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Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

Which parts of government spending do you consider 'waste', and what proportion of government spending do they add up to? If they are 'mountains' of waste they should be easy to identify, and if you have such a strongly held viewpoint on it, you should also have plenty of evidence.

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It's not as simple as saying a given program is a waste. The government procurement system is incredibly wasteful. Instead of actually going with the lowest bidder they intentionally order parts from lots of different Congressional districts. Otherwise funding won't get approved. A prime example of what happens when you can escape government procurement is SpaceX.

Beyond that there's huge obvious ones that come along all the time like the F22s we keep buying more of even though the military doesn't want them. This of course is a jobs program for engineers and a way to again funnel money into the districts which all these random parts are procured.

Please distinguish between federal-level procurement and state and local procurement.

"Instead of actually going with the lowest bidder .. " In many states, it's law that they must go with the lowest bidder. This often causes problems because that lowest bidder delivers shoddy work that leads to eventual cost overruns--going with the "best value" instead of "lowest price" would reward companies that could meet both cost AND quality expectations. It'd also more closely reflect private sector considerations if those laws were changed; a private company can spend more for higher quality and get the long-term benefit of that quality deliverable, and that's a trade-off and decision that's simply taken away from state/local procurement professionals.

State and local procurement tends to run pretty lean, and tends to be pretty accountable. All this stuff is public record, and local papers will often cull through that stuff looking for juicy nuggets. The relative rarity of public purchasing scandals, at least for state and local folks, tells you that they're probably doing a pretty good job (even with the goofy restrictions like "you must buy from the lowest bidder even if their work is shit").

You just stated that state and local government, by law, must go to the lowest bidder and that shoots them in the foot because there's cost over-runs, etc. That doesn't sound "pretty lean" or "accountable" to me.

Is it actually the law though, not just lazy officials? We had that problem in Estonia too, but some procurement officials have actually begun to write scoring systems for proposals and so being the lowest bidder is sometimes actually negatively scored.

I am actually most sympathetic to the idea that the military is the single really identifiable point where large-scale waste is identifiable. However, even that spending is dwarfed by health and welfare transfer payments, and procurement is a fraction of military spending. So... yeah, procurement is big and wasteful. But in 2013 (the last year that Wikipedia had) we've got around ~100B of procurement out of 610B of military spending and out of 3.45 trillion dollars of spending.

That's like 1 dollar out of 34, probably not all 100% wasted either.

I'm not going to argue that there's not a lot of wasteful government spending - transfer payments that don't need to happen, waste in healthcare, etc. I just don't see much of a path towards a really substantial change in tax rates that would emerge from 'cutting waste'. Tackling transfer payments IMO is a much bigger deal, but this is also likely unfixable for political reasons (essentially the middle class have to be bribed to support anti-poverty programs by including them in the transfer payment merry-go-round).

Military spending serves two purposes. The first is as a jobs program for the poor and nominally educated. The second is a sieve through which we pour ginormous sums of money in the hopes of creating technological breakthroughs such as computers, solar panels, nuclear power, etc. None of which would've come to market nearly as quickly, if at all, without seemingly insurmountable government waste. The United States wouldn't even have been conquered by Europeans without massive government waste shipping some people across the Atlantic.

It's important to keep these ideas in mind when we talk about government waste.

Also, military spending of WWII got us out of the depression. We haven't really stopped and no one really knows what would happen to our economy if we did.

I would like to see some of that diverted into more important things like health care. Of course the whole prison concept is very, very expensive. We house more prisoners (total, not per capita) than any other country in the world. How much does that cost us in money and liberty?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...

Our military spending isn't as high as some would like you to think. They always show that stat that says we spend more than the top X other countries in the world combined. That's certainly a damning statistic. But if you look at our military spending as a percentage of GDP we're not even in the top 10. And it's important to note when comparing our spending to other first world countries, other countries get their defense spending subsidized by being our ally. They can spend less because we have their backs. If they had to proportionally provide for their own defenses, we'd look even more reasonable. Believe me, I think we could cut a LOT of military spending, it's just not as crazy out of whack as popular rhetoric would have you believe.

Easy to identify but widespread and hard to cure - one example is the practice of "needing" to exhaust this year's budget for fear of a reduction next year. In business you'd be rewarded for saving money. In government you replace an office full of Dell PCs that are less than a year old. This sort of inertia touches nearly every part of gov.

Wait, in business? In many places I've been the budget runs on "use it or lose it" in the private sector as well.

You're only getting a cost savings medal if it's substantial and doesn't affect your own department.

Yes, the idea that business is any better at not wasting money is a fallacy, particularly large, cash-cow businesses.

But your point is right. The incentives for budgeting, at least at the government institution I worked for years ago is if you don't use it, you lose it, so it leads to completely using the budget every year regardless of if it is actually needed or not.

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