[papabrown]

Who is to blame?

Part of the original article is a lie (at least as how it pertains to the US). The social security system will eventually be unable to pay out at current rates. But notice how nobody worries about whether we'll still be able to spend 10x what everyone else spends on the military?

A lot of this is about how we plan on spending our money. The current argument is framed as "if we don't change anything, this might happen" but the change everyone focuses on is the change in how much money goes towards satisfying the retirement savings.

You notice nobody suggests buying less aircraft carriers or scaling back the military? Instead it's all about not reducing any other spending. Putting the spotlight on one particular form of spending and then declaring that if it can't pay for itself due to demographic changes, we should scare the shit out of everyone and privatize it and pour trillions of dollars into Wall Street.

[freeflight]

>Instead it's all about not reducing any other spending.

I'm even more amazed how many people think the welfare budget is supposed to stay fixed, not accounting for any growth in population at all, while military spending, going over budget, is considered the most normal thing in the world and leads to an increase in military budget.

[papabrown]

I've always considered myself a fiscal conservative. Not the "let's cut all welfare" type of fiscal conservative but the kind who says, "Ok, we just found out that the Pentagon can't account for billions of dollars worth of equipment. Let's figure this out and try to use taxpayer money as efficiently as possible."

I think if you cut all of the waste and abuse and held agencies to certain targets (i.e. 90% of taxpayer funds earmarked for education have to make it to the classroom level) you would free up enough money that you could actually create poverty programs that solved poverty. You could improve education without paying more for it. You could smooth out demographic shifts that challenge the social security system.

The government is a big money sucking machine. It's not that we aren't paying enough taxes, it's that they're being spent irresponsibly.

[freeflight]

>I think if you cut all of the waste and abuse and held agencies to certain targets (i.e. 90% of taxpayer funds earmarked for education have to make it to the classroom level) you would free up enough money that you could actually create poverty programs that solved poverty.

You might not realize it, but that view is very similar to planned economies by a central government, just like in the USSR.

If you assume government agencies are merely inefficient (sure they are, barely anything is perfect) and you start dictating efficiency targets, you gonna get pretty much the same result as the USSR got: Lot's of corruption for the sake of keeping appearances of high efficiency intact.

Imho the solution can't be mere better micromanagement, that would assume up till now people have just all been too incompetent, which is, of course, an appealing thought because it makes it easy to point fingers and makes the solution looks so simple (if the lazy people would stop being lazy then everything would be fine!), but it's also a pretty generalizing thought and as such I don't think it represents the issue in its completeness.

An argument could be made for "simplifying government". That's where something like a universal basic income, ideally linked to GDP, might actually be quite useful. If a UBI is in place, then there's no more need for additional welfare programs, as such it would allow for the removal of a massive bureaucratic overhead.