>In some areas, US administrative capacity remains world-beating, most obviously the military, which enjoys bipartisan and popular support, and vast investments of resources.
Haha, the military is not well-administered. It is well-administered for a military, but things go on that would never be allowed in a private company. Remember the two recent naval accidents? The gang they found operating out of a fort? The fact that on-base accidents are the leading cause of casualties?
Yeah, someone with the public purse should have a much higher degree of accountability than someone who is spending their own money. In OP's examples, they were much less accountable.
In both public and private organizations the US suffers from people being less careful with other people's money or property than they would their own.
I think it can be made to have a high degree of accountability. There are a variety of budget approaches that can change the current nightmare.
I really like the Singapore model, where government employees are highly compensated, have built a culture of efficiency, and there are repercussions if they don't deliver.
and yet is the us the worst example what happens when healthcare is privatised. higher costs for patients, regardless for insurance; more sick people, because the go less to the doc for an check up and the highest prices for meds, because they are unregulated.
He didn’t say it’s “well administered” (how well or poorly administered it is is multifaceted and certainly arguable). He said it has high “administrative capacity”. For example, the US military was able to deliver billions of dollars of equipment to Ukraine in a matter of weeks, sending dozens to hundreds of planeloads every day across an ocean, as part of a complicated worldwide supply chain. They did not need to ask permission for this (except from the President), run public hearings in advance, go through court battles, etc., but could just get started right away.
Something is going to be the leading cause of casualties.
In peacetime, it doesn't seem outrageous that that would be on-base accidents (especially if that includes automobile accidents and injuries during training exercises).
The US was in two wars for nearly 2 decades, to say nothing of various other special operations, and accidents were a leading cause of deaths and permanent disability for a large number of those years.
Readiness is important, but IMO, the Army does a ton of unnecessary and unnecessarily dangerous training for capabilities that are almost never needed (jumping, in particular, but also certain types of combat training). Most importantly, this destroys people's physical health for no reason. Secondarily, this also costs the taxpayer enormous sums of money (each permanent disability retirement for a 30 year old is many millions of dollars).
The other branches might be more reasonable. Not sure.
> Readiness is important, but IMO, the Army does a ton of unnecessary and unnecessarily dangerous training for capabilities that are almost never needed.
Readiness is precisely about training for things that will almost never happen. Until they do.
That observation doesn't justify all risks. To reduce to absurdity, clearly we shouldn't train for war by running war games in which soldiers actually shoot and kill each other, even though there's a compelling argument that this would probably be a very good way to maximize readiness...
IMO, the number of jumps the Army does each year is far in excess of what is necessary for readiness.
No. I'm not sure how I would get that research, or if it's even possible. The problem with preparing for war is that war is fairly uncommon, and even when it happens, certain activities are rare enough with such a huge number of alternate causalities for failure that you might not have enough data for a useful natural experiment.
What I can say with some confidence is that there are perverse organizational incentives for some highly accident-prone training exercises. So, even if these exercises are required for readiness, that's not the (only) reason they're done in such high numbers.
>>>I'm not sure how I would get that research, or if it's even possible.
Military Operations Research is a huge field. I like to use Google Scholar, which has many Masters Theses from military grad students, etc... Here's a few results to walk you "on target" if you want to continue to dig:
Of course not combat training in general. A few specific and specifically injury-prone activities. Sorry for the poor wording.
FWIW, this isn't some crazy take. "Maybe the number and severity of injuries due to this activity is reducing readiness more than the resulting experience is increasing readiness" is a known trade-off.
Outfitting people in poor-fitting gear and then having them do unnatural exercises asks for permanent injury; this is stuff the military seems to do a lot and a constant stream of partially disabled people come out.
I don't expect that number to ever go to 0, but I'd hope it could be smaller.
> You really think the military should forgo combat training?
This is not what anyone said. I'm in strong favor of more realistic training.
Of course, even this may be unnecessary for many. E.g., read the uncle comment's anecdote about ROTC.
> there was a woman on a guaranteed nursing scholarship who was probably about 4'10", 80 pounds, and she tore both ACLs from all the marching with 90 pounds of gear.
>there was a woman on a guaranteed nursing scholarship who was probably about 4'10", 80 pounds, and she tore both ACLs from all the marching with 90 pounds of gear.
Whose idiocy was at fault here? I don't honestly think the military wanted people like this in the first place.
Ridiculously bad take. The military desperately wants good nurses. The military also wants people who will follow orders even when those orders may cause harm to one's self. The military doesn't have a particularly compelling need for all (or even the majority) of its nurses to carry large packs for long distances.
It seems to be the instructors' fault. They are supposed to know what they're doing and should not be assigning excercises that someone is physically incapable of performing.
If they raised concerns and were overruled, then it's that person's fault also.
Lol. Yah, wrecking skilled officer candidates -- especially nurses-- by giving them exercises that enlisted infantry struggle at when you have a massive nursing shortage in the military is awesome.
Meanwhile at the next door ROTC program it's all ridiculously soft and drill.
He has a point in some areas. Combat jumps for example. They are largely unnecessary and to be honest, may be a relic of the past. Warfare has gotten advanced enough where putting troops on the ground via a C130 and parachute may be obsolete in most instances. Now, small insertions of Special forces may not be, but large scale 101st airborne ones may be. But they tend to do a lot higher altitude jumps of a different kind.
It is like the Marine Corp who just disbanded their armored division and gave all the tanks to the Army. If an army can put a javelin in the hands of enough soldiers, are tanks really that effective anymore?
Now this isn't to say all combat training it useless, but some may be. Some of those things we are doing may be relics of the past and no longer necessary. We seem to train like the next world war is going be just like World War 2, but I imagine the next world war will look a whole lot different.
I found this comment a bit unfairly grayed out when I first saw it and want to add some nuance to this, as a person who left the Army due to physical disability caused by training rather than combat.
Training is the core of what we do, and extremely important no matter what. But, the nature of the training often doesn't match the real job. For instance, I remember at LDAC, a required ROTC summer course where you get evaluated and stack ranked prior to being given a job, there was a woman on a guaranteed nursing scholarship who was probably about 4'10", 80 pounds, and she tore both ACLs from all the marching with 90 pounds of gear. Forcing cadets that you know for certain are going into healthcare fields to train as infantry is no doubt harmful and unnecessary. At the time, women weren't even legally able to try becoming infantry, but still forced to do the training.
Personally, I served in a combat job, but even then, a lot of what we did felt more like hazing and dick measuring contests than skills-related. For instance, in a Cav unit, we were all required to do spur rides until passing, which involved activities like carrying telephone poles up and down hilly trails for 12 miles at 3 in the morning after not sleeping for 48 hours. I have no doubt doing stuff like that contributed to the spinal degeneration I eventually lost two years of my life to after leaving the services. Nonetheless, being a large, physical capable person who played and excelled at sports my entire life, I enjoyed that type of thing at the time. In retrospect, though, it sure looks wasteful and stupid. The repeated forced sleep deprivation is especially egregious, as it seems like the top contributor to all the accidents, and as far as I understood, training in a sleep deprived state doesn't actually improve your ability to deal with sleep deprivation in theater. At best, it helps to weed out and select who can and can't naturally deal with it, but it isn't really trainable.
Whether a particular unit is itself necessary seems a question independent of whether its training is necessary.
At this point, the US military has determined that having paratroop units available is a useful capability in war. Arguing whether that tool is still useful is completely valid, and I would hope goes for anything: strategies, tactics, personnel, armaments, vehicles, equipment, etc.
However, once decided that a particular tool is necessary, it seems to me unquestionable that they should be kept in a ready, prepared, capable state. I suppose that too, can be debated, insofar as what constitutes "ready, prepared, capable," but if we've decided that our military needs people to jump out of planes, I would hope it goes without question that those people need to practice jumping out of planes.
shorter: training and necessity of a unit seem to be orthogonal concepts
I agree with this and will add that the cost of the risk of having to pay to support a disabled veteran for life needs to be considered part of the whole deal. If you can't afford the servicemember, properly trained and properly insured, then don't "buy" them at all.
>> Arguing whether that tool is still useful is completely valid... I suppose that too, can be debated, insofar as what constitutes "ready, prepared, capable"
Okay. I argue such and debate such. Very clearly. In my original post. What is the point of this reply?
> If you can't afford the servicemember, properly trained and properly insured, then don't "buy" them at all.
Okay. Clearly yes. Now find me a servicemember who would rather have medical retirement over avoiding permanent disability. That's the main reason we should not be risking life and limb unnecessarily. You know, like I said. In my original post. What is the post of the reply?
This knee-jerk need to defend the Army on full display in this thread is, if we're honest, is the primary difference between the military and most of the civilian government: not superior administrative competence, but mostly just better PR.
When you say unnecessary training it's not clear to me whether you're making a general statement or talking about details.
For example if a servicemember volunteers for paratrooper school and gets badly hurt on a jump then I'm going to assume the training was necessary because that's what the school is for. The people at the school are experts and it's a waste of military resources to put a trained servicemember out of commission permanently and the school will be held responsible so everyone has a strong incentive to be careful. However it sounded sort of like you were saying a paratrooper unit doesn't need to practice jumping so much because they'll probably never need to do that.
On the other hand if you're saying that the military should more aggressively investigate safer training techniques where that can be done with no loss of quality then I'm all for that. Maybe some training can be done with VR simulations in a wind tunnel before you actually send people up in a plane, awesome.
Also I'm sure you support veteran care, I was just adding that if the military decides some unit is necessary, then they need to train that unit appropriately, and (here's my part) they need to bear the full cost of any potential injury. Given how badly veterans are sometimes treated I felt that should be said.
Re: jumping in particular, my point is more nuanced: that we train too many paratroopers and also there are too many dangerous jumps for which the readiness ROI isn't worth the additional injuries.
Those two are related and form a vicious cycle. The more people you injure, the the more you have train. The more jumps you require for minimal readiness, the more folks eventually refuse to re-up to even leave the Army as they watch their friends drop like flies to spinal injuries.
Jumps, and dangerous jumps in particular, are a huge point of contention in the Army because the Army likes to screw soldiers by claiming that spinal injuries from jumps aren't service-related.
Then there's a really long tail of physical fitness training that has more to do with macho signalling than actual readiness. Plenty of discussion down-thread.
There is nuance and trade-off, but there's a LOT of training in the military that does little or nothing for readiness and contributes massively to injury rates. I think the Army is so far to the "stupid" end of that spectrum that the nuanced conversation doesn't make much sense to me.
Note that "well-administered for a military, but not well-administered in absolute terms" can be a feature rather than a bug, as long as the military is able to attract and utilize better human capital in times of trouble. I agree that our military has room for improvement, but I think it's fine that our most effective generalist administrators tend to be uninterested in the military when there are no dire threats.
> The fact that on-base accidents are the leading cause of casualties?
What exactly do you expect here? You'd be happier if the leading cause were heart disease or warfare? The point is to be so good at everything else and so healthy that the only thing that can hurt you is error. That's success. The rank order of accidents isn't important. Only total quantity.
> An article on the decline of state capacity. Not a mention of affirmative action, disparate impact, or the ability to fire people. Liberals are committed to egalitarianism, simply unable to recognize massive differences in competence between humans.
> “we don’t invest in administration, partly due to ideological opposition to the ability of government do its job.”
> Yes, people don’t want to invest in government because we’ve seen what kind of people work in it since they unionized and we banned written exams.
> “In some areas, US administrative capacity remains world-beating, most obviously the military, which enjoys bipartisan and popular support, and vast investments of resources.”
> Yes, and it is the one place that uses IQ tests, and it has a lot of white males at the top.
> Liberals are committed to egalitarianism, simply unable to recognize massive differences in competence between humans.
I don't believe this is true at all. Many socialists do vote for the Democratic Party as the lesser of two evils, but liberals are not committed to egalitarianism at all costs. They have used the Federal bureaucracy as a jobs program since the end of the civil war. Similarly, the mitilary tends to be a jobs program for the more conservative parts of the country. Efficiency and performance has rarely ever been the goal, employment has.
Meritocracies can by tyrannical. Organizations select for sociopaths to rise to the top. People are unaware of their biases. Minorities - in race, gender, viewpoint, or along some other axis - are marginalized and it has a real cost to the organization and society. Things like affirmative action are an attempt to recognize and correct these biases. No one is looking to fill a quota except those who don’t understand the problem to begin with. And if you think the military is any more efficient a bureaucracy than any other government sector I have a bridge to sell you.
This guy is a talker, not a doer. The top demographic is 50% above the next highest in median performance[0]. So drastically hyper-performant that the American people are terrified enough to restrict their immigration.
If he believed in a meritocracy he would permit them to come. But he's actually one of the terrified ones. And a fear of being out-competed naturally lends itself to this sort of rhetoric.
I did a bit of googling around. As best I can tell, the person you're talking about wants the US to have more high-skilled immigration and is, himself, an immigrant.
He's talker class: psychology, international relations. You can tell because of his conclusion. The demographic he chose as exhibiting top performance is at median half-productivity of top-of-the-line, which just coincidentally aligns with his own.
But since the conclusion is staring him in the face at a +50% effect size, I'm glad he can connect the dots.
If the Government payed compelling wages they'd get top talent willing to make the change. Personally, why would I want to move from a FAANG to a government job just to deal with more B.S., 50%+ less compensation, and drastically slower career growth that's based on years of service.
It’s not only about pay. The government is in fact legally prohibited from trying to get top talent, because the methods to distinguish top talent are typically found to have disparate impact on the non-top talent, and so run afoul of civil rights laws. Indeed, the one branch of government that is distinguished by OP as still somewhat competent and capable, the military, is the only one that’s using IQ tests (ASVAB etc) in hiring.
> "... is the only one that’s using IQ tests (ASVAB etc) in hiring."
Do you realize how incredibly low the bar is for the ASVAB? I got very close to the highest possible score back when I was 17. Far higher than the highest requirement for any job in the Army. I am, at best, moderately above average in IQ. IMO the requirement of a college degree for some jobs is a stronger IQ discriminator than the ASVAB.
They're less concerned with getting top talent among the enlisted men -- that's what officers are for -- and instead want to avoid really dumb soldiers. That's what the minimum cut-off scores are for. There was an experiment during the Vietnam war where they waived these restrictions [1], and the results were a disaster for both the army and the low-scoring people who were let in.
> The government is in fact legally prohibited from trying to get top talent, because the methods to distinguish top talent are typically found to have disparate impact on the non-top talent, and so run afoul of civil rights laws.
What are you referring to? This is a very generic statement, and I'm willing to bet it's generic because any specific claim would be falsifiable in 99% of cases.
> the one branch of government that is distinguished by OP as still somewhat competent and capable, the military, is the only one that’s using IQ tests (ASVAB etc) in hiring.
LMAO.
1. The ASVAB is not a test for identifying high intelligence. It's exactly the opposite -- a test for filtering out extremely low intelligence. A low ASVAB score probably signals a serious learning disability or massive educational deficit. A really high ASVAB score probably means you won't fail out of a mediocre college in your first semester. That's about the extent of the signal because it's calibrated so low.
2. Some other civil services do have required exams (eg the post office), but they tend to be on the lowest end of the skills/education spectrum. Again, exams filter out the worst, but aren't helpful for separating the good from the best.
3. The services that don't have exams would not benefit from the ASVAB (eg NASA asking applicants with graduate degrees in STEM multiple choice questions such as "why is water denser than air"... if a candidate is that unintelligent/uneducated they won't have made it to the interview stage in the first place).
Also: Most highly selective private sector employers do not use IQ tests. Not sure why IQ tests are so fetishized among a certain set. They really aren't particularly useful interview instruments.
Government is quite attractive for most workers in terms of benefits, security, and workload.
I think the bigger issue is not overall compensation, but the lack of performance based compensation.
Guaranteed pay increases, no bonuses, and seniority based promotion means there are few incentives to actually perform or have an impact.
I have several smart friends who are state/federal employees and they love their jobs. They don't mind so much that the programs they work on are fundamentally flawed or grossly inefficient.
I always hear about how we need to tax, but never about how can we do 2x for the same amount of taxes that are already collected. Gov efficiency needs to be questioned and audited. I bet if we just clean up our house, it'd be much bigger than we thought. No newspapers are interested in reporting it, but they'll happily report how we need to tax this or that.
I've worked with and in Government agencies. The amount of waste and inefficiencies out competes even the worst of large corporations. When agencies were new (1950-1970), we saw incredible progress and efficiencies. But, there is no one to clean up the crud that's built up over the years.
