[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.