[gjsman-1000]

I'm not disputing it; but the downvoters missed my point.

My point is that voters know that if a mere coffee mug costs that much, who knows what else stupid is going on. It's a smoke signal saying there's waste of unprecedented amounts everywhere.

[bdamm]

It is even deeper than that. The problem is that voters do not have faith in the organizations created to oversee and regulate government waste. Perhaps there isn't enough visibility. Or maybe the typical shenanigans that commenters love to harp on hides the actual good work that public servants sometimes do in managing the public purse.

So as with most political challenges, it all comes down to trust, and a failure to garner it.

The lack of trust then creates the vaccuum into which silly notions of thinking a coffee cup is worth a grand, or an ashtray is tens of thousands of dollars, or the magic hammer that is the same as a normal hammer but costs 100x, or whatever.

[potato3732842]

Of they just don't fundamentally trust the institutions.

I bet there isn't a single person in this country that can't pick a subject they care a lot about on which the government actively gaslit them in the last ~5yr.

That kind of tarnishes what the .gov has to say on every other subject.

[bdamm]

I'm not saying people should implicitly trust the government.

I'm saying that lack of trust, and lack of the ability of people and government to meet in a way that develops trust, is the issue that underlies people holding up a "$1280 coffee mug" as an example of government waste.

The ideal is that representatives you do trust would be evaluating the government for you, and so you would be building trust by experiencing trust with one or more of your representatives. But the scale of the federal government has resulted in few people actually trusting their representatives, and the experience of having a trust test with a representative doesn't scale. This is the fundamental issue.

To be totally clear, I am implying that a change to the system needs to proceed towards improvements in accountability and visibility, so that people can experience more legitimate trust in their government.

[potato3732842]

People shouldn't need to trust. If you architect the system around it then it will attract people who want to abuse that trust. The system needs to be designed so that no trust is needed, the "correct" thing to do for any given cog in it is also the "correct" thing overall.