[shimman]

No, this is the core of a particular brand of politics: neoliberal politics. Where the financialization of everything is what's most important. There was a time, still in lived memory, where the US government was able to complete many types of projects and it also coincided with the period of lowest economic inequality (the great compression), the expansion of civil rights, and had the highest taxes against the elites this country has ever seen.

Obviously if you hate democracy you'll want to destroy this system, which is what they've been working at for the last 50ish years.

[s1artibartfast]

Tax rates are not the same as effective taxes paid, and US taxes as a percent of GDP are at an all time high. This is besides the fact that gdp is many times higher, growing geometrically.

It is an interesting question of what changed in terms of ability to execute, but lack of funding isn't the answer. I suspect it is a combination of scope creep, application to intractable problems, and baumols cost disease at work.

[miki123211]

Don't forget vetocracy.

Every regulation, whether it's environmental, DEIA or anti-fraud, adds a few steps to each project. With enough regulations and enough steps, things just slow down to a crawl.

As governments and legal systems get older, they get into more and more situations where a bad thing happens, and the politicians must show that they've done something to stop a similar thing from happening again. Nobody can publicly admit that it's fine to letting a 5-year-old kid die once in a while, even if that would be the right call. This results in more and more layers of regulation being added, which nobody has an incentive to remove.

[myrmidon]

> Nobody can publicly admit that it's fine to letting a 5-year-old kid die once in a while, even if that would be the right call.

Sure, there are such cases, but a lot of regulation was written in blood, and the price that affected individuals or even our whole species paid was often monumental:

Having cancer literally eat the workers faces is not acceptable (=> radium girls), nor are mistakes like leaded gas or CFCs.

Everytime people advocate for big immediate gains from abolishing regulations, you can be almost certain that they are selling toxic snake oil.

Current US admin seems no exception, especially when comparing related promises with actual results (e.g. Doge).

edit: I'm not saying that pruning back regulations is bad, but it needs to be a careful, deliberate effort and big immediate payoffs are often unrealistic.

[solatic]

> Tax rates are not the same as effective taxes paid

Correct, but the tax system is nonetheless quite effective at setting behavioral incentives and disincentives. Higher income and estate tax rates incentivize capital being locked up in investments instead (for lower capital gains taxes); those investments put people to work and are subject to Labor negotiating higher compensation. Allowing donations to non-profits to deduct from other taxes allows private individuals (compared to a government bureaucracy) to more efficiently fund social welfare programs, which incidentally, also put people to work in the administration of such programs.

Funding government is not the sole goal of higher taxation rates, but rather, also how incentives in society are shaped.

[throwaway2037]

    > US taxes as a percent of GDP are at an all time high

I found this from the Federal Reserve: "Federal Receipts as Percent of Gross Domestic Product"

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

It looks pretty steady around 17%. It was as high as 20% in the late 1990s. However, this does not include state and local taxes. I could not find a source for it. What is your source of information?

[s1artibartfast]

I was thinking something along the lines of this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ

However, my main point was to refute the idea of some mythical past where the government was massively more funded, and therefore more competent and capable.

This also ignores the effect of the growing pie over time, but that is somewhat a tangent.

If someone is referencing back to the 1930s tax rates, those total receipts were closer to 10% of GDP when things like the Hoover Dam and Interstate System were being built.

Today, the rates are closer to 30% and the GDP being taxed is 25-30 times larger, controlling for inflation.

To me, this suggests that the reason we can't perform infrastructure projects is not lack of funding

[s1artibartfast]

By way of analogy, imagine someone making a $20k salary that can do big things while spending 10% of their salary projects. However, someone making $600k, spending 30% of that on projects can't get get meaningful work done.

These are the proportions we are talking about. It begs a lot of questions.

Are the projects really comparable? Did competence change? Did the working environment?