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i think a pretty good, pretty accurate, way of explaining to less news-obsessed people what’s going on is Trump and Musk are turning the US into a “shithole country”, as the man himself once put it.
@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/
@interfluidity
superficial. As an example, nearly 90% of all money spent on welfare is consumed by the beast, crumbs actually go to the poor.
USAID is only one small venue through which money is spent on corruption/waste.
Federal workers are over paid, underworked, and overly self important.
Yes we should go after everything, I'd be happy to see the entire thing collapse.
What percentage of my life should I have to work for other people to reap the benefit? At present it's about half.
@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/
@interfluidity 2% is too many. Have you seen the stats on how much time is spent watching porn on federal computers?
.5% should be just fine.
@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.