It's hard to take these apocalyptic premonitions about federal government reduction seriously.
See for instance: https://www.investopedia.com/gilded-age-7692919
Musk and his ilk are interested in looting the treasury. It has nothing to do with government efficiency.
It's not like comparing apples with oranges, it's literally comparing a bacteria with country.
You're also forgetting the tremendous amount of social unrest during that time because of that inequality (and as a result, the workers rights we enjoy today which largely arose from that period, and the Great Depression, though there have been great efforts to erode them).
I mean, there was technological and medical improvements, sure, and continued urbanization.
But that’s… those are some of our nations most shameful, inequal, racist years in its entire history. The federal government as it exists now was just getting started after we realized we needed it thanks to the civil war, and many local democratic systems were completely broken. More relevantly, we didn’t have cancer researchers, epidemiologists, the NSF, or, most relevantly, nuclear weapons.
Finally, a HUGE majority of the costs of the federal government are social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense spending. I doubt even the biggest libertarian on here could advocate cutting any those with a straight face, unless they’re young and don’t know anyone older than them, and/or advocates isolationism.
Regardless, this exact story makes it clear that the goal isn’t cutting the size of the government at all — it’s politicizing the civil service, and bringing it under the exclusive control of a supreme executive. They’re not exactly ashamed of it!
Who says I don't advocate cutting those too, if you're asking? And I am grey haired, not sure about the ageism.
Majority is just a collection of tiny minorities, in this case my minority opinion partially aligns. As it turns out minority isn't aways what you think.
https://napolitannews.org/posts/19-percent-of-voters-know-wh...
(PDF) https://napolitannews.org/assets/pdfs/67633dc0cced7-gcm24-12...
They moved the goalposts to what fraction of voters were questionably polled to know about DOGE, because my claim is pretty much irrefutable. Then when I use their own criteria suddenly we cry foul that I used their own goal posts that they shifted to.
I was attempting to find evidence for your claim, and I found that survey. If you can find other surveys, please share, as I am seeing this being repeated a lot.
Are you suggesting their creation was improper? Or suggesting constituency advocation would make it proper?
Either way you might draw uncomfortable conclusions.
I think plenty of people would like to cut Medicare and Medicaid spending, not by reducing service, but by cleaning up the unbelievably broken medical system in the US.
As President Musk said, “that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity”
And, sadly, I won't take "Trump won the election and then put Elon in charge of cutting stuff, so clearly Americans support that decision" as evidence instead of direct, scientific surveys. For one thing, much less than half of the voting public voted affirmatively for Trump; for another, I hope we can all agree that people on all sides very often vote for reasons very loosely related to the candidate's actual positions on policy.
Apologies if I'm rude, really grateful that such convos are happening on HN in the first place! Separate from "would we be better off with or without the New Deal welfare state and/or the entire federal government", I think this is an appropriate place to agree on empirical facts about the current situation. And "that idea is extremely unpopular" is such a fact, IMHO.
See: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v81n4/v81n4p1.html
They’ve been fed a lie that the system is failed and believe it.
This isn’t my opinion. I’m a widow and survivors benefits for my children has significantly eased the burden of taking care of them. I’m strongly in favor of expanding these programs and soaking the rich to pay for them. Instead they’re getting their money, and someday find themselves on the wall.
The poor can gain something at least temporarily by taking it from the rich. Another less violent option is mutually beneficial voluntary interactions.
The government told a bunch of rich people that the incredibly valuable people they owned were no longer their property, and gave money and land to the people who previously had nothing because they hadn't been considered people. That's what kicked off your Gilded Age
If you're ignoring that huge economic event in your analysis of the economics of the latter half of the 19th century, trying to replicate it today is going to be very rough.
Given your other replies in this thread, you're not interested in arguing honestly and I'm not going to continue engaging.
Emancipation isn't Marxist, historically or conceptually.
> That's what kicked off your Gilded Age
Absolutely not. "Railroads were the major growth industry," with industrialisation and immigration being the era's economic drivers [1]. "The South remained economically devastated after the American Civil War" and remained a drag on the American economy throughout most of the Gilded Age.
Nothing about that era resembles Marxism, and I’d guess you’d struggle to tell the difference between Karl Marx and the Marx Brothers.
Reconstruction was shut down. Slaves went from assets to contract services. Jim Crow ensured that there was no movement upward. For the aristocracy, they were hurt by the depredation of war but recovered stronger than before under the new system.
The gilded age was about railroads. The south with their feudalist system was a backwater producing mostly raw material. They moved out of irrelevance because social control allowed them to control the Senate for decades.
It also had nothing to do with Marxism. There was no redistribution of land as in social revolutions in other countries (France, Russia, China).