6 ms·

It's amazing how the general public seems to think people involved with the bureaucracy would never support cuts and downsizing. They should get a moral compass

It's amazing how the general public seems to think people involved with the bureaucracy would never support cuts and downsizing. They should get a moral compass and try working there for a while.

throw10920 1y ago
Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient. To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable. Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bratbag 1y ago
  The majority of obese people want to be thin, but will die obese anyway. Just wanting something that requires a significant overhaul of how you do things, is not enough.
  - paddleon 1y ago
    better analogy: the majority of fouix-gras birds would prefer not to be force-fed and caged. The people working in the bureaucracy do not have the authority to overhaul it.
    - parineum 1y ago
      The people working in the bureaucracy chose to be there. Bureaucracies self select for people that are okay with it. I'm sure there's a few who are there to change it from the inside but they are the exception. You're not going to find a lot of vegans working in a meat packing plant.
      - wizzwizz4 1y ago
        But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Some people prioritise pragmatism over ideological purity. (See https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-inside-a-slaughterhouse/ https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-insid... and parts of https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683.)
        kashunstva 1y ago
        > But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Your first link is the first-person account of a vegan who went undercover to document the abject cruelty that exists in slaughterhouses. The pragmatism was in service of a mission to protect animals by disseminating information on such cruelty rather than the “I need a job.” type of pragmatism. There’s a moral distinction here.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        The first link's narrator blew the whistle to industry regulators on practices unethical by non-vegan standards, something that is only possible if you're on the ground. The second link quotes an interview: > Basically, I'm an animal lover. I don't take any pleasure in what we're doing, but if I can do it as quietly and professionally as possible, then I think we've achieved something. I was not at all referring to 'the "I need a job" type of pragmatism' (which would not be moral pragmatism for a vegan); rather, doing a job that involves killing animals in such a way that your presence reduces the marginal harm could be seen as defensible to a vegan.
- egorfine 1y ago
  > the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient and thus be fired?
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    Or just actually deliver what people need faster and better?
    - egorfine 1y ago
      There are no incentives for that. Bureaucrat will get paid at the end of the month no matter what. But if said bureaucrat makes its own process more efficient, they might get fired because they are not needed anymore.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        Worse, their boss's (maybe not direct boss, but somewhere up there) prestige, power and career potential directly tracks headcount. So even if the DMV clerks want it to not suck, management want it to suck.
      - etiam 1y ago
        Most bureaucrats are also humans, and not solely or even mainly motivated for their every action by having it rewarded with maximum salary profit. Plenty of dysfunctional bureaucratic organizations have high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn due to the stress of repeatedly enforcing policies the employee knows full well are morally reprehensible. So in real psychology, I claim there's plenty of incentive, even for the majority of people in the organizations.
        egorfine 1y ago
        > Most bureaucrats are also humans Not for long. > high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn See
- scotty79 1y ago
  > government budgets should increase monotonically It should and not even just linearily. If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets. Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on. Of course it should be funded with taxes not debt and that's where the worst part of government spending is. That it's done by indebting itself to billionaires and letting them suck more and more government money each year through debt servicing.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    That seems like a difficult position to make coherent. The comment seems to start by arguing that government spending should increase as much as is reasonably possible because it draws resources away from billionaires. Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves. It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.
    - scotty79 1y ago
      > There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government. Unless it's borrowed directly from billionaires which is what got most governments in financial problems they are currently in. > The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not To asses that you only need to compare rate of growth of billionaires wealth to the rate of growth of the entire economy. Then you can see how much they suck out of non-billionaires.
