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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/

@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 The Federal debt is not money borrowed from future generations, any more than GMs debt is. It's the capital structure of the government and the base of private sector financial assets. That doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about it -- the main problem with the Federal debt is it compels the government to make current payments to disproportionately already rich people. 1/

@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/

@interfluidity
you have corrolation and cause mixed up.

As societies become prosperous, their governments grow, like parasites grow the more somebody eats.

@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.

@interfluidity
The US used to be such an outlier and it's looking hopeful that it will be again.

@Phil The US will have to recover the capacity to actively govern and superintend its economy to become a hopeful outlier again. That will require investment in a capable state. Your path will bring "strength" to government only in policing, in crushing internal dissent. That is the worst kind of state. You will find that you, and your business, don't like it either. /fin

@interfluidity
We will see and i will gloat.

@Phil I hope we won't, but if we do, I promise I won't gloat and say I told you so. We'll have to work hand-in hand to, um, build back better.