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.
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.
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.
I don't think our politicians actually care. They prefer to fight culture wars and pay lip service to real issues.
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".
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.