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DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

nytimes.com

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Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#441

Post by oezi »

rayiner wrote: post #187
MisterKent wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first" The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the ti…

“Soft power” and “hegemony” are fake concepts invented by credentialed elites. Americans are properly distrustful of those ideas. The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.

This is the same way to say that friendship is a fake concept just because it is intangible.

Soft power and hegemony absolutely played vital roles since the end of WW2. We seem to have forgotten how much everything relied on them.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#442

Post by Terr_ »

cwalv wrote: post #426
sxyuan wrote: post #248

For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread): 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least th…

> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. > What do you think should be cut, an…

> Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I

GDP per se, maybe not, however we should still expect it to scale with the costs of services and goods that are correlated.

Ex: If the dollar price of rent doubles, then dollar expenditures to keep the elderly from dying in ditches will likewise double, even with no change in population.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#443

Post by dustingetz »

christophilus wrote: post #206
cuuupid wrote: post #84

I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like “they’re cutting something important!” Or “they’re stopping critical research!” because every government contract needs justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire in…

I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them…

did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison. So when I see USAID or whatever with some bleeding heart mission statement, all i can think of is how many vendors are siphoning off that money while paying lip service to the culture war theme of the year, like a drug lord making sure to be seen at church every every Sunday. It’s not a question of, like, is it one third fraud or half fraud. There is absolutely no accountability and there is not a single competitive aspect about these projects. At no point whatsoever is there a credible attempt to deliver on promises made. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does and what that program I saw does is let about 150 people bill about $100 per hour to the government. All you have to do, to collect your $800 per day, is report that your jira ticket is taking more story points than expected due to technical debt, and make sure your MS Teams stays green from 8 to 6 (buy a mouse wiggler)!

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#444

Post by tovej »

thrance wrote: post #367
JackYoustra wrote: post #299

Rule of law is what allows us to grow. Acemoglu won a nobel prize showing that institutions cause growth. Destroy institutions and you'll undershoot potential.

Pet peeve: there is no Nobel prize of economics, Alfred Nobel didn't include "economy" in his will. Instead there is a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences" whose purpose is to give credibility to the unscientific field of economics. The prize itself is mostly awarded to neoliberalists economists and does not often represent the majority views in the field.

The price is awarded exclusively to neoclassical economists, because it's effectively a marketing tool for neoclassical economics, which is the economic theory base of neoliberal shareholder capitalism.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#445

Post by LargeWu »

cwalv wrote: post #426
sxyuan wrote: post #248

For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread): 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least th…

> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. > What do you think should be cut, an…

Scaling with GDP, rather than population, implies that government spending is scaling with the country's ability to provide services commensurate with prosperity.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#446

Post by patagurbon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #400
sxyuan wrote: post #248

For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread): 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least th…

> The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how? Old people [1], veterans [2], high earners and homeowners [3] turn out to vote. The only demographic we can cut benefits to are the poor. That's what's happening. (Given partisan polarisation, my guess is Democrats will take an axe to veteran benefits next cycle.) > Why shouldn't the health i…

> given partisan polarization…

Democrats do a lot of things deeply wrong, but they seem to exhibit punitive behavior like this a lot less than their Republican counterparts. Republicans pay a lot of lip service to veterans but actual GOP legislation in favor of them is sparse at best

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#447

Post by chgs »

oezi wrote: post #428
James_K wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 is not a fact in the slightest. The American government is guilty of under-investment in perhaps every area outside of military. The notion of bipartisan climbing public debt is also false. Bill Clinton brought the government into running and Democrats have had consistently better budget responsibility than Republicans, though the reason for this is more that the Dems fund government through taxes where the Republi…

So why are the Republicans now trying to reign-in the spending? It worked well for them in the past to rely on debt. Why should they care now? Is it about funneling this money into their tax cut? Why not just run up more debt?

They aren’t

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#449

Post by _DeadFred_ »

anoxor wrote: post #2

I like that the focus is on the issues with the disruptors that have been running for a few weeks, not the egregious spending for decades.

This disruption are not about spending though.

In their own words what it is about:

"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#450

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Jedd wrote: post #422
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how? Old people [1], veterans [2], high earners and homeowners [3] turn out to vote. The only demographic we can cut benefits to are the poor. That's what's happening. (Given partisan polarisation, my guess is Democrats will take an axe to veteran benefits next cycle.) > Why shouldn't the health i…

> Health insurance is orthogonal to federal spending. As an Australian looking at the USA - I'm not sure how you make that claim sincerely. Perhaps you're constraining it specifically to 'insurance', rather than the only slightly broader question of private health coverage. It still feels like a tenuous claim, given parent's valid point about health costs at the federal level, and intimation around the poor compariso…

> Perhaps you're constraining it specifically to 'insurance', rather than the only slightly broader question of private health coverage

Correct. Our major uses of our $4.9tn of annual healthcare funds are 31% to hospital care, 20% to physician and clinical services and 9% to retail prescription drugs [1]. Lowering that number begins and ends with better price transparency from and efficiency in hospitals and physicians' practices.

Our sources of funds are private health insurance (30%), Medicare (21%), Medicaid (18%) and out-of-pocket (10%). Within the context of federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid are relevant, as well as the price and utilisation of the aforementioned uses.

> You seem to be conflating corporations with wealthy people

I'm specifically saying these are separate, and that taxing the latter would strike me as fairer than raising taxes on McDonalds franchisees.

[1] https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf

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