Parking apps requires registration. I arrive, park my car then
(1) via machine: insert my card into the machine, get ticket, leave
(2) via app: spend 10 minutes registering an account, email, password, phone number, wants verification via email or phone number, wants me to register my credit card and the agree to them selling all my data.
IF on the other hand, they just made it use some kind of common e-cash and no registration, no tracking, no account, I'd be 100% for it.
2/3. Then perhaps the US should elect representatives who will expand Medicare to more people. (Or go back in time and get the public option added back to Obamacare.) Unfortunately, instead we have an increasing number of people using Medicare Advantage, essentially a private wrapper around a public insurance plan, which costs taxpayers 22% more per participant.
4. Are we looking at the same graph? The ratio is almost half of what it was in the '70s. The economy has grown substantially; corporate tax contributions, not so much.
I agree with your sentiment that we should talk about what spending achieves and not just the dollar amounts. Hopefully, now that a lot of things are being cut, more people will appreciate what the government has been quietly providing for us all this time. I just hope that the rebuilding won't be as slow and painful as I fear it will be.
This framing is a bit far from the actual motivating issue underlying the federal "budget" itself. I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country. If you frame it as simply whether to spend money on this or that or if you're getting comparable value to other countries, then it is inevitable for the sides to talk past one another.
I think it is more productive to understand the "federal budget is out of control" argument in its spirit and motivational effectiveness. The simple fact is that many people are unhappy about HOW the money is spent and would rather reserve the choices on how to spend that money to the households.
To respond to your specific callouts, the growth of federal programs in the post WWII era is a fundamental point of contention. Averages going back to the 1970s (pegged to GDP of all things) are somewhat beside the political point. The federal bureaucracy is enormous. The ancillary industries that service the federal budget is prone to grift, graft, and corruption. Anyone who has worked in or near Washington DC knows this.
I believe you are talking about Social Security, which is a bit different from "taking care of the elderly." It is more like a public pension. Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary. Your framing is already misleading but let's go on.
Combining "defense and veterans" is also misleading. I believe somewhere south of 5% goes to Veterans Affairs (if that much). If you think the US government should spend 15% of its budget on its war machine and the inevitable foreign wars that feed the military industrial complex, we can have that discussion. I don't think 15% of budget is an absurd amount to maintain a global empire, but I assure you it won't be cut all that much.
"Taking care of the poor and disabled" is also a misleading number. Much of that is towards the "welfare state" which is a very gameable and corrupt program. Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote. And if you think the corruption only helps the poor, you are ignoring the many services that benefit from a large pool of welfare recipients.
Health care costs in the US are too high, but there are many perverse incentives at work leading to those costs that would be tedious to go into here. You cannot begin to fix them without removing the main sources of cost. One is that the population is unhealthy, but also over-medicalized. If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day. You don't charge that kind of money unless you have someone by the short and curlies.
Corporations are the employers of the workforce. Many are also owned by you and me as common stockholders in our 401k and other savings. You say they are declining as a percentage, but that says nothing about what the optimal percentage is. Too high and you will choke off dynamism and job creation, and drive industry overseas. Who does that benefit?
But all this penny-counting is a distraction. The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie. As the recent political realignment suggests, most people don't want to be governed by this a federal bureaucracy (or civl service, if you prefer) that has its own political interests at odds with the rest of the population. Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption. It's useful to point out "waste" in terms of inefficiency, but more revealing to point out spending at odds with the values of the majority of the population. People may not want their tax dollars spent on projects they find diametrically opposed to what they value. They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network that extends well beyond any benefits that come back to them. It is at those moments that people start to think that the government isn't working for them. Is that so hard to understand?
So far they have found pretty much no resistance. The few judges raising their voices are threatened with jail to make examples. Do not put too much faith in the strength of your institutions.
In the unlikely event my phone dies (hasn’t ever happened in 20 years of having phones) then I’ll go to the desk and ask them to print a boarding pass.
> Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so
This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.
Your argument all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?
And yet if you look at who drives politics and finances all the campaigns in a small town, it's all the usual suspects. Landowners and major employers and sometimes some out of town gigacorp that wants to ban municipal broadband, or open a coal mine, or something of the sort.
For some reason, you never really get some field of a thousand flowers of unique political insights blooming.
Low quality video mixed with some key snapshots and full audio would only be about half a terabyte per year. So even with current pricing, a surveillance state can easily pay $3-10 dollars to store that if it wants to.
No, Federal minimum wage was $1.60/hr from 1968-1974. That's $10.24 in 2024 dollars, or significantly less than what works expect from low wage jobs today. And 1974 was a trough, it was raised multiple times in the late 70's.
I remain frustrated at the extent to which fake info gets distributed in discussions like this. You can look this stuff up! And in fact US workers[1] are wealthier today than they ever have been.
[1] There's a distasteful caveat though: white, male US workers in 1974 were doing much better relative to their peers than the same demographic is today. But minorities and women have done really well. A lot of the concern among the very male HN set over "workers" actually turns out to be an expression of frustration over social change and not economics at all.
I mean, some people are interested in computers. Some people are interested in performance. Some people like to understand how the things they work with and use on a regular basis work at a very fundamental level; it's not like understanding assembly is like trying to understand computing via physics, it is directly a part of the process. I think there was a time when many people found it exciting to learn, still there are some, but now there are so many non-technical programmers working in the field, making web pages, etc., that it is a minority percentage compared earlier times.
Using the 14th Amendment to give corporations free speech rights combined with the belief that campaign contributions are a form of speech is a big part of the problem. The intention of the 14th Amendment had nothing to do with corporations but someone wanted that hack and the consequences have been immense.
If we went back to campaigns being funded by individuals, the pandering to mega-corporations would be significantly reduced. Since wealth disparity exists, it still wouldn't eliminate the influence of wealthy donors but without corporations being able to effectively purchase elected officials, it's likely that wealth concentration would also be reduced.
Yeah, surprise surprise, $13/hour is trending towards the average minimum wage ($11.18/hour). Except without any benefits, and all the expenses that would normally be covered by your employer.
Competition among insurance companies in most other systems (like the Bismarckian system) is far more constrained and so consumes far less capital. A huuuuge portion of health insurance premiums just go toward spending on ads to pull members from other insurers and otherwise retain your own (especially while they are paying into the plan rather than pulling from the plan, at which point you’re happy to lose them).
Everything I've read about pledge and unveil really admire the approach and the results but it didn't seem to have a big impact outside of OpenBSD. It took ~20 years for OpenBSD's CSPRNG to be re-implemented everywhere else maybe we're operating on a similar timeline here.
I was just going to say, malpractice coverage and very litigious patients/legal system supporting this with high damages is a very USA thing. I know a few cases where where malpractice payout was miniscule compared to damage done in my country in EU (eg. 20 year old got his leg amputated because of malpractice during routine appendix surgery, got less than 1m€ after 12 years in court, and initially was going to get nothing)
(1) via machine: insert my card into the machine, get ticket, leave
(2) via app: spend 10 minutes registering an account, email, password, phone number, wants verification via email or phone number, wants me to register my credit card and the agree to them selling all my data.
IF on the other hand, they just made it use some kind of common e-cash and no registration, no tracking, no account, I'd be 100% for it.