We can't even do six sigma because that itself would become a bureaucratic endeavor. I've seen how six sigma works great in a nimble Japanese manufacturing company, but not so great in American mega corporation. I am not sure what the solution is, perhaps complete abolishment of the agency and starting a new one.
Your theory falls apart in light of the fact that there are long running government agencies outside the US that are efficient.
So, "crud buildup" isn't it, not by itself. There is, however, a good case to be made that the increasing politicization makes the job inherently harder. Statements like "I bet if we just clean our house" are exactly that - it is not a proposal that's in any way actionable, but if enough people say it, there will be increased pressure to justify actions, which creates more bureaucracy.
Mind, I'm not saying there shouldn't be accountability. But we must move this discussion away from "Just do <simple slogan>" towards actual analysis, or the side effects of a populist discussion mean that administrative efforts drown in layers and layers of useless ass covering, just to shield from that pressure.
Starting from scratch doesn't really solve - or even discover - the underlying problem either. It might be a tool to address issues, but we don't know until we concretely investigate what the problems and root causes are.
Alas, that requires serious investment. And I really don't see a political climate where any effort to invest large amounts into rebuilding administrative capacity is successful. We're currently very much in a feedback loop. How to break that is, at least to me, ultimately a question of societal stability.
Efficiency is expensive in the short term. It usually requires investments, hiring new people, and spending some time changing the ways things are done. You will only see the benefits in the long term.
Politicians often don't get this, and they may even deliberately choose not to get it. In the public sector, "efficiency" is usually a codeword for slashing budgets and assuming that agencies will magically get their work done with fewer resources.
How much of this decline is due to the fact we do not measure the efficiency of administration in any form at all. We don’t measure success, we only measure the effort, which inherently creates a more inefficient system.
A lot of the decline is down to poor incentives. Failure is often seen as a reason to ask for more money rather than stopping a program. In many ways actual success is disincentivised. If a contractor delivers on time and on budget, then they have to bid a new contract rather than extend an existing one. If a program reduces homelessness it no longer needs the same level of funding because there are less homeless. When crime is low it's hard to justify a new SWAT team.
government jobs are low pay but people will take them for the lifetime pension after they retire. this incentivizes slow moving, long tenured, employees who have little motivation to do things differently. it attracts these people
i think we would be in a better place without pensions and instead paying people better rates
That’s true to a degree, but I lament the loss of pensions. People should be able to have that kind of security plus incentives to do a good job.
I think an even worse problem is unions in the government. There, you have people that literally do nothing and yet are untouchable because of their union.
The nice thing about pensions is you can't redirect the money to increasing your competitiveness for scarce goods or advantages now, instead of saving it.
"But isn't that a reduction of choice, so, a bad thing?" it would be, except that if enough of your peers also don't have that option, it means they can't outcompete you by harming their own retirement, so you don't need to do that in order to simply not fall behind. No more getting outcompeted for housing in good school districts because your peers are willing to live paycheck-to-paycheck and live on cat food in retirement, and you're not. And so on.
> I think an even worse problem is unions in the government.
This sounds good, but my mother worked for the local government and it changed my mind. Public employees have the most capricious employer in existence -- voters. The union helps mitigate that. My mother would have had her pension cut to nothing after years with no cost-of-living wage adjustments if it were simply up to the voters.
Defined benefit pensions are outdated. They put too much financial risk on taxpayers, and require the employee to stay a minimum number of years in order to receive any benefit at all. Defined contribution retirement plans are superior in every way, and most federal government employees are now on plans like 403(b).
> In some areas, US administrative capacity remains world-beating, most obviously the military, which enjoys bipartisan and popular support, and vast investments of resources.
I think this claim requires support. Yes, military spending is high and has bipartisan support, but I don't particularly agree that it is a hallmark of highly capable administration. Funding does not equal capacity.
Uhhhh... being able to conduct two wars on the other side of the planet for decades and then having people so ignorant of the costs and complexity that they think it's not clearly a miracle of state capacity? That's obscene state capacity.
The US military supplies and operates bases all over the world, manages huge R&D and equipment pipelines, directly employs more people in the US than Walmart or Amazon, and is capable of incredible organizational and logistics feats like evacuating Afghanistan in a week and dumping an army’s worth of equipment into Ukraine in a month. The administrative capacity of the US military is very high, to the point that organizational and administrative issues are rarely a limiting factor in conducting operations.
I am fairly sure that decades of undermining trust in the federal government will at some point reach a tipping point where multiple states will no longer be interested in having a federal government. Just like Brexit, if you keep pointing at the feds as the source of all ill, eventually people will take you seriously and want out. And as with Brexit, states that find themselves on their own will be insignificant on the world stage, but with a surplus of sovereignty.
Unlike Brexit, the first American civil war has set precedent to prevent secession. The first state to attempt secession will be labeled a word (like insurrectionist, fascist, racist, etc.) and then, like Ukraine, invaded.
Which IMHO would be a healthy counterbalance to the federalists who successfully increased the power of the central government during the 20th century.
Also worth noting that the UK itself has been perfectly reasonable (at least so far) about constituent countries that want to consider leaving - Scotland had an independence referendum and Northern Ireland has as a part of the Good Friday Agreement a possibility for uniting with the Republic.
What does secession even mean? People living in the state will still pay federal taxes (the true source of federal power). Declare all federal laws invalid? This is such a fantasy I don't even know why people discuss it. Ever since the Interstate commerce act and threading of federal funds into states it has become impossible to realistically secede even if you could logistically pull it off.
Secession would mean not paying federal taxes and repossessing federal assets within the seceding state.
If you look to the Civil war, fighting wasn't kicked off by the declaration of separation, the flashpoint was possession of federal armories in southern states.
I agree it is largely fantasy. The federal gov would never hand over bases in Texas, ect.
I mean - only if the state residents revoked their citizenship. As a US citizen you enjoy the pleasure of paying federal taxes no matter where in the world you live.
Secession from the United States by definition means a revocation of citizenship. They're no longer a state, they're a nation that just happens to share landmass with the US, like Canada and Mexico, and their people are no longer American citizens, but citizens of that nation.
Would that be all citizens? Using Florida as an example if they seceded would all current Florida residents lose their US citizenship? What about people visiting Florida - or those with multiple homes (snow birds etc...)?
What if you personally object to the secession - would the US allow you to retain your citizenship and "immigrate" to Georgia?
And, what if Florida refused to recognize a class of residents as new citizens? What would happen to all the federal prisoners located in Florida when secession happened - Florida probably doesn't want to adopt a large population of incarcerated Americans, they'd probably try to give them back to America somehow - ditto for incarcerated Floridians being held outside the state - though Florida might not want them back anyways.
I think, at EOD, the US would probably offer continued US citizenship to any Florida residents who refused to accept Florida citizenship - which would likely result in Florida being a majority expat country, since, would you rather throw your personal future in with some new secessionist government or an established government that might end up eating Florida in a few weeks anyways?
And let's suppose Texas secedes. An outsized portion of their economy is dependent both directly and indirectly on the US gov't via the military (and defense contractors) and NASA (and related contractors). 99% of that work would leave the state, and even if the employees decided to stay they'd have no income sources which has a great ripple effect on the area (see what happens in the small when factories leave towns).
And other portions of their economy are dependent on being a port (both land and sea) for goods entering and leaving the US, much of which would be redirected to other areas unless US purchasers decide to pay extra costs to import through Texas (unlikely).
(Not American here) Why do states never want other states to secede? It seems to me like if a state is taking more federal money than they return in tax, and they want out, most other states would benefit if they left. Why would you invade and force them to stay?
Because it's just talk. No state in the union has anything like the military force required to close their borders and defend their territory. The rest of the states wouldn't bother invading, they'd just ignore them. What are they going to do, put mines on the Interstates? I guess it could get violent for a couple days.
One of the most pro-Republican states is Wyoming, state population around 581,000 in 2020. If we consider Trump voters as a proxy for people who might want to secede, we have about 235,000 people who voted for Trump out of about 427,000 eligible. That's about 55% of eligible voters and 40% of the whole population. Even if secession were legal, it would be unjust to let a state secede with only 40% support.
A more viable attempt at secession might look like: perhaps a new Hawaiian independence party forms with massive (>80%) and sustained (>20 years) on-the-ground support, with all federal representatives coming from this party. Eventually this party might convince the federal and enough state governments to support a constitutional amendment recognizing a specific independence referendum. That's very theoretical but I hope illustrates what actual secession might look like.
Because all of them are Americans and deserve protection under our common laws. All states are in the union with the understanding that the union will protect everyone, including unionists in a state with significant support for secession. It's not my idea of justice, it's our idea of justice, all of ours. Turning our back on them by letting a state leave illegally would be betraying that trust.
Also consider that before the U.S. civil war the southern states voted against Lincoln, the northern candidate, in fact he was not even on the ballot in many of them. If the enslaved people in those states had been able to vote things would have gone differently. So we have a unique and terrible history of states seceding based on a minority's wishes.
Not that theoretical. Scottish independence is a template for how you'd approach it without military conflict. The issue there being that despite voting for an independence party for decades they don't actually seem to want it and their referendum to secede failed, partly because the independence movement turned into a generic left wing political party that wasn't very interested in working out the complicated details.
This though experiment always gets stuck with the military and social security when I start to imagine this possibility. Not sure how you go about dividing those up.
Does it really require Russian involvement though? Starve the beast tactics didn't require Russians, and was the goal not to reduce funding and make services useless?
In reality the states that are most outwardly in favor of small/no federal government and "states' rights" are also the ones that benefit most from federal spending. Don't buy into the campaign speeches too much. The federal government is only going to keep getting stronger. There's too much money in it for everyone involved.
Not if it ends up costing more in the long run, like when instead of spending money on prevention it must be spent on disaster recovery. If the agreement was "We won't give you this money now, and we won't rescue you later when it turns out you would have needed it" the attitude might be different.
If any state is going to be demanding a federal bail out anytime soon it’s going to be blue states like Illinois and New York facing catastrophic pension burdens coming due.
The federal government probably should not bail out IL and NY's pension systems, which are mismanaged. But have you done the math on this red/blue net dependency thing? I pulled up the numbers on proposed and theoretical pension bailouts, and then the net federal dependency numbers for red states, and it does not appear to be a close call. But I didn't look very carefully. Did you?
Illinois has the highest tax burden in the country. We're not Greece. We are paying through the nose for, well, everything. We get 95 cents on the dollar for our federal taxes, and we pay a lot of those.
Texas is a lower-tax state. It is, in some ways, better managed than Illinois. But it gets 20 cents back on every dollar it pays in federal taxes.
It seems to me that the reason not to bail out pension systems is that they're long-term unsustainable, and that they're mismanaged, and something has to be done to stop the bleeding. But it's hard to argue that bailing them out would be a redistributive injustice. We subsidize the low-tax red states.
(A comically similar microcosm of this debate occurs within Illinois, with rural Illinoisans regularly making noise about wanting to divest itself of Chicagoland. Go right ahead, Peoria!)
Yeah most of the states opposed to the federal government would never lead because they get a large amount of equalization type payments due to various measures on which they perform worse than successful states.
It's nearly impossible to leave a government you don't really approve of if they are transferring a large amount of money into your local economy.
Are you sure of that characterization that the UK was the poorest member when it joined? That seems incorrect. The UK has always been one of the stronger economies in the European zone.
In 1972 the UK still hadn't recovered economically from WWII, and the other members of the EU at the time were France, West Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. With the possible exception of Italy, all those are (per capita) economic powerhouses.
Thanks, I'm never sure about when Italy seemed to have declined (relative to some of the more wealthy neighbors). Or maybe tourism and partially remembered facts aren't a reliable source and their economy is still doing well.
Unfortunately the public within the states that benefit most from federal spending are constantly told the opposite by their leaders. Similar situation with water rights, and several other tragedies of the commons.
Maybe consider that the desire of groups of people to be in charge of decisions that affect them, instead of submitting to the decisions of far away rulers, overrides for many people the desire for free money. Many people, for example, want Puerto Rico to be independent, even though they undoubtedly would get more free money if they became a state.
That federal spending is done perpetually at a budget deficit though. Is it so difficult to believe that a state couldn't also figure out how to build a money printer?
The federal money printer is backed by the strength of the national economy. How would the money printer backed by the states ranked at the bottom in GDP per capita, lifespan, education etc. fare? I can't imagine that going well.
I think that article is just number massaging. I have been to both Sweden and several US states (some of them quite wealthy) and there's no color. As in: a diabetic school teacher can afford insulin. On the explanation section of that article it says:
> The Census numbers are much higher than the OECD numbers for a variety of reasons. In fact, the OECD income number of the US is only 59 percent of the Census number.
The adjustment they did was "moving all the medians of all the states down by 59%" but I don't think that is enough. A more appropriate way to compare things would have been figuring how what those "differentiating reasons" and deducing amounts for each of the states, or incrementing the other countries' median in the same way. The American Census could (for example) be counting every state's natural resources as part of each household's income. In that case, they should include Sweden's petrol reserves in that computation. With the disparate measurement methods and the simplistic adjustment, they are comparing apples to oranges.
In the US, most school teachers can also afford insulin, because they have generous healthcare plans. Remember, over 80% of Americans are happy with their own healthcare quality. The difference between the US and Sweden is that Americans would rather have bigger houses and more cars than ensure that the small fraction of teachers who can’t get insulin now can do so.
To be clear, that adjustment can only affect the relative numbers across US states, not the overall average for US states. That is because all states are adjusted by the OECD number for the US. Presumably the OECD methodology is consistent within itself.
So maybe the Census includes oil resources and OECD doesn’t. Discounting the US numbers across the board to 59% may make Texas and California artificially look better than Mississippi. But the overall average of the US states would still correspond to the OECD number for the US, which presumably is computed the same way as for Sweden.
I assume it would be fine. Iowa’s GDP is bigger than Greece and it’s GDP per capita is comparable to Norway’s. Mississippi’s GDP per capita is higher than France’s.
Yet France provides far more social services to its citizens with less money per capita than Mississippi. I guess the difference is mainly due to immense spending on defense and medical care.
Defense is a drop in the bucket, 3.5% of GDP in the US versus 2% in France. The difference is taxes and what people have let after taxes. France’s taxes are 45% of GDP, versus 25% in the US. The French have universal healthcare, but Americans have bigger trucks and more TVs. And based on their voting patterns, they prefer it this way, whatever you think about their priorities.
Imagine if the poor but anti-democratic states that choose policies that hurt their citizens and vastly benefit form being subsidized by rich liberal states like NY and California, say Kentucky and Mississippi leave the US.
More on topic, those poor states that benefit from federal money would not have a very strong economy and they would not be able to do deficit spending on their own currency or pay for things through deficit spending. If Oregon, Washington and California formed a new country or joined Canada they'd be better off financially, because their tax drain to poor state america would end. I don't want a split but I'm starting to feel it will happen in my lifetime. I'm more than ok with helping the poorer states with their infrastructure needs, we are all in this together. But I'm tired of 15% of the population having control over the federal agenda through the senate.
Japan has deficit-spent more than the United States as of late. Japan has problems, but an existential loss of trust in the central government and failure of state capacity are not among them. They have bullet trains.
Once states secede, they lose all the clout that comes from being part of the world's only superpower controlling the world's reserve currency. Southern states would be better off switching to Pesos than printing their own.
You're agreeing with me. I'm saying that it is in fact hard to just run a printing press, which is why US dollars are worth something and Zimbabwe dollars are not.
Texas is enormous. If they switched to their own currency it'd be doing fine. This "clout" and "superpower" nonsense was talked up big time by Remainers in the UK too. Guess what - post leaving nothing is observably different. The average voter doesn't care about the sort of stuff thinktanks care about. Their concerns are local. A Republic of Texas probably wouldn't have invaded Iraq, and thus may in some sense be less superpowery than the USA, but does the average Texan see that as a problem or a benefit?
The UK has one of the six accepted world's "hard" currencies. Other countries with a similar GDP to Texas cannot issue a hard currency. International trade will still happen in dollars, although I suppose they could print a bill for internal use.
Russia, which has a similar GDP, didn't have any appreciable external debts denoted in rubles. They were denoted in dollars, pounds sterling or other hard currencies.
Those states benefit from Fed money because they have multiple century debt from lack of investment. "States Rights" is just about slavery and wanting it back, but that won't solve their problems with the investment they already are not doing and are unwilling to do.
That was a large part of it, but it also had to do with taxation over building highways for trade in the north while the south had ample waterways to move trade goods... I'm not saying it wasn't about slavery as well, before anyone gets mad.
