Why is American administrative capacity in decline?
donmoynihan.substack.com
donmoynihan.substack.com
US has anti-Federalists, though who can work to legally diminish the power of the central government.
If you look to the Civil war, fighting wasn't kicked off by the declaration of separation, the flashpoint was possession of federal armories in southern states.
I agree it is largely fantasy. The federal gov would never hand over bases in Texas, ect.
It is strange that the US is one of the only countries in the world to tax citizens abroad.
What if you personally object to the secession - would the US allow you to retain your citizenship and "immigrate" to Georgia?
And, what if Florida refused to recognize a class of residents as new citizens? What would happen to all the federal prisoners located in Florida when secession happened - Florida probably doesn't want to adopt a large population of incarcerated Americans, they'd probably try to give them back to America somehow - ditto for incarcerated Floridians being held outside the state - though Florida might not want them back anyways.
I think, at EOD, the US would probably offer continued US citizenship to any Florida residents who refused to accept Florida citizenship - which would likely result in Florida being a majority expat country, since, would you rather throw your personal future in with some new secessionist government or an established government that might end up eating Florida in a few weeks anyways?
And other portions of their economy are dependent on being a port (both land and sea) for goods entering and leaving the US, much of which would be redirected to other areas unless US purchasers decide to pay extra costs to import through Texas (unlikely).
A more viable attempt at secession might look like: perhaps a new Hawaiian independence party forms with massive (>80%) and sustained (>20 years) on-the-ground support, with all federal representatives coming from this party. Eventually this party might convince the federal and enough state governments to support a constitutional amendment recognizing a specific independence referendum. That's very theoretical but I hope illustrates what actual secession might look like.
Also consider that before the U.S. civil war the southern states voted against Lincoln, the northern candidate, in fact he was not even on the ballot in many of them. If the enslaved people in those states had been able to vote things would have gone differently. So we have a unique and terrible history of states seceding based on a minority's wishes.
Reduction of the fed may be the only way to ever meaningfully address national debt.
Illinois has the highest tax burden in the country. We're not Greece. We are paying through the nose for, well, everything. We get 95 cents on the dollar for our federal taxes, and we pay a lot of those.
Texas is a lower-tax state. It is, in some ways, better managed than Illinois. But it gets 20 cents back on every dollar it pays in federal taxes.
It seems to me that the reason not to bail out pension systems is that they're long-term unsustainable, and that they're mismanaged, and something has to be done to stop the bleeding. But it's hard to argue that bailing them out would be a redistributive injustice. We subsidize the low-tax red states.
(A comically similar microcosm of this debate occurs within Illinois, with rural Illinoisans regularly making noise about wanting to divest itself of Chicagoland. Go right ahead, Peoria!)
It's nearly impossible to leave a government you don't really approve of if they are transferring a large amount of money into your local economy.
> The Census numbers are much higher than the OECD numbers for a variety of reasons. In fact, the OECD income number of the US is only 59 percent of the Census number.
The adjustment they did was "moving all the medians of all the states down by 59%" but I don't think that is enough. A more appropriate way to compare things would have been figuring how what those "differentiating reasons" and deducing amounts for each of the states, or incrementing the other countries' median in the same way. The American Census could (for example) be counting every state's natural resources as part of each household's income. In that case, they should include Sweden's petrol reserves in that computation. With the disparate measurement methods and the simplistic adjustment, they are comparing apples to oranges.
To be clear, that adjustment can only affect the relative numbers across US states, not the overall average for US states. That is because all states are adjusted by the OECD number for the US. Presumably the OECD methodology is consistent within itself.
So maybe the Census includes oil resources and OECD doesn’t. Discounting the US numbers across the board to 59% may make Texas and California artificially look better than Mississippi. But the overall average of the US states would still correspond to the OECD number for the US, which presumably is computed the same way as for Sweden.
More on topic, those poor states that benefit from federal money would not have a very strong economy and they would not be able to do deficit spending on their own currency or pay for things through deficit spending. If Oregon, Washington and California formed a new country or joined Canada they'd be better off financially, because their tax drain to poor state america would end. I don't want a split but I'm starting to feel it will happen in my lifetime. I'm more than ok with helping the poorer states with their infrastructure needs, we are all in this together. But I'm tired of 15% of the population having control over the federal agenda through the senate.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Yes. There's a reason US dollars are accepted worldwide Zimbabwean dollars aren't.
Once states secede, they lose all the clout that comes from being part of the world's only superpower controlling the world's reserve currency. Southern states would be better off switching to Pesos than printing their own.
Russia, which has a similar GDP, didn't have any appreciable external debts denoted in rubles. They were denoted in dollars, pounds sterling or other hard currencies.
EDIT: https://medium.com/@jonathanusa/everything-you-know-about-th...
Germany, for example, has "state's rights." Religious people in Bavaria decided that government buildings should display crosses (https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/31/europe/bavaria-germany-crosse...) and folks in Berlin don't get to veto that. When German press asked Angela Merkel why she wouldn't order a nationwide COVID lockdown, she explained German federalism, and the German press (which is much smarter than the American press) nodded and moved on. India features states that differ quite significantly in their healthcare systems or social laws. In Switzerland, a country the size of Maryland, laws on same-sex marriage differ between cantons until national consensus was reached less than two years ago.
America is a country of 330 million people, and far more diverse than Germany or Switzerland. Why should we ignore the real need for flexibility and localism just because some people who are long dead abused federalism?
Different groups of people wanting to cooperate to some extent but not be micromanaged by other groups of people isn’t unique to Germany. Federalism keeps recurring because it solves a recurring human problem.
> I'm not making the argument Federal power is bad, the people who benefit from it the most are, and are grifting the system by intentionally subverting anything that would improve their people's situation.
I like to assume that people are acting rationally in their interest given their values and priorities. People disagree about what would “improve” their situation,” or what will be the real outcome of efforts undertaken to “improve the situation.” Last I checked people are moving from California to Texas, not the other way around. Let’s assume at the very least people rationally appreciate the trade offs of that.
> Look at the build back better plan, they screwed that up and most of our highways are out of their operating life spans by more than double the original life time.
And why do you assume that Build Back Better would address that problem? I used to be a transit fan. I dutifully road Amtrak and Metro and MARC to work for years. And you know what? I gave up, moved to the exurbs, and bought a big SUV. Because we can’t actually do infrastructure and we shouldn’t even try. My change of heart was bitterly confirmed true when I saw the BBB proposal for Amtrak (which last I checked planned to blow tens of billions of dollars without building any new track).
Being from Bangladesh, I don’t actually believe that all cultures equally good at all things. Clearly Americans just can’t do things that require large scale coordination. Instead of beating our heads against the wall about it, we should just try to restructure our society to avoid those weaknesses.
