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> Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care. How though. Roads are a public good and fixing th

> Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care. How though. Roads are a public good and fixing them should come from the governments pocket. How can you say the problem is private industry, when the government is doing such a good job collecting our tax money. You should be asking where is that money going. And then you will see its because of mismanagement by the government. Trillions in debt, for what? Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's better to vote for people who vibe with you, than people who can provide essential services.

mmooss 4mo ago
The tax rates in the US are low; that's why there is so much debt and so few services. Anti-tax groups have long followed the 'Starve the Beast' strategy (and their opponents are completely incompetent and fall for it every time): 1) Cut taxes 2) Point out the resulting deficit, say we're spending too much, and cut services 3) Repeat Now we're at point 2. It's not spending, it's lack of revenue. Some large corporations pay no tax. The US has cut IRS enforcement even though it pays for itself many, many times over. The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary), and because their taxes are cut over and over and they have endless loopholes - e.g., trust funds!
- tmoertel 4mo ago
  > The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary)... A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide jobs, rather than spend their wealth on luxuries for themselves. In this way, we have an economy focused more on the needs and wants of regular people, and less on producing what wealthy people want. Can you spot a flaw in that line of reasoning?
  - mmooss 4mo ago
    I'm not taking a test (feel free to answer yourself) but my view is that it's the same old talking point: Help the wealthy, and the Nth order effects will benefit others. The only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy. (I think that's a good way to analyse any policy - the 1st order effects are the ones you can count on; the Nth order effects are just BS that magically costs nothing, but gets others to go along - 'the people will pay for this stadium for my privately owned franchise (1st order) and it will bring business to the community (2nd order).' That's repeated over and over, and the 2nd order effect is well known to not happen, but it sometimes gets enough votes from those uneducated in the issue.) I think in the 1980s the Reagan administration called it 'trickle-down economics', such an incredibly revealing name!
    - tmoertel 4mo ago
      Okay, but you didn't refute the line of reasoning. You called it "the same old talking point" and then jumped to the conclusion that "the only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy." But you didn't show that your claim was true. Or that the claim you were responding to was false. Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
      - ranger_danger 4mo ago
        [dead]
      - orwin 4mo ago
        > Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else? Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments (share buyback is very often a good tell), then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
- inglor_cz 4mo ago
  Looking at the stats, the US public spending is about 40 per cent of the American GDP, which, though lower than most of the EU, is not really "low". 40 per cent of something as huge as the American economy is huge as well. Given that the US economy is a quarter of the global economy, US public spending is one tenth of the economic output of the entire mankind. That is not low. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-spending.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-s... BTW Swiss public spending is lower (32 per cent), and Swiss sidewalks and roads are uniformly nice. At the same time, Germany is at 48 per cent and it has a big problem with aging infrastructure, railways, bridges etc. Swiss rail authority regularly refuses delayed German trains at the border in order not to cause chaos in the reliable Swiss railway network. Given the 32 vs. 48 per cent of public spending, you would expect it to be the other way round, but it isn't. The mapping between the volume of public spending and quality of public services is not that simple. Maybe the problem in the US is that too much money gets siphoned away by various legal or illegal means. Famously, whenever places like California or NYC try to build something like a new subway line or a new high-speed rail, their project budgets balloon into absolutely insane volumes, much higher than comparable projects in France, Italy or Japan, and the main reason is that various special interests need to be satisfied, from the construction unions to various NIMBYs. With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.