Those people who want small government always expand governmental powers when they are in charge. Example 1: Look at what the SCOTUS just did about the 4th amendment having no power for 100 miles inland from the border.
This is a remarkably bad argument. Many countries around the world have some sort of federal system. People who agree with each other enough to participate in some level of government together, but not enough to participate in a unitary government together, is a common problem that exists around the world. Federalism is a solution to that problem around the world.
Germany, for example, has "state's rights." Religious people in Bavaria decided that government buildings should display crosses (https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/31/europe/bavaria-germany-crosse...) and folks in Berlin don't get to veto that. When German press asked Angela Merkel why she wouldn't order a nationwide COVID lockdown, she explained German federalism, and the German press (which is much smarter than the American press) nodded and moved on. India features states that differ quite significantly in their healthcare systems or social laws. In Switzerland, a country the size of Maryland, laws on same-sex marriage differ between cantons until national consensus was reached less than two years ago.
America is a country of 330 million people, and far more diverse than Germany or Switzerland. Why should we ignore the real need for flexibility and localism just because some people who are long dead abused federalism?
Germany is not America. I'm not making the argument Federal power is bad, the people who benefit from it the most are, and are grifting the system by intentionally subverting anything that would improve their people's situation. Look at the build back better plan, they screwed that up and most of our highways are out of their operating life spans by more than double the original life time. Germany also was given a huge leg up after WW2 when all of FDR's constitution writers went over and basically gave you all the worker protections FDR wanted for the USA.
Different groups of people wanting to cooperate to some extent but not be micromanaged by other groups of people isn’t unique to Germany. Federalism keeps recurring because it solves a recurring human problem.
> I'm not making the argument Federal power is bad, the people who benefit from it the most are, and are grifting the system by intentionally subverting anything that would improve their people's situation.
I like to assume that people are acting rationally in their interest given their values and priorities. People disagree about what would “improve” their situation,” or what will be the real outcome of efforts undertaken to “improve the situation.” Last I checked people are moving from California to Texas, not the other way around. Let’s assume at the very least people rationally appreciate the trade offs of that.
> Look at the build back better plan, they screwed that up and most of our highways are out of their operating life spans by more than double the original life time.
And why do you assume that Build Back Better would address that problem? I used to be a transit fan. I dutifully road Amtrak and Metro and MARC to work for years. And you know what? I gave up, moved to the exurbs, and bought a big SUV. Because we can’t actually do infrastructure and we shouldn’t even try. My change of heart was bitterly confirmed true when I saw the BBB proposal for Amtrak (which last I checked planned to blow tens of billions of dollars without building any new track).
Being from Bangladesh, I don’t actually believe that all cultures equally good at all things. Clearly Americans just can’t do things that require large scale coordination. Instead of beating our heads against the wall about it, we should just try to restructure our society to avoid those weaknesses.
Brexit showed how politicians can lose control of their campaign speeches -- I personally do not believe it was what any senior politicians actually wanted.
> In reality the states that are most outwardly in favor of small/no federal government and "states' rights" are also the ones that benefit most from federal spending.
It's worth noting that the issue gets confused because of the makeup of the political coalitions in the US. Namely the party of "small government" is a coalition of social conservatives (who often are fine with government spending, so long as it's not forcing liberal social policy on them), and economic libertarians (who care deeply about low taxes and less business regulation, but aren't as sensitive to liberal social policy). The social conservatives bring the votes, but party has historically prioritized the policy of the libertarians.
Until relatively recently, it was actually pretty common for the states you speak of to send socially conservative Democrats to Congress. Over the last 15 or so years, the Republicans successfully exploited the compromises those Democrats were often forced to make with an officially socially-liberal party to defeat them electorally.
Also, as an anecdote, one of these states (North Dakota) could probably legitimately claim to be one of the most socialist states in the country. It literally has a couple major state-owned businesses.
If you took social issues off the table, I think you'll see those states behave much differently.
It's a hell of a bargain, though -- we'll destroy your economy, attack you population, but give you money so you're not as dirt poor as we would have otherwise made you.
> California? What other states have wanted to secede recently?
California did not want to secede. A Russian-linked group tried repeatedly over the 2016 to 2020 period to get an initiative for an independence referendum on to the ballot in the state, but never managed to qualify the initiative, much less pass the initiative calling for an independence referendum.
> also the ones that benefit most from federal spending
The analyses that draw this conclusion leave a lot out. By narrowing the discussion to spending, they ignore the many benefits of federal policy for corporations based in the big cities in a few states. A few industries come to mind that would make a lot less money if federal policy were different: banks, pharma, entertainment, and even technology.
We literally fought a war over the ability to secede from the union. The precedent for an indestructible pact once you're admitted to the united states is quite strong. Any state government that intended to leave would be seen as illegitimate and be dismantled by the feds.
You would need consent from the rest of the states in order to leave, and that isn't happening any time soon.
Really? If Florida wants to leave, who’s objecting to that? Half the remaining states would be on the side of “good riddance to bad rubbish” and the other half would support it because “let’s go Brandon!”
I don’t think the hard part is getting people on board with it. The hard part is just getting a vote on it.
EDIT to address your point: I think if enough people want it, it will happen. The Civil War was about slavery, no matter what some folks will say. The current direction isn’t towards war, it’s towards an indifference followed by dissolution. There’s no energy to keep Florida or Texas or California from leaving if that’s what a large majority want.
So, Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama?
If they raised this sort of thing to a vote, I would strongly hope that we let them build their own Republican utopia.
They'll never raise this to a vote, though, because the last thing they want is for that wish to be granted. Complaining about the federal government when you've mismanaged your state is easy, actually having to manage it without relying on handouts is not.
The energy is the federal government itself. It owns the tanks and the bombs should your state decide to withdraw 'by force'. Never happening. The only valid option right now is to Amend the constitution which requires 38/50 states to ratify it. That is 76% of states. (e.g. never happening). The union is kind of a done deal until or unless the federal government somehow fails.
There’s no scenario where a state leaves by force. There is a point at which apathy leads to dissolution. If no one cares, then it’s inevitable. It’s entropy.
> tanks and bombs and jets and nukes are kept in states though
We're talking about a military coup in the United States, which is a big topic, but technically, very few tanks and bombs or jets or nukes are in states. In part, for this reason. They're on federal property. States have militias; the U.S. has aircraft carriers and cruise missiles. If a secessionist government tried to invade federal territory, I would be wholly in favor of a decisive (if compassionate) military response.
If the situation is such that a mass of state residents is physically attempting to overwhelm a military base like at the end of "V for Vendetta", then the political situation will have long been obvious and preparations will have been made. Things will have gone way past some 60%/40%, gerrymandered state government making a declaration.
>Ukraine gave Russia the nukes it held within its border. Looking back probably not a great idea.
This is a popular factoid, but it often leaves out the fact that Russia had the codes to use the nukes, the ability to maintain them, and that other countries (like the US) wanted the nukes out of Ukraine.
If they had kept them, it is far from clear that they would be a nuclear power today.
As someone who lives in California, I thought you were talking about us. I wish I could move to Florida. Seems like a better place to live in almost all regards.
Notably, because CA has the nation's strongest building codes, we can handle Richter 6.0 earthquakes with essentially no damage except to the oldest buildings.
OTOH, Florida begs for federal handouts every time there's a big storm because somehow they never get around to requiring developers to build flood-resistant structures.
When someone calls an entire population of a state, nation, or region as "horrible people"; we call them bigots. It is time for introspection and reflection when you get to a point where everyone you don't agree with are horrible people. And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
Usually this would be flagged, but it goes with the party lines I suppose so it is allowed.
Considering that the Florida governor's approval rating has gone up the more he picks on minorities and LGBTQ individuals, it's pretty clear that the governor's stance is shared by the overwhelming majority of Floridians, and I'm within my rights to think that the people who overwhelmingly think that my nephew is a freak are all horrible people.
And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
That is objectively false. Only the Miami-Dade metropolitan area in Florida leans blue.
Yes that is my immediate gut reaction. Florida passed the don’t say gay bill and has a hard on for going after trans people that doesn’t appear to be going away.
They didn’t even say all of Florida is awful people. You have a bad faith reading of their comment and then think up a bad faith conspiracy about why it is not flagged.
The funniest thing of all is talking about generalizing all people when talking about a state that passed laws to demonize all lgbtqia people.
I think you grossly over estimate how willing people would be to leave the Union.
Eastern Washington and Oregon have been talking about seceding from their respective states for /years/ and absolutely nothing has come of it because—surprise—most people don’t want to leave.
The number of people who are intensely political (who dislike Florida because politics or who are “Let’s go, Brandon!”) are a very small part of the population. They’re just very loud.
I don't understand this argument at all. Why are New York and California so hell bent on keeping Texas in the union and telling it what to do? It seems to me that it would be preferable to them for red states to leave the union, so that blue states can have universal healthcare and government-funded abortions.
I think this is actually at the root of why America's administrative capacity has become so weak. Administrators are, for want of a better phrase, not content to stay in their lane, and try to smuggle other ideological baggage through their administration, which breeds resentment and resistance. Transportation planners are not content to build the roads people want, but want to make people take trains instead. Educators and public health experts think it's their job to weigh on race relations. The administrative class has always been haughty, since its inception in the Wilson era, but now they've found religion and become evangelical about it.
For one, the construct of "red states" and "blue states" is wrong. It would be more like city states. Texas is barely hanging on to the idea that it is a "red state" as you would call it. A bit more domestic migration to the cities and it could easily become another "blue state."
Most states that appear to lean in either direction at the governmental level have very substantial opposition voter populations. This is the biggest reason nobody is seriously going to consider secession, aside of rhetoric for the base.
This still doesn't explain why states are so hell bent on regulating policy within other states instead of letting them make and learn from their own policy decisions
I cannot answer that. It is obviously bipartisan, however, because conservative state legislatures are attempting to regulate abortion access in other states.
I know there are periodic federal bills, but how are state legislatures regulating access across state lines? Is this issue of local residents that travel for it?
They're regulating local citizens that travel, which still has jurisdictional issues afaik. E.g. a state can't generally file charges against a citizen for possession of marijuana if the possession occurred in another state.
I'm not sure what happens in the case of an abortion provider from a legal state visiting an illegal state. My suspicion is that they might try and be rebuked on jurisdictional grounds. It's an even weaker case than local citizen travel, since no part of the acts occurred inside the jurisdiction.
No they’re not. A few are trying to regulate their citizens traveling to other states to get abortions. Meanwhile the mainstream position on the left is imposing a standard that under 30% of Americans support (elective abortions to 24 weeks) in every single state.
A US citizen in Egypt can be prosecuted under the FCPA for paying a business related bribe in Egypt. Would you say that’s closer to “trying to regulate business practices in other countries” or “trying to regulate the conduct of their own citizens?”
That goes to whether the regulation is permissible or not. We are talking about how to characterize the regulation. Regulating one’s own citizens while they are traveling elsewhere is different than trying to regulate a different state.
> That goes to whether the regulation is permissible or not. We are talking about how to characterize the regulation.
I don't know what hair you're trying to split here, but the gymnastics are getting even more imporessive.
> Regulating one’s own citizens while they are traveling elsewhere is different than trying to regulate a different state.
Missouri's law, for example, would allow Missouri citizens to sue out-of-state physicians who perform an abortion on a Missourian but have never lived, set foot in, or done business in Missouri.
Looking forward to the incoming sequence of twists and flips.
Can you please omit swipes and name-calling from your posts here? especially on divisive topics and regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
This topic generates strong feelings for obvious and legitimate reasons. But that makes it more important (not less) to follow the site guidelines. That's why we added this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Red states versus blue states is still a meaningful axis even on top of the urban/rural divide. Georgia voted for Biden and has two Democrat senators, but on say abortion it's closer to deep red Ohio than to Connecticut. Democrats in Baltimore or Philadelphia, moreover, have only a vague resemblance to Democrats in San Francisco or New York City.
I guess my county (Anne Arundel, MD) is technically "blue" at the moment--it went for Biden +14. But in 2018's "blue wave" it went for Larry Hogan +38. Maryland, despite being solidly Democrat, is pretty conservative in a distinctly mid-Atlantic way.
Anyone with a brain understands that we are stronger together than apart. People who advocate for leaving the union should be seen for what they are, children throwing a tantrum. Do you think most Americans on either side would want to deal with border checkpoints, different currencies, nuclear proliferation, tariffs, property disputes, and a myriad of other issues that would come with leaving the union?
While we have disagreements, the American people are not particularly divided on the major issues.
Texas went for Trump over Biden by a margin of about 630,000 votes in a state with a population of close to 30 million. That's a really tight margin for New York and California to decide to cut the whole state loose.
Another factoid: Biden got 5,244,886 votes in New York and 5,259,126 votes in Texas. In other words, more people voted for Biden in Texas than in New York.
That analysis incorrectly treats Biden and Trump voters as homogenous, which isn’t true. I’ll use Georgia as an example because I lived there. Georgia Democrats are quite different than San Francisco Democrats. Throughout the 2000s state level politics was pretty amiable, with conservative democrats in Atlanta more or less getting along with republicans at the state level: https://www.ajc.com/blog/politics/the-bipartisan-duo-strikes...
That changed recently when the state became the target of national politics. Suddenly, the folks on the other side of the aisle were not Georgia Democrats, but California and New York Democrats. That created a ton of polarization that didn’t exist before.
Right now, our national politics pits California and New York Democrats against Mississippi Republicans, and the rest of us just have to pick a side. Things would be far less polarized if we split up, and it was California Democrats versus California Republicans and Texas Democrats versus Texas Republicans.
Here in Maryland, we have an extremely popular Republican governor that does Republican stuff like oppose public transit and try to keep taxes low. State politics is quite civil, because Baltimore isn’t San Francisco (despite voting similarly for Biden) but neither is Carroll County Mississippi (despite voting similarly for Trump).
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying but it sounds like your theory is that Texan and Georgian voters were hornswoggled by New York and California carpetbaggers so their votes somehow don't matter for this discussion. The plain fact is that as of 2020 approximately as many Texan voters wanted Biden as Trump, to where a 3% shift would have changed the result. Those voters could have stayed home but they went in and cast a ballot. Talking about secession on that margin is ridiculous.
Also, if you're using New York and California Democrats as a proxy for left-wing voters, Biden is pretty disappointing on that front. A huge part of why Biden was the nominee was specifically so he could appeal to centrist voters. The fact that Texan and Georgian voters voted for someone who was picked partly to appeal to those same people should not be surprising.
> I'm not entirely sure what you're saying but it sounds like your theory is that Texan and Georgian voters were hornswoggled by New York and California carpetbaggers so their votes somehow don't matter for this discussion.
No, I’m making a completely different argument. The point is that Georgia Democrats are closer to Georgia Republicans than California Democrats are to Georgia Republicans. When politics is locally focused, there is less acrimony because the sides are less far apart.
But when Georgia politics came under the national spotlight, it became a proxy for the fight between New York and California Democrats and Mississippi Republicans. “Democrat” in Georgia used to mean Zell Miller, but now refers to Nancy Pelosi. That greatly increased the acrimony of politics in the state.
Your point about Biden actually supports my point. Before southern Democrats rescued his campaign, the Act Blue donors and activists were running a carnival where candidates were all raising their hand to open borders. Trump didn’t run against Biden, he ran against those people. That’s only possible because New York and California Democrats have so much power over the party apparatus and messaging that it’s easy to make them the face of the party.
If the states were split up, that wouldn’t happen. My county exec is a Democrat, but it’s hard for me to get worked up about him because he’s a farmer. If folks in New York and California had no input into the laws that applied to me, or how my schools are run, etc., I don’t think I would follow politics at all.
It really seems like you're making the argument I said you were making, that Georgia Democrats are basically Republicans actually and that the Democrats ought to have run a Republican-lite Joe Manchin character (who would have gotten stomped), or, failing that, some wild-eyed left-coast radical (who would have gotten stomped), but instead the national and state parties colluded to run candidates who could actually win.
I'm struggling to understand how we go from that, to saying that there is even the remotest support in Georgia to secede even though every national candidate Georgians elected is in the party currently in power, or that after secession the elections would or should go back to Republican vs. Republican-lite. The only way any of that makes sense is if the actual goal is to separate the Georgia Democrats from the national apparatus to hopefully give state Republicans a chance to figuratively beat the newly-activated voters into submission. In fact if we're going strictly by the numbers then in any split Georgia should stay with the Democratic parts of the country.