It's worth noting that the issue gets confused because of the makeup of the political coalitions in the US. Namely the party of "small government" is a coalition of social conservatives (who often are fine with government spending, so long as it's not forcing liberal social policy on them), and economic libertarians (who care deeply about low taxes and less business regulation, but aren't as sensitive to liberal social policy). The social conservatives bring the votes, but party has historically prioritized the policy of the libertarians.
Until relatively recently, it was actually pretty common for the states you speak of to send socially conservative Democrats to Congress. Over the last 15 or so years, the Republicans successfully exploited the compromises those Democrats were often forced to make with an officially socially-liberal party to defeat them electorally.
Also, as an anecdote, one of these states (North Dakota) could probably legitimately claim to be one of the most socialist states in the country. It literally has a couple major state-owned businesses.
If you took social issues off the table, I think you'll see those states behave much differently.
California did not want to secede. A Russian-linked group tried repeatedly over the 2016 to 2020 period to get an initiative for an independence referendum on to the ballot in the state, but never managed to qualify the initiative, much less pass the initiative calling for an independence referendum.
The analyses that draw this conclusion leave a lot out. By narrowing the discussion to spending, they ignore the many benefits of federal policy for corporations based in the big cities in a few states. A few industries come to mind that would make a lot less money if federal policy were different: banks, pharma, entertainment, and even technology.
You would need consent from the rest of the states in order to leave, and that isn't happening any time soon.
I don’t think the hard part is getting people on board with it. The hard part is just getting a vote on it.
EDIT to address your point: I think if enough people want it, it will happen. The Civil War was about slavery, no matter what some folks will say. The current direction isn’t towards war, it’s towards an indifference followed by dissolution. There’s no energy to keep Florida or Texas or California from leaving if that’s what a large majority want.
If they raised this sort of thing to a vote, I would strongly hope that we let them build their own Republican utopia.
They'll never raise this to a vote, though, because the last thing they want is for that wish to be granted. Complaining about the federal government when you've mismanaged your state is easy, actually having to manage it without relying on handouts is not.
Ukraine gave Russia the nukes it held within its border. Looking back probably not a great idea.
We're talking about a military coup in the United States, which is a big topic, but technically, very few tanks and bombs or jets or nukes are in states. In part, for this reason. They're on federal property. States have militias; the U.S. has aircraft carriers and cruise missiles. If a secessionist government tried to invade federal territory, I would be wholly in favor of a decisive (if compassionate) military response.
The bigger challenge, as it always is, is the people.
Anyone can declare anything. What matters is who the troops and missile launchers listen to. That’s the Pentagon.
Would soldiers who live in these states obey DC's order to kill their neighbors and friends?
They certainly might, depending on the circumstances. But it is unclear to me that the outcome would be simple.
This is a popular factoid, but it often leaves out the fact that Russia had the codes to use the nukes, the ability to maintain them, and that other countries (like the US) wanted the nukes out of Ukraine.
If they had kept them, it is far from clear that they would be a nuclear power today.
As someone who lives in California, I thought you were talking about us. I wish I could move to Florida. Seems like a better place to live in almost all regards.
Unless of course, Florida's hurricanes, mosquitos, sinking land, horrible people, and lackluster economy are keeping you from moving there?
OTOH, Florida begs for federal handouts every time there's a big storm because somehow they never get around to requiring developers to build flood-resistant structures.
When someone calls an entire population of a state, nation, or region as "horrible people"; we call them bigots. It is time for introspection and reflection when you get to a point where everyone you don't agree with are horrible people. And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
Usually this would be flagged, but it goes with the party lines I suppose so it is allowed.
And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
That is objectively false. Only the Miami-Dade metropolitan area in Florida leans blue.
The funniest thing of all is talking about generalizing all people when talking about a state that passed laws to demonize all lgbtqia people.
Eastern Washington and Oregon have been talking about seceding from their respective states for /years/ and absolutely nothing has come of it because—surprise—most people don’t want to leave.
The number of people who are intensely political (who dislike Florida because politics or who are “Let’s go, Brandon!”) are a very small part of the population. They’re just very loud.
I think this is actually at the root of why America's administrative capacity has become so weak. Administrators are, for want of a better phrase, not content to stay in their lane, and try to smuggle other ideological baggage through their administration, which breeds resentment and resistance. Transportation planners are not content to build the roads people want, but want to make people take trains instead. Educators and public health experts think it's their job to weigh on race relations. The administrative class has always been haughty, since its inception in the Wilson era, but now they've found religion and become evangelical about it.
No particular state is more hell-bent on keeping Texas in the union than Texas.
All of the Texan talk of secession is just virtue signaling and pea-cocking, intended to drive the voter base to show up to the polls.
Most states that appear to lean in either direction at the governmental level have very substantial opposition voter populations. This is the biggest reason nobody is seriously going to consider secession, aside of rhetoric for the base.
I'm not sure what happens in the case of an abortion provider from a legal state visiting an illegal state. My suspicion is that they might try and be rebuked on jurisdictional grounds. It's an even weaker case than local citizen travel, since no part of the acts occurred inside the jurisdiction.
Impressive gymnastics.
I don't know what hair you're trying to split here, but the gymnastics are getting even more imporessive.
> Regulating one’s own citizens while they are traveling elsewhere is different than trying to regulate a different state.
Missouri's law, for example, would allow Missouri citizens to sue out-of-state physicians who perform an abortion on a Missourian but have never lived, set foot in, or done business in Missouri.
Looking forward to the incoming sequence of twists and flips.
This topic generates strong feelings for obvious and legitimate reasons. But that makes it more important (not less) to follow the site guidelines. That's why we added this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I guess my county (Anne Arundel, MD) is technically "blue" at the moment--it went for Biden +14. But in 2018's "blue wave" it went for Larry Hogan +38. Maryland, despite being solidly Democrat, is pretty conservative in a distinctly mid-Atlantic way.
While we have disagreements, the American people are not particularly divided on the major issues.
Another factoid: Biden got 5,244,886 votes in New York and 5,259,126 votes in Texas. In other words, more people voted for Biden in Texas than in New York.
That changed recently when the state became the target of national politics. Suddenly, the folks on the other side of the aisle were not Georgia Democrats, but California and New York Democrats. That created a ton of polarization that didn’t exist before.
Right now, our national politics pits California and New York Democrats against Mississippi Republicans, and the rest of us just have to pick a side. Things would be far less polarized if we split up, and it was California Democrats versus California Republicans and Texas Democrats versus Texas Republicans.
Here in Maryland, we have an extremely popular Republican governor that does Republican stuff like oppose public transit and try to keep taxes low. State politics is quite civil, because Baltimore isn’t San Francisco (despite voting similarly for Biden) but neither is Carroll County Mississippi (despite voting similarly for Trump).
