> I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country.
The word "unaccountable" gets thrown around a lot in these discussions. The leaders of these bureaucracies are ultimately appointed by and accountable to the President, who is in turn elected by and accountable to the public. In what sense are they unaccountable?
> Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary.
I'm talking about both Social Security (21%) and Medicare (15%). Historically, families were much bigger; you'd have many children who could all pitch in to help take care of their parents. Historically, people also didn't get treated for cancer, heart disease, etc.
Families, churches, and charities still exist, and still can help in this capacity. As a person with gradually aging parents, I fully intend to help my parents however possible, but I'm also glad that society (well, for them, Canadian society) sees fit to provide them some support too. And as a Christian, I'm both happy when I see churches serving the poor and elderly, and happy when I see society agreeing with these Christian values and also collectively striving to serve the poor and elderly.
> Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote.
If you're talking about welfare traps where government benefits disappear when your income increases over a (fairly low) threshold, disincentivizing extra work or raises, I fully agree that there are changes to be made.
On the other hand, if you think people don't work because they think they can live off government handouts, I'm curious if you've ever tried that, or put yourself in the shoes of someone who has.
> If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day.
Fully agree on Medicare negotiation. I've seen my fair share of hospital bills, and believe me, I wasn't laughing...
> The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie.
Only if you pretend that FDR, LBJ, etc. are not "American" (or perhaps, as American as apple pie - but maybe pumpkin?). Yes, there's always been a strain of rugged individualism in American political thought. We'll see where it leads, I guess.
> They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network... Is that so hard to understand?
What's hard to understand is how this (IMO) distorted view of the government has taken hold. The government may be slow at times, may be wasteful at times, but, til now, it's worked. Old people get health care. Social Security checks get cashed. National parks stay open. Science gets funded. Planes stay in the air. The US university system is the envy of the world. And so on.
What hasn't worked is that people's lives haven't really improved that much. Jobs have gotten worse - more part time, more "gig economy". Housing prices have shot up. Health care costs are out of control. Etc. But please, help me draw the line between excess government spending and all of these problems, because I can't seem to see the connection.
People voted for change, and now they're going to get it I guess. Let's see if it's the kind of change they wanted.
It only will make sense when you reintroduce the idea of "the political" into your framework. Without that, a government is simply a territorial administrative apparatus or provincial satrapy. If your parents are Canadian, perhaps you are as well (or at least very familiar with Canada), and can relate to a government seeing its population as simply interchangeable units of administrative responsibility managed by a hedonic rationalism. I think Canada is a great example of what US voters in the last election don't want to be. It's kind of a nice, albeit cold, place but very authoritarian and prone to treating its identity as something of little value and an embarrassment, except contra the big bad United States next door. Canadians look at our health care system and school shootings and suppose their system is obviously better, but Canada comes across as very naive and ungrateful for the benefits it receives as our northern neighbor. I suspect there are many Canadians who also don't like their government's policies but are at a loss on how to effect change because their government is less susceptible to populist political waves than the US.
The government works in some areas and not in others. Our once envied university system has become a human gristmill cartel, indenturing a generation of our youth under debts they will never dig out of because of perverse incentives engineered via vast federal spending programs. Foreign students may still come for the prestige but many diplomas are effectively worthless and many schools properly should be mothballed. In any case, measuring a government's worth by how many people receive benefits is a pretty pathetic standard. It's beneath human dignity to have such meager aspirations for a country.