- callmeal 1y ago
  >To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great) Um, $11,000,000,000 for ICE is not a cut. $850 Billion for the department of war (an increase of $25 billion over last year) is not a cut. But yes, CFPB's funding for 2025 which gets reduced from about $823 million to about $446 million is a cut. Which will be great for consumers because we can now start paying extra fees that will boost corporate profits.
  - throw10920 1y ago
    When did I ever try to justify those budget increases or cuts? You need to improve your reading comprehension.
- callmeal 1y ago
  >government budgets should increase monotonically Well, they should track population growth. You cannot effectively serve a larger population with the same resources, otherwise we would continue to have two lane freeways everywhere.
  - throw10920 1y ago
    Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly. The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.
    - callmeal 1y ago
      Improving technology has not increased housing stock or transportation options. Everyone still needs a place to stay and ways to get to/from work. Another issue is that using technology to reduce humans in the loop is what gets us "your call is important to us..." levels of customer support. If the number of people who need to apply for id/license/passports keeps increasing, then the number of people servicing those requests also needs to increase (or we need to stop complaining about the dmv). No amount of technology is going to replace that need.
      - throw10920 1y ago
        [flagged]
        cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
- _heimdall 1y ago
  The challenge for the second approach is that budgets are going to be spent once they have been allocated. If you improve efficiency and reduce costs that savings will just get spent somewhere else or on some new initiative. Government work and corporate work are very much the same in that way, budgets are use it or lose it and everyone will use it this year so their budget isn't reduces next year.
  - the8472 1y ago
    Some companies manage to maintain war chests, others have some insane "we had EOY leftover budget so we spent it on another redesign" craziness going on. Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?
    - throw10920 1y ago
      > Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from? That specific one is an unfortunate side-effect of needing to allocate budgets in advance. Large organizations working with a lot of money need to statically schedule their budgets in advance - and because they don't have crystal balls, they can't actually know in advance how much they'll need, and have to make educated guesses. If a department didn't use all of its allocated budget last year, sure that's a very weak signal that it was given too large of a budget - but it is a signal, and there aren't very many other good ones.
      - _heimdall 1y ago
        In my opinion this has always been a sign that an organization grew too large. Its the way of the world now to aim for growing into a huge org, hiring as much as you can on the way up. Once those in charge know little more about a part of their company than the budget surplus at the end of the fiscal year the model just doesn't make sense.
      - the8472 1y ago
        It's not a signal, no. If you're good at forecasting but don't have a crystal ball then you'll overestimate on some years and underestimates on others, averaging out. And the budget-burning shows that this encourages making over-estimates and then spending the excess to make the actual numbers match the prediction. It's no different than research based on falsified data at that point.
- runako 1y ago
  > To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable. The US federal government has taken a third route: increasing scale faster than resources. Before this administration, the # of federal employees sat roughly where it was in 1969 (there have been some fluctuations since then). In addition to the added tasks/departments/etc., there are 70% more Americans for which to administer government. Scope has gone up quite a bit faster than headcount. I haven't done the analysis, but would be curious to see how this compares to given companies over similar timelines.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
szundi 1y ago
[dead]
rowanG077 1y ago
Every individual can support efficiency and downsizing and yet it will not happen. With such an extremely large organization it's not enough people just want something. You need concrete drivers for change.
- Propelloni 1y ago