Also, if you're using New York and California Democrats as a proxy for left-wing voters, Biden is pretty disappointing on that front. A huge part of why Biden was the nominee was specifically so he could appeal to centrist voters. The fact that Texan and Georgian voters voted for someone who was picked partly to appeal to those same people should not be surprising.
No, I’m making a completely different argument. The point is that Georgia Democrats are closer to Georgia Republicans than California Democrats are to Georgia Republicans. When politics is locally focused, there is less acrimony because the sides are less far apart.
But when Georgia politics came under the national spotlight, it became a proxy for the fight between New York and California Democrats and Mississippi Republicans. “Democrat” in Georgia used to mean Zell Miller, but now refers to Nancy Pelosi. That greatly increased the acrimony of politics in the state.
Your point about Biden actually supports my point. Before southern Democrats rescued his campaign, the Act Blue donors and activists were running a carnival where candidates were all raising their hand to open borders. Trump didn’t run against Biden, he ran against those people. That’s only possible because New York and California Democrats have so much power over the party apparatus and messaging that it’s easy to make them the face of the party.
If the states were split up, that wouldn’t happen. My county exec is a Democrat, but it’s hard for me to get worked up about him because he’s a farmer. If folks in New York and California had no input into the laws that applied to me, or how my schools are run, etc., I don’t think I would follow politics at all.
I'm struggling to understand how we go from that, to saying that there is even the remotest support in Georgia to secede even though every national candidate Georgians elected is in the party currently in power, or that after secession the elections would or should go back to Republican vs. Republican-lite. The only way any of that makes sense is if the actual goal is to separate the Georgia Democrats from the national apparatus to hopefully give state Republicans a chance to figuratively beat the newly-activated voters into submission. In fact if we're going strictly by the numbers then in any split Georgia should stay with the Democratic parts of the country.
Also I'm not sure what Pelosi has to do with any of this but at the moment, from the outside, the face of Georgia Democrats look like Ossoff, Warnock and Abrams all of whom are authentically local. I'm sure Trump and the Republican party would like people to think that Pelosi is the face of the Georgia Democrats, though.
I do feel bad for Georgian voters, not to mention the people counting the votes. It wasn't their fault that the balance of power came down to them in the end and I'm sure most of them didn't like being in the middle of that firestorm. However I suspect any acrimony was primarily due to the fact that the Democrats found a winning strategy in a formerly safe state.
They aren't. It's not 1860, no one is campaigning on preserving the Union over other policy considerations. While there would be intense disputes about how to treat people who didn't want to be separated from the US, and about disposition of federal property in the event of a divorce, few in NY or CA outside of the Republican minority in each state would expend even the slightest effort on keeping Texas in the Union as such, though they might oppose bad divorce terms on those other issues.
On the other hand, all the other Republican-led states would oppose the idea fiercely, because it would be a giant shift away from the Republican Party in the national balance of political power. (And, yes, Texas is far from solid red by population, but that's not what matters.)
Then why do they care so much about abortion laws in Texas, or whether Texas expands Medicaid, etc? Really, why do they care about the federal government at all?
Historically, Democrats cared about the federal government because Republicans states like California had the money and they needed the federal government to redistribute it. But today, Democrat states have the money. So what’s the point? Why not just adopt universal healthcare in California without regard to what Texas does?
Because Texas is in the Union, and what is Constitutionally allowed in Texas is what is Constitutionally allowed in their state, and they don't assume that they will have a permanent legislative majority there, because, well, history shows that they likely won't.
Other than that Californians care about rights in Texas the same.way they care about rights in Saudi Arabia.
I think it’s more like the Crusades. Californians believe in the universalism of their moral world view and want to impose it on the heathens in Texas. More like George Bush trying to bring democracy to the Middle East.
That's like saying you need permission to break the law.
Deep down, we all know that if you want to do a thing, you can just do it, and leave those who value systems and processes and order to grapple with it. Trump proved that.
Edit: to be clear, I do not support or like this reality. But if you don't think that the right will do anything other than "lol u mad libs? deal with it" then you haven't been paying attention.
And not even that. Similar agreements and compromises on shared standards, data transfer, compliance etc still have to be made to enable trade. Brexit voters were promised a "bonfire of regulations" yet red tape has doubled to continue trade with the EU and the trade deals the UK has signed with Japan and others are literal copy/paste of EU ones.
The mechanisms to enable secession from the union are either constitutional amendment or military might.
We already see this with legal marijuana, there are multiple campaigns aimed to form interstate compacts without the consent of congress. Ultimately a situation where the federal government declines to enforce its legal authority will just lead to a defacto change in the supremacy clause of the US constitution.
The only situation I see where this would become problematic is if a state chose to stop sending tax dollars to the federal government. Even then, the federal government has levers to pull that would be tough for a state to circumvent except by exiting the dollar - which no state has any reason to do.
This is not generally how taxes work, though; instead, individuals and businesses send taxes to the federal government (and sometimes, also to their states), and the federal government returns a great deal of the money to the states and localities, directly or indirectly. Leaving the federal government wouldn't mean the states would stop sending the feds money, it means they would be completely unable to pay for all sorts of infrastructure and entitlements that they receive money from the federal government for.
Worst case scenario, I'd see some byzantine system of declarations required when doing something across state lines or people using "fed taxed" and "state taxed" financial institutions depending on their objectives. Given the current state of military affairs, a war over Rhode Island would be a complex endeavor - a war over Texas, California, or New York is a practical impossibility.
The state that tried to leave might find itself with a civil war as the two sides within it -- the majority of whom already believe that the other party represents the most mortal enemy imaginable -- duke it out for control.
The big item issues such as
- Federal bans on abortion
- Controversial Presidential elections
- A series of unfortunate Supreme court decisions
- Immigration
- Infrastructure spending
Are all issues which can be handled with a legal decoupling. If all sides remained notionally in Congress, then there is very little likelihood that Congress would address the matter. A sensible supreme court would leave it as a political issue for a few decades before declaring a defacto status as was done for West Virginia's statehood. For all intents and purposes, a de facto decoupling would look more like a return to State relationships prior to 1900 then a secession.
While some may wish for a military based solution to stop a legal decoupling... there simply does not seem to be a plausible route for any military solution by any party. Russia made it ~100km into Ukraine before being stopped, it's 2900 KM between Houston and Boston - all means of ending such a stalemate would escalate to MAD as the military remains spread across states for political and defense purposes. Even in the civil war, the North was unable to enforce integration of the south through reconstruction.
That's an interesting Taiwan-ish model for succession. It probably has a better chance of success than the kind of outright succession the Confederacy tried, because it could be conducted slowly while still paying lip service to the Union. At each small step, military intervention might seem like too extreme of an escalation.
