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Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised at all that people would hold such contradictory views, simultaneously demanding tax cuts and service improvements, but it is surprising that someone could utter them in the same breath and keep a straight face.

Maybe it's just a lack of self awareness?

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Or is it knowledge that most of the cost are going to growing administrative costs and bureaucracies and not to actually provide the services they are their ostensibly to provide. It reminded me of when my home towns school district had budget cuts no one in the administrative side was let go but a dozen or so teachers where laid off. services are cut but administive side stay the same or grow.

I don't think people really understand where the money is going. I just looked at the numbers in the article, and I'm shocked that the upkeep of a little stretch of road in front of your house costs almost a thousand dollars a year. We just get used to that stuff being around and forget it costs money.

People think that way about all infrastructure, actually. "They want to raise water rates? What for?! We already pay $36/month!" Nobody thinks about the cost of digging up streets, replacing worn pipes, upgrading treatment plants, etc.

For some I'm sure it is, but I believe there's another facet to it: waste. A lot of tax revenue is totally wasted, and while some is almost certainly inevitable in an organization as large as the government, I strongly feel that no taxes should be raised or imposed until all reasonable avenues of reducing that have been pursued. For example, this should not be a thing: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08333.pdf

By setting up conditions that will never be met, you're insisting that taxes never be raised. Which is fine, but just honestly advocate for that. Also, that pdf is singularly stupid. Look at the first page: they found waste of $77k in the DoD! In a budget approaching one TRILLION dollars. There's always going to be a couple percent of waste; that's life in any big organization, public or private. Even if their 50% waste is accurate -- hell, even if it's 100% waste -- they're discussing $15B in a $3T federal budget -- half a percent.

any government budget is just too big to get any feeling for this imho. And you can either always argue that its just spend on the wrong things, like military, espionage, social security or that others are not paying enough, like Apple only paying very little taxes because they hoard their money abroad.

Yep, budget mismanagement and being underfunded are completely separate things. It's entirely possible that the "moron" woman interviewed believed that the budget was plenty, but being negligently mis-spent.

Most of them want nothing to do with actually understanding how their government works or how their money is spent, because they've been conditioned from a young age to believe that the government can't do anything right and anyone who works or receives benefits from the government is lazy and entitled. Some will even do the song and dance of telling everyone who will listen how private industry could do so much better, even though the average business in this country ends up being insolvent within a few years of beginning.

Their taxes will never be low enough because the service they receive will never meet their completely unrealistic standards.

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