Also I'm not sure what Pelosi has to do with any of this but at the moment, from the outside, the face of Georgia Democrats look like Ossoff, Warnock and Abrams all of whom are authentically local. I'm sure Trump and the Republican party would like people to think that Pelosi is the face of the Georgia Democrats, though.
I do feel bad for Georgian voters, not to mention the people counting the votes. It wasn't their fault that the balance of power came down to them in the end and I'm sure most of them didn't like being in the middle of that firestorm. However I suspect any acrimony was primarily due to the fact that the Democrats found a winning strategy in a formerly safe state.
> Why are New York and California so hell bent on keeping Texas in the union
They aren't. It's not 1860, no one is campaigning on preserving the Union over other policy considerations. While there would be intense disputes about how to treat people who didn't want to be separated from the US, and about disposition of federal property in the event of a divorce, few in NY or CA outside of the Republican minority in each state would expend even the slightest effort on keeping Texas in the Union as such, though they might oppose bad divorce terms on those other issues.
On the other hand, all the other Republican-led states would oppose the idea fiercely, because it would be a giant shift away from the Republican Party in the national balance of political power. (And, yes, Texas is far from solid red by population, but that's not what matters.)
People in these states would care if secession were seriously on the table, since a lot of them have personal connections to the state and will not be like "Oh, I guess my parents are going to be in a different country now, no big deal," especially if said parents very much don't want their state to secede.
Then why do they care so much about abortion laws in Texas, or whether Texas expands Medicaid, etc? Really, why do they care about the federal government at all?
Historically, Democrats cared about the federal government because Republicans states like California had the money and they needed the federal government to redistribute it. But today, Democrat states have the money. So what’s the point? Why not just adopt universal healthcare in California without regard to what Texas does?
> Then why do they care so much about abortion laws in Texas
Because Texas is in the Union, and what is Constitutionally allowed in Texas is what is Constitutionally allowed in their state, and they don't assume that they will have a permanent legislative majority there, because, well, history shows that they likely won't.
Other than that Californians care about rights in Texas the same.way they care about rights in Saudi Arabia.
I don’t find either argument persuasive. Fighting these battles about what happens in Texas has a cost in terms of political capital that Californians could spend on other issues that directly benefit themselves. I find both of those theories to be a remote concern compared to the concrete benefits they could get for themselves by just dropping those fights.
I think it’s more like the Crusades. Californians believe in the universalism of their moral world view and want to impose it on the heathens in Texas. More like George Bush trying to bring democracy to the Middle East.
"You would need consent from the rest of the states in order to leave, and that isn't happening any time soon."
That's like saying you need permission to break the law.
Deep down, we all know that if you want to do a thing, you can just do it, and leave those who value systems and processes and order to grapple with it. Trump proved that.
Edit: to be clear, I do not support or like this reality. But if you don't think that the right will do anything other than "lol u mad libs? deal with it" then you haven't been paying attention.
And not even that. Similar agreements and compromises on shared standards, data transfer, compliance etc still have to be made to enable trade. Brexit voters were promised a "bonfire of regulations" yet red tape has doubled to continue trade with the EU and the trade deals the UK has signed with Japan and others are literal copy/paste of EU ones.
It's surprising the extent to which legal scholars assume that state exits from the Union are a settled question. Ultimately, it's unlikely that the federal government would or even could force a state into compliance once the state government and courts have opted to treat state law as taking precedence above federal law.
We already see this with legal marijuana, there are multiple campaigns aimed to form interstate compacts without the consent of congress. Ultimately a situation where the federal government declines to enforce its legal authority will just lead to a defacto change in the supremacy clause of the US constitution.
The only situation I see where this would become problematic is if a state chose to stop sending tax dollars to the federal government. Even then, the federal government has levers to pull that would be tough for a state to circumvent except by exiting the dollar - which no state has any reason to do.
> The only situation I see where this would become problematic is if a state chose to stop sending tax dollars to the federal government.
This is not generally how taxes work, though; instead, individuals and businesses send taxes to the federal government (and sometimes, also to their states), and the federal government returns a great deal of the money to the states and localities, directly or indirectly. Leaving the federal government wouldn't mean the states would stop sending the feds money, it means they would be completely unable to pay for all sorts of infrastructure and entitlements that they receive money from the federal government for.
The states would have to pass laws prohibiting the businesses and individuals within their borders from paying the federal taxes -- and that probably would get some sort of reaction.
But probably not a military one, the feds could just arrange for garnishment via banks. States would have to force customers to use different banks which don't do garnishment - and the feds would probably cut those banks off from the rest of the banking system.
Worst case scenario, I'd see some byzantine system of declarations required when doing something across state lines or people using "fed taxed" and "state taxed" financial institutions depending on their objectives. Given the current state of military affairs, a war over Rhode Island would be a complex endeavor - a war over Texas, California, or New York is a practical impossibility.
Yeah. The thing is, though, "the enemy" is already inside. Every state -- even the bluest ones, have red populations. Every state -- even the reddest ones, have blue populations.
The state that tried to leave might find itself with a civil war as the two sides within it -- the majority of whom already believe that the other party represents the most mortal enemy imaginable -- duke it out for control.
There are few issues in the US I see motivating such an extreme reaction within a state border for the majority of US states. The only breaking points I see are reasonably well handled through a legal decoupling of states and the federal government.
The big item issues such as
- Federal bans on abortion
- Controversial Presidential elections
- A series of unfortunate Supreme court decisions
- Immigration
- Infrastructure spending
Are all issues which can be handled with a legal decoupling. If all sides remained notionally in Congress, then there is very little likelihood that Congress would address the matter. A sensible supreme court would leave it as a political issue for a few decades before declaring a defacto status as was done for West Virginia's statehood. For all intents and purposes, a de facto decoupling would look more like a return to State relationships prior to 1900 then a secession.
While some may wish for a military based solution to stop a legal decoupling... there simply does not seem to be a plausible route for any military solution by any party. Russia made it ~100km into Ukraine before being stopped, it's 2900 KM between Houston and Boston - all means of ending such a stalemate would escalate to MAD as the military remains spread across states for political and defense purposes. Even in the civil war, the North was unable to enforce integration of the south through reconstruction.
> It's surprising the extent to which legal scholars assume that state exits from the Union are a settled question. Ultimately, it's unlikely that the federal government would or even could force a state into compliance once the state government and courts have opted to treat state law as taking precedence above federal law.
That's an interesting Taiwan-ish model for succession. It probably has a better chance of success than the kind of outright succession the Confederacy tried, because it could be conducted slowly while still paying lip service to the Union. At each small step, military intervention might seem like too extreme of an escalation.
Though it still would be difficult. At some point it would require the state citizens to start breaking federal laws in very obvious ways (e.g. stop paying federal taxes), but I doubt they'd be fine with not crossing state lines in that case. Also a lot of the money in state budgets pass through the federal government, so it would probably be really expensive to replace that without some of the more extreme steps.
Even in an extreme political separation, the integration and infrastructure of the Union is a utility for the vast majority of Americans. Californian's may want to secede, but they'll probably want to keep the Dollar and maintain a unified navy with the rest of the US. Few would be interested in the friction of having to go through customs within the US either. While we're at it.. centralized infrastructure projects are pretty useful - does anyone want 50 different highway systems?
Er, incompatible highway systems aren't really a thing even across borders. At most there are border checkpoints but it's not like the roads themselves can't be joined together. The lone exception is islands like the UK where people drive on the other side, and water marks the demarcation point.
The federal government choose to relax their enforcement policy in deference to changing national attitudes. But prior to they dealt with the mismatch on marijuana laws by... going into the states and enforcing on the business owners, basically forcing them into bankruptcy. The state may have legalized such businesses but they could not protect them from federal authority.
> Ultimately, it's unlikely that the federal government would or even could force a state into compliance once the state government and courts have opted to treat state law as taking precedence above federal law.
This has been tested, and the states—consisting of a very large share of the states up to that moment in the union—testing it ultimately failed.
The federal-state balance of the relative capacities to apply force has not, in the interim, shifted in favor of the states in any way I can ascertain, in fact, those capacities have been significantly centralized in the Federal government since the last time it was tried in a large scale way, or even since the more recent, smaller scale attempts.
> We already see this with legal marijuana, there are multiple campaigns aimed to form interstate compacts without the consent of congress.
Source? There has been lots of talk of an interstate compact with Congressional approval as an alternative vehicle, and transitional stepping stone, to general federal legalization, but I’ve seen nothing about a renegade compact.
State marijuana legalization leans on non-commandeering doctrine rather than nullification.
> The only situation I see where this would become problematic is if a state chose to stop sending tax dollars to the federal government.
When do states send tax dollars to the federal government? Individuals send tax dollars to the federal government, but states mostly receive federal money.
Part of the problem with Brexit is that the UK has suffered from a right-wing government for the past 40-odd years. While right-wingers say they are for "small government" this is largely performative, and what they mean is "much much bigger government, if you count all the money going into my husband's cousin's offshore company".
It's a scam. Right-wing governments like the Conservatives are run by and for junkies, who will steal anything not nailed down to sell off cheap for a quick fix of cash.
A number of those states will be ones that are a net recipient of tax dollars sent by all the states to the Federal government. Many of them in the south. I would be more than happy to see them cut off from any federal funding.
California can likely hold its own on the world stage. And it pays more into the federal government than it gets out. Not saying calexit is a good idea. Just that the numbers line up.
are you saying that having morals puts one at a disadvantage or that jobs requiring accountability should not pay good because otherwise you'll mostly get people without morals?
I haven't seen a lot of evidence to support public employees having a moral problem. Unless you are referring to politicians, in which case I wholeheartedly agree. But these are who you are voting into office.
This is a lot of words to say "the Constitution kinda sucks for a modern state & economy, civil law is kinda simply better than common law in at least this one particular way, and also the TL;DR answer to the headline, despite all that, is 'Republicans refuse to fully staff agencies'"
The stuff about progressives at the top is weird. I don't know how they even found a large enough data set of enacted progressive policies to draw a conclusion about whether they're too policy-focused rather than admin-focused. Then the rest of the article is largely about how Republicans won't staff agencies properly, so how could it possibly matter how admin-focused progressives are? Progressives don't even control the democratic party, let alone have control of government, so I don't know what the point of the opening section was.
[EDIT] That first bit's me summarizing the article's points, by the way, not just throwing in my own take, as several top-level posters seem to have decided to do. Admittedly, connecting the civil/common law divide to the courts section is mine, but considering that comes up over and over again in analyses of this problem, and that section's largely describing the exact effect that those others have also noticed, I think that's fair.
A friend of mine who started working IT for a city government says:
“There’s 50 government departments and like a dozen teams in the IT department who all handle different stuff. Each department uses their own niche software. Extremely clunky and confusing.”
How do you fix management problems in situations like this? How do you create accountability where there is none?
Imagine if everyone spent the last forty years watching half of the politicians talk about how awesome it is when you can one-up the government and how ineffective they are... and then being surprised that there is very little good will left towards the government.
It's expensive for the government to do things because
1. Everyone knows the government wastes money on everything so why not charge them a higher price.
2. Nobody feels any guilt out of keeping as much money out of the government's hands as possible (since you can spend that money more efficiently!)
3. One political party gains points whenever they make inefficient spending decisions since it reinforces their narrative about the government being inefficient.
Number 3 is often solely blamed but I think it's faded somewhat compared to 1 & 2. I don't think many GOP politicians intentionally make bad financial decisions with the hope of making the government look bad - but when they make mistakes the blame they receive is generally outweighed by the general malaise over inefficient government which supports their platform. Cheating the government is so popular and widely endorsed that Trump essentially ran for president on it.
It’s funny that he use the empire state building and then talk about federal government.
The government didn’t build the empire state building, a private corporation did.
Now there is so much regulation that it would be impossible to get through the permit in 5 years.
It’s the same here in Canada, all the infrastructure, building, farms, road that were built around 1900 are no longer possible with the level of regulation.
We are getting into a kafkaesque state where the technology is super productive but the regulations swallow every improvement and them some.
* Govt is not so much about helping get things done (think of older projects like interstate highway systems) and is more focused on stopping things (5+ years of environmental reports to do anything meaningful). That's one big shift for better or worse depending on perspective.
* Govt is graded HEAVILY on non-performance objectives - so things like compliance, equity, etc etc are critical issues, and the actual performance of programs which is much harder to measure is not a focus. I've helped on that stuff, it can make your head spin. You'll be trying to do a reading program for kids and in San Francisco need to train staff on the McBride Principles for Northern Ireland and much more.
* Major focus on getting folks in trouble vs saying "good job" internally to govt systems. So many folks learn to keep their heads down, the tall grass gets cut.
I have great sympathy for ALL line / front end staff in these systems (think teachers, police etc) trying to get stuff done. There are now 100 ways to be punished and somewhat fewer ways to be celebrated.
> Govt is not so much about helping get things done (think of older projects like interstate highway systems) and is more focused on stopping things (5+ years of environmental reports to do anything meaningful). That's one big shift for better or worse depending on perspective.
This is a political choice (or I guess, an outcome of political environment). Strategizing how to return to a politics of getting this done for citizens is probably more use than any culture war stuff going on now.
Our administrative capacity is in decline by design.
The American people were long ago sold on the idea that the government was just too big and their lives would be better if less of their tax dollars went to fund all this unnecessary government.
For more than 50 years the Republican party has been actively trying to shrink the government. Some of their plans, such as starving government programs for money have been so effective that their Democrat counterparts had to also downsize departments in order to keep them alive.
Some examples of this starvation are the burdens placed on the USPS to fully fund future pensions, and the continual under-funding of the IRS.
I think the american public has been sold on the idea that govt should be bigger and bigger and more bloated than ever. Most people either approve or just don't care.
The vast majority of that spending is in one of three categories: Social Security, Medicare, and the Military.
Yet that isn't what is being cut in the name of "Government too big!". In fact, those categories only seem to be growing in cost with no apparent measures by the GOP to curb them.
Three areas of government that have broad bipartisan support. The right wants smaller government, in theory, but they also want to "keep the government out of my Medicare!" So the spending isn't ever going to down, only up.
Republican dislike of social programs (I mean their voters, not the politicians) is largely a marketing thing, not based on what the programs actually do.
You poll people on whether they support Social Program X, you get a very different result from if you describe a hypothetical program that just happens to do exactly what Social Program X does, and ask them if they would support that. For extra comedic value you can also ask if they'd like to replace Program They Hate with this new program that's identical.
A similar hating-the-label-not-the-thing effect is how you get nonsensical shit like people apparently thinking Medicare isn't "socialized medicine". If they like it, it must not be [Bad Thing].
I often think about this when people claim more funding is the solution to problems. There is a hard cap on taxation and if you were to tax every cent of GDP you would only double the budget.
If we were getting good value for our dollar I would agree that we are spending too much. Even though we spend the most out of any country on things like medical care and our military, we aren't getting a good return on investment. Large corporate interests have greased enough government wheels to keep the big payouts rolling their way.
If you want to decrease spending, fine lets start by lowering the costs of medical care and medicines, and start looking at getting better value out of our military spending.
It isn't Republicans starving the government for money, because as others have pointed out, government spending has done nothing but go up in every measure, absolute and relative, within your entire lifetime unless you're old enough to have been around for the end of World War 2.
The main problem is the mandatory spending. It's exciting to write your bill declaring some funding "mandatory", but then there's nothing to be done about it.
I have a theory about this: the idea that, as Reagan put it, "The nine most terrifying words in the English Language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help" have become so deeply embedded in our national consciousness that almost nobody, on the left or right, really believes that the government can be a force for good anymore. Because it's so deeply embedded, I think it's become self fulfilling prophecy.
I also think we need to look at why that is. Is it because of personal experience, unreasonable expectations, and/or people pushing the idea for their own goals
The right assumes the government is incompetent, and then crafts policy to kneecap government at every opportunity.
The left assumes the government could be competent, but only if everyone tries to make it so, and they know what the right is doing (all of this policy is completely aboveboard and public).
Net result, everyone can safely assume the government is incompetent. It is much easier to prevent it from working than to make it work. We'd have to have bipartisan interest in making it work effectively, and we do not have that.
Or another way to put it, it actually requires effort to make it work, but it requires no effort to not make it work. Its about like saying "hey that kid is drowning! I could swim and go save him, but instead I am going to go get a Slurpee."