Though it still would be difficult. At some point it would require the state citizens to start breaking federal laws in very obvious ways (e.g. stop paying federal taxes), but I doubt they'd be fine with not crossing state lines in that case. Also a lot of the money in state budgets pass through the federal government, so it would probably be really expensive to replace that without some of the more extreme steps.
This has been tested, and the states—consisting of a very large share of the states up to that moment in the union—testing it ultimately failed.
The federal-state balance of the relative capacities to apply force has not, in the interim, shifted in favor of the states in any way I can ascertain, in fact, those capacities have been significantly centralized in the Federal government since the last time it was tried in a large scale way, or even since the more recent, smaller scale attempts.
> We already see this with legal marijuana, there are multiple campaigns aimed to form interstate compacts without the consent of congress.
Source? There has been lots of talk of an interstate compact with Congressional approval as an alternative vehicle, and transitional stepping stone, to general federal legalization, but I’ve seen nothing about a renegade compact.
State marijuana legalization leans on non-commandeering doctrine rather than nullification.
When do states send tax dollars to the federal government? Individuals send tax dollars to the federal government, but states mostly receive federal money.
It's a scam. Right-wing governments like the Conservatives are run by and for junkies, who will steal anything not nailed down to sell off cheap for a quick fix of cash.
The left assumes the government could be competent, but only if everyone tries to make it so, and they know what the right is doing (all of this policy is completely aboveboard and public).
Net result, everyone can safely assume the government is incompetent. It is much easier to prevent it from working than to make it work. We'd have to have bipartisan interest in making it work effectively, and we do not have that.
There's no right crafting policy to kneecap the city's ability to function as a city.
I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
We've got 25 million to build a bridge to a sports stadium. Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
>I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
Because my city is not good at being a city.
Sports stadiums are massive sources of revenue for cities.
> Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.
That's not true. They're almost always a net loss and either way I'm not talking about the money that went to the stadium. I'm talking about the money spent on building a single pedestrian bridge to that stadium.
>It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.
Obviously I meant 4 hours a week picking up trash in a single park.
I’m up in a small town in British Columbia, population circa 40K. Our compost is collected weekly; our recycling and garbage biweekly (garbage used to be weekly but they’ve supplied us with humongous wheeled bins now); our landfill separates trash by kind, sells what can be recycled, and keeps track of where it buried the rest; we have a massive composting facility that sells its end product; our sewer treatment plant sends its output to ranchland spray irrigation and golf courses. In the spring and fall, a chipping truck comes along and mulches any tree trimmings.
We maintain our infrastructure. Old underground services are regularly upgraded on schedule. Roads are resurfaced when they’re worn. Our downtown core was beautified a few years ago, with new trees, brickwork, etc. Down at the beaches, cottonwood trees are removed when they become hazardous; new trees are planted. Our parks are clean, despite the homeless living in them. Heck, we built several apartment buildings for those homeless that have their life together enough to qualify for residency (though provincial funding assisted on this.)
Over the past twenty or thirty years we’ve build a new swimming pool/rec centre; a multi-sheet ice rink; a truly excellent performing arts centre; acres of new park; a new track-and-field venue; removed a decrepit and failing arena; and are in the process of building out a new arena/outdoor sports centre. The only thing we’ve completely failed to implement is a new art gallery.
We do have a homeless problem (our weather is very nice) and there is a heck of a drugs problem (a lot of weed was grown around here back in the day, and there’s an undercurrent of gang activity involving the hard drugs). But on the whole, it’s a very laidback, safe, well-run community of caring people.
It’s sad that your town is a failure. It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town.
They probably do have people who can administer with comparable competency, but I think the competency required to manage a town of 40k is very different from the kind of competency you need to get those results in a much larger town.
At small city scale, administrative layers can be thin and infrequent because of the smaller scale. Changing collections to be every other week could probably be a meeting with a few dozen workers. In a major city, that could be hundreds or thousands of workers, requiring administrative layers to handle rescheduling, handling concerns, etc, etc.
Small cities also generally have to develop smaller portions of their budget to dynamically adjusting to shifts in the city. How often do you have to build new roads and expand existing ones to handle shifts in traffic? What's the worst case scenario for traffic in a city of 40k, vs a city with millions of people? The major cities I've lived in are constantly having to build new roads and expand existing ones, and they're barely making a dent in the traffic problem.
Stuff like taking down trees and cleaning parks is pretty easy when the town is small enough to have a half dozen people do it. You need a whole administration layer when you can't have 6 people that just wander around parks fixing things that need to be fixed.
Like many things, I think complexity and cost of those services tends to scale exponentially with population rather than linearly.
Yes, it's a pretty astoundingly corrupt city. But stamping out corruption is one of the fundamental components of good governance.
TBF this one isn't government specific. It's often easier to fund a debt instrument for a big initiative than to find a revenue stream for a small obvious win. This happens in large companies, too, btw. You argue for years to consistently invest a small amount in something, the investment is never made, and then the company ends up acquiring to save itself from that exact underinvestemnt.
City run trash collection is totally a thing in some areas, and it actually makes sense if done well. I once lived in a conservative city that had it (and did it well).
Where I live now, we have private trash collection. That meant we had dozens of garbage trucks from different companies driving through the neighborhood on every trash day, until one of my neighbors organized everyone to switch to one single company.
Even the brightest among the HN crowd can fall into the trap that "The other side is incompetent." There are geniuses and idiots on both sides. If your city is poorly run, its not because your city is run by one party over the other. It's because the people running your city is competent at running a campaign and incompetent at running a city. There's not much more to it than that.
BTW, the people picking up trash in our neighborhood are bleeding heart liberals.
We needed healthcare reform. What we got was the ACA.
What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????
Average peoples' material conditions are getting worse and worse. They need some kind of simple universal assistance. They don't need yet another way of getting means tested.
> What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????
Wealthy powerful interests who fund politicans on both sides ensure those reforms fail or are watered down to nothing. This is not about complexity. It's simple corruption.
The only real net beneficiaries of the ACA were the insurance companies. People are compelled to get high deductible insurance. And that's enforced through the tax-code for some reason???
They made a minor concession about denials for preexisting conditions. But, now they just claim everything is 'not medically necessary' instead.
People need healthcare. Not 11,000 pages of more bureaucratic nonsense.
I still remember Obama having a televised meeting with Republicans from Congress and each of the Republicans had this big stack of papers next to them as a sort of prop to suggest to the folks at home that it was some bureaucratic government takeover. What nonsense. The U.S. government is a complicated thing, so is healthcare, and put it all together and yeah it might take a few pages. Bills like that get passed all the time. And even as careful as the authors were, Republicans were happy to read the law closely and take advantage of every loophole they could, with the Medicaid expansion nonsense and the endless lawsuits on technicalities.
