[throw10920]

Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient.

To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.

Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.

[bratbag]

The majority of obese people want to be thin, but will die obese anyway.

Just wanting something that requires a significant overhaul of how you do things, is not enough.

[paddleon]

better analogy: the majority of fouix-gras birds would prefer not to be force-fed and caged.

The people working in the bureaucracy do not have the authority to overhaul it.

[parineum]

The people working in the bureaucracy chose to be there. Bureaucracies self select for people that are okay with it. I'm sure there's a few who are there to change it from the inside but they are the exception.

You're not going to find a lot of vegans working in a meat packing plant.

[wizzwizz4]

But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse. Some people prioritise pragmatism over ideological purity. (See https://our-compass.org/2020/06/15/i-worked-undercover-insid... and parts of https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50986683.)

[kashunstva]

> But you are going to find vegans working in a slaughterhouse.

Your first link is the first-person account of a vegan who went undercover to document the abject cruelty that exists in slaughterhouses. The pragmatism was in service of a mission to protect animals by disseminating information on such cruelty rather than the “I need a job.” type of pragmatism. There’s a moral distinction here.

[wizzwizz4]

The first link's narrator blew the whistle to industry regulators on practices unethical by non-vegan standards, something that is only possible if you're on the ground. The second link quotes an interview:

> Basically, I'm an animal lover. I don't take any pleasure in what we're doing, but if I can do it as quietly and professionally as possible, then I think we've achieved something.

I was not at all referring to 'the "I need a job" type of pragmatism' (which would not be moral pragmatism for a vegan); rather, doing a job that involves killing animals in such a way that your presence reduces the marginal harm could be seen as defensible to a vegan.

[runako]

> To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.

The US federal government has taken a third route: increasing scale faster than resources. Before this administration, the # of federal employees sat roughly where it was in 1969 (there have been some fluctuations since then). In addition to the added tasks/departments/etc., there are 70% more Americans for which to administer government.

Scope has gone up quite a bit faster than headcount. I haven't done the analysis, but would be curious to see how this compares to given companies over similar timelines.

[callmeal]

>government budgets should increase monotonically

Well, they should track population growth. You cannot effectively serve a larger population with the same resources, otherwise we would continue to have two lane freeways everywhere.

[throw10920]

Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly.

The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.

[callmeal]

Improving technology has not increased housing stock or transportation options. Everyone still needs a place to stay and ways to get to/from work. Another issue is that using technology to reduce humans in the loop is what gets us "your call is important to us..." levels of customer support.

If the number of people who need to apply for id/license/passports keeps increasing, then the number of people servicing those requests also needs to increase (or we need to stop complaining about the dmv). No amount of technology is going to replace that need.

[throw10920]

[flagged]

[mulmen]

> The customer service experience that I get from Google is orders of magnitude better than anything that I've gotten from a staffed government agency.

Really? That’s the exact opposite of my experience. How do you even contact Google?

I have had consistently great experiences with government agencies from my local utility to the IRS. With a government agency I call the clearly posted phone number and immediately get an actual person who solves the problem. With private companies I have to navigate byzantine phone trees or fight with brain dead chat bots.

[_heimdall]

The challenge for the second approach is that budgets are going to be spent once they have been allocated. If you improve efficiency and reduce costs that savings will just get spent somewhere else or on some new initiative.

Government work and corporate work are very much the same in that way, budgets are use it or lose it and everyone will use it this year so their budget isn't reduces next year.

[the8472]

Some companies manage to maintain war chests, others have some insane "we had EOY leftover budget so we spent it on another redesign" craziness going on. Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?

[throw10920]

> Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?

That specific one is an unfortunate side-effect of needing to allocate budgets in advance. Large organizations working with a lot of money need to statically schedule their budgets in advance - and because they don't have crystal balls, they can't actually know in advance how much they'll need, and have to make educated guesses. If a department didn't use all of its allocated budget last year, sure that's a very weak signal that it was given too large of a budget - but it is a signal, and there aren't very many other good ones.

[_heimdall]

In my opinion this has always been a sign that an organization grew too large.

Its the way of the world now to aim for growing into a huge org, hiring as much as you can on the way up. Once those in charge know little more about a part of their company than the budget surplus at the end of the fiscal year the model just doesn't make sense.

