[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.