The inability to come up with simple reforms stems from they see themselves as uniquely qualified to manage the affairs of state. They went to the best schools. They have all the best policy positions. If you have any disagreements about policy, it's simply because you don't understand. This is the prevailing attitude despite an abysmal performance over the past 40 years after they completely abandoned the New Deal.
The concept that government is there to help is taken like a conspiracy theory and slowly 'Starving the beast' provides ample opportunity for failure that only furthers anti-federalist mentality. Or as some should be saying as they campaign, "Government doesn't work, elect me and I'll prove it!"
Haha, the military is not well-administered. It is well-administered for a military, but things go on that would never be allowed in a private company. Remember the two recent naval accidents? The gang they found operating out of a fort? The fact that on-base accidents are the leading cause of casualties?
I really like the Singapore model, where government employees are highly compensated, have built a culture of efficiency, and there are repercussions if they don't deliver.
In peacetime, it doesn't seem outrageous that that would be on-base accidents (especially if that includes automobile accidents and injuries during training exercises).
Mundane things are deadly, simply because we use them everyday.
The US was in two wars for nearly 2 decades, to say nothing of various other special operations, and accidents were a leading cause of deaths and permanent disability for a large number of those years.
Readiness is important, but IMO, the Army does a ton of unnecessary and unnecessarily dangerous training for capabilities that are almost never needed (jumping, in particular, but also certain types of combat training). Most importantly, this destroys people's physical health for no reason. Secondarily, this also costs the taxpayer enormous sums of money (each permanent disability retirement for a 30 year old is many millions of dollars).
The other branches might be more reasonable. Not sure.
Readiness is precisely about training for things that will almost never happen. Until they do.
IMO, the number of jumps the Army does each year is far in excess of what is necessary for readiness.
What I can say with some confidence is that there are perverse organizational incentives for some highly accident-prone training exercises. So, even if these exercises are required for readiness, that's not the (only) reason they're done in such high numbers.
Military Operations Research is a huge field. I like to use Google Scholar, which has many Masters Theses from military grad students, etc... Here's a few results to walk you "on target" if you want to continue to dig:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA545145.pdf
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA618622.pdf
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=airb...
You really think the military should forgo combat training?
FWIW, this isn't some crazy take. "Maybe the number and severity of injuries due to this activity is reducing readiness more than the resulting experience is increasing readiness" is a known trade-off.
I don't expect that number to ever go to 0, but I'd hope it could be smaller.
> You really think the military should forgo combat training?
This is not what anyone said. I'm in strong favor of more realistic training.
Of course, even this may be unnecessary for many. E.g., read the uncle comment's anecdote about ROTC.
> there was a woman on a guaranteed nursing scholarship who was probably about 4'10", 80 pounds, and she tore both ACLs from all the marching with 90 pounds of gear.
Whose idiocy was at fault here? I don't honestly think the military wanted people like this in the first place.
Does that need outweigh outweigh the difficulty of individually tailored ROTC programs for one person? I don't know
If they raised concerns and were overruled, then it's that person's fault also.
Meanwhile at the next door ROTC program it's all ridiculously soft and drill.
This all speaks to poor organizational controls.
It is like the Marine Corp who just disbanded their armored division and gave all the tanks to the Army. If an army can put a javelin in the hands of enough soldiers, are tanks really that effective anymore?
Now this isn't to say all combat training it useless, but some may be. Some of those things we are doing may be relics of the past and no longer necessary. We seem to train like the next world war is going be just like World War 2, but I imagine the next world war will look a whole lot different.
Training is the core of what we do, and extremely important no matter what. But, the nature of the training often doesn't match the real job. For instance, I remember at LDAC, a required ROTC summer course where you get evaluated and stack ranked prior to being given a job, there was a woman on a guaranteed nursing scholarship who was probably about 4'10", 80 pounds, and she tore both ACLs from all the marching with 90 pounds of gear. Forcing cadets that you know for certain are going into healthcare fields to train as infantry is no doubt harmful and unnecessary. At the time, women weren't even legally able to try becoming infantry, but still forced to do the training.
Personally, I served in a combat job, but even then, a lot of what we did felt more like hazing and dick measuring contests than skills-related. For instance, in a Cav unit, we were all required to do spur rides until passing, which involved activities like carrying telephone poles up and down hilly trails for 12 miles at 3 in the morning after not sleeping for 48 hours. I have no doubt doing stuff like that contributed to the spinal degeneration I eventually lost two years of my life to after leaving the services. Nonetheless, being a large, physical capable person who played and excelled at sports my entire life, I enjoyed that type of thing at the time. In retrospect, though, it sure looks wasteful and stupid. The repeated forced sleep deprivation is especially egregious, as it seems like the top contributor to all the accidents, and as far as I understood, training in a sleep deprived state doesn't actually improve your ability to deal with sleep deprivation in theater. At best, it helps to weed out and select who can and can't naturally deal with it, but it isn't really trainable.
At this point, the US military has determined that having paratroop units available is a useful capability in war. Arguing whether that tool is still useful is completely valid, and I would hope goes for anything: strategies, tactics, personnel, armaments, vehicles, equipment, etc.
However, once decided that a particular tool is necessary, it seems to me unquestionable that they should be kept in a ready, prepared, capable state. I suppose that too, can be debated, insofar as what constitutes "ready, prepared, capable," but if we've decided that our military needs people to jump out of planes, I would hope it goes without question that those people need to practice jumping out of planes.
shorter: training and necessity of a unit seem to be orthogonal concepts
Okay. I argue such and debate such. Very clearly. In my original post. What is the point of this reply?
> If you can't afford the servicemember, properly trained and properly insured, then don't "buy" them at all.
Okay. Clearly yes. Now find me a servicemember who would rather have medical retirement over avoiding permanent disability. That's the main reason we should not be risking life and limb unnecessarily. You know, like I said. In my original post. What is the post of the reply?
This knee-jerk need to defend the Army on full display in this thread is, if we're honest, is the primary difference between the military and most of the civilian government: not superior administrative competence, but mostly just better PR.
For example if a servicemember volunteers for paratrooper school and gets badly hurt on a jump then I'm going to assume the training was necessary because that's what the school is for. The people at the school are experts and it's a waste of military resources to put a trained servicemember out of commission permanently and the school will be held responsible so everyone has a strong incentive to be careful. However it sounded sort of like you were saying a paratrooper unit doesn't need to practice jumping so much because they'll probably never need to do that.
On the other hand if you're saying that the military should more aggressively investigate safer training techniques where that can be done with no loss of quality then I'm all for that. Maybe some training can be done with VR simulations in a wind tunnel before you actually send people up in a plane, awesome.
Also I'm sure you support veteran care, I was just adding that if the military decides some unit is necessary, then they need to train that unit appropriately, and (here's my part) they need to bear the full cost of any potential injury. Given how badly veterans are sometimes treated I felt that should be said.
