzerland (and Sweden,) the competition between them works well, IMHO. > Which internet operator are you paying because you want them to thrive ? I don't have a choice where I live. I.e. it's as bad as a monopoly. It used to be good, but then UPC was bought by Sunrise, and they seem intent on making me leave ASAP. > How do you feel about Qualcomm and feeding them money ? Blissfully ignorant.
• littlestymaar 3y ago
  The “perceived incompetence” is propaganda-induced perception causes by the private sector and pro-business ideologists… (And when you defund public services it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy)
• PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  The reduction in upper rate marginal taxes and the narrative about government incompetence were both promulgated by the same people. They are not distinct. The reality is that all human organizations - government, for-profit, not-for-profit - suffer from incompetence, corruption and inefficiency. The story that the right likes to tell us is that because there is (typically) a choice of companies (and that they are subject to competition with each other), it doesn't matter (as much) if a company suffers from these things, because you can "go elsewhere". Vertical integration in so many business sectors, along with corporate mergers and the waning of antitrust really does give lie to this, in my opinion. For example, all US cell phone companies are shit, they all have shitty websites, shitty customer service, shitty rates, idiot salespeople ... moving from T-Mobile to Verizon because the former screwed something up solves absolutely nothing.
  • WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > The reality is that all human organizations - government, for-profit, not-for-profit - suffer from incompetence, corruption and inefficiency. My observation is that size matters. Generally speaking: The larger an entity is, the more difficult it becomes to be a benefit to the public. The ability to cause harm doesn't diminish the same way (if at all). Governments and NGOs at least have a realized duty to be a public benefit. The same obligation is typically not recognized for corporations (eg: Shareholder good is applauded - even while it brings brings detriment to society, employees, the company).
    • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      Well, to a point, you may be right. However, there many very large organizations that generally do better than the majority, so I don't think it's a linear or even necessarily causal relationship. Size certainly makes incompetence, inefficiency and corruption easier, and harder to eliminate. There's also the problem of balance: several UN organizations, for example, do immense good with remarkably limited resources but occasionally they or their cousins fuck up really badly and cause severe harm. Because of the way our media (and our brains) work, we are much more aware of the fuck ups, but this is not necessarily a rational way to assess their overall efficacy. I do think that the right has a small point in their perspective. It is almost certainly the case that being "the only game in town" does lead to a different set of incentives for public organizations. But I'm not clear that incentives are for worse behavior, at least not overall. Some parts of it are pretty complex to reason about - there's not a lot of potential within (local) government to get wildly rich, unlike in private corporations, but there's enough to keep small time grifters and scroungers happy. So it's certainly different from the private context, but better or worse is hard to say as a general rule.
• rpgbr 3y ago
  This stigma, not by coincidence, is reinforced by economic elites. It’s part of their playbook, and they are pretty convincing for a lot of people.
• missedthecue 3y ago
  I don't think it's a stigma. It's observable. Government agencies are created to fix problems. If they fix the problem they are downsized. As an extreme example, the Department of War got very big in WW2, fixed the problem of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then shrunk. From 40% of GDP, to about 5%, and today a little over 2 or 3% For most government agencies, it doesn't work this way. They get lots of funding, aren't able to fix the problem, and so the solution is to give them more and more funding. The result is that non or barely functional agencies are getting bigger and bigger, spawn out countless sub agencies and special task forces, and the problems they exist to solve remain. HUD funding for instance has grown multiples, inflation adjusted, since the 1980s, but no American will tell you the housing market or affordability is great right now. And HUD will get another huge increase for the next fiscal year, then again the next, ad infinitum. This is fundamental problem. Until it's fixed, this fact, or what you term 'stigma' will continue to exist.
  • WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > Government agencies are created to fix problems. If they fix the problem they are downsized. Typically, sizable problems that need solving do not stay fixed. Issues that have broad impact are likely either chronic or will morph into new problems. Downsizing in the face of a chronic problem seems unwise. So does downsizing to ignore the the offshoot (or new variant) of the problem.
• spacebanana7 3y ago
  > except for a lack of oversight on the latter. It’s much easier for regulators to penalise a private sector actor than a public sector actor. Anything which makes the public sector actor look bad can be perceived as an attack on the incumbent politicians, who’re usually the people who hired the regulators.