My (US) wife continues to be in awe of the UK services compared to the US. I just wish the bus would come on time when I'm over there...
I’ve known people that have worked at the DMV on a temporary basis and they would get in trouble every time they got work done because they made regular people look bad.
The idea is is that if you can not fire a person, department, agency or whatever but you’re forced to use them than the end result will often be bad.
Basically the exact same reasons that most people hate HOAs.
https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/outlays-GDP....
The know the roads are but because it is a physical infrastructure they don't pay attention.
Look at the Post Office issues recently, from your comment.
Welcome to US politics.
When I went to the CA DMV to get my real id, the person helping me was very pleasant and nice. I told her this was in remarkable contrast to my usual DMV experience, and she told me “we’re the new generation.”
There's probably some locations that are chronically busy, but I've had the luck to not use them.
but in this case, they are not 'providing timely and cost-effective services', so is it really a myth?
If the belief is that there is no way that the government could ever provide good services, then the only solution seems to be to get rid of them and have someone else provide good services. The challenge I see with this solution is that private service providers have a very very strong incentive to get people to believe that this is the only solution: it's hard to compete with an effective monopoly.
If the belief is that they could provide good services, then we might see that maybe they don't provide good services for a number of reasons and try to improve them as well.
EXAMPLE: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/biden-cannot-fir...
> The challenge I see with this solution is that private service providers have a very very strong incentive to get people to believe that this is the only solution: it's hard to compete with an effective monopoly.
One political party has been devoted to handicapping government functions at every possible point for at least 40 years, and still some parts of the government continue to function well, so well that people don't even notice or think about them.
People notice the IRS--underfunded on purpose, and with intense lobbying to ensure it is illegal to provide a higher quality of service--and the DMV--underfunded in most states--but not anything else that works cost-effectively, like public schools or the USPS.
We were left with the impression that the USA just doesn’t care about improving these things. So it’s nice to see that the improvements are coming, they just took a while.
I don't think our politicians actually care. They prefer to fight culture wars and pay lip service to real issues.
The anti-statism in the US turns readily into "if you interact with the state, it should be a miserable underfunded experience" rather than "since it has to happen, we're going to make it easy and convenient so as not to consume too much time, money and energy from our citizens"
(unless a libertarian wants to argue that the US should simply not issue passports at all and .. leave it up to private enterprise somehow?)
Intuit already disgusts me with the tax shenanigans, can't imagine passports...
As an intern that knew my way around mail merges, outlook, and excel macros (around 2010), their minds were blown. But also they patted me on the head, gave me a phone, and asked me to physically call every DMV office in CA to ask them how many physical manuals they needed shipped to their office
Nobody wants their passport fees to triple and it wouldn’t be fair. There also isn’t always an incentive to make things more efficient in the short term, so it’s not quite as simple in this case.
I won't take you up on your offer, but I'd recommend for us all to take this concept of a passport and peel it back to it's core and constituent parts. Then be a bit honest and see how we feel about the freedom we supposedly have to roam this Earth free from tyranny and fear.
On one side there is a party that actively believes that "government is the problem", and does its best to prove that by deliberately kneecapping government agencies. Just look at the recent debate over the IRS. I mean, I don't like being taxed anymore than anyone else, but I think a professional, competent IRS is a clear necessity for funding the federal government.
On the other side there is a fear of getting branded "socialist", or just proposing things that will never come to pass, so what we are often left with is these Frankenstein "private-public" partnerships that are usually the worst of all possible worlds. E.g. you have the case where student loans are made by private institutions (or at least non-federal ones), but then then federal government guarantees them. So what we've built up is an incentive structure that makes college as expensive as possible, as student debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and even if it is discharged by the feds, it is the feds who are left holding the bag. Lenders and colleges are just incentivized to charge as much as possible because they are made whole no matter what.
Any new money will get spent on something flashy that will buy votes.
But give them a government job enforcing anything, and they become the polar opposite somehow.
There may be a little of that in my home country, but nowhere near this extreme.
> So it’s nice to see that the improvements are coming, they just took a while.
This is one single improvement, long overdue. I wouldn't extrapolate to anything else.
Agree with your sentiments about the current process and hopes for improvement.
USA is (more or less) a democracy so which party is in power at the time determines what "USA wants".
Had new passport in hand one week later. Regular service.
They can be fast if they want to.
Other countries might require presence or a signed affidavit from both parents when the child is actually flying out of the country.
My mom had custody but her bio dad and his wife kept kidnapping her and taking her across state lines.
At one point the dad was at the airport with a shotgun waiting for them. Police had to sneak my parents onto a plane.
Eventually my mom just walked with for several years at school never letting her out of her sight. That stopped at least one attempt, maybe more.
The US has interests in maintaining the status quo to keep the cheap labour flowing, gun exports, and drugs to maintain the social hierarchy.
If mexico managed to get rid a of a cartel member, the CIA would start working on making a new one
Doesn't solve the issue but you can see how long it'll take and impress old people by knowing where the bus is :)
Though even postal items can arrive in a week as well, with luck.
"The UK will roll out new "iconic" blue passports for a post-Brexit Britain in March — but they will be produced in Poland by a French-Dutch company."
(The UK "blue" is basically black, whereas US passports are actually blue)
https://py.usembassy.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/274/2017/0...
For example if you do 1 passport a day you can't have a dedicated person handling for example issues caused by dual nationalities. If you do 1000 a day you can have someone who just handles that and knows exactly how to do it.
A tech example would be that Google knows exactly how to get a worker a visa as they do it all the time and they're very efficient at it. A little startup might have no idea what they're doing and would be very inefficient at it.
The larger the org the harder it is to change in big ways (at least in my experience)
Even with organizational overhead.
Which is more efficient: Distributing thousands of books by pallet in large, predictable quantities of pallets, to a limited number of Amazon warehouses or sending a single box of 20 books to thousands of bookstores?