  - mmooss 4mo ago
    I appreciate the the public spending statistic, which adds a dose of reality to the discussion. At the same time, a few cherry-picked examples (Swiss and German railways) is meaningless. It's true the US spends a lot in absolute terms, but a huge economy with 340 million people has a lot of roads and other expenses. And the US is inefficient at building some things (subways) and probably more efficient at others. Again, it's cherry picking unless we have broader data. > With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste. As I said in the GP, there is waste (inefficiency) in everyone and everything, and larger organizations unavoidably have more. The cherry-picked examples don't prove the US and every local goverment in it are somehow less efficient, but certainly there is inefficiency. But the statement "higher taxes will only result in higher waste" is logically wrong: higher taxes (and assumed higher spending) will lead to more waste - unavoidable for anyone and any org - but also more productivity; you can't have one without the other. E.g., if 15% of every dollar is wasted then higher taxes increase both waste and output. The US does have roads, schools, healthcare, sewers, etc., and even some urban light rail, paid for by taxes. The money does produce things, and many of those things can only be accomplished with taxes. On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste. That's probably not what you mean but that's what some anti-tax groups say and what they do - cut everything regardless of outcome, which is what has been done on a national level recently. The simplistic answers are dangerous and not useful.
- pseudohadamard 4mo ago
  Many years ago a US friend told me that the way to tell the true state of a nation's finances is to look at its infrastructure, because when money is tight that's the first thing that gets cut. Don't look at the imaginary numbers in the stock market, look at the roads, sidewalks, bridges, railway lines. I was kinda shocked, when working in South Africa, to find that the roads and sidewalks there were often in much better shape than ones I'd seen in the US. And from the other side, the only place I've ever seen roads as patched and potholed as ones in US cities was in rural Russia.
wongarsu 4mo ago
You are assuming that the obsession with maximizing profit is limited to private industry, where the post you are replying to makes no such assumption. I agree that the government ought to work for the public good, and not doing so is mismanagement and corruption. But following the logic of the parent poster, the postulate would be that the mismatch between what the government ought to do and what it does is an outgrowth of a society that values maximizing profit over satisfying needs. Which I find hard to deny if we are a bit flexible with the question "whose profit is maximized". This is just a different way to arrive at the word corruption, but it provides a frame for possible societal causes for that widespread corruption
- readthenotes1 4mo ago
  The way greed applies to the public purse is mediated by zero cost accounting wherein a government agency is compelled to spend all of their year's allocation without completing their work so that they can justify getting more in the next budget cycle.
_DeadFred_ 4mo ago
>Trillions in debt, for what? In the US, the Republican party for the last 40 years has had a policy of starve the beast. They actively choose policies that provide worse services/break the governments ability to provide services/pile on unsustainable debt so that they can make the very same argument you are. Government is broken (yes, because Republicans have chosen to intentionally break it for 40 years. It is hard for a country to function when half of politics is intent on making the country worse in order to reach their political agenda). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