  Agreed, and to add: take a look at the incentive structures. Virtually everybody anywhere is acting rationally within the dominant incentive structure they are confronted with. I know this seems so abstract it sounds like a truism and not actionable. Considering that incentive structures come in many guises (laws, morals, money etc.) the first thing we need to figure out which incentive structure is dominant in a given situation. An employee of a bureaucracy, for example, might share the presented moral disapproval about inefficiency but is it the dominant incentive structure? Probably not. For example, DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, emphasising cost reduction vs. effectivity and privacy. People were (maybe are, nobody is reporting anything on this anymore) up in arms because they had to abandon incentive structures they knew to navigate. DOGE was a colossal failure because emphasising efficiency over effectivity is always like polishing a turd and many people said as much "back then" but look at the incentive structure of those who didn't and don't. Many of them have not prospered in the previous structures, so they support the new ones, even if they are insane to you and me. They act rationally.
  - cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
  - paddleon 1y ago
    > DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, yes > emphasising cost reduction no.
  - Tangurena2 1y ago
    > DOGE toppled existing incentive structures DOGE attacked organizations investigating companies owned by Musk. Nothing else.
guappa 1y ago
The problem with random cuts is that the same people whose only skill is to play office politics are the only ones who will be left after.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  That wouldn't be a problem if the cuts were truly random. In practice, they aren't.
  - mulmen 1y ago
    Well if our choice is a hypothetical fire all the political operators or fire randomly then random will leave more political operators.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      If only such a hypothetical could be implemented. I don't think it's easy to design a firing process that would outperform random chance there. In any non-random process, office politicians would always be first in line with an excuse for why they specifically should not be fired. No matter what the criteria for not getting fired are - they'll do their damn best to make sure they meet them.
      - mulmen 1y ago
        Agreed. But while I agree political operators corrupt all objective processes I refuse to conclude that we should cause random destruction instead.
        ACCount37 1y ago
        Why not? It's unclear if a better option even exists. I do think there's a threshold of organizational dysfunction that justifies unleashing "random destruction" upon it. Or even "total destruction" - and building it all anew. Perhaps the tree of efficiency needs to be watered with the blood of career bureaucrats.
coldtea 1y ago
The public is totally right, those people would never support cuts and downsizing, unless it affects a rival department.
- cavisne 1y ago
  Right, just like how Bernie switched from targeting millionaires to billionaires once he became a billionaire himself.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    You probably meant to write "millionaire himself", and I don't know if it's true, but yes, same principle
  - gjm11 1y ago
    I don't know anything much about the history of Sanders's rhetoric specifically, but: Inflation and economic growth mean that "millionaire" very much doesn't mean what it used to N years ago, and more so the larger N is. (And Sanders has been around for a while, so N can be pretty big if you're comparing early-Sanders with late-Sanders.) If you believe something along the lines of "the richest 1% of society, the ones who have > 10x more wealth each than a typical upper-middle-class person, have too much money and too much power and we should change that" -- which I think is the kind of thing Sanders believes -- then talking about "millionaires" was a reasonable way to express that 50 years ago; these days what we need is a word whose meaning is more like "person with $20M or more"; give it another 50 years and "billionaires" might express roughly the same meaning that "millionaires" did in 1975. (Or, of course, there might be a huge economic crash, or a currency devaluation, or a technological singularity, or something.) So someone could switch from complaining about "millionaires" to complaining about "billionaires" just because the way the meanings of those words have shifted means that the best word for pointing at a particular social issue used to be "millionaires" and is now "billionaires". Because we really only have "millionaire" and "billionaire" and, more generally, numbers spaced by powers of 1000, the sets of people you can talk about pithily change over time. So, at the moment, you can talk about "millionaires" and be referencing something like the top 15% of US households (so if you're wanting to engage in some hostile rhetoric, pointing it at "millionaires" is probably broader than you want for several reasons); or you can talk about "billionaires" and be referencing something more like the top 0.0003% (so if you're wanting to raise money by redistribution, "billionaires" is probably much narrower than you want). I suspect there are a few good PhD theses to be written investigating questions like "do populist-leftist movements have more success in places/times where some handy term like 'millionaire' picks out roughly the top 0.3%-3% of the population than in places where there's no word that does that?". (Note: numbers above are in the right ballpark but I make no claim that careful calculation wouldn't change them somewhat.)

