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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 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/
@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/
@interfluidity The words government and investment do not belong in the same sentance.
Govt takes money out of the economy consumes most of it, then dumps a little of it back in on the otherside of the bucket This is not investing.
It's a hinderence to investment. Govt is an expense.
Some are necessary, but most is unnecessary and a drag.
We employ 58 people. When the business makes money 25% is re-invested in it. 25% comes to us. 50% goes to government.
if not for that we have 200 emp.
@Phil Government is absolutely investment. It's not always the most romantic investment. Maintaining the pipes and sewers in your business establishment may not be exciting, but it's necessary and it's absolutely investment. So it is with government. If the government didn't have its take, you'd have zero employees, no roads, no court, no common currency, and widespread banditry. You are getting a bargain, even with the not-so-great quality f government we currently have.
@interfluidity
People had business and employees when the federal government was 3% of GDP, so this is just made up bull shit, fed to easy marks by the very government whose dick they suck.
@Phil people traveled from Europe to America before the 20th Century, so it's bullshit for easy marks that airplanes matter.
my friend, if you are unlucky your theories will be tested. for your sake as much of mind, i'll try to limit the likelihood, though. for my kid's sake, i'll look for alternatives elsewhere.
@interfluidity
Every time a government has shrunk, their economy has thrived. It's happening in Argentina right now. And has happed many times.
There is INSURMOUNTABLE evidence that big government crushes freedom and prosperity.
You have to be completely snowed, or brainwashed, or willfully blind to not see it.
@Phil You my friend are completely snowed and completely brainwashed.
Which countries provide the highest quality of life, including material prosperity, to the broadest group of people? The Nordics, by a long mile. Small government is not the key. Argentina has been a basket case for decades, and I don't know what the result of its current experiments will be, but whatever happens the mechanism will not be "small government universally good".
> The Nordics, by a long mile. Small government is not the key.
To be fair, Norway specifically does this from under the US nuclear umbrella, and funds it by selling oil to the US.
> Finland,
I am not in Finland, but there are a lot of Finns on fedi, and I have heard (I'd like to stress that this is second-hand) that the view is that resisting the Soviet occupation was a Pyrrhic victory in the sense that their current foreign and economic policy are largely driven by whether the US or Russia is applying more pressure.
> The US nuclear umbrella is globally important big government.
The globe doesn't fund it, though; the globe protests it, incessantly carries out online activism about American elections on American platforms, etc. The umbrella is one of the tendrils of US hegemony, and most of the people in charge have been interested in wielding this hegemony to run the world. Nuland said that her goal with Ukraine was to "give Russia its own Afghanistan"; hardly in the interest of the Ukrainian people to be used as a quagmire. It's not in the interest of Americans, either.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_address (I'm quoting the reading copy; I don't know if there are substantial differences in the sections I quoted):
> AMERICAN MAKERS of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. [...] THIS CONJUNCTION of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. [...] IN THE COUNCILS of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
The feeling here is a very American non-interventionist sentiment, but in government, it's split between that and globalist hard-liners. Most regular people don't want to continue the sugar cane war that Teddy Roosevelt started with Brazil a century ago and the only thing keeping it going is that most people don't know about it. You ask almost any South American how they feel about US intervention, they've got different opinions.
> Whatever free riding is in that hadn't translated to Nordic levels of well-being in Greece or the UK.
The UK maintains its own nuclear arsenal.
> The Nordics are obviously doing some things right.
Libertas inaestimabilis res est. I'm glad to have what prosperity we do have, but cattle have a very high standard of living: I'd rather be free than a rich serf.
You know, if you wanna talk about standard of living, Liechtenstein has a very high one and has the legal right to abolish their government, cities have the right to secede.
07--the_3rd_world.mp3
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@dcc @Phil @p spending money badly is not "socialist policy".
The US spends as much public money as most social democracies do on healthcare, and spends as much again privately. That's not the fault of "socialist policy". Universal health care works great many places. It's the fault of private sector incumbents blocking any sane arrangement of the health care system so they can continue to suck at the teat.
More* also no Universal health care is terrible. The reason why alphabetical sucks in America is because there is no "private sector" healthcare. Insurance companies, hospitals, and the us government. I don't care to explain the full scam to you since its at least 3 paragraph's complicated
This is true, the more government has gotten invollved, the more costly anything becomes. (education, healthcare, transportation, etc)
Where governments spread it around, they are subsudised by the US or innovation is styfled.
If it weren't for corruption in government, no such blocks would be possible.
Universal health care all comes with problems. All healthcare has to be rationed in one way or another, its an unavoidable reality.
plus a disproportionate percentage of innovation in healthcare comes from the US and there is a cost to that and government makes that cost higher.
I would have to se extroidinary evidence of this extroidinary claim to believe it.
> spending money badly is not "socialist policy".
Over-regulation and safety nets are. "Too big to fail" is.
> Universal health care works great many places.
The Dutch have been trying to figure out how to make killing yourself more appealing for years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarco_pod ) and have a de facto legalization of infant euthanasia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_Protocol ). People don't jump the Canadian border to avail themselves of the doctors there, and the NHS has been complicit
Another big-government foreign policy maneuver, overseen by USAID and probably driven by the CIA, was the forced sterilization of 300,000 native Peruvians by its universal healthcare system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_sterilization_in_Peru .
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Pushing abortion and MAID at specific groups is anti-racist AF, dawg!
@p @dcc @Phil @interfluidity You don't get universal healthcare without eugenics unless resources become infinite.
The only debate is whether or not eugenics can be a good thing.
@Cyrillic @dcc @Phil @p @interfluidity To me, ideally it would be more like selectively subsidized healthcare, the same way Russia currently subsidizes the building of families.
If you're providing value and get in a car wreck or something, there's no reason your country shouldn't help.
Maybe if we're being nice, it can be free or cheap to disabled people if they get a vasectomy or something.
But obviously we're just getting into fantasy land shit at that point. I have the money to cover my medical bills so Idrc.
In many circles "Go sign up for Canadian Healthcare" is = to "Kill yourself faggot."
They're good at keeping you healthy when you're young and don't need healthcare. Our small town in Montana - just a few miles from Medicine Hat Alberta - has the sort of hospital you only seen in huge cities. Lots of specialists.
It's packed full year around with Canadian Snowbirds who don't want to die of cancer waiting for an operable tumor to be removed.
> They're good at keeping you healthy when you're young and don't need healthcare.
Yeah, that's what I hear.
> It's packed full year around with Canadian Snowbirds who don't want to die of cancer waiting for an operable tumor to be removed.
I hear a lot of people go up to buy their meds in Canada but nobody sneaks up there to sit in a hospital lobby under a sign that says "Suicide booth: no waiting!"
It's like the firework stands and casinos 50 feet inside the Indian Reservation.
> It's like the firework stands and casinos 50 feet inside the Indian Reservation.
Ha, I drove through Oklahoma. Even the gas stations!