[the8472]

It's not a signal, no. If you're good at forecasting but don't have a crystal ball then you'll overestimate on some years and underestimates on others, averaging out.

And the budget-burning shows that this encourages making over-estimates and then spending the excess to make the actual numbers match the prediction. It's no different than research based on falsified data at that point.

[scotty79]

> government budgets should increase monotonically

It should and not even just linearily. If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets. Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on. Of course it should be funded with taxes not debt and that's where the worst part of government spending is. That it's done by indebting itself to billionaires and letting them suck more and more government money each year through debt servicing.

[roenxi]

That seems like a difficult position to make coherent. The comment seems to start by arguing that government spending should increase as much as is reasonably possible because it draws resources away from billionaires.

Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves.

It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.

[scotty79]

> There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government.

I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government. Unless it's borrowed directly from billionaires which is what got most governments in financial problems they are currently in.

> The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not

To asses that you only need to compare rate of growth of billionaires wealth to the rate of growth of the entire economy. Then you can see how much they suck out of non-billionaires.

[roenxi]

> I don't think that's the contract. Government must be funded by citizens which all are consumers. What billionaires extract from consumers can't go towards funding the government.

I don't think you're articulating your point clearly here - what billionaires extract from consumers has to go towards funding the government in part, that is what they use to pay their taxes. Otherwise where does the wealth used to pay the taxes come from? Capital only generates a return in a context where there is someone to consume what it produces.

Just to put my view - I'm with you 100% that billionaires are sucking money out of the government. Look at any billionaire and a good chunk of their wealth seems to come from some combination of regulatory capture and government contracts. I'm just not seeing how you square that with "and therefore the government should grow at the same rate of the economy". It seems like a counter-intuitive position to take if you've identified that billionaire wealth is a key justification and the billionaires are very good at extracting money from the government. It seems likely to me that billionaire wealth would scale with the size of government.

The wealth of government is ultimately funded by the middle class. There aren't enough billionaires to carry the load. Eg, Elon Musk's net worth is estimated at $500 billion which isn't enough to cover 1 year of spending of the US military, for example. So he taps out after 1 year and then someone has to find funding for the 2nd year somewhere else. And you'd consume a few more billionaires (none of whom have Musk-level wealth) to cover the parts of the US government that aren't war-related. It wouldn't last long if billionaires have to fund it.

[scotty79]

> Otherwise where does the wealth used to pay the taxes come from?

Consumers.

> Capital only generates a return in a context where there is someone to consume what it produces.

Exactly. If you don't tax the return sufficiently it amplifies the capital (lands in th pockets of billionaires in other words).

> It seems like a counter-intuitive position to take if you've identified that billionaire wealth is a key justification and the billionaires are very good at extracting money from the government. It seems likely to me that billionaire wealth would scale with the size of government.

What billionaires extract from the government in terms of subsidies and such is nothing compared to what they get as a result of tax cuts and being undertaxed in general.

Basically we should tax billionaires more. Government getting richer because of that is just a side effect.

Government growing with the size of the economy is not a goal. It's a gauge showing us that billionaires are adequately taxed.

I'm using term "billionaires" loosely. 10 hecto-millionaires are fine too as a replacement for one billionaire.

Again the goal is not to fund the government. It's to remove power from unelected oligarchs.

[parineum]

Increase in GDP is created by inflation and increases in productivity.

Government budgets should increase with inflation but there is zero reason for them to partake in the increase in productivity. Increases in productivity should, generally, also be applicable to government programs and, as such, they should get relatively cheaper over time, not more expensive.

If we want to _add_ programs, government budgets should increase in kind but the efficiency of government should rise over time as the things required to run government become cheaper. This rarely happens though because government programs don't have the same incentives that lead to increases in efficiency.

It's funny you're so against billionaires scooping up that money but want the government to scoop it up instead. Government is just big business with guns.

[scotty79]

> It's funny you're so against billionaires scooping up that money but want the government to scoop it up instead.

The reason is that government is ruled democratically which makes it less likely to successfully execute terrible decisions persistently. There's also some influence of the public on those decisions. In case of billionaires there's nothing to stop them to pursue idiotic, societally and economically harmful goals on a whim. There's also difference of transparency and availability of warning signs. Not to mention that I can change which government rules me by boarding a plane but Zuckerberg is influencing my life in every place on Earth.