Those two are related and form a vicious cycle. The more people you injure, the the more you have train. The more jumps you require for minimal readiness, the more folks eventually refuse to re-up to even leave the Army as they watch their friends drop like flies to spinal injuries.
Jumps, and dangerous jumps in particular, are a huge point of contention in the Army because the Army likes to screw soldiers by claiming that spinal injuries from jumps aren't service-related.
Then there's a really long tail of physical fitness training that has more to do with macho signalling than actual readiness. Plenty of discussion down-thread.
There is nuance and trade-off, but there's a LOT of training in the military that does little or nothing for readiness and contributes massively to injury rates. I think the Army is so far to the "stupid" end of that spectrum that the nuanced conversation doesn't make much sense to me.
[1] https://blog.anduril.com/rebooting-the-arsenal-of-democracy-...
As if, private companies were the pinnacle of human organization?
Some assumptions to clear up here.
Any demographic that is almost entirely young and, by selection, fit, accidents are guaranteed to be the leading cause of death.
What exactly do you expect here? You'd be happier if the leading cause were heart disease or warfare? The point is to be so good at everything else and so healthy that the only thing that can hurt you is error. That's success. The rank order of accidents isn't important. Only total quantity.
Do you realize how incredibly low the bar is for the ASVAB? I got very close to the highest possible score back when I was 17. Far higher than the highest requirement for any job in the Army. I am, at best, moderately above average in IQ. IMO the requirement of a college degree for some jobs is a stronger IQ discriminator than the ASVAB.
What are you referring to? This is a very generic statement, and I'm willing to bet it's generic because any specific claim would be falsifiable in 99% of cases.
> the one branch of government that is distinguished by OP as still somewhat competent and capable, the military, is the only one that’s using IQ tests (ASVAB etc) in hiring.
LMAO.
1. The ASVAB is not a test for identifying high intelligence. It's exactly the opposite -- a test for filtering out extremely low intelligence. A low ASVAB score probably signals a serious learning disability or massive educational deficit. A really high ASVAB score probably means you won't fail out of a mediocre college in your first semester. That's about the extent of the signal because it's calibrated so low.
2. Some other civil services do have required exams (eg the post office), but they tend to be on the lowest end of the skills/education spectrum. Again, exams filter out the worst, but aren't helpful for separating the good from the best.
3. The services that don't have exams would not benefit from the ASVAB (eg NASA asking applicants with graduate degrees in STEM multiple choice questions such as "why is water denser than air"... if a candidate is that unintelligent/uneducated they won't have made it to the interview stage in the first place).
Also: Most highly selective private sector employers do not use IQ tests. Not sure why IQ tests are so fetishized among a certain set. They really aren't particularly useful interview instruments.
It is an easy numeric way to satisfy a superiority complex.
I think the bigger issue is not overall compensation, but the lack of performance based compensation.
Guaranteed pay increases, no bonuses, and seniority based promotion means there are few incentives to actually perform or have an impact.
I have several smart friends who are state/federal employees and they love their jobs. They don't mind so much that the programs they work on are fundamentally flawed or grossly inefficient.
In the words of Grover Norquist, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
The why and how is far more then can be adequately explained in an internet comment. But broadly, the US government is capable of doing things to help people, but a lot of time and money has been spent to make sure they're not allowed to help people.
The single greatest accomplishment was Proposition-13. It caps property increases to a level that is lower than inflation, with the end result that property tax bases are more-or-less continually shrinking. This leads to all sorts of effects:
* Local governments are poor. In particular, local governments can't afford to pay for their own schools, shifting education to the state level.
* It increases NIMBYism because there is no downside to property value increase.
* Municipalities strongly prefer high-end development.
* Government revenues come primarily from sales tax and income tax. These sources are highly sensitive to economic disruptions, so when the economy tanks, the state becomes extremely poor.
* It gives entrenched businesses and landlords some advantages over new ones, as their fixed expenses decline over time.
To give you an idea of the scale that we're talking about: In the early 2000's the city of San Francisco had a shortfall of $100 million one year. If the Transamerica building's property taxes had increased along with its value, it would have been paying an additional $50 million in taxes that year. That's was half the city's shortfall.
[As an aside, anyone who tells you that California has high taxes probably knows nothing about how property taxes work there.]
Also, don't let me get started on the recall systems and the proposition systems. Learn from California. Direct democracy sucks.
For example, the idea that the US has trouble with subways is often justified by reference to the LA subway and the NYC Second Avenue subway. Closer inspection, though, reveals that the LA subway was put off for so long in part because it was known that it would require much tunneling through rock which would be very expensive. In the case of the NYC Second Avenue subway the initial proposal was made roughly one hundred years ago and was rejected as unreasonably expensive to attempt because of the extensive complications. The subway plan was raised again and again over the years each time being rejected as unrealistically expensive. Then recently it was decided that improvements to tunneling technology would finally make the Second Avenue subway possible, but unfortunately when completed it turned out to have been unreasonably expensive to build. Instead of taking into account the context and nearly one hundred years of analysis concluding that the Second Avenue subway could not be practically built people instead conclude that the cost overruns are part of some mysterious malaise that has settled on all infrastructure construction work.
It could easily be the case that American administrative capacity is not in decline, but society has become more complex. Certainly the move from paper records to digital media has greatly improved administrative capacity across almost all commercial industry and government.
* Govt is not so much about helping get things done (think of older projects like interstate highway systems) and is more focused on stopping things (5+ years of environmental reports to do anything meaningful). That's one big shift for better or worse depending on perspective.
* Govt is graded HEAVILY on non-performance objectives - so things like compliance, equity, etc etc are critical issues, and the actual performance of programs which is much harder to measure is not a focus. I've helped on that stuff, it can make your head spin. You'll be trying to do a reading program for kids and in San Francisco need to train staff on the McBride Principles for Northern Ireland and much more.
* Major focus on getting folks in trouble vs saying "good job" internally to govt systems. So many folks learn to keep their heads down, the tall grass gets cut.
I have great sympathy for ALL line / front end staff in these systems (think teachers, police etc) trying to get stuff done. There are now 100 ways to be punished and somewhat fewer ways to be celebrated.
This is a political choice (or I guess, an outcome of political environment). Strategizing how to return to a politics of getting this done for citizens is probably more use than any culture war stuff going on now.
Months late, over budget, missing information, not able to process the volume needed...and at the end of the day they just pointed the finger at Oracle...despite tons of documents provided that showed poor oversight by the government. After multiple lawsuits Oregon got $100M back of the $240M they paid...but that's was a stupid number of dollars to be spent in the first place providing a place that ultimately targeted just a few hundred thousand people (at most...for 2022 it was 147K).
You can research their COVID unemployment debacle as another fumble in administrative capacity.
