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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

> The government has zero ability to control its expenditure, because the electorate vote themselves benefits.

Could you give me some examples of this? Living in a nation with universal healthcare, I've never seen this.

What else would you call students voting for loan forgiveness? Point blank the candidate is effectively saying, "we will give you $xx,xxx" in the form of loan forgiveness. It is the same for healthcare. This is a literal voting for benefits; and, this creates perverse incentives for the electorate to vote for whomever will "pay them" the most for their vote. Candidates are simply buying votes by offering free stuff with taxpayer monies. It is completely broken at this point with one candidate trying to out-give the next.

So let's say that the roads in my town are broken. No one can drive on them because they're filled with potholes.

One candidate says that they're going to reorganize the local government so that our roads will be fixed. With your argument, that candidate is trying to bribe voters in order to get into office and the voters are simply voting for benefits.

Except that here in Europe (Germany and Austria) in each election, saving money on social programs by cutting cost overhead as well as services is a big topic and parties arguing for those cuts regularly get around half of the votes.

The one candidate tries to buy votes by offering free stuff pairs by taxpayer money, the other one tries to buy votes by promising to stop giving out free and lowering taxes.

Prop 13 is a great example in California.

Vote to freeze my property taxes? Yes!

Vote to increase spending? Yes!

see pensions for municipal/state employees in the US.

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