Yeah - the answer is that the cost to deliver a service from my local government is a lot cheaper than it is when it's coming from the private sector.
People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.
In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.
So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.
That is where the income is coming from, of course. That is also exactly what I'm saying. The tax cost of paying for a public service tends to be, nearly universally, less than the cost of paying for the same service in the private sector.
While there are some pretty easy examples here, the easiest one is probably health care: The country that pays the most - by far - for 'average-ish' health care is the one where the system is privatized.
Except that public and Co-Op utilities are also noticeably cheaper to operate than private sector utilities. And also, public roads are basically universally cheaper than private roads (as rare as they are).
And public schools. And public communication infra. The list just goes on and on. It's not 'just healthcare' and the amount of data on this is so staggering that to suggest that the private sector running things somehow results in an efficiency gain of some kind is borderline brainwashed rhetoric from Fox News more than it is any kind of defensible position.
> public roads are basically universally cheaper than private roads (as rare as they are).
Do you have any numbers to support this? Governments spending stupidly higher than private sector for this, I know this as a matter of fact.
Same for the other claims about "public schools. And public communication infra." Per unit of service provided, governments spend upwards of 2 to 5x in major western countries.
Reasonably efficient. Local schools are good, local roads are good, job market is solid, housing is being built and the urban planning is better than most areas. Taxes are high, but not NJ/NYC high.
People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.
In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.
So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.