It's amazing how the general public seems to think people involved with the bureaucracy would never support cuts and downsizing. They should get a moral compass and try working there for a while.

throw10920 1y ago

Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient. To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable. Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bratbag 1y ago
The majority of obese people want to be thin, but will die obese anyway. Just wanting something that requires a significant overhaul of how you do things, is not enough.
- paddleon 1y ago
  better analogy: the majority of fouix-gras birds would prefer not to be force-fed and caged. The people working in the bureaucracy do not have the authority to overhaul it.
  - parineum 1y ago
    The people working in the bureaucracy chose to be there. Bureaucracies self select for people that are okay with it. I'm sure there's a few who are there to change it from the inside but they are the exception. You're not going to find a lot of vegans working in a meat packing plant.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Some people prioritise pragmatism over ideological purity. (See https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-inside-a-slaughterhouse/ https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-insid... and parts of https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683.)
      - kashunstva 1y ago
        > But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Your first link is the first-person account of a vegan who went undercover to document the abject cruelty that exists in slaughterhouses. The pragmatism was in service of a mission to protect animals by disseminating information on such cruelty rather than the “I need a job.” type of pragmatism. There’s a moral distinction here.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        The first link's narrator blew the whistle to industry regulators on practices unethical by non-vegan standards, something that is only possible if you're on the ground. The second link quotes an interview: > Basically, I'm an animal lover. I don't take any pleasure in what we're doing, but if I can do it as quietly and professionally as possible, then I think we've achieved something. I was not at all referring to 'the "I need a job" type of pragmatism' (which would not be moral pragmatism for a vegan); rather, doing a job that involves killing animals in such a way that your presence reduces the marginal harm could be seen as defensible to a vegan.
egorfine 1y ago
> the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient and thus be fired?
- rkomorn 1y ago
  Or just actually deliver what people need faster and better?
  - egorfine 1y ago
    There are no incentives for that. Bureaucrat will get paid at the end of the month no matter what. But if said bureaucrat makes its own process more efficient, they might get fired because they are not needed anymore.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      Worse, their boss's (maybe not direct boss, but somewhere up there) prestige, power and career potential directly tracks headcount. So even if the DMV clerks want it to not suck, management want it to suck.
    - etiam 1y ago
      Most bureaucrats are also humans, and not solely or even mainly motivated for their every action by having it rewarded with maximum salary profit. Plenty of dysfunctional bureaucratic organizations have high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn due to the stress of repeatedly enforcing policies the employee knows full well are morally reprehensible. So in real psychology, I claim there's plenty of incentive, even for the majority of people in the organizations.
      - egorfine 1y ago
        > Most bureaucrats are also humans Not for long. > high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn See
scotty79 1y ago
> government budgets should increase monotonically It should and not even just linearily. If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets. Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on. Of course it should be funded with taxes not debt and that's where the worst part of government spending is. That it's done by indebting itself to billionaires and letting them suck more and more government money each year through debt servicing.
- roenxi 1y ago
  That seems like a difficult position to make coherent. The comment seems to start by arguing that government spending should increase as much as is reasonably possible because it draws resources away from billionaires. Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves. It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.
  - scotty79 1y ago
    > There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government. Unless it's borrowed directly from billionaires which is what got most governments in financial problems they are currently in. > The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not To asses that you only need to compare rate of growth of billionaires wealth to the rate of growth of the entire economy. Then you can see how much they suck out of non-billionaires.
callmeal 1y ago
>To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great) Um, $11,000,000,000 for ICE is not a cut. $850 Billion for the department of war (an increase of $25 billion over last year) is not a cut. But yes, CFPB's funding for 2025 which gets reduced from about $823 million to about $446 million is a cut. Which will be great for consumers because we can now start paying extra fees that will boost corporate profits.
- throw10920 1y ago
  When did I ever try to justify those budget increases or cuts? You need to improve your reading comprehension.
callmeal 1y ago
>government budgets should increase monotonically Well, they should track population growth. You cannot effectively serve a larger population with the same resources, otherwise we would continue to have two lane freeways everywhere.
- throw10920 1y ago
  Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly. The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.
  - callmeal 1y ago
    Improving technology has not increased housing stock or transportation options. Everyone still needs a place to stay and ways to get to/from work. Another issue is that using technology to reduce humans in the loop is what gets us "your call is important to us..." levels of customer support. If the number of people who need to apply for id/license/passports keeps increasing, then the number of people servicing those requests also needs to increase (or we need to stop complaining about the dmv). No amount of technology is going to replace that need.
    - throw10920 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
_heimdall 1y ago
The challenge for the second approach is that budgets are going to be spent once they have been allocated. If you improve efficiency and reduce costs that savings will just get spent somewhere else or on some new initiative. Government work and corporate work are very much the same in that way, budgets are use it or lose it and everyone will use it this year so their budget isn't reduces next year.
- the8472 1y ago
  Some companies manage to maintain war chests, others have some insane "we had EOY leftover budget so we spent it on another redesign" craziness going on. Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?
  - throw10920 1y ago
    > Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from? That specific one is an unfortunate side-effect of needing to allocate budgets in advance. Large organizations working with a lot of money need to statically schedule their budgets in advance - and because they don't have crystal balls, they can't actually know in advance how much they'll need, and have to make educated guesses. If a department didn't use all of its allocated budget last year, sure that's a very weak signal that it was given too large of a budget - but it is a signal, and there aren't very many other good ones.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      In my opinion this has always been a sign that an organization grew too large. Its the way of the world now to aim for growing into a huge org, hiring as much as you can on the way up. Once those in charge know little more about a part of their company than the budget surplus at the end of the fiscal year the model just doesn't make sense.
    - the8472 1y ago
      It's not a signal, no. If you're good at forecasting but don't have a crystal ball then you'll overestimate on some years and underestimates on others, averaging out. And the budget-burning shows that this encourages making over-estimates and then spending the excess to make the actual numbers match the prediction. It's no different than research based on falsified data at that point.
runako 1y ago
> To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable. The US federal government has taken a third route: increasing scale faster than resources. Before this administration, the # of federal employees sat roughly where it was in 1969 (there have been some fluctuations since then). In addition to the added tasks/departments/etc., there are 70% more Americans for which to administer government. Scope has gone up quite a bit faster than headcount. I haven't done the analysis, but would be curious to see how this compares to given companies over similar timelines.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

szundi 1y ago

[dead]

rowanG077 1y ago

Every individual can support efficiency and downsizing and yet it will not happen. With such an extremely large organization it's not enough people just want something. You need concrete drivers for change.

