I think mostly in a budgetary sense: Corruption, tax evasion. You can't just have a flow of wealth into some bureaucracy that goes unchecked, because the power

I think mostly in a budgetary sense: Corruption, tax evasion. You can't just have a flow of wealth into some bureaucracy that goes unchecked, because the power the bureaucracy has to extract even more wealth increases over time. In the USA, the military industrial complex is the biggest example of this, the general self-licking ice cream cone. I don't think it depends on hole location or rate of flooding. If the rate is greater than zero, and if the second derivative is non-negative (i.e. it isn't self regulating, the rate of loss itself does not decrease over time like a self-healing wound) then eventually it will flood. If the second derivative is zero, and the hole is very small relative to the size of the ship, it will take a while. Our government is not well compartmentalized. The evolution of the US government has trended towards increasing federal over state power (for some good reasons). Maybe programs like social security are compartmentalized in the sense that if they collapse, they don't bring down other sectors of government.