This problem isn't unique to software actually, it boils down to how government contracting works and how even after someone gets the contract it's very much requirements driven with little room for flexibility and A LOT of overhead.
This should be a strong counterargument, at least in Oregon, any time some schmuck says something dumb like "Ya don't get fired for choosing Oracle."
It should, in fact, be grounds for immediate termination. Cisco, too.
“There’s 50 government departments and like a dozen teams in the IT department who all handle different stuff. Each department uses their own niche software. Extremely clunky and confusing.”
How do you fix management problems in situations like this? How do you create accountability where there is none?
Here’s an article… and years later it is still not working right.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3269011/phoenix-fiasco-one-year-p...
For example, if a European government or the government of Japan had allowed their public transit system to become even close to as bad as the systems we have in the USA, that government would not be re-elected.
People in the UK love to complain about their train system, even though it is better than anything people in the USA can dream of.
American voters have resigned themselves to the idea that government is going to fail to provide certain things, so they aren't surprised or outraged when that turns out to be the case, so our politicians don't fear for their jobs. Nothing will change unless politicians know they won't get re-elected if the government fails to execute.
The American people were long ago sold on the idea that the government was just too big and their lives would be better if less of their tax dollars went to fund all this unnecessary government.
For more than 50 years the Republican party has been actively trying to shrink the government. Some of their plans, such as starving government programs for money have been so effective that their Democrat counterparts had to also downsize departments in order to keep them alive.
Some examples of this starvation are the burdens placed on the USPS to fully fund future pensions, and the continual under-funding of the IRS.
Just federal alone is 30%!
just google: "govt spend as percentage of GDP"
I think the american public has been sold on the idea that govt should be bigger and bigger and more bloated than ever. Most people either approve or just don't care.
Yet that isn't what is being cut in the name of "Government too big!". In fact, those categories only seem to be growing in cost with no apparent measures by the GOP to curb them.
Three areas of government that have broad bipartisan support. The right wants smaller government, in theory, but they also want to "keep the government out of my Medicare!" So the spending isn't ever going to down, only up.
You poll people on whether they support Social Program X, you get a very different result from if you describe a hypothetical program that just happens to do exactly what Social Program X does, and ask them if they would support that. For extra comedic value you can also ask if they'd like to replace Program They Hate with this new program that's identical.
A similar hating-the-label-not-the-thing effect is how you get nonsensical shit like people apparently thinking Medicare isn't "socialized medicine". If they like it, it must not be [Bad Thing].
If you want to decrease spending, fine lets start by lowering the costs of medical care and medicines, and start looking at getting better value out of our military spending.
The main problem is the mandatory spending. It's exciting to write your bill declaring some funding "mandatory", but then there's nothing to be done about it.
Which, to a close approximation, everyone actually supports. We don't reduce government spending because we don't want to.
government jobs are low pay but people will take them for the lifetime pension after they retire. this incentivizes slow moving, long tenured, employees who have little motivation to do things differently. it attracts these people
i think we would be in a better place without pensions and instead paying people better rates
I think an even worse problem is unions in the government. There, you have people that literally do nothing and yet are untouchable because of their union.
"But isn't that a reduction of choice, so, a bad thing?" it would be, except that if enough of your peers also don't have that option, it means they can't outcompete you by harming their own retirement, so you don't need to do that in order to simply not fall behind. No more getting outcompeted for housing in good school districts because your peers are willing to live paycheck-to-paycheck and live on cat food in retirement, and you're not. And so on.
This sounds good, but my mother worked for the local government and it changed my mind. Public employees have the most capricious employer in existence -- voters. The union helps mitigate that. My mother would have had her pension cut to nothing after years with no cost-of-living wage adjustments if it were simply up to the voters.
I think this claim requires support. Yes, military spending is high and has bipartisan support, but I don't particularly agree that it is a hallmark of highly capable administration. Funding does not equal capacity.
American leaders are usually lawyers, pol sci majors and similar folk. No wonder things are not running smoothly.
Most of this is bunk. The government is really good at operations and incredible at capital spending and management. In general, operations in larger government entities are documented, audited and executed to a standard only found in regulated industries. Even then, companies suck too - look at Bank of America losing millions in cash due to incompetence and poor controls as an example.
The government’s key weaknesses are around change, which is difficult, and governance, which limits the ability of professional managers to run their business. At the Federal level, Congress tightly controls appropriations and sets priorities. Sometimes that means that the full resources of the US are deployed at a target, other times that means that a critical problem goes unsolved because the program is starved of resources.
Witnessing how COVID response was managed in different states was both horrifying and inspiring. You get the government you want.
All of that was enabled by the massive mobilization of Federal resources. The Trump administration, which suffered from many self-inflicted crises and issue with ability to execute, was able to leverage the bureaucracy to get the response going. In short, the US government accomplished something incredible through the pandemic. The capability is there, but the politics drive inaction.
There are some progressives who seem to put ideology above effective action but they don't last (e.g the DA who just got recalled. He did some good work but he couldn't get the daily job done so he's out.)
Some specifics:
> Does anyone seriously doubt that a federal UI system would be better run than the state-run versions that collapsed during the pandemic?
Yes, I do (seriously doubt that)! The last time the federal government took on something like this, it was a train wreck which relied on the industry taking on tours of duty to fix it. The notion that the Federal Government is more competent than the states is belied by the series of articles being written in the first place! Is it better for the feds to something once than for the states to do it 50 times - that's a different question altogether.
> There are simply fewer federal government employees relative to the tasks we ask of them. As a percentage of the population, the federal workforce was 1.13 percent in 1967 but shrank to 0.64 percent by 2018. We see a similar decline with the IRS...
We didn't have computers in 1967. Did human productivity not increase more than 2x in the last 51 years? Why do we need more humans? Did complexity in tax code outpace gains in productivity? Has the IRS not modernized (spending money elsewhere)? I feel like this stat is totally irrelevant to any understanding of the problem and moreover, the suggested solution is perfectly in line with the fundamental problem the author is trying to solve (lets throw money at ineffective governance because that's what we do).
> If my interpretation is right, the Republicans who are creating administrative dysfunction described above are also contributing to declining state capacity by picking judges inherently suspicious of administrative power.
This is not strictly Republicans' doing. We continuously cheered as Trump policies were stricken by the courts. As a society as a whole, we've continually pushed administration into the judicial branch - out of cowardice and opportunity alike.
There has always been this argument over states rights and strong central government.
It's expensive for the government to do things because
1. Everyone knows the government wastes money on everything so why not charge them a higher price.
2. Nobody feels any guilt out of keeping as much money out of the government's hands as possible (since you can spend that money more efficiently!)
3. One political party gains points whenever they make inefficient spending decisions since it reinforces their narrative about the government being inefficient.
