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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

In theory so would I. But in practice the government keeps spending more and more money without providing more or better services so it's just not a good investment. If the government wants to build infrastructure they should pick a couple of big projects and complete them on time and on budget. Then maybe I will be willing to fork over more taxes for more projects.

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Operation Warp Speed had a pretty good ROI for the USA, no?

Yes and most of that came from removing regulatory delays, raising the obvious question of why they were there in the first place.

You're forgetting coordinating at scale, and giant piles of money for parallelization of the building the manufacturing infrastructure. You think regulation was holding us back? How about the infrastructure to make the vaccines?

No I'm not forgetting about that. It's just that manufacturing was never the time constraint on how fast a vaccine could be produced. It's regulatory time. The manufacturing process was also shortened (and parallelized, as you pointed out), but you can see from this chart that the main savings was shortening a 4 year regulatory process to 6 months. https://media.defense.gov/2020/Aug/13/2002476369/-1/-1/0/200...

Consider the meaning of necessary vs. sufficient conditions. You're confusing the two.

It would be interesting to have a "tax rewards" system, so that people didn't

You paid $10k of taxes this year? Here's for you a free pass to all national parks.

You paid $50k? Here's the card - similar to the one police officers give to their wives - that lets you get off minor infractions.

Small tokens of appreciation often go long way.

Why should poor people (assuming they are poor through no fault of their own) not have equal access to services?

If anyone was serious about democracy they would give tax payers the option to select the services they are willing to pay towards. Tick the box to pay towards a new Aircraft Carrier, a new Hospital, Vaccines, Making viruses more deadly etc.

Direct democracy is a bit hard to manage - because people are generally too dumb and can't see the forest for the trees.

That aircraft carrier might be the big weight in a trade negotiation or prevention of a regional conflict which could escalate.

Representative democracy should work better, because you (the voter) judge based on the outcome, and vote, rather than try to understand every possible policy (which is going to overwhelm any individual anyway).

I doubt distrust in govt is based on lack of services vs taxes paid. It’s a propaganda war being lapped up by Trumpists and far right crowds worldwide because it fits their view - no govt unless they win.

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