No, in my estimate, its more like, you have to be willing to piss some people off to make stuff go. Perhaps better wording would be that you can't accomplish things without sacrifice. We aren't willing to do that. You can't have CA's environmental review process and timely/cost effective construction. You can't have SF's discretionary review process and ... any construction, really. You can't solve the housing crisis without building housing, but to do that, you'd actually have to build housing. The cost of that housing is multiples of the public sectors budget, so you'd need to first of all, admit that, and then allow the private sector to do it. The private sector only does stuff that makes a profit... so we'd just rather not build housing than change regulations. Now, we get to say we like affordable housing and protecting the environment when our policies don't result in affordable housing and we push people out of environmentally efficient cities into the suburbs/exurbs/wilderness. Fundamentally, if you want to be able to build stuff in CA, you have to get rid of all of the universal, asymmetric vetoes that allow any person to spend $200 to cause millions in costs via review processes.
I live an extremely democratic leaning city and they basically suck at everything. Yard waste has sat on my curb for 2 months now because I guess they just don't feel like picking it up any more. Equipment has been broken in my local playground for nearly a year now. The only one that actually picks up trash in my local park in an organized fashion is the Libertarian Party of all people. And I could go on.
There's no right crafting policy to kneecap the city's ability to function as a city.
Cities have different problems from the federal government, usually funding being the big one. Even a Democratic city that overall favors good government will have problems being effective without sufficient funds to pull it off.
I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
>Cities have different problems from the federal government, usually funding being the big one. Even a Democratic city that overall favors good government will have problems being effective without sufficient funds to pull it off.
We've got 25 million to build a bridge to a sports stadium. Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
>I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
>Sports stadiums are massive sources of revenue for cities.
That's not true. They're almost always a net loss and either way I'm not talking about the money that went to the stadium. I'm talking about the money spent on building a single pedestrian bridge to that stadium.
>It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.
Obviously I meant 4 hours a week picking up trash in a single park.
I think your problems must stem from astounding levels of corruption.
I’m up in a small town in British Columbia, population circa 40K. Our compost is collected weekly; our recycling and garbage biweekly (garbage used to be weekly but they’ve supplied us with humongous wheeled bins now); our landfill separates trash by kind, sells what can be recycled, and keeps track of where it buried the rest; we have a massive composting facility that sells its end product; our sewer treatment plant sends its output to ranchland spray irrigation and golf courses. In the spring and fall, a chipping truck comes along and mulches any tree trimmings.
We maintain our infrastructure. Old underground services are regularly upgraded on schedule. Roads are resurfaced when they’re worn. Our downtown core was beautified a few years ago, with new trees, brickwork, etc. Down at the beaches, cottonwood trees are removed when they become hazardous; new trees are planted. Our parks are clean, despite the homeless living in them. Heck, we built several apartment buildings for those homeless that have their life together enough to qualify for residency (though provincial funding assisted on this.)
Over the past twenty or thirty years we’ve build a new swimming pool/rec centre; a multi-sheet ice rink; a truly excellent performing arts centre; acres of new park; a new track-and-field venue; removed a decrepit and failing arena; and are in the process of building out a new arena/outdoor sports centre. The only thing we’ve completely failed to implement is a new art gallery.
We do have a homeless problem (our weather is very nice) and there is a heck of a drugs problem (a lot of weed was grown around here back in the day, and there’s an undercurrent of gang activity involving the hard drugs). But on the whole, it’s a very laidback, safe, well-run community of caring people.
It’s sad that your town is a failure. It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town.
> It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town.
They probably do have people who can administer with comparable competency, but I think the competency required to manage a town of 40k is very different from the kind of competency you need to get those results in a much larger town.
At small city scale, administrative layers can be thin and infrequent because of the smaller scale. Changing collections to be every other week could probably be a meeting with a few dozen workers. In a major city, that could be hundreds or thousands of workers, requiring administrative layers to handle rescheduling, handling concerns, etc, etc.
Small cities also generally have to develop smaller portions of their budget to dynamically adjusting to shifts in the city. How often do you have to build new roads and expand existing ones to handle shifts in traffic? What's the worst case scenario for traffic in a city of 40k, vs a city with millions of people? The major cities I've lived in are constantly having to build new roads and expand existing ones, and they're barely making a dent in the traffic problem.
Stuff like taking down trees and cleaning parks is pretty easy when the town is small enough to have a half dozen people do it. You need a whole administration layer when you can't have 6 people that just wander around parks fixing things that need to be fixed.
Like many things, I think complexity and cost of those services tends to scale exponentially with population rather than linearly.
> We've got 25 million to build a bridge to a sports stadium. Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
TBF this one isn't government specific. It's often easier to fund a debt instrument for a big initiative than to find a revenue stream for a small obvious win. This happens in large companies, too, btw. You argue for years to consistently invest a small amount in something, the investment is never made, and then the company ends up acquiring to save itself from that exact underinvestemnt.
> I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
City run trash collection is totally a thing in some areas, and it actually makes sense if done well. I once lived in a conservative city that had it (and did it well).
Where I live now, we have private trash collection. That meant we had dozens of garbage trucks from different companies driving through the neighborhood on every trash day, until one of my neighbors organized everyone to switch to one single company.
In my experience, you’ll typically find the most inefficiency when private companies have been contracted to do this kind of work. Theoretically, they should be incentivized to be more efficient, otherwise they might lose their contract. However, because the contracting process offers so many opportunities for people to trade favors, in reality once a company has the contract they’re effectively locked in. At that point, their incentive is to do the bare minimum possible to keep their own costs down and their profits high.
Interestingly, my neighborhood was mostly on a single company, due to several HOAs banding together and negotiating a group deal. But the company has now announced that it will no longer be honoring the group discount, so it's probably going to fracture again.
I would push back on the idea that there’s no right crafting policy to kneecap the city’s ability to function as a city. I don’t think they have to, because a lot of the techniques they might use to do so have already been fully absorbed by even the left leaning politicians in this country. For example, a lot of cities sub-contract all kinds of things they could be doing directly with city employees in the name of efficiency. However, in doing so, they often end up creating additional management layers that end up slowing down the work, all in the service of a marginally lower cost. This is neoliberal thinking, and it is pervasive across just about every level of government across the United States.
I too live in an extremely democratic leaning city and the only time my waste has not been picked up was when I forgot to push it out to the curb.
Even the brightest among the HN crowd can fall into the trap that "The other side is incompetent." There are geniuses and idiots on both sides. If your city is poorly run, its not because your city is run by one party over the other. It's because the people running your city is competent at running a campaign and incompetent at running a city. There's not much more to it than that.
BTW, the people picking up trash in our neighborhood are bleeding heart liberals.
Sure there are. You have a huge faction of the government that loves complex, baroque technocratic solutions to everything because they've convinced themselves that complexity justifies their power.
We needed healthcare reform. What we got was the ACA.
What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????
Average peoples' material conditions are getting worse and worse. They need some kind of simple universal assistance. They don't need yet another way of getting means tested.
> We needed healthcare reform. What we got was the ACA.
> What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????
Wealthy powerful interests who fund politicans on both sides ensure those reforms fail or are watered down to nothing. This is not about complexity. It's simple corruption.
Having keenly paid attention while the ACA was debated and passed and implemented I would say a lot of those opposed were as clueless about it as they are about Glass-Steagall.
Yeah. Okay the "death panels" was just people cynically pretending palliative care wasn't a thing.
The only real net beneficiaries of the ACA were the insurance companies. People are compelled to get high deductible insurance. And that's enforced through the tax-code for some reason???
They made a minor concession about denials for preexisting conditions. But, now they just claim everything is 'not medically necessary' instead.
People need healthcare. Not 11,000 pages of more bureaucratic nonsense.
The big benefit of the ACA is that anyone can buy real, solid health insurance just like they were ordering something off Amazon, and if they fall into certain categories the government will pay for it. That's huge. I don't know if you had experience buying insurance before the ACA but it was a lot worse, putting it mildly. If the insurance companies made out then it was a "take my money, please!" situation from the perspective of the buyers. People before the ACA paid a lot of money to even get to the point where they had an insurance card in hand and a number to call to argue about benefits, or they did without entirely and envied those who had that.
I still remember Obama having a televised meeting with Republicans from Congress and each of the Republicans had this big stack of papers next to them as a sort of prop to suggest to the folks at home that it was some bureaucratic government takeover. What nonsense. The U.S. government is a complicated thing, so is healthcare, and put it all together and yeah it might take a few pages. Bills like that get passed all the time. And even as careful as the authors were, Republicans were happy to read the law closely and take advantage of every loophole they could, with the Medicaid expansion nonsense and the endless lawsuits on technicalities.
I think they understood the difference between single payer and private payers, and mandated private insurance. When it comes to the weird regulations imposed by the ACA, I agree most people, including representatives, still don't know what it entailed.
I'm not sure they understood it, for example people like pre-existing condition protections but not mandated coverage, but the latter was intended to support the former. Basically people wanted the benefit but not the cost, which we might say is good politics but bad understanding.
That's one part of it. The other part is just plain narcissism.
The inability to come up with simple reforms stems from they see themselves as uniquely qualified to manage the affairs of state. They went to the best schools. They have all the best policy positions. If you have any disagreements about policy, it's simply because you don't understand. This is the prevailing attitude despite an abysmal performance over the past 40 years after they completely abandoned the New Deal.
Not all "government" is created equal. Federal spending is 30% of GDP. That is a lot for a bureaucracy that lives far removed from the concerns of the average citizen. Perhaps send most of these money back to state/city level?
It's "Doesn't she look tired" but for the federal government as an entity. Much of the conservative side of the country still actively fights any expansion or increase to the federal government however nowadays it's more about greed and grift ex limiting regulations on businesses, expanding mining/drilling options vs EPA protections, or removing worker/voter rights.
The concept that government is there to help is taken like a conspiracy theory and slowly 'Starving the beast' provides ample opportunity for failure that only furthers anti-federalist mentality. Or as some should be saying as they campaign, "Government doesn't work, elect me and I'll prove it!"
NGOs would. Government might provide funding, under the awareness that it was temporary, and could be cut by the next Republican administration. (On the other hand, Republicans at their peak weren't willing to totally defund the NEA under Gingrich, so legends of red pencils slashing willy nilly may be exaggerated.)
We have seen issues with those in government not wanting to do what is best overall and instead think they can do better themselves. Oregon has many great examples of that...the biggest being the Cover Oregon mishap. Hundreds of millions were spent to setup their own Obamacare website instead of using the Feds...and it was completely mishandled.
Months late, over budget, missing information, not able to process the volume needed...and at the end of the day they just pointed the finger at Oracle...despite tons of documents provided that showed poor oversight by the government. After multiple lawsuits Oregon got $100M back of the $240M they paid...but that's was a stupid number of dollars to be spent in the first place providing a place that ultimately targeted just a few hundred thousand people (at most...for 2022 it was 147K).
You can research their COVID unemployment debacle as another fumble in administrative capacity.
The same could be said about healthcare.gov in the first place though. The reality is most user-facing government software is horribly designed.
This problem isn't unique to software actually, it boils down to how government contracting works and how even after someone gets the contract it's very much requirements driven with little room for flexibility and A LOT of overhead.
This was a pretty disappointing take in my estimate. It mostly seems to spend its time scapegoating republicans while ignoring the elephant in the room. CA is building a 100 billion train from Bakersfield (379,879) to Merced (84,081). SF, specifically, is perhaps the most dysfunctional city in the country... spending outrageous sums of money accomplishing very little, and there are ~no~ only 8% devious republicans in sight! The 2 mile Van Ness ~light rail~ bus line took approximately 2 decades to complete!
Some specifics:
> Does anyone seriously doubt that a federal UI system would be better run than the state-run versions that collapsed during the pandemic?
Yes, I do (seriously doubt that)! The last time the federal government took on something like this, it was a train wreck which relied on the industry taking on tours of duty to fix it. The notion that the Federal Government is more competent than the states is belied by the series of articles being written in the first place! Is it better for the feds to something once than for the states to do it 50 times - that's a different question altogether.
> There are simply fewer federal government employees relative to the tasks we ask of them. As a percentage of the population, the federal workforce was 1.13 percent in 1967 but shrank to 0.64 percent by 2018. We see a similar decline with the IRS...
We didn't have computers in 1967. Did human productivity not increase more than 2x in the last 51 years? Why do we need more humans? Did complexity in tax code outpace gains in productivity? Has the IRS not modernized (spending money elsewhere)? I feel like this stat is totally irrelevant to any understanding of the problem and moreover, the suggested solution is perfectly in line with the fundamental problem the author is trying to solve (lets throw money at ineffective governance because that's what we do).
> If my interpretation is right, the Republicans who are creating administrative dysfunction described above are also contributing to declining state capacity by picking judges inherently suspicious of administrative power.
This is not strictly Republicans' doing. We continuously cheered as Trump policies were stricken by the courts. As a society as a whole, we've continually pushed administration into the judicial branch - out of cowardice and opportunity alike.
Yeah I know - I used to live a block away (`~` is markdown for strike through). The original plan, in the 90s I think, was to put some rail down, but it was abandoned in lieu of a bus line. They spent 10 years doing planning, then I want to say 6 or 7 years on the actual project. Regardless, 15 years spent to rejigger 2 miles of road seems to fit the bill to a T, no?
This article touches on the key point here: the government exists to represent the interests of the capital-owning class. This isn't a Republican or Democrat issue. There's really no difference when it comes to that.
Additionally, since the Reagan era, government institutions have been defunded, attacked and undermined by successive (primarily Republican) adminstrations. The inevitable ineffectiveness that results is then used as an argument for further defunding.
But here's the one mistake the article makes: it's confusing Democrats with progressives and fundamentally mischaracterizes Democratic Party motivations.
There are like maybe 4 actual progressives in the Democratic Party at the Federal level. The Democratic Party hates actual progressives. Just look at the primary in the Texas 28th just recently. Pelosi and Clyburn went out of their way to campaign for Henry Cuellar who is pro-gun and the only anti-abortion Democrat in Congress over the actual progressive Cisneros.
The Democrats (including Biden) were architects of the 1994 Crime Bill that is perhaps the biggest factor in mass incarceration in the US. Not so fun fact: the US is ~3% of the world population but has ~25% of the world's prisoners.
The entire purpose of the Democratic Party is to say "look at how terrible the Republicans are" and use that for fundraising. In any European country the Democrats would be considered a conservative (probably center right) party.
So it's not that the Democrats are too focused on policy rather than administrative capacity (as the article argues) but rather they're focused entirely on aesthetics. The Democratic Party loves nothing more than appearing to do something without having to do anything.
Let me add something to the specific example of the Fifth Circuit:
> A very good example of this comes in the form of a recent 5th Circuit decision that essentially gutted the ability of the SEC to do much of its job. In Jarkesy v. Securities and Exchange Commission, the court ruled that the SEC’s use of administrative hearings violated the right to a jury trial, and therefore was unconstitutional. This is a major break from almost a century of precedent that accepted that the SEC could employ administrative hearings and administrative law judges.
What people need to realize here is that courts aren't apolitical polymaths presiding in a vacuum. Courts (including the Supreme Court) are and have always been political. If you look at the 5th Circuit appeals court judges [1], 12 are appointed by Republicans, 5 by Democrats. Undermining institutions like the SEC is not an accident. It's by design. It's part of a system that doesn't want the capital-owning class regulated.
"government exists to represent the interests of the capital-owning class" - this is especially true for US, because US politicians need enormous resources to get elected (mainly for media access) and basically the only way to get them is via contributions from lobbyists. US politicians understand that what gets them elected are not people, but money.
So if US people want to change that they would need to focus on expelling money from election process: severely limiting donations, especially from business, compensating candidates for the election costs, and mandating equal access to media covering elections (most EU countries have that and it works pretty well). But, don't expect politicians and corporate owned media to support that in any way - you would need a major grass roots movement to change that. Unfortunately at the moment I don't see any major shift in this direction.
Such efforts of reducing the impact of money on politics have been completely gutted by the Supreme Court who has decided that money is speech and the government can't limit that through campaign finance reform.
To directly answer the title of the post: because human beings are horrible at grappling with The Prisoner's Dilemma. It is a psychological blindspot that (I have no data but anecdotes to back this up, but I'm still quite sure of it) I would wager humans fail often enough that, at scale, it acts as a sort of expression of entropy.
Most of the problems of this world come down to us being engaged in scads of massive Prisoner's Dilemmas with (generally) fairly fast memory decay. NIMBYism, Realpolitik, etc. all come down to Prisoner's Dilemma--most people want a better world but nobody wants to be taken advantage of by others' selfish actions.
For example, if a European government or the government of Japan had allowed their public transit system to become even close to as bad as the systems we have in the USA, that government would not be re-elected.
People in the UK love to complain about their train system, even though it is better than anything people in the USA can dream of.
