[meow1032]

I have a feeling that the lack of faith that Americans have in their government ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. I work closely with a lot of government employees, and it really seems like 95% of the work is about avoiding "boondoggles" -- i.e. highly visible failures. This is because boondoggles can be used as political tools, and ultimately, politicians are more concerned about getting reelected than getting anything done. The upshot of this, is that they would rather risk low visibility failures way more than high visibility failures. As an example, about 10 years ago, they were looking to install wifi in one of the buildings that I work in so they bought a bunch of routers. One of the higher ups wanted to assure that this wouldn't cause any security issues so they ordered audit after audit after audit. Eventually they just stopped trying and the building still doesn't have wifi, and they wasted all the money on those routers and audits. The problem is that they don't even have any sensitive data or data to be secured on that network. It's like this for everything. I think a better system would be to tolerate some very visible failures vs basically guaranteed non-visible failures.

[AnthonyMouse]

Federal receipts as a percentage of GDP have been basically the same since WWII. (Before that they were significantly less.) One of the reasons for this is that we started spending around the "maximum size of government" level during WWII for obvious reasons, i.e. the point past which raising taxes doesn't increase government revenues because they're offset by shrinking the economy, and never receded from there because there was never anyone who could cause it to stop and had the incentive to. What changes is really only who gets the money.

So all the spending is effectively zero sum. The real tax rate never really goes up or down very much, so if you want to do something, you have to find something else to not do.

All of the incentives then fall directly out of that. If you're getting money and nobody is paying attention to you then the most important thing is to have them continue to not pay attention to you so that you can keep getting the money. Meanwhile, if you want to get money for something, find someone else to make look bad so you can justify taking it from them.

Obviously this doesn't produce good results, but the problem is structural. The populist reforms made in the first half of the 20th century deleted all of the checks and balances on federal spending (compare how much of the budget of EU countries is the EU itself), which requires government programs to compete based on political power rather than merit because you can't just say that a program is worth the money, you have to find something else to displace whose advocates are weak enough to defeat because the trough is already full. Which has little to do with whether your program is better than theirs.

Imagine if we spent half as much money but the reduction came out of the likes of ludicrous military boondoggles and de facto subsidies for pharma companies.

[Hnaomyiph]

Sounds like how I start projects. Try and figure out every last detail, get hung up on doing all this preparation, learning, etc and eventually give up because I’m tired of the process or things aren’t turning out as perfect as I’d like them. Recently I’ve been trying to follow the ‘move fast and break things’ mentality, albeit more of a ‘just try moving a bit and things breaking is ok’ mentality.

[romski]

The occasional failure scenario is well captured by private companies.