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@interfluidity for 50 years a great beast has been hovering over our nation engorging itself, growing ever larger and shitting more and more all over the people. Trump and Musk are disembowling that beast, but those who love wallowing in the beasts excreta and live to feed it, are mourning the process.

@Phil do you know how much, say, Federal government employment has grown as a share of the population?

@interfluidity Doesnt matter, federal spending as a percentage of GDP has grown steadily since 1948. And this number UNDERSTATES the problem since federal spending is included in GDP, if you look at federal spending in relation to non government GDP, its grown to be enourmous. and its intrusive, wasteful and corrupt.

Regarding the number of people, regardless of percentages, (which is a bogus measure since many positions have nothing to do with the size of the population) its way to many

@Phil the share of the workforce Federally employed has dramatically shrunk, because people making errors like yours have been around since the 1970s. that has increased the cost of the Federal government, as contractors charge much more and over time perform much worse (as they don’t preserve institutional knowledge). 1/

@Phil the fiscal footprint of the Federal government is down to health care, social security, and military. USAID, for example, is a rounding error. Trump has promised to preserve and protect SS and Medicare. Should we go after VA? Medicaid for the poor? Dramatically shrink the military? 2/

@Phil There are things we could do! If we reformed the patent system, made use of compulsory licensing for drugs, we could reduce hundreds of billions of expenditure. we’d have to fund more pharma research publicly, but that’s be a bargain. What’s Trump doing? Oh, wait. He’s killing NIH and NSF, again, things that cost a rounding error, but with enormous payoffs. 3/

@Phil Even on his own terms, on your terms, these guys prejudices don’t address the problem they claim to be after. It’s just ignorant hostility blowing up hobbyhorses. Shithole country stuff. /fin

@interfluidity You just make stuff up. The enourmous payoff from NIH is Covid. Whoopee!

And you don't reduce expenditures by funding stuff. It has never worked and never will, bucause the feds are too stupid to fund the right stuff.

they are staffed by people who think like you and ignore reality.

@Phil Federal workers outside the military is less than 2% of the workforce. Almost every new development in pharma and medicine begins with NIH/NSF funded research. Even very neoliberal economists like Benjamin Jones who study this stuff acknowledge that basic research funding is very high return, mistargeting is an issue but the unexhausted benefits of basic research overwhelm that drag, the main constraint is quantitative. 1/

@Phil You should be careful what you wish for. You do have allies in government now. You may get the collapse you think you want. You won’t like it. Failed states are shithole countries. Sure, you’ll pay a smaller share of your income to the state, to “welfare”, whatever. But it’ll be a smaller share of a smaller income, and you’ll face a lot of new and miserable costs, financial and in quality-of-life terms. /fin

@interfluidity It can not be worse.

@Phil I can't imagine a statement more obviously and foolishly wrong than this one.

I hope you don't get proven wrong and can continue to enjoy these luxury resentments, because I don't want to have to live in the reality that disproves you.

@interfluidity

You obviously have no faith in state or local governments.

@Phil I am fine with state and local governments. But if my native Maryland were an independent country, it's be a small, weak, powerless country and I'd sure hope it was in some kind of union that could protect and pursue its interests. (If my current Florida were becoming an independent country, I'd be a refugee somewhere else before trusting its current government.)

@Phil I do wish local governments had the same kind of power against state governments that US state governments have against the Federal government.

@Phil I am glad that you at least admit you are destroying what exists on the basis of what ultimately is an optimistic faith about what would happen if we just shook the etch-a-sketch.

It would however be a catastrophe if people for whom hope and such faith were their only plan took control of government.

Oh, wait. Fuck.

@Phil I'd love to see the methodology behind these "stats" that enrage you. Of course there are cases of Federal workers hitting porn sites. You'll find cases of any class of desktop workers hitting porn sites, unless employer surveillance is known to be very strict and punishment known to be severe.

You are succumbing to pure propaganda that reinforces your prejudices. I'm sure all those postal workers are masturbating to their phones while walking to your doorstep with your mail.

@interfluidity You are the one falling for propaganda and maniuplation of statistics.

This graph is meaningless.
1. The overall percantage of the US workforce has also fallen as a percentage of the population overtime.
2. As a result of productivity gains, the private sector workforce, per $million of GDP has also fallen significantly.
3. The "decrease in the federal workforce as a percentage of the population is nowhere near what it should be.
4. This graph is cherry picking the years.

@Phil This graph is all the years FRED has. I didn't cherry pick anything. Here's Federal employment to labor force. Also no editing of dates, just what FRED has.

@interfluidity
An amazing thing happened in the 1970's
The labor force participation rate in the US skyrocked due to women entering the workforce in huge numbers.
At that point the federal workforce should have been cut nearly in half.

Instead, the portion of the wealth the country generates, that it consumes has grown.
From 3% in 1900 to over 24% today. (though about a quarter of it is borrowed from future generations.)

@Phil you don't like population as baseline, even though population is what the government serves. you think share of workforce should have collapsed even faster than it did, though it collapsed at an extraordinary rate during the 1970s, because of women's entry into the workforce.

it feels like like maybe these are arguments looking to justify a present conclusion, rather than a conclusion base on intelligible arguments.

@Phil I wonder what contemporary countries you do not consider shitholes spend substantially less on government than the US. It's a very different world than 1900, everywhere. In 1900, most people still subsisted on land near where they lived. Under contemporary agriculture practices, most of us would starve absent some other basis for a claim to that food. 2/

@Phil The "higher productivity jobs" that came later did not arrive in sufficient numbers purely spontaneously. Absent the broadening of purchasing power created by the Federal government pursuing public goods more expansively and direct redistributions of purchasing power like Social Security, much of the country would have starved, begged, or been wards of private charity. If you want 19th C govt, you need 19th C labor intensive agricultue. /fin

@interfluidity
You give credit to government where credit is not due,
they're just ascertions.
the productivity came, not as a result of government, but in spite of it.
It's a result of technology and industrial revolution and inovation.

Government mostly hinders these things. I know this, I live it every day.

@Phil "Productivity" depends on people with purchasing power paying for stuff. When people were no longer necessary on farms, sure, now richer farmers were willing to pay more for new things, but they were a small fraction of those made poor. Factories could produce tons of new things, but who would buy them? Factory workers, said Ford. But those were never enough, and now they are robots too. Without a state purchasing broadly, sure we can produce a lot, but we have few buyers. 1/

@Phil Why do no states of the kind you say you want actually exist in the world? Why is the correlation between prosperity and govt share of GDP, both in a formal GDP sense but also in an informal, is this a prosperous place sense, so resolutely and obviously positive among developed countries? https://peterlevine.ws/?p=23198 2/

@Phil i am sorry for whatever experience you are living. i have friends who've had shitty (state) government jobs that have turned them resolutely MAGA-ish. but individual workplace experiences don't overwhelm the aggregate experience of the 20th C (only government can ensure full employment), and the contemporary experience, size-of-state tends to correlated positively with prosperity. 3/

@Phil @Phil there is lots of important work that should be done to improve the quality of government! obviously, if quality of expenditure is shitty enough, whatever forces drive the correlation of prosperity with government would break down. i'm first to agree that US governance is particularly pathological and incompetent. just read @Alon. 4/

@Phil if that were the case, you'd think there would be these brilliant outliers that have shaken off the parasite. But in fact they don't exist. The closest you can come is states like Singapore, which seem to have a low government share of GDP, but instead of taxes they require forced "private" savings in a central provident fund, from which you purchase health and housing services on a sliding scale. They synthesize what in most places is public as a compulsory notional private.