American voters have resigned themselves to the idea that government is going to fail to provide certain things, so they aren't surprised or outraged when that turns out to be the case, so our politicians don't fear for their jobs. Nothing will change unless politicians know they won't get re-elected if the government fails to execute.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadHaha, the military is not well-administered. It is well-administered for a military, but things go on that would never be allowed in a private company. Remember the two recent naval accidents? The gang they found operating out of a fort? The fact that on-base accidents are the leading cause of casualties?
I really like the Singapore model, where government employees are highly compensated, have built a culture of efficiency, and there are repercussions if they don't deliver.
In peacetime, it doesn't seem outrageous that that would be on-base accidents (especially if that includes automobile accidents and injuries during training exercises).
Mundane things are deadly, simply because we use them everyday.
The US was in two wars for nearly 2 decades, to say nothing of various other special operations, and accidents were a leading cause of deaths and permanent disability for a large number of those years.
Readiness is important, but IMO, the Army does a ton of unnecessary and unnecessarily dangerous training for capabilities that are almost never needed (jumping, in particular, but also certain types of combat training). Most importantly, this destroys people's physical health for no reason. Secondarily, this also costs the taxpayer enormous sums of money (each permanent disability retirement for a 30 year old is many millions of dollars).
The other branches might be more reasonable. Not sure.
Readiness is precisely about training for things that will almost never happen. Until they do.
IMO, the number of jumps the Army does each year is far in excess of what is necessary for readiness.
What I can say with some confidence is that there are perverse organizational incentives for some highly accident-prone training exercises. So, even if these exercises are required for readiness, that's not the (only) reason they're done in such high numbers.
Military Operations Research is a huge field. I like to use Google Scholar, which has many Masters Theses from military grad students, etc... Here's a few results to walk you "on target" if you want to continue to dig:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA545145.pdf
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA618622.pdf
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=airb...
You really think the military should forgo combat training?
FWIW, this isn't some crazy take. "Maybe the number and severity of injuries due to this activity is reducing readiness more than the resulting experience is increasing readiness" is a known trade-off.
I don't expect that number to ever go to 0, but I'd hope it could be smaller.
> You really think the military should forgo combat training?
This is not what anyone said. I'm in strong favor of more realistic training.
Of course, even this may be unnecessary for many. E.g., read the uncle comment's anecdote about ROTC.
> there was a woman on a guaranteed nursing scholarship who was probably about 4'10", 80 pounds, and she tore both ACLs from all the marching with 90 pounds of gear.
Whose idiocy was at fault here? I don't honestly think the military wanted people like this in the first place.
Does that need outweigh outweigh the difficulty of individually tailored ROTC programs for one person? I don't know
If they raised concerns and were overruled, then it's that person's fault also.
Meanwhile at the next door ROTC program it's all ridiculously soft and drill.
This all speaks to poor organizational controls.
It is like the Marine Corp who just disbanded their armored division and gave all the tanks to the Army. If an army can put a javelin in the hands of enough soldiers, are tanks really that effective anymore?
Now this isn't to say all combat training it useless, but some may be. Some of those things we are doing may be relics of the past and no longer necessary. We seem to train like the next world war is going be just like World War 2, but I imagine the next world war will look a whole lot different.
Training is the core of what we do, and extremely important no matter what. But, the nature of the training often doesn't match the real job. For instance, I remember at LDAC, a required ROTC summer course where you get evaluated and stack ranked prior to being given a job, there was a woman on a guaranteed nursing scholarship who was probably about 4'10", 80 pounds, and she tore both ACLs from all the marching with 90 pounds of gear. Forcing cadets that you know for certain are going into healthcare fields to train as infantry is no doubt harmful and unnecessary. At the time, women weren't even legally able to try becoming infantry, but still forced to do the training.
Personally, I served in a combat job, but even then, a lot of what we did felt more like hazing and dick measuring contests than skills-related. For instance, in a Cav unit, we were all required to do spur rides until passing, which involved activities like carrying telephone poles up and down hilly trails for 12 miles at 3 in the morning after not sleeping for 48 hours. I have no doubt doing stuff like that contributed to the spinal degeneration I eventually lost two years of my life to after leaving the services. Nonetheless, being a large, physical capable person who played and excelled at sports my entire life, I enjoyed that type of thing at the time. In retrospect, though, it sure looks wasteful and stupid. The repeated forced sleep deprivation is especially egregious, as it seems like the top contributor to all the accidents, and as far as I understood, training in a sleep deprived state doesn't actually improve your ability to deal with sleep deprivation in theater. At best, it helps to weed out and select who can and can't naturally deal with it, but it isn't really trainable.
At this point, the US military has determined that having paratroop units available is a useful capability in war. Arguing whether that tool is still useful is completely valid, and I would hope goes for anything: strategies, tactics, personnel, armaments, vehicles, equipment, etc.
However, once decided that a particular tool is necessary, it seems to me unquestionable that they should be kept in a ready, prepared, capable state. I suppose that too, can be debated, insofar as what constitutes "ready, prepared, capable," but if we've decided that our military needs people to jump out of planes, I would hope it goes without question that those people need to practice jumping out of planes.
shorter: training and necessity of a unit seem to be orthogonal concepts
Okay. I argue such and debate such. Very clearly. In my original post. What is the point of this reply?
> If you can't afford the servicemember, properly trained and properly insured, then don't "buy" them at all.
Okay. Clearly yes. Now find me a servicemember who would rather have medical retirement over avoiding permanent disability. That's the main reason we should not be risking life and limb unnecessarily. You know, like I said. In my original post. What is the post of the reply?
This knee-jerk need to defend the Army on full display in this thread is, if we're honest, is the primary difference between the military and most of the civilian government: not superior administrative competence, but mostly just better PR.
For example if a servicemember volunteers for paratrooper school and gets badly hurt on a jump then I'm going to assume the training was necessary because that's what the school is for. The people at the school are experts and it's a waste of military resources to put a trained servicemember out of commission permanently and the school will be held responsible so everyone has a strong incentive to be careful. However it sounded sort of like you were saying a paratrooper unit doesn't need to practice jumping so much because they'll probably never need to do that.
On the other hand if you're saying that the military should more aggressively investigate safer training techniques where that can be done with no loss of quality then I'm all for that. Maybe some training can be done with VR simulations in a wind tunnel before you actually send people up in a plane, awesome.
Also I'm sure you support veteran care, I was just adding that if the military decides some unit is necessary, then they need to train that unit appropriately, and (here's my part) they need to bear the full cost of any potential injury. Given how badly veterans are sometimes treated I felt that should be said.
Those two are related and form a vicious cycle. The more people you injure, the the more you have train. The more jumps you require for minimal readiness, the more folks eventually refuse to re-up to even leave the Army as they watch their friends drop like flies to spinal injuries.
Jumps, and dangerous jumps in particular, are a huge point of contention in the Army because the Army likes to screw soldiers by claiming that spinal injuries from jumps aren't service-related.
Then there's a really long tail of physical fitness training that has more to do with macho signalling than actual readiness. Plenty of discussion down-thread.
There is nuance and trade-off, but there's a LOT of training in the military that does little or nothing for readiness and contributes massively to injury rates. I think the Army is so far to the "stupid" end of that spectrum that the nuanced conversation doesn't make much sense to me.
[1] https://blog.anduril.com/rebooting-the-arsenal-of-democracy-...
As if, private companies were the pinnacle of human organization?
Some assumptions to clear up here.
Any demographic that is almost entirely young and, by selection, fit, accidents are guaranteed to be the leading cause of death.
What exactly do you expect here? You'd be happier if the leading cause were heart disease or warfare? The point is to be so good at everything else and so healthy that the only thing that can hurt you is error. That's success. The rank order of accidents isn't important. Only total quantity.
> “we don’t invest in administration, partly due to ideological opposition to the ability of government do its job.”
> Yes, people don’t want to invest in government because we’ve seen what kind of people work in it since they unionized and we banned written exams.
> “In some areas, US administrative capacity remains world-beating, most obviously the military, which enjoys bipartisan and popular support, and vast investments of resources.”
> Yes, and it is the one place that uses IQ tests, and it has a lot of white males at the top.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/153487716566093004...
There is more on the guys Substack on how abuse of CRA and disparate impact has wrecked public sector competence.
“The worst person you know just made a good point” etc.
I don't believe this is true at all. Many socialists do vote for the Democratic Party as the lesser of two evils, but liberals are not committed to egalitarianism at all costs. They have used the Federal bureaucracy as a jobs program since the end of the civil war. Similarly, the mitilary tends to be a jobs program for the more conservative parts of the country. Efficiency and performance has rarely ever been the goal, employment has.
If he believed in a meritocracy he would permit them to come. But he's actually one of the terrified ones. And a fear of being out-competed naturally lends itself to this sort of rhetoric.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
But since the conclusion is staring him in the face at a +50% effect size, I'm glad he can connect the dots.
Do you realize how incredibly low the bar is for the ASVAB? I got very close to the highest possible score back when I was 17. Far higher than the highest requirement for any job in the Army. I am, at best, moderately above average in IQ. IMO the requirement of a college degree for some jobs is a stronger IQ discriminator than the ASVAB.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/reviews/McNamara
What are you referring to? This is a very generic statement, and I'm willing to bet it's generic because any specific claim would be falsifiable in 99% of cases.
> the one branch of government that is distinguished by OP as still somewhat competent and capable, the military, is the only one that’s using IQ tests (ASVAB etc) in hiring.
LMAO.
1. The ASVAB is not a test for identifying high intelligence. It's exactly the opposite -- a test for filtering out extremely low intelligence. A low ASVAB score probably signals a serious learning disability or massive educational deficit. A really high ASVAB score probably means you won't fail out of a mediocre college in your first semester. That's about the extent of the signal because it's calibrated so low.
2. Some other civil services do have required exams (eg the post office), but they tend to be on the lowest end of the skills/education spectrum. Again, exams filter out the worst, but aren't helpful for separating the good from the best.
3. The services that don't have exams would not benefit from the ASVAB (eg NASA asking applicants with graduate degrees in STEM multiple choice questions such as "why is water denser than air"... if a candidate is that unintelligent/uneducated they won't have made it to the interview stage in the first place).
Also: Most highly selective private sector employers do not use IQ tests. Not sure why IQ tests are so fetishized among a certain set. They really aren't particularly useful interview instruments.
It is an easy numeric way to satisfy a superiority complex.
I think the bigger issue is not overall compensation, but the lack of performance based compensation.
Guaranteed pay increases, no bonuses, and seniority based promotion means there are few incentives to actually perform or have an impact.
I have several smart friends who are state/federal employees and they love their jobs. They don't mind so much that the programs they work on are fundamentally flawed or grossly inefficient.
I've worked with and in Government agencies. The amount of waste and inefficiencies out competes even the worst of large corporations. When agencies were new (1950-1970), we saw incredible progress and efficiencies. But, there is no one to clean up the crud that's built up over the years.
We can't even do six sigma because that itself would become a bureaucratic endeavor. I've seen how six sigma works great in a nimble Japanese manufacturing company, but not so great in American mega corporation. I am not sure what the solution is, perhaps complete abolishment of the agency and starting a new one.
So, "crud buildup" isn't it, not by itself. There is, however, a good case to be made that the increasing politicization makes the job inherently harder. Statements like "I bet if we just clean our house" are exactly that - it is not a proposal that's in any way actionable, but if enough people say it, there will be increased pressure to justify actions, which creates more bureaucracy.
Mind, I'm not saying there shouldn't be accountability. But we must move this discussion away from "Just do <simple slogan>" towards actual analysis, or the side effects of a populist discussion mean that administrative efforts drown in layers and layers of useless ass covering, just to shield from that pressure.
Starting from scratch doesn't really solve - or even discover - the underlying problem either. It might be a tool to address issues, but we don't know until we concretely investigate what the problems and root causes are.
Alas, that requires serious investment. And I really don't see a political climate where any effort to invest large amounts into rebuilding administrative capacity is successful. We're currently very much in a feedback loop. How to break that is, at least to me, ultimately a question of societal stability.
Politicians often don't get this, and they may even deliberately choose not to get it. In the public sector, "efficiency" is usually a codeword for slashing budgets and assuming that agencies will magically get their work done with fewer resources.
government jobs are low pay but people will take them for the lifetime pension after they retire. this incentivizes slow moving, long tenured, employees who have little motivation to do things differently. it attracts these people
i think we would be in a better place without pensions and instead paying people better rates
I think an even worse problem is unions in the government. There, you have people that literally do nothing and yet are untouchable because of their union.
"But isn't that a reduction of choice, so, a bad thing?" it would be, except that if enough of your peers also don't have that option, it means they can't outcompete you by harming their own retirement, so you don't need to do that in order to simply not fall behind. No more getting outcompeted for housing in good school districts because your peers are willing to live paycheck-to-paycheck and live on cat food in retirement, and you're not. And so on.
This sounds good, but my mother worked for the local government and it changed my mind. Public employees have the most capricious employer in existence -- voters. The union helps mitigate that. My mother would have had her pension cut to nothing after years with no cost-of-living wage adjustments if it were simply up to the voters.
I think this claim requires support. Yes, military spending is high and has bipartisan support, but I don't particularly agree that it is a hallmark of highly capable administration. Funding does not equal capacity.
US has anti-Federalists, though who can work to legally diminish the power of the central government.
If you look to the Civil war, fighting wasn't kicked off by the declaration of separation, the flashpoint was possession of federal armories in southern states.
I agree it is largely fantasy. The federal gov would never hand over bases in Texas, ect.
It is strange that the US is one of the only countries in the world to tax citizens abroad.
What if you personally object to the secession - would the US allow you to retain your citizenship and "immigrate" to Georgia?
And, what if Florida refused to recognize a class of residents as new citizens? What would happen to all the federal prisoners located in Florida when secession happened - Florida probably doesn't want to adopt a large population of incarcerated Americans, they'd probably try to give them back to America somehow - ditto for incarcerated Floridians being held outside the state - though Florida might not want them back anyways.
I think, at EOD, the US would probably offer continued US citizenship to any Florida residents who refused to accept Florida citizenship - which would likely result in Florida being a majority expat country, since, would you rather throw your personal future in with some new secessionist government or an established government that might end up eating Florida in a few weeks anyways?
And other portions of their economy are dependent on being a port (both land and sea) for goods entering and leaving the US, much of which would be redirected to other areas unless US purchasers decide to pay extra costs to import through Texas (unlikely).
A more viable attempt at secession might look like: perhaps a new Hawaiian independence party forms with massive (>80%) and sustained (>20 years) on-the-ground support, with all federal representatives coming from this party. Eventually this party might convince the federal and enough state governments to support a constitutional amendment recognizing a specific independence referendum. That's very theoretical but I hope illustrates what actual secession might look like.
Also consider that before the U.S. civil war the southern states voted against Lincoln, the northern candidate, in fact he was not even on the ballot in many of them. If the enslaved people in those states had been able to vote things would have gone differently. So we have a unique and terrible history of states seceding based on a minority's wishes.
Reduction of the fed may be the only way to ever meaningfully address national debt.
Illinois has the highest tax burden in the country. We're not Greece. We are paying through the nose for, well, everything. We get 95 cents on the dollar for our federal taxes, and we pay a lot of those.
Texas is a lower-tax state. It is, in some ways, better managed than Illinois. But it gets 20 cents back on every dollar it pays in federal taxes.
It seems to me that the reason not to bail out pension systems is that they're long-term unsustainable, and that they're mismanaged, and something has to be done to stop the bleeding. But it's hard to argue that bailing them out would be a redistributive injustice. We subsidize the low-tax red states.
(A comically similar microcosm of this debate occurs within Illinois, with rural Illinoisans regularly making noise about wanting to divest itself of Chicagoland. Go right ahead, Peoria!)
It's nearly impossible to leave a government you don't really approve of if they are transferring a large amount of money into your local economy.
> The Census numbers are much higher than the OECD numbers for a variety of reasons. In fact, the OECD income number of the US is only 59 percent of the Census number.
The adjustment they did was "moving all the medians of all the states down by 59%" but I don't think that is enough. A more appropriate way to compare things would have been figuring how what those "differentiating reasons" and deducing amounts for each of the states, or incrementing the other countries' median in the same way. The American Census could (for example) be counting every state's natural resources as part of each household's income. In that case, they should include Sweden's petrol reserves in that computation. With the disparate measurement methods and the simplistic adjustment, they are comparing apples to oranges.
To be clear, that adjustment can only affect the relative numbers across US states, not the overall average for US states. That is because all states are adjusted by the OECD number for the US. Presumably the OECD methodology is consistent within itself.