Number 3 is often solely blamed but I think it's faded somewhat compared to 1 & 2. I don't think many GOP politicians intentionally make bad financial decisions with the hope of making the government look bad - but when they make mistakes the blame they receive is generally outweighed by the general malaise over inefficient government which supports their platform. Cheating the government is so popular and widely endorsed that Trump essentially ran for president on it.
The stuff about progressives at the top is weird. I don't know how they even found a large enough data set of enacted progressive policies to draw a conclusion about whether they're too policy-focused rather than admin-focused. Then the rest of the article is largely about how Republicans won't staff agencies properly, so how could it possibly matter how admin-focused progressives are? Progressives don't even control the democratic party, let alone have control of government, so I don't know what the point of the opening section was.
[EDIT] That first bit's me summarizing the article's points, by the way, not just throwing in my own take, as several top-level posters seem to have decided to do. Admittedly, connecting the civil/common law divide to the courts section is mine, but considering that comes up over and over again in analyses of this problem, and that section's largely describing the exact effect that those others have also noticed, I think that's fair.
> “we don’t invest in administration, partly due to ideological opposition to the ability of government do its job.”
> Yes, people don’t want to invest in government because we’ve seen what kind of people work in it since they unionized and we banned written exams.
> “In some areas, US administrative capacity remains world-beating, most obviously the military, which enjoys bipartisan and popular support, and vast investments of resources.”
> Yes, and it is the one place that uses IQ tests, and it has a lot of white males at the top.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/153487716566093004...
There is more on the guys Substack on how abuse of CRA and disparate impact has wrecked public sector competence.
“The worst person you know just made a good point” etc.
I don't believe this is true at all. Many socialists do vote for the Democratic Party as the lesser of two evils, but liberals are not committed to egalitarianism at all costs. They have used the Federal bureaucracy as a jobs program since the end of the civil war. Similarly, the mitilary tends to be a jobs program for the more conservative parts of the country. Efficiency and performance has rarely ever been the goal, employment has.
If he believed in a meritocracy he would permit them to come. But he's actually one of the terrified ones. And a fear of being out-competed naturally lends itself to this sort of rhetoric.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
But since the conclusion is staring him in the face at a +50% effect size, I'm glad he can connect the dots.
Additionally, since the Reagan era, government institutions have been defunded, attacked and undermined by successive (primarily Republican) adminstrations. The inevitable ineffectiveness that results is then used as an argument for further defunding.
But here's the one mistake the article makes: it's confusing Democrats with progressives and fundamentally mischaracterizes Democratic Party motivations.
There are like maybe 4 actual progressives in the Democratic Party at the Federal level. The Democratic Party hates actual progressives. Just look at the primary in the Texas 28th just recently. Pelosi and Clyburn went out of their way to campaign for Henry Cuellar who is pro-gun and the only anti-abortion Democrat in Congress over the actual progressive Cisneros.
The Democrats (including Biden) were architects of the 1994 Crime Bill that is perhaps the biggest factor in mass incarceration in the US. Not so fun fact: the US is ~3% of the world population but has ~25% of the world's prisoners.
The entire purpose of the Democratic Party is to say "look at how terrible the Republicans are" and use that for fundraising. In any European country the Democrats would be considered a conservative (probably center right) party.
So it's not that the Democrats are too focused on policy rather than administrative capacity (as the article argues) but rather they're focused entirely on aesthetics. The Democratic Party loves nothing more than appearing to do something without having to do anything.
Let me add something to the specific example of the Fifth Circuit:
> A very good example of this comes in the form of a recent 5th Circuit decision that essentially gutted the ability of the SEC to do much of its job. In Jarkesy v. Securities and Exchange Commission, the court ruled that the SEC’s use of administrative hearings violated the right to a jury trial, and therefore was unconstitutional. This is a major break from almost a century of precedent that accepted that the SEC could employ administrative hearings and administrative law judges.
What people need to realize here is that courts aren't apolitical polymaths presiding in a vacuum. Courts (including the Supreme Court) are and have always been political. If you look at the 5th Circuit appeals court judges [1], 12 are appointed by Republicans, 5 by Democrats. Undermining institutions like the SEC is not an accident. It's by design. It's part of a system that doesn't want the capital-owning class regulated.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
So if US people want to change that they would need to focus on expelling money from election process: severely limiting donations, especially from business, compensating candidates for the election costs, and mandating equal access to media covering elections (most EU countries have that and it works pretty well). But, don't expect politicians and corporate owned media to support that in any way - you would need a major grass roots movement to change that. Unfortunately at the moment I don't see any major shift in this direction.
That too is a political decision.
The IRS admitting to ‘targeting’ republican groups was a disaster. https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes-for-...
This is still referenced in republican circles.
As that article notes, they did also target liberal groups in the same way. The hearings they held basically found they were doing a poor job generally.
There's this pattern of cutting funding, and then using the disasters caused by the funding cuts as "proof" the government can't do anything right.
Now there is so much regulation that it would be impossible to get through the permit in 5 years.
It’s the same here in Canada, all the infrastructure, building, farms, road that were built around 1900 are no longer possible with the level of regulation.
We are getting into a kafkaesque state where the technology is super productive but the regulations swallow every improvement and them some.
Well, who is John Galt?
I've worked with and in Government agencies. The amount of waste and inefficiencies out competes even the worst of large corporations. When agencies were new (1950-1970), we saw incredible progress and efficiencies. But, there is no one to clean up the crud that's built up over the years.
We can't even do six sigma because that itself would become a bureaucratic endeavor. I've seen how six sigma works great in a nimble Japanese manufacturing company, but not so great in American mega corporation. I am not sure what the solution is, perhaps complete abolishment of the agency and starting a new one.
So, "crud buildup" isn't it, not by itself. There is, however, a good case to be made that the increasing politicization makes the job inherently harder. Statements like "I bet if we just clean our house" are exactly that - it is not a proposal that's in any way actionable, but if enough people say it, there will be increased pressure to justify actions, which creates more bureaucracy.
Mind, I'm not saying there shouldn't be accountability. But we must move this discussion away from "Just do <simple slogan>" towards actual analysis, or the side effects of a populist discussion mean that administrative efforts drown in layers and layers of useless ass covering, just to shield from that pressure.
Starting from scratch doesn't really solve - or even discover - the underlying problem either. It might be a tool to address issues, but we don't know until we concretely investigate what the problems and root causes are.
Alas, that requires serious investment. And I really don't see a political climate where any effort to invest large amounts into rebuilding administrative capacity is successful. We're currently very much in a feedback loop. How to break that is, at least to me, ultimately a question of societal stability.
Politicians often don't get this, and they may even deliberately choose not to get it. In the public sector, "efficiency" is usually a codeword for slashing budgets and assuming that agencies will magically get their work done with fewer resources.