mmooss 4mo ago

The tax rates in the US are low; that's why there is so much debt and so few services. Anti-tax groups have long followed the 'Starve the Beast' strategy (and their opponents are completely incompetent and fall for it every time): 1) Cut taxes 2) Point out the resulting deficit, say we're spending too much, and cut services 3) Repeat Now we're at point 2. It's not spending, it's lack of revenue. Some large corporations pay no tax. The US has cut IRS enforcement even though it pays for itself many, many times over. The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary), and because their taxes are cut over and over and they have endless loopholes - e.g., trust funds!

tmoertel 4mo ago
> The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary)... A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide jobs, rather than spend their wealth on luxuries for themselves. In this way, we have an economy focused more on the needs and wants of regular people, and less on producing what wealthy people want. Can you spot a flaw in that line of reasoning?
- mmooss 4mo ago
  I'm not taking a test (feel free to answer yourself) but my view is that it's the same old talking point: Help the wealthy, and the Nth order effects will benefit others. The only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy. (I think that's a good way to analyse any policy - the 1st order effects are the ones you can count on; the Nth order effects are just BS that magically costs nothing, but gets others to go along - 'the people will pay for this stadium for my privately owned franchise (1st order) and it will bring business to the community (2nd order).' That's repeated over and over, and the 2nd order effect is well known to not happen, but it sometimes gets enough votes from those uneducated in the issue.) I think in the 1980s the Reagan administration called it 'trickle-down economics', such an incredibly revealing name!
  - tmoertel 4mo ago
    Okay, but you didn't refute the line of reasoning. You called it "the same old talking point" and then jumped to the conclusion that "the only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy." But you didn't show that your claim was true. Or that the claim you were responding to was false. Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
    - ranger_danger 4mo ago
      [dead]
    - orwin 4mo ago
      > Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else? Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments (share buyback is very often a good tell), then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
inglor_cz 4mo ago
Looking at the stats, the US public spending is about 40 per cent of the American GDP, which, though lower than most of the EU, is not really "low". 40 per cent of something as huge as the American economy is huge as well. Given that the US economy is a quarter of the global economy, US public spending is one tenth of the economic output of the entire mankind. That is not low. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-spending.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-s... BTW Swiss public spending is lower (32 per cent), and Swiss sidewalks and roads are uniformly nice. At the same time, Germany is at 48 per cent and it has a big problem with aging infrastructure, railways, bridges etc. Swiss rail authority regularly refuses delayed German trains at the border in order not to cause chaos in the reliable Swiss railway network. Given the 32 vs. 48 per cent of public spending, you would expect it to be the other way round, but it isn't. The mapping between the volume of public spending and quality of public services is not that simple. Maybe the problem in the US is that too much money gets siphoned away by various legal or illegal means. Famously, whenever places like California or NYC try to build something like a new subway line or a new high-speed rail, their project budgets balloon into absolutely insane volumes, much higher than comparable projects in France, Italy or Japan, and the main reason is that various special interests need to be satisfied, from the construction unions to various NIMBYs. With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.
- mmooss 4mo ago
  I appreciate the the public spending statistic, which adds a dose of reality to the discussion. At the same time, a few cherry-picked examples (Swiss and German railways) is meaningless. It's true the US spends a lot in absolute terms, but a huge economy with 340 million people has a lot of roads and other expenses. And the US is inefficient at building some things (subways) and probably more efficient at others. Again, it's cherry picking unless we have broader data. > With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste. As I said in the GP, there is waste (inefficiency) in everyone and everything, and larger organizations unavoidably have more. The cherry-picked examples don't prove the US and every local goverment in it are somehow less efficient, but certainly there is inefficiency. But the statement "higher taxes will only result in higher waste" is logically wrong: higher taxes (and assumed higher spending) will lead to more waste - unavoidable for anyone and any org - but also more productivity; you can't have one without the other. E.g., if 15% of every dollar is wasted then higher taxes increase both waste and output. The US does have roads, schools, healthcare, sewers, etc., and even some urban light rail, paid for by taxes. The money does produce things, and many of those things can only be accomplished with taxes. On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste. That's probably not what you mean but that's what some anti-tax groups say and what they do - cut everything regardless of outcome, which is what has been done on a national level recently. The simplistic answers are dangerous and not useful.
pseudohadamard 4mo ago
Many years ago a US friend told me that the way to tell the true state of a nation's finances is to look at its infrastructure, because when money is tight that's the first thing that gets cut. Don't look at the imaginary numbers in the stock market, look at the roads, sidewalks, bridges, railway lines. I was kinda shocked, when working in South Africa, to find that the roads and sidewalks there were often in much better shape than ones I'd seen in the US. And from the other side, the only place I've ever seen roads as patched and potholed as ones in US cities was in rural Russia.

wongarsu 4mo ago

You are assuming that the obsession with maximizing profit is limited to private industry, where the post you are replying to makes no such assumption. I agree that the government ought to work for the public good, and not doing so is mismanagement and corruption. But following the logic of the parent poster, the postulate would be that the mismatch between what the government ought to do and what it does is an outgrowth of a society that values maximizing profit over satisfying needs. Which I find hard to deny if we are a bit flexible with the question "whose profit is maximized". This is just a different way to arrive at the word corruption, but it provides a frame for possible societal causes for that widespread corruption

readthenotes1 4mo ago
The way greed applies to the public purse is mediated by zero cost accounting wherein a government agency is compelled to spend all of their year's allocation without completing their work so that they can justify getting more in the next budget cycle.

_DeadFred_ 4mo ago

>Trillions in debt, for what? In the US, the Republican party for the last 40 years has had a policy of starve the beast. They actively choose policies that provide worse services/break the governments ability to provide services/pile on unsustainable debt so that they can make the very same argument you are. Government is broken (yes, because Republicans have chosen to intentionally break it for 40 years. It is hard for a country to function when half of politics is intent on making the country worse in order to reach their political agenda). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast