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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I might be projecting; but there is probably a fair amount of overlap between people who are in favour of enacting good emergency preparedness are the same sort of people who like balanced budgets (whether by raising revenue or decreasing costs). Those sort of people seem to struggle in US politics and the electorate doesn't seem to prioritise that sort of thinking.

It isn't surprising that the government would be caught flat-footed by anything that wasn't needing a regular response. Long-term thinkers only get voted in by accident; the public prefers charisma.

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>the electorate doesn't seem to prioritise that sort of thinking.

>the public prefers charisma.

Democracy is not really tuned to long term thinking. It's tuned to "the next election cycle", and in places like California elections are happening all the time.

I think Democracy in the USA would have a better shot if it weren't for the two-party system.

Which is pretty much an emergent property of the first-past-the-post voting system.

I disagree. A multi-party system exacerbates the problem I'm talking about (lack of long term thinking). If we get government that swings back and forth between multiple parties with vastly different visions for the country every cycle, that seems much worse than swings between two parties that are fairly aligned at their cores.

Coalition governments are often very stable across many election cycles. There’s rarely one single party entirely in charge.

Just trying to understand: does your comment assume full power swinging between many parties? What about distributed power proportional to party representation?

So I think the US is missing two important things:

1. Preferential voting rather than first-passed-the-post, which is an idiotic system designed the maintain the status quo; and

2. Mandatory voting. The level of voter suppression in the US is simply staggering.

But having a multi-party system doesn't really solve anywhere near as much as you might think. Other countries have this. Israel being one. And there you have single issue and single interest parties who hold a disproportionate sway because they only care about one thing.

In Australia at times we've had a small party (2-5 sEnators out of 76) who hold the balance of power and whatever pet issues they have have to be addressed, which is fine if you agree with them but not so fine if you don't. In times passed this has included the Australian Democrats (whose bargain with the Howard Government to pass GST also led to the downfall of the party in big part) and the Greens. But it could just as easily have been One Nation, a dog-whistle anti-immigration, pro-White party that looks like a real "pioneer" in the Trump era.

Does mandatory voting make things better? My unresearched fear would be that the people who don't bother to vote without mandatory voting are even less informed than the low-informed masses that do vote. If that line of thinking is correct, then it implies that mandatory voting would swamp the polls with masses of people who would be the most easily swayed by political advertising

Mandatory voting fosters a culture where being an informed citizen is part of one's civic duty, but ballot spoiling should absolutely be built into the system. If you force people to shoot up, you need to give people the ability to voice that they don't like any of the options presented, or that they just don't have an opinion.

Mandatory voting is necessary in the US because of the amount of voter suppression. It should be hard to stop someone from voting.

Are voters in California suppressed?

I think the US also needs mandatory military service for all citizens.

I think you're projecting, this was cut in the name of balancing the budget by decreasing costs (albeit to help meet a massive budget deficit) if you read the article.

I'm working off the rumors [0] that California has a massive long term problem which is generally being ignored by successive governments. I don't see how they can sustain an emergency preparedness program if they have that sort of business-as-usual preparedness problem. Step 1 to me is always be prepared for the most-likely future case, then step 2 is prepare for progressively less likely scenarios.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2019/04/16/no-ca...

That article was written during a booming stock market, too. CalPERS (the retirement fund in question) projects something like 7-8% stock returns to stay even nominally solvent.

If the market doesn't (pretty much fully) recover within the next six months, the entire CA pension system is going to be catastrophically insolvent.

The sad part is that the pension system is already walking dead. They’re going to need a bailout, it’s only now people are starting to have real conversations about it.

Should the CA tax payer pick up the bill for promises made to state employees that were never expected to be payable? We’ll see how that goes. Either way the tax payer and the pensioners lose.

I guess if you get your California economic outlook from Grover Norquist's spokesman, you might get an incomplete picture. May I recommend a second source, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics or other reputable agency?

I would say that

1. Current system allows running over budget too easily

2. Many costs are difficult to cut (like unionized state employees)

3. Alternatively, the low hanging fruit is cut very fast when budget requires balancing.

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