Propelloni 1y ago
Agreed, and to add: take a look at the incentive structures. Virtually everybody anywhere is acting rationally within the dominant incentive structure they are confronted with. I know this seems so abstract it sounds like a truism and not actionable. Considering that incentive structures come in many guises (laws, morals, money etc.) the first thing we need to figure out which incentive structure is dominant in a given situation. An employee of a bureaucracy, for example, might share the presented moral disapproval about inefficiency but is it the dominant incentive structure? Probably not. For example, DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, emphasising cost reduction vs. effectivity and privacy. People were (maybe are, nobody is reporting anything on this anymore) up in arms because they had to abandon incentive structures they knew to navigate. DOGE was a colossal failure because emphasising efficiency over effectivity is always like polishing a turd and many people said as much "back then" but look at the incentive structure of those who didn't and don't. Many of them have not prospered in the previous structures, so they support the new ones, even if they are insane to you and me. They act rationally.
- cindyllm 1y ago
  [dead]
- paddleon 1y ago
  > DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, yes > emphasising cost reduction no.
- Tangurena2 1y ago
  > DOGE toppled existing incentive structures DOGE attacked organizations investigating companies owned by Musk. Nothing else.

guappa 1y ago

The problem with random cuts is that the same people whose only skill is to play office politics are the only ones who will be left after.

ACCount37 1y ago
That wouldn't be a problem if the cuts were truly random. In practice, they aren't.
- mulmen 1y ago
  Well if our choice is a hypothetical fire all the political operators or fire randomly then random will leave more political operators.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    If only such a hypothetical could be implemented. I don't think it's easy to design a firing process that would outperform random chance there. In any non-random process, office politicians would always be first in line with an excuse for why they specifically should not be fired. No matter what the criteria for not getting fired are - they'll do their damn best to make sure they meet them.
    - mulmen 1y ago
      Agreed. But while I agree political operators corrupt all objective processes I refuse to conclude that we should cause random destruction instead.
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        Why not? It's unclear if a better option even exists. I do think there's a threshold of organizational dysfunction that justifies unleashing "random destruction" upon it. Or even "total destruction" - and building it all anew. Perhaps the tree of efficiency needs to be watered with the blood of career bureaucrats.

coldtea 1y ago

The public is totally right, those people would never support cuts and downsizing, unless it affects a rival department.

cavisne 1y ago
Right, just like how Bernie switched from targeting millionaires to billionaires once he became a billionaire himself.
- coldtea 1y ago
  You probably meant to write "millionaire himself", and I don't know if it's true, but yes, same principle
- gjm11 1y ago
  I don't know anything much about the history of Sanders's rhetoric specifically, but: Inflation and economic growth mean that "millionaire" very much doesn't mean what it used to N years ago, and more so the larger N is. (And Sanders has been around for a while, so N can be pretty big if you're comparing early-Sanders with late-Sanders.) If you believe something along the lines of "the richest 1% of society, the ones who have > 10x more wealth each than a typical upper-middle-class person, have too much money and too much power and we should change that" -- which I think is the kind of thing Sanders believes -- then talking about "millionaires" was a reasonable way to express that 50 years ago; these days what we need is a word whose meaning is more like "person with $20M or more"; give it another 50 years and "billionaires" might express roughly the same meaning that "millionaires" did in 1975. (Or, of course, there might be a huge economic crash, or a currency devaluation, or a technological singularity, or something.) So someone could switch from complaining about "millionaires" to complaining about "billionaires" just because the way the meanings of those words have shifted means that the best word for pointing at a particular social issue used to be "millionaires" and is now "billionaires". Because we really only have "millionaire" and "billionaire" and, more generally, numbers spaced by powers of 1000, the sets of people you can talk about pithily change over time. So, at the moment, you can talk about "millionaires" and be referencing something like the top 15% of US households (so if you're wanting to engage in some hostile rhetoric, pointing it at "millionaires" is probably broader than you want for several reasons); or you can talk about "billionaires" and be referencing something more like the top 0.0003% (so if you're wanting to raise money by redistribution, "billionaires" is probably much narrower than you want). I suspect there are a few good PhD theses to be written investigating questions like "do populist-leftist movements have more success in places/times where some handy term like 'millionaire' picks out roughly the top 0.3%-3% of the population than in places where there's no word that does that?". (Note: numbers above are in the right ballpark but I make no claim that careful calculation wouldn't change them somewhat.)