So maybe the Census includes oil resources and OECD doesn’t. Discounting the US numbers across the board to 59% may make Texas and California artificially look better than Mississippi. But the overall average of the US states would still correspond to the OECD number for the US, which presumably is computed the same way as for Sweden.
More on topic, those poor states that benefit from federal money would not have a very strong economy and they would not be able to do deficit spending on their own currency or pay for things through deficit spending. If Oregon, Washington and California formed a new country or joined Canada they'd be better off financially, because their tax drain to poor state america would end. I don't want a split but I'm starting to feel it will happen in my lifetime. I'm more than ok with helping the poorer states with their infrastructure needs, we are all in this together. But I'm tired of 15% of the population having control over the federal agenda through the senate.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Yes. There's a reason US dollars are accepted worldwide Zimbabwean dollars aren't.
Once states secede, they lose all the clout that comes from being part of the world's only superpower controlling the world's reserve currency. Southern states would be better off switching to Pesos than printing their own.
Russia, which has a similar GDP, didn't have any appreciable external debts denoted in rubles. They were denoted in dollars, pounds sterling or other hard currencies.
EDIT: https://medium.com/@jonathanusa/everything-you-know-about-th...
Germany, for example, has "state's rights." Religious people in Bavaria decided that government buildings should display crosses (https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/31/europe/bavaria-germany-crosse...) and folks in Berlin don't get to veto that. When German press asked Angela Merkel why she wouldn't order a nationwide COVID lockdown, she explained German federalism, and the German press (which is much smarter than the American press) nodded and moved on. India features states that differ quite significantly in their healthcare systems or social laws. In Switzerland, a country the size of Maryland, laws on same-sex marriage differ between cantons until national consensus was reached less than two years ago.
America is a country of 330 million people, and far more diverse than Germany or Switzerland. Why should we ignore the real need for flexibility and localism just because some people who are long dead abused federalism?
Different groups of people wanting to cooperate to some extent but not be micromanaged by other groups of people isn’t unique to Germany. Federalism keeps recurring because it solves a recurring human problem.
> I'm not making the argument Federal power is bad, the people who benefit from it the most are, and are grifting the system by intentionally subverting anything that would improve their people's situation.
I like to assume that people are acting rationally in their interest given their values and priorities. People disagree about what would “improve” their situation,” or what will be the real outcome of efforts undertaken to “improve the situation.” Last I checked people are moving from California to Texas, not the other way around. Let’s assume at the very least people rationally appreciate the trade offs of that.
> Look at the build back better plan, they screwed that up and most of our highways are out of their operating life spans by more than double the original life time.
And why do you assume that Build Back Better would address that problem? I used to be a transit fan. I dutifully road Amtrak and Metro and MARC to work for years. And you know what? I gave up, moved to the exurbs, and bought a big SUV. Because we can’t actually do infrastructure and we shouldn’t even try. My change of heart was bitterly confirmed true when I saw the BBB proposal for Amtrak (which last I checked planned to blow tens of billions of dollars without building any new track).
Being from Bangladesh, I don’t actually believe that all cultures equally good at all things. Clearly Americans just can’t do things that require large scale coordination. Instead of beating our heads against the wall about it, we should just try to restructure our society to avoid those weaknesses.
It's worth noting that the issue gets confused because of the makeup of the political coalitions in the US. Namely the party of "small government" is a coalition of social conservatives (who often are fine with government spending, so long as it's not forcing liberal social policy on them), and economic libertarians (who care deeply about low taxes and less business regulation, but aren't as sensitive to liberal social policy). The social conservatives bring the votes, but party has historically prioritized the policy of the libertarians.
Until relatively recently, it was actually pretty common for the states you speak of to send socially conservative Democrats to Congress. Over the last 15 or so years, the Republicans successfully exploited the compromises those Democrats were often forced to make with an officially socially-liberal party to defeat them electorally.
Also, as an anecdote, one of these states (North Dakota) could probably legitimately claim to be one of the most socialist states in the country. It literally has a couple major state-owned businesses.
If you took social issues off the table, I think you'll see those states behave much differently.
California did not want to secede. A Russian-linked group tried repeatedly over the 2016 to 2020 period to get an initiative for an independence referendum on to the ballot in the state, but never managed to qualify the initiative, much less pass the initiative calling for an independence referendum.
The analyses that draw this conclusion leave a lot out. By narrowing the discussion to spending, they ignore the many benefits of federal policy for corporations based in the big cities in a few states. A few industries come to mind that would make a lot less money if federal policy were different: banks, pharma, entertainment, and even technology.
You would need consent from the rest of the states in order to leave, and that isn't happening any time soon.
I don’t think the hard part is getting people on board with it. The hard part is just getting a vote on it.
EDIT to address your point: I think if enough people want it, it will happen. The Civil War was about slavery, no matter what some folks will say. The current direction isn’t towards war, it’s towards an indifference followed by dissolution. There’s no energy to keep Florida or Texas or California from leaving if that’s what a large majority want.
If they raised this sort of thing to a vote, I would strongly hope that we let them build their own Republican utopia.
They'll never raise this to a vote, though, because the last thing they want is for that wish to be granted. Complaining about the federal government when you've mismanaged your state is easy, actually having to manage it without relying on handouts is not.
Ukraine gave Russia the nukes it held within its border. Looking back probably not a great idea.
We're talking about a military coup in the United States, which is a big topic, but technically, very few tanks and bombs or jets or nukes are in states. In part, for this reason. They're on federal property. States have militias; the U.S. has aircraft carriers and cruise missiles. If a secessionist government tried to invade federal territory, I would be wholly in favor of a decisive (if compassionate) military response.
The bigger challenge, as it always is, is the people.
Anyone can declare anything. What matters is who the troops and missile launchers listen to. That’s the Pentagon.
Would soldiers who live in these states obey DC's order to kill their neighbors and friends?
They certainly might, depending on the circumstances. But it is unclear to me that the outcome would be simple.
This is a popular factoid, but it often leaves out the fact that Russia had the codes to use the nukes, the ability to maintain them, and that other countries (like the US) wanted the nukes out of Ukraine.
If they had kept them, it is far from clear that they would be a nuclear power today.
As someone who lives in California, I thought you were talking about us. I wish I could move to Florida. Seems like a better place to live in almost all regards.
Unless of course, Florida's hurricanes, mosquitos, sinking land, horrible people, and lackluster economy are keeping you from moving there?
OTOH, Florida begs for federal handouts every time there's a big storm because somehow they never get around to requiring developers to build flood-resistant structures.
When someone calls an entire population of a state, nation, or region as "horrible people"; we call them bigots. It is time for introspection and reflection when you get to a point where everyone you don't agree with are horrible people. And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
Usually this would be flagged, but it goes with the party lines I suppose so it is allowed.
And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
That is objectively false. Only the Miami-Dade metropolitan area in Florida leans blue.
The funniest thing of all is talking about generalizing all people when talking about a state that passed laws to demonize all lgbtqia people.
Eastern Washington and Oregon have been talking about seceding from their respective states for /years/ and absolutely nothing has come of it because—surprise—most people don’t want to leave.
The number of people who are intensely political (who dislike Florida because politics or who are “Let’s go, Brandon!”) are a very small part of the population. They’re just very loud.
I think this is actually at the root of why America's administrative capacity has become so weak. Administrators are, for want of a better phrase, not content to stay in their lane, and try to smuggle other ideological baggage through their administration, which breeds resentment and resistance. Transportation planners are not content to build the roads people want, but want to make people take trains instead. Educators and public health experts think it's their job to weigh on race relations. The administrative class has always been haughty, since its inception in the Wilson era, but now they've found religion and become evangelical about it.
No particular state is more hell-bent on keeping Texas in the union than Texas.
All of the Texan talk of secession is just virtue signaling and pea-cocking, intended to drive the voter base to show up to the polls.
Most states that appear to lean in either direction at the governmental level have very substantial opposition voter populations. This is the biggest reason nobody is seriously going to consider secession, aside of rhetoric for the base.
I'm not sure what happens in the case of an abortion provider from a legal state visiting an illegal state. My suspicion is that they might try and be rebuked on jurisdictional grounds. It's an even weaker case than local citizen travel, since no part of the acts occurred inside the jurisdiction.
Impressive gymnastics.
I don't know what hair you're trying to split here, but the gymnastics are getting even more imporessive.
> Regulating one’s own citizens while they are traveling elsewhere is different than trying to regulate a different state.
Missouri's law, for example, would allow Missouri citizens to sue out-of-state physicians who perform an abortion on a Missourian but have never lived, set foot in, or done business in Missouri.
Looking forward to the incoming sequence of twists and flips.
This topic generates strong feelings for obvious and legitimate reasons. But that makes it more important (not less) to follow the site guidelines. That's why we added this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I guess my county (Anne Arundel, MD) is technically "blue" at the moment--it went for Biden +14. But in 2018's "blue wave" it went for Larry Hogan +38. Maryland, despite being solidly Democrat, is pretty conservative in a distinctly mid-Atlantic way.
While we have disagreements, the American people are not particularly divided on the major issues.
Another factoid: Biden got 5,244,886 votes in New York and 5,259,126 votes in Texas. In other words, more people voted for Biden in Texas than in New York.
That changed recently when the state became the target of national politics. Suddenly, the folks on the other side of the aisle were not Georgia Democrats, but California and New York Democrats. That created a ton of polarization that didn’t exist before.
Right now, our national politics pits California and New York Democrats against Mississippi Republicans, and the rest of us just have to pick a side. Things would be far less polarized if we split up, and it was California Democrats versus California Republicans and Texas Democrats versus Texas Republicans.
Here in Maryland, we have an extremely popular Republican governor that does Republican stuff like oppose public transit and try to keep taxes low. State politics is quite civil, because Baltimore isn’t San Francisco (despite voting similarly for Biden) but neither is Carroll County Mississippi (despite voting similarly for Trump).
Also, if you're using New York and California Democrats as a proxy for left-wing voters, Biden is pretty disappointing on that front. A huge part of why Biden was the nominee was specifically so he could appeal to centrist voters. The fact that Texan and Georgian voters voted for someone who was picked partly to appeal to those same people should not be surprising.
No, I’m making a completely different argument. The point is that Georgia Democrats are closer to Georgia Republicans than California Democrats are to Georgia Republicans. When politics is locally focused, there is less acrimony because the sides are less far apart.
But when Georgia politics came under the national spotlight, it became a proxy for the fight between New York and California Democrats and Mississippi Republicans. “Democrat” in Georgia used to mean Zell Miller, but now refers to Nancy Pelosi. That greatly increased the acrimony of politics in the state.
Your point about Biden actually supports my point. Before southern Democrats rescued his campaign, the Act Blue donors and activists were running a carnival where candidates were all raising their hand to open borders. Trump didn’t run against Biden, he ran against those people. That’s only possible because New York and California Democrats have so much power over the party apparatus and messaging that it’s easy to make them the face of the party.
If the states were split up, that wouldn’t happen. My county exec is a Democrat, but it’s hard for me to get worked up about him because he’s a farmer. If folks in New York and California had no input into the laws that applied to me, or how my schools are run, etc., I don’t think I would follow politics at all.
I'm struggling to understand how we go from that, to saying that there is even the remotest support in Georgia to secede even though every national candidate Georgians elected is in the party currently in power, or that after secession the elections would or should go back to Republican vs. Republican-lite. The only way any of that makes sense is if the actual goal is to separate the Georgia Democrats from the national apparatus to hopefully give state Republicans a chance to figuratively beat the newly-activated voters into submission. In fact if we're going strictly by the numbers then in any split Georgia should stay with the Democratic parts of the country.
Also I'm not sure what Pelosi has to do with any of this but at the moment, from the outside, the face of Georgia Democrats look like Ossoff, Warnock and Abrams all of whom are authentically local. I'm sure Trump and the Republican party would like people to think that Pelosi is the face of the Georgia Democrats, though.
I do feel bad for Georgian voters, not to mention the people counting the votes. It wasn't their fault that the balance of power came down to them in the end and I'm sure most of them didn't like being in the middle of that firestorm. However I suspect any acrimony was primarily due to the fact that the Democrats found a winning strategy in a formerly safe state.
They aren't. It's not 1860, no one is campaigning on preserving the Union over other policy considerations. While there would be intense disputes about how to treat people who didn't want to be separated from the US, and about disposition of federal property in the event of a divorce, few in NY or CA outside of the Republican minority in each state would expend even the slightest effort on keeping Texas in the Union as such, though they might oppose bad divorce terms on those other issues.
On the other hand, all the other Republican-led states would oppose the idea fiercely, because it would be a giant shift away from the Republican Party in the national balance of political power. (And, yes, Texas is far from solid red by population, but that's not what matters.)
Then why do they care so much about abortion laws in Texas, or whether Texas expands Medicaid, etc? Really, why do they care about the federal government at all?
Historically, Democrats cared about the federal government because Republicans states like California had the money and they needed the federal government to redistribute it. But today, Democrat states have the money. So what’s the point? Why not just adopt universal healthcare in California without regard to what Texas does?
Because Texas is in the Union, and what is Constitutionally allowed in Texas is what is Constitutionally allowed in their state, and they don't assume that they will have a permanent legislative majority there, because, well, history shows that they likely won't.
Other than that Californians care about rights in Texas the same.way they care about rights in Saudi Arabia.
I think it’s more like the Crusades. Californians believe in the universalism of their moral world view and want to impose it on the heathens in Texas. More like George Bush trying to bring democracy to the Middle East.
That's like saying you need permission to break the law.
Deep down, we all know that if you want to do a thing, you can just do it, and leave those who value systems and processes and order to grapple with it. Trump proved that.
Edit: to be clear, I do not support or like this reality. But if you don't think that the right will do anything other than "lol u mad libs? deal with it" then you haven't been paying attention.
And not even that. Similar agreements and compromises on shared standards, data transfer, compliance etc still have to be made to enable trade. Brexit voters were promised a "bonfire of regulations" yet red tape has doubled to continue trade with the EU and the trade deals the UK has signed with Japan and others are literal copy/paste of EU ones.
The mechanisms to enable secession from the union are either constitutional amendment or military might.
We already see this with legal marijuana, there are multiple campaigns aimed to form interstate compacts without the consent of congress. Ultimately a situation where the federal government declines to enforce its legal authority will just lead to a defacto change in the supremacy clause of the US constitution.
The only situation I see where this would become problematic is if a state chose to stop sending tax dollars to the federal government. Even then, the federal government has levers to pull that would be tough for a state to circumvent except by exiting the dollar - which no state has any reason to do.
This is not generally how taxes work, though; instead, individuals and businesses send taxes to the federal government (and sometimes, also to their states), and the federal government returns a great deal of the money to the states and localities, directly or indirectly. Leaving the federal government wouldn't mean the states would stop sending the feds money, it means they would be completely unable to pay for all sorts of infrastructure and entitlements that they receive money from the federal government for.
Worst case scenario, I'd see some byzantine system of declarations required when doing something across state lines or people using "fed taxed" and "state taxed" financial institutions depending on their objectives. Given the current state of military affairs, a war over Rhode Island would be a complex endeavor - a war over Texas, California, or New York is a practical impossibility.
The state that tried to leave might find itself with a civil war as the two sides within it -- the majority of whom already believe that the other party represents the most mortal enemy imaginable -- duke it out for control.
The big item issues such as
- Federal bans on abortion
- Controversial Presidential elections
- A series of unfortunate Supreme court decisions
- Immigration
- Infrastructure spending
Are all issues which can be handled with a legal decoupling. If all sides remained notionally in Congress, then there is very little likelihood that Congress would address the matter. A sensible supreme court would leave it as a political issue for a few decades before declaring a defacto status as was done for West Virginia's statehood. For all intents and purposes, a de facto decoupling would look more like a return to State relationships prior to 1900 then a secession.
While some may wish for a military based solution to stop a legal decoupling... there simply does not seem to be a plausible route for any military solution by any party. Russia made it ~100km into Ukraine before being stopped, it's 2900 KM between Houston and Boston - all means of ending such a stalemate would escalate to MAD as the military remains spread across states for political and defense purposes. Even in the civil war, the North was unable to enforce integration of the south through reconstruction.
That's an interesting Taiwan-ish model for succession. It probably has a better chance of success than the kind of outright succession the Confederacy tried, because it could be conducted slowly while still paying lip service to the Union. At each small step, military intervention might seem like too extreme of an escalation.