Leaving the money with the populace is not an option. Citizens are weak, money will get scooped. The question is by whom. I'll pick democratic government over billionaires every day of the week.

[throw10920]

And here we have a double demonstration of both stupid and malicious.

> If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets

Stupid. For the purposes of this discussion, the government exists to provide services. The cost of those services, in general, decreases with economic productivity.

> Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on.

Both stupid and malicious. Mind-bogglingly stupid, because that profit isn't just captured by the wealthy, but by all economic classes. Malicious, because you'd rather sabotage the economy than let some people take excess profits based on their wealth alone.

[scotty79]

Government doesn't provide services. Government owns the land and the population simply by the fact of having army that can exert control. It provides monetary system you measure worth of everything in. You provide the service of producing economic value.

You can't with straight face claim that profit is not captured by billionaires but by everybody if economy grows 3% but billionaires wealth doubles in the same period. They not only capture the entire new profit of economy growth but also extract wealth from all other parties including government.

[throw10920]

> Government doesn't provide services.

Yet again, factually incorrect. The government provides many services - social security, food stamps, military protection, utilities, research funding, pharmaceutical oversight, and many, many, many other things. You're just wrong.

> You provide the service of producing economic value.

Also wrong. That is not a "service" provided to the government - it's just something that people do, and they have the right to keep those rewards.

> You can't with straight face claim that profit is not captured by billionaires but by everybody if economy grows 3% but billionaires wealth doubles in the same period

Those things are unrelated.

Yet again - a mixture between stupidity and malice, driven by base greed, envy, and resentment of what others have that you don't.

[scotty79]

> Yet again, factually incorrect. The government provides many services - social security, food stamps, military protection, utilities, research funding, pharmaceutical oversight, and many, many, many other things. You're just wrong.

Sorry for using a short-hand. Government doesn't provide services for your benefit. The only goal of providing those benefits is to best enable you to produce economic value that government and the rich can capture.

> That is not a "service" provided to the government - it's just something that people do, and they have the right to keep those rewards.

The only right of the physical world is might.

Why do you think anyone just lets people do what people "just" do? They let people do it because powerful benefit.

It's the same reasoning why a warlord lets peasants grow crops and raise animals and chases away neighboring warlord. Because then there's something he can take for himself. Political systems change but the basic mechanic never did. Democracy and capitalism are just a way better tool for exploitation than feudalism could ever be. Efficient. Stable. Didn't you ever notice that with development of new, more enlightened systems of power tax burden doesn't shrink but grows instead?

> Those things are unrelated.

We have one monetary system. It's all related.

> Yet again - a mixture between stupidity and malice, driven by base greed, envy, and resentment of what others have that you don't.

I have plenty, way more than I ever deserved. I'm at risk of being directly negatively financially affected by policies I advocate for. Drop the armchair moral psychoanalysis because you miss every time, on all counts.

[throw10920]

> The only right of the physical world is might.

Ok, you're just evil. No need to justify anything to an evil person.

[callmeal]

>To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great)

Um, $11,000,000,000 for ICE is not a cut. $850 Billion for the department of war (an increase of $25 billion over last year) is not a cut.

But yes, CFPB's funding for 2025 which gets reduced from about $823 million to about $446 million is a cut. Which will be great for consumers because we can now start paying extra fees that will boost corporate profits.

[throw10920]

When did I ever try to justify those budget increases or cuts? You need to improve your reading comprehension.

[egorfine]

> the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient

and thus be fired?

[rkomorn]

Or just actually deliver what people need faster and better?

[egorfine]

There are no incentives for that. Bureaucrat will get paid at the end of the month no matter what.

But if said bureaucrat makes its own process more efficient, they might get fired because they are not needed anymore.

[etiam]

Most bureaucrats are also humans, and not solely or even mainly motivated for their every action by having it rewarded with maximum salary profit.

Plenty of dysfunctional bureaucratic organizations have high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn due to the stress of repeatedly enforcing policies the employee knows full well are morally reprehensible.

So in real psychology, I claim there's plenty of incentive, even for the majority of people in the organizations.

[egorfine]

> Most bureaucrats are also humans

Not for long.

> high rates of occupational burnout and high employee churn

See

[potato3732842]

Worse, their boss's (maybe not direct boss, but somewhere up there) prestige, power and career potential directly tracks headcount.

So even if the DMV clerks want it to not suck, management want it to suck.