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> I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste In fact, I’d
by smogcutter 2y ago
> I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste
In fact, I’d argue that the government’s role is specifically to spend on things that are economically inefficient but nonetheless important.
- dmurray 2y agoRight, but theres a difference between "economically inefficient because every dollar spent here translates to less than a dollar of direct returns" and "economically inefficient because every dollar spent on this requires spending five dollars more on administering it". It's absolutely possible for a government to value investing in health care or education or foreign aid in a way that a corporation could never monetize, but still value doing it in a more effective way.
- rbanffy 2y ago> "economically inefficient because every dollar spent on this requires spending five dollars more on administering it" Is there evidence that this is what’s actually happening?
- fourside 2y agoI’m sure you can find some evidence of that. You also need to find evidence that every department that is getting slashed has those kind of inefficiencies. The government is large and complex. Even inside large companies, which are comparatively smaller you’ll find different departments have different level of inefficiencies.
- dcow 2y agoWhich is why a discussion on this topic at such a high level isn't really productive. You need to look at each line item and ask whether it’s fraud/waste/abuse and then make a call. That is exactly what DOGE is doing. If you don’t trust them then you’ll never get to a discussion on meaningful details.
- smegger001 2y agoIts not. they are just firing everyone they can. if they were being careful and looking at every line item they would not have accidentally fired the engineers that maintain our nuclear weapon initiating a mad scramble to rehire them. you cant have small team doing that level of audit in the time frames they have been in operation.
- dcow 2y agoYou can—you’re watching it happen. Sounds like the problem was swiftly remedied.
- smegger001 2y agoThey wouldn't have fired them in the first place if they had been doing a line by line audit. This is the equivalent of flipping every breaker in the box turn off one light in an apartment building. Sure the light turned off but you also turned off everyone's refrigerators, and the oxygen machine the old lady in apartment 3b needs to live. But you turned it back on the breakers of anyone who came down and complained... unfortunately the old lady died but she didn't make it down to complain. the question is who are Doge going to kill with their actions that wont get their complaints heard?
- dcow 2y agoNothing concerns me less than a quickly remedied mistake. PS: at many time’s I’ve been successful using the “flip every breaker” strategy. A well designed oxygen machine has a battery and a fridge can tolerate a brief power outage.
- Jcowell 2y ago> A well designed oxygen machine has a battery and a fridge can tolerate a brief power outage. Sure, but you would at least do the due diligence to confirm that the case for Mrs Shelby before you YOLO it and wish for the best with her life on the line.
- Arkhadia 2y ago“The government is large and complex” EXATLY the issue.
- ave_b_2011 2y agoThe country is almost 340 million people. That’s 340,000,000 individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and geographies. They wake up every morning and go about their lives. Things like planes need to stay in the air, water needs to be clean, trains need to not derail in the middle of towns, dams need to stay not only structurally sounds but in some cases keep producing electricity. The USA is the fourth largest country by area in the entire world. To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.
- 6figurelenins 2y ago> To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say. I can stipulate there must be essential complexity. I think we have to dispute any suggestion that this hypothetically-essential complexity has grown at the same rate as the spending[1]. It's not obvious that fairness, charity, national defense, public health, postage stamps, corn ethanol... [or air traffic control (cough), clean water (cough), non-derailing trains (cough), levees (cough)]..., ad infinitum should require a static percentage of the economy. Essential or not, those costs fundamentally cannot continue to outpace real GDP growth. Rather, it seems obvious to me that the political class has scope-creeped "governance" into spending as an end in itself. Practically, and morally, the government is too big and complex, and it should be drastically smaller and simpler. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#Historical_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#H...
- consteval 2y agoIs there any way to provide care, education, and prosperity for hundreds of millions of people that is not complex? We're software engineers. If anyone should understand the difference between domain complexity and added complexity, it should be us.
- teyc 2y agoIn any large orgs the more people involved the more deadlocks you have and it can become a policy quagmire. Both meta and twitter achieved more velocity once cuts are in place.
- ses1984 2y agoWhat has Twitter done since cutting?
- dcow 2y agoTwitter has turned an incredible profit and launched an AI assistant since almost the entire user base claimed that Elon was going to run the company into the ground.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoHuh? Twitter is unprofitable.
- dcow 2y agoSays who?
- VectorLock 2y agoDo you have a source for the assertion that Twitter has "incredible profits?" As a private company I think their financials aren't as widely published any more, but I honestly haven't seen any information on which way their financials are going.
- matt-attack 2y agohttps://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/02/x-in-2024-doubled-highest-yearly-twitter-profits.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/02/x-in-2024-doubled-high...
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- smegger001 2y agoexactly the opposite actually, lets look at medicare, Medicare Part A. and Part B. are administered by the government and of their funding about 98.6% is spent on care with the 1.4% going to administration. Medicare part D is privately administered and replaces part A and B, but 15% is spent on administration and often covers less. More Perfect Union has good video covering it on youtube https://youtu.be/cQR67WRcVUg?si=LfRk2gQ57XPiwtS9 https://youtu.be/cQR67WRcVUg?si=LfRk2gQ57XPiwtS9
- dcow 2y agoAnd yet an off the shelf drug purchased by medicaid is often hundreds of times more expensive than when retail buys it. Something is happening and people taking their cut aren’t dumb enough to have it appear as top end administrative cost.
- smegger001 2y agothat would be medicaid not medicare which are two different programs and is because they aren't allowed bargain on medication pricing expect on a few select medications
- rbanffy 2y ago> because they aren't allowed bargain on medication pricing expect on a few select medications This is absolutely outrageous.
- smegger001 2y agoyes, it is. call your representative and senator and complain.
- braebo 2y agoThey can’t do anything about it now that the Republican Party has sold the country out to deranged white nationalist fascists and an unelected billionaire.
- potato3732842 2y ago5:1 sounds absurd but I bet most municipal projects that are largely grant funded are probably somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1. I cringe when I hear about my town getting $20k-200k grants for stuff that would have cost perhaps half as much were my town simply catering to its own needs rather than trying to optimize for getting the feds to pick up the tab. My town's library, several school programs and several intersection renovations fall into this category. The library in particular is pretty stupid for reasons outside the scope of this comment.
- exe34 2y ago> "economically inefficient because every dollar spent on this requires spending five dollars more on administering it". could you say a few words on how you think dodge making it harder for anything to happen without going through them is going to make it cost less to spend on the useful things?
- consteval 2y agoIt's important to recognize that a large part of the inefficiencies are due to the private sector and having to work around that. A single payer healthcare system is, by every measure, more efficient than private healthcare. There's 1 system. You don't need hundreds of billing analysts. You don't need administrators on top of administrators. You don't need constant tug of war. Part of the reason Medicaid is so inefficient is because there's other things that are not Medicaid.
- nobodywillobsrv 2y agoThe problem is that all that spending will stop if the US falls
- stouset 2y agoIn addition to that, to spend on things that produce net positive returns for society, but whose benefits are diffuse enough that every smaller entity isn't incentivized enough to do it. Also, to adjust market dynamics to shift things toward long-term good when short-term incentives won't necessarily produce the same result.