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Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

Since 1980 the consistent message in the US from one party is that its objective is to shrink government until it can be drowned in the bathtub. Because of this we are unable to act in common, since government is the closest thing we have to common action.

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This doesn't explain problems on the state and local level, even in liberal cities:

"If paralysis ended once you walked out of the Capitol, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis. We’d have better social insurance infrastructure. We’d have better infrastructure, period. But it doesn’t.

To put the question simply: Why is Penn Station, the flagship rail station in New York City, such a dump? Why can’t the richest city in the richest nation in the world have, at the very least, a train station with seating, some nice restaurants, working elevators, and an absence of human waste falling through the ceiling?"

If the average voter prioritises roads/schools/caring for the disabled above high speed rail; and the federal government contributes a smaller portion towards that, the state has to spend more on it, leaving less money for high speed rail.

Cities are relatively broke. See the NYC budget: https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/understandingthebudget....

I know some would zoom in on those pensions, but those are basically social safety net / 401k investment replacements. And the 18% wouldn't make or break large projects. Building is more expensive than ever for many reasons, which include permits and lawsuits, but also labor cost.

Efforts to raise taxes are usually thwarted by threats of business and wealthy citizens fleeing.

Yes, and this is why when the other party dominates at the local level, their governments and economies are seen as paragons of effectiveness like California's...

I find more and more, especially after the recent crisis, that the reality is our Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over meaningless ideals and have left things like impacting measurable outcomes in the dust. Each party is built around some kind of bull shit moral that defines the in/out groups and then cronyism wherever/however they can get it for their in group.

That's weird. This is the first I'm hearing the "drowned in a bathtub" metaphor. And now here, two separate people are using those exact words to assert it's been the drum-beat of the Republican party for 30 years.

It's a phrase spoken by Grover Norquist which is at least 10 years old.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist, 2001

The simplest measure of the size of federal government is the budget. Spending has grown wonderfully since 1980, so frankly if their objective is to “shrink government” they’ve done a horrible job.

Actually, as a percentage of GDP, it hasn't grown much at all in that time period. Or let me state that differently, it didn't grow much because it actually shrank

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spendi...

EDIT: misread chart, made false claim above. 1980 was a few percentage points of GDP below 2019 spending. Sorry for the false claim.

Percentage of GDP seems like a really awkward measure. Government takes dollars to run and budget makes for a good approximation of size. With GDP, imagine someone invented an amazing technology that 10x'd the GDP of a country. Would you expect the gov budget to 10x in line? That would seem like a terrible capture of resources.

(imagine say, the internet, etc)

It still measures effective ROI - and traditionally growth in GDP is accompanied by growing needs. It is true that it is fuzzy - different needs scale differently as well. A 10x GDP rise would almost certainly cause an explosion in demand for other services as well with or without the influx caused by the growtg.

That chart shows government spending at about 35.8% of GDP in 1980, and 37.8% now.

Indeed. I totally misread the chart. Edited my post to reflect the error.

In my defense, I think it still shows something quite different from what the OP was claiming. But I was even more clearly wrong.

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