Unaccountable civil services aren't hard to understand in history. Like a military that is ostensibly under the control of the king or president but not really, so have civil services sometimes constituted as separate government that can just ignore the commands of elected representatives of a people. Laws can and are passed to entrench the civil service even deeper, making it hard to fire any but the top-level appointees. These can try to get the institution to do something differently but if the institution is unresponsive they can rant and rave all day, the careerists can just wait them out. It's not hard to understand if you study incentives. They are deeply misaligned and it is only because the administration learned some of these lessons the first time around that they came in with a much more effective game plan this time. You can see how dramatic actions are required to overcome the institutional resistance. I'm sorry that good people have/will lose jobs, but government should not be a tenured jobs program. The taxpayer doesn't have that luxury, why should this subgroup? Why should we all engage in a fantasy that federal employees aren't people who, sometimes despite the best of intentions, are going to pursue their group interests even at the expense of other groups? Huge pots of money are going to attract huge pressures from outsiders trying to access funding. Many of the high profile grants to ridiculous projects are not surprising when you see these institutions as participants in political patronage networks. There has to be some way to officially distribute the money. Have them dig and fill holes or put on puppet theater for the blind. It doesn't really matter.
Keep in mind there is no ultimate fix for this. All institutions decay and need to be replaced from time to time. Getting upset about this particular patronage network being disrupted is the wrong worry unless you were a particular recipient of its largesse. If not, then you might come out better off at the end of the day.
It sounds like you have a fair bit of pride in the US, and a fair number of grievances as well. Goodness knows there's plenty of grievances to go around, and I can hardly fault you for having pride in your country and desiring to see better days for it.
So, I suppose I'll just hope (against hope) that you're right in your optimism about these changes.
I'm a Canadian expat who's lived in the US for many years, partly for work and partly because of the relationships built up over these years. I can only laugh a little and shake my head at your notion that Canada is authoritarian. I suppose it all depends on how you define freedom, and whose freedom ultimately matters.
You posed the original comment in one frame (costs). I responded with a different frame (politics). If I have a hope from interacting with you and others about our political moment (or history in general) on HN it is simply that you may broaden your horizons on the role and function of government to be more than as a sort of beekeeper of the hive. I have personally done very well materially under late stage global liberalism and have nothing to be resentful about. But even so I find the its ideology inhumane and offensive in the nose.
The word "unaccountable" gets thrown around a lot in these discussions. The leaders of these bureaucracies are ultimately appointed by and accountable to the President, who is in turn elected by and accountable to the public. In what sense are they unaccountable?
> Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary.
I'm talking about both Social Security (21%) and Medicare (15%). Historically, families were much bigger; you'd have many children who could all pitch in to help take care of their parents. Historically, people also didn't get treated for cancer, heart disease, etc.
Families, churches, and charities still exist, and still can help in this capacity. As a person with gradually aging parents, I fully intend to help my parents however possible, but I'm also glad that society (well, for them, Canadian society) sees fit to provide them some support too. And as a Christian, I'm both happy when I see churches serving the poor and elderly, and happy when I see society agreeing with these Christian values and also collectively striving to serve the poor and elderly.
> Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote.
If you're talking about welfare traps where government benefits disappear when your income increases over a (fairly low) threshold, disincentivizing extra work or raises, I fully agree that there are changes to be made.
On the other hand, if you think people don't work because they think they can live off government handouts, I'm curious if you've ever tried that, or put yourself in the shoes of someone who has.
> If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day.
Fully agree on Medicare negotiation. I've seen my fair share of hospital bills, and believe me, I wasn't laughing...
> The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie.
Only if you pretend that FDR, LBJ, etc. are not "American" (or perhaps, as American as apple pie - but maybe pumpkin?). Yes, there's always been a strain of rugged individualism in American political thought. We'll see where it leads, I guess.
> They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network... Is that so hard to understand?
What's hard to understand is how this (IMO) distorted view of the government has taken hold. The government may be slow at times, may be wasteful at times, but, til now, it's worked. Old people get health care. Social Security checks get cashed. National parks stay open. Science gets funded. Planes stay in the air. The US university system is the envy of the world. And so on.
What hasn't worked is that people's lives haven't really improved that much. Jobs have gotten worse - more part time, more "gig economy". Housing prices have shot up. Health care costs are out of control. Etc. But please, help me draw the line between excess government spending and all of these problems, because I can't seem to see the connection.
People voted for change, and now they're going to get it I guess. Let's see if it's the kind of change they wanted.