Though it still would be difficult. At some point it would require the state citizens to start breaking federal laws in very obvious ways (e.g. stop paying federal taxes), but I doubt they'd be fine with not crossing state lines in that case. Also a lot of the money in state budgets pass through the federal government, so it would probably be really expensive to replace that without some of the more extreme steps.
This has been tested, and the states—consisting of a very large share of the states up to that moment in the union—testing it ultimately failed.
The federal-state balance of the relative capacities to apply force has not, in the interim, shifted in favor of the states in any way I can ascertain, in fact, those capacities have been significantly centralized in the Federal government since the last time it was tried in a large scale way, or even since the more recent, smaller scale attempts.
> We already see this with legal marijuana, there are multiple campaigns aimed to form interstate compacts without the consent of congress.
Source? There has been lots of talk of an interstate compact with Congressional approval as an alternative vehicle, and transitional stepping stone, to general federal legalization, but I’ve seen nothing about a renegade compact.
State marijuana legalization leans on non-commandeering doctrine rather than nullification.
When do states send tax dollars to the federal government? Individuals send tax dollars to the federal government, but states mostly receive federal money.
It's a scam. Right-wing governments like the Conservatives are run by and for junkies, who will steal anything not nailed down to sell off cheap for a quick fix of cash.
The stuff about progressives at the top is weird. I don't know how they even found a large enough data set of enacted progressive policies to draw a conclusion about whether they're too policy-focused rather than admin-focused. Then the rest of the article is largely about how Republicans won't staff agencies properly, so how could it possibly matter how admin-focused progressives are? Progressives don't even control the democratic party, let alone have control of government, so I don't know what the point of the opening section was.
[EDIT] That first bit's me summarizing the article's points, by the way, not just throwing in my own take, as several top-level posters seem to have decided to do. Admittedly, connecting the civil/common law divide to the courts section is mine, but considering that comes up over and over again in analyses of this problem, and that section's largely describing the exact effect that those others have also noticed, I think that's fair.
“There’s 50 government departments and like a dozen teams in the IT department who all handle different stuff. Each department uses their own niche software. Extremely clunky and confusing.”
How do you fix management problems in situations like this? How do you create accountability where there is none?
Here’s an article… and years later it is still not working right.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3269011/phoenix-fiasco-one-year-p...
It's expensive for the government to do things because
1. Everyone knows the government wastes money on everything so why not charge them a higher price.
2. Nobody feels any guilt out of keeping as much money out of the government's hands as possible (since you can spend that money more efficiently!)
3. One political party gains points whenever they make inefficient spending decisions since it reinforces their narrative about the government being inefficient.
Number 3 is often solely blamed but I think it's faded somewhat compared to 1 & 2. I don't think many GOP politicians intentionally make bad financial decisions with the hope of making the government look bad - but when they make mistakes the blame they receive is generally outweighed by the general malaise over inefficient government which supports their platform. Cheating the government is so popular and widely endorsed that Trump essentially ran for president on it.
Now there is so much regulation that it would be impossible to get through the permit in 5 years.
It’s the same here in Canada, all the infrastructure, building, farms, road that were built around 1900 are no longer possible with the level of regulation.
We are getting into a kafkaesque state where the technology is super productive but the regulations swallow every improvement and them some.
Well, who is John Galt?
* Govt is not so much about helping get things done (think of older projects like interstate highway systems) and is more focused on stopping things (5+ years of environmental reports to do anything meaningful). That's one big shift for better or worse depending on perspective.
* Govt is graded HEAVILY on non-performance objectives - so things like compliance, equity, etc etc are critical issues, and the actual performance of programs which is much harder to measure is not a focus. I've helped on that stuff, it can make your head spin. You'll be trying to do a reading program for kids and in San Francisco need to train staff on the McBride Principles for Northern Ireland and much more.
* Major focus on getting folks in trouble vs saying "good job" internally to govt systems. So many folks learn to keep their heads down, the tall grass gets cut.
I have great sympathy for ALL line / front end staff in these systems (think teachers, police etc) trying to get stuff done. There are now 100 ways to be punished and somewhat fewer ways to be celebrated.
This is a political choice (or I guess, an outcome of political environment). Strategizing how to return to a politics of getting this done for citizens is probably more use than any culture war stuff going on now.
The American people were long ago sold on the idea that the government was just too big and their lives would be better if less of their tax dollars went to fund all this unnecessary government.
For more than 50 years the Republican party has been actively trying to shrink the government. Some of their plans, such as starving government programs for money have been so effective that their Democrat counterparts had to also downsize departments in order to keep them alive.
Some examples of this starvation are the burdens placed on the USPS to fully fund future pensions, and the continual under-funding of the IRS.
Just federal alone is 30%!
just google: "govt spend as percentage of GDP"
I think the american public has been sold on the idea that govt should be bigger and bigger and more bloated than ever. Most people either approve or just don't care.
Yet that isn't what is being cut in the name of "Government too big!". In fact, those categories only seem to be growing in cost with no apparent measures by the GOP to curb them.
Three areas of government that have broad bipartisan support. The right wants smaller government, in theory, but they also want to "keep the government out of my Medicare!" So the spending isn't ever going to down, only up.
You poll people on whether they support Social Program X, you get a very different result from if you describe a hypothetical program that just happens to do exactly what Social Program X does, and ask them if they would support that. For extra comedic value you can also ask if they'd like to replace Program They Hate with this new program that's identical.
A similar hating-the-label-not-the-thing effect is how you get nonsensical shit like people apparently thinking Medicare isn't "socialized medicine". If they like it, it must not be [Bad Thing].
If you want to decrease spending, fine lets start by lowering the costs of medical care and medicines, and start looking at getting better value out of our military spending.
The main problem is the mandatory spending. It's exciting to write your bill declaring some funding "mandatory", but then there's nothing to be done about it.
Which, to a close approximation, everyone actually supports. We don't reduce government spending because we don't want to.
The left assumes the government could be competent, but only if everyone tries to make it so, and they know what the right is doing (all of this policy is completely aboveboard and public).
Net result, everyone can safely assume the government is incompetent. It is much easier to prevent it from working than to make it work. We'd have to have bipartisan interest in making it work effectively, and we do not have that.
There's no right crafting policy to kneecap the city's ability to function as a city.
I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
We've got 25 million to build a bridge to a sports stadium. Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
>I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
Because my city is not good at being a city.
Sports stadiums are massive sources of revenue for cities.
> Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.
That's not true. They're almost always a net loss and either way I'm not talking about the money that went to the stadium. I'm talking about the money spent on building a single pedestrian bridge to that stadium.
>It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.
Obviously I meant 4 hours a week picking up trash in a single park.
I’m up in a small town in British Columbia, population circa 40K. Our compost is collected weekly; our recycling and garbage biweekly (garbage used to be weekly but they’ve supplied us with humongous wheeled bins now); our landfill separates trash by kind, sells what can be recycled, and keeps track of where it buried the rest; we have a massive composting facility that sells its end product; our sewer treatment plant sends its output to ranchland spray irrigation and golf courses. In the spring and fall, a chipping truck comes along and mulches any tree trimmings.
We maintain our infrastructure. Old underground services are regularly upgraded on schedule. Roads are resurfaced when they’re worn. Our downtown core was beautified a few years ago, with new trees, brickwork, etc. Down at the beaches, cottonwood trees are removed when they become hazardous; new trees are planted. Our parks are clean, despite the homeless living in them. Heck, we built several apartment buildings for those homeless that have their life together enough to qualify for residency (though provincial funding assisted on this.)
Over the past twenty or thirty years we’ve build a new swimming pool/rec centre; a multi-sheet ice rink; a truly excellent performing arts centre; acres of new park; a new track-and-field venue; removed a decrepit and failing arena; and are in the process of building out a new arena/outdoor sports centre. The only thing we’ve completely failed to implement is a new art gallery.
We do have a homeless problem (our weather is very nice) and there is a heck of a drugs problem (a lot of weed was grown around here back in the day, and there’s an undercurrent of gang activity involving the hard drugs). But on the whole, it’s a very laidback, safe, well-run community of caring people.
It’s sad that your town is a failure. It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town.
They probably do have people who can administer with comparable competency, but I think the competency required to manage a town of 40k is very different from the kind of competency you need to get those results in a much larger town.
At small city scale, administrative layers can be thin and infrequent because of the smaller scale. Changing collections to be every other week could probably be a meeting with a few dozen workers. In a major city, that could be hundreds or thousands of workers, requiring administrative layers to handle rescheduling, handling concerns, etc, etc.
Small cities also generally have to develop smaller portions of their budget to dynamically adjusting to shifts in the city. How often do you have to build new roads and expand existing ones to handle shifts in traffic? What's the worst case scenario for traffic in a city of 40k, vs a city with millions of people? The major cities I've lived in are constantly having to build new roads and expand existing ones, and they're barely making a dent in the traffic problem.
Stuff like taking down trees and cleaning parks is pretty easy when the town is small enough to have a half dozen people do it. You need a whole administration layer when you can't have 6 people that just wander around parks fixing things that need to be fixed.
Like many things, I think complexity and cost of those services tends to scale exponentially with population rather than linearly.
Yes, it's a pretty astoundingly corrupt city. But stamping out corruption is one of the fundamental components of good governance.
TBF this one isn't government specific. It's often easier to fund a debt instrument for a big initiative than to find a revenue stream for a small obvious win. This happens in large companies, too, btw. You argue for years to consistently invest a small amount in something, the investment is never made, and then the company ends up acquiring to save itself from that exact underinvestemnt.
City run trash collection is totally a thing in some areas, and it actually makes sense if done well. I once lived in a conservative city that had it (and did it well).
Where I live now, we have private trash collection. That meant we had dozens of garbage trucks from different companies driving through the neighborhood on every trash day, until one of my neighbors organized everyone to switch to one single company.
Even the brightest among the HN crowd can fall into the trap that "The other side is incompetent." There are geniuses and idiots on both sides. If your city is poorly run, its not because your city is run by one party over the other. It's because the people running your city is competent at running a campaign and incompetent at running a city. There's not much more to it than that.
BTW, the people picking up trash in our neighborhood are bleeding heart liberals.
We needed healthcare reform. What we got was the ACA.
What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????
Average peoples' material conditions are getting worse and worse. They need some kind of simple universal assistance. They don't need yet another way of getting means tested.
> What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????
Wealthy powerful interests who fund politicans on both sides ensure those reforms fail or are watered down to nothing. This is not about complexity. It's simple corruption.
The only real net beneficiaries of the ACA were the insurance companies. People are compelled to get high deductible insurance. And that's enforced through the tax-code for some reason???
They made a minor concession about denials for preexisting conditions. But, now they just claim everything is 'not medically necessary' instead.
People need healthcare. Not 11,000 pages of more bureaucratic nonsense.
I still remember Obama having a televised meeting with Republicans from Congress and each of the Republicans had this big stack of papers next to them as a sort of prop to suggest to the folks at home that it was some bureaucratic government takeover. What nonsense. The U.S. government is a complicated thing, so is healthcare, and put it all together and yeah it might take a few pages. Bills like that get passed all the time. And even as careful as the authors were, Republicans were happy to read the law closely and take advantage of every loophole they could, with the Medicaid expansion nonsense and the endless lawsuits on technicalities.
The inability to come up with simple reforms stems from they see themselves as uniquely qualified to manage the affairs of state. They went to the best schools. They have all the best policy positions. If you have any disagreements about policy, it's simply because you don't understand. This is the prevailing attitude despite an abysmal performance over the past 40 years after they completely abandoned the New Deal.
The concept that government is there to help is taken like a conspiracy theory and slowly 'Starving the beast' provides ample opportunity for failure that only furthers anti-federalist mentality. Or as some should be saying as they campaign, "Government doesn't work, elect me and I'll prove it!"
Months late, over budget, missing information, not able to process the volume needed...and at the end of the day they just pointed the finger at Oracle...despite tons of documents provided that showed poor oversight by the government. After multiple lawsuits Oregon got $100M back of the $240M they paid...but that's was a stupid number of dollars to be spent in the first place providing a place that ultimately targeted just a few hundred thousand people (at most...for 2022 it was 147K).
You can research their COVID unemployment debacle as another fumble in administrative capacity.
This problem isn't unique to software actually, it boils down to how government contracting works and how even after someone gets the contract it's very much requirements driven with little room for flexibility and A LOT of overhead.
This should be a strong counterargument, at least in Oregon, any time some schmuck says something dumb like "Ya don't get fired for choosing Oracle."
It should, in fact, be grounds for immediate termination. Cisco, too.
Some specifics:
> Does anyone seriously doubt that a federal UI system would be better run than the state-run versions that collapsed during the pandemic?
Yes, I do (seriously doubt that)! The last time the federal government took on something like this, it was a train wreck which relied on the industry taking on tours of duty to fix it. The notion that the Federal Government is more competent than the states is belied by the series of articles being written in the first place! Is it better for the feds to something once than for the states to do it 50 times - that's a different question altogether.
> There are simply fewer federal government employees relative to the tasks we ask of them. As a percentage of the population, the federal workforce was 1.13 percent in 1967 but shrank to 0.64 percent by 2018. We see a similar decline with the IRS...
We didn't have computers in 1967. Did human productivity not increase more than 2x in the last 51 years? Why do we need more humans? Did complexity in tax code outpace gains in productivity? Has the IRS not modernized (spending money elsewhere)? I feel like this stat is totally irrelevant to any understanding of the problem and moreover, the suggested solution is perfectly in line with the fundamental problem the author is trying to solve (lets throw money at ineffective governance because that's what we do).
> If my interpretation is right, the Republicans who are creating administrative dysfunction described above are also contributing to declining state capacity by picking judges inherently suspicious of administrative power.
This is not strictly Republicans' doing. We continuously cheered as Trump policies were stricken by the courts. As a society as a whole, we've continually pushed administration into the judicial branch - out of cowardice and opportunity alike.
Additionally, since the Reagan era, government institutions have been defunded, attacked and undermined by successive (primarily Republican) adminstrations. The inevitable ineffectiveness that results is then used as an argument for further defunding.
But here's the one mistake the article makes: it's confusing Democrats with progressives and fundamentally mischaracterizes Democratic Party motivations.
There are like maybe 4 actual progressives in the Democratic Party at the Federal level. The Democratic Party hates actual progressives. Just look at the primary in the Texas 28th just recently. Pelosi and Clyburn went out of their way to campaign for Henry Cuellar who is pro-gun and the only anti-abortion Democrat in Congress over the actual progressive Cisneros.
The Democrats (including Biden) were architects of the 1994 Crime Bill that is perhaps the biggest factor in mass incarceration in the US. Not so fun fact: the US is ~3% of the world population but has ~25% of the world's prisoners.
The entire purpose of the Democratic Party is to say "look at how terrible the Republicans are" and use that for fundraising. In any European country the Democrats would be considered a conservative (probably center right) party.
So it's not that the Democrats are too focused on policy rather than administrative capacity (as the article argues) but rather they're focused entirely on aesthetics. The Democratic Party loves nothing more than appearing to do something without having to do anything.
Let me add something to the specific example of the Fifth Circuit:
> A very good example of this comes in the form of a recent 5th Circuit decision that essentially gutted the ability of the SEC to do much of its job. In Jarkesy v. Securities and Exchange Commission, the court ruled that the SEC’s use of administrative hearings violated the right to a jury trial, and therefore was unconstitutional. This is a major break from almost a century of precedent that accepted that the SEC could employ administrative hearings and administrative law judges.
What people need to realize here is that courts aren't apolitical polymaths presiding in a vacuum. Courts (including the Supreme Court) are and have always been political. If you look at the 5th Circuit appeals court judges [1], 12 are appointed by Republicans, 5 by Democrats. Undermining institutions like the SEC is not an accident. It's by design. It's part of a system that doesn't want the capital-owning class regulated.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
So if US people want to change that they would need to focus on expelling money from election process: severely limiting donations, especially from business, compensating candidates for the election costs, and mandating equal access to media covering elections (most EU countries have that and it works pretty well). But, don't expect politicians and corporate owned media to support that in any way - you would need a major grass roots movement to change that. Unfortunately at the moment I don't see any major shift in this direction.
That too is a political decision.
For example, if a European government or the government of Japan had allowed their public transit system to become even close to as bad as the systems we have in the USA, that government would not be re-elected.
People in the UK love to complain about their train system, even though it is better than anything people in the USA can dream of.
American voters have resigned themselves to the idea that government is going to fail to provide certain things, so they aren't surprised or outraged when that turns out to be the case, so our politicians don't fear for their jobs. Nothing will change unless politicians know they won't get re-elected if the government fails to execute.