Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

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rodoheel said:
The point about the post office isn't that the post office shouldn't try, within legal constraints, to be as efficient as it can be. (Which, by the way, it does have an incentive to do as an agency, because its budget is limited and set by Congress, and it has to use that budget to do all its work.) The point is that it can't, and shouldn't, ever subordinate the provision of service to efficiency. For example, federal law sets postage rates for the entire country. It is obviously more expensive to deliver mail from Greensboro to rural Montana than from Greensboro to Raleigh - and private companies like FedEx and UPS can charge more for the former than the latter - but the post office has to charge the same rate for both. And the post office can't change those rates without going through several layers of review and oversight mean to confirm that the change is necessary, appropriate, and in the best interests of citizens who rely on being able to send mail. if anyone wanted to make the post office a more efficient operation, the obvious solution would be to charge more for its service - and to scale those charges based on the actual cost of delivering mail - but that solution isn't an option, and shouldn't be.

As for the latter point, I'm not really sure how that requires explanation. Anyone who has ever been part of bidding and executing a government contract understands how much oversight there is to prevent fraud. abuse, and favoritism in such contracts. Compare that to a private company, even a publicly traded one, where the CEO of a company generally can just enter whatever contract he likes, with shareholders having limited oversight over that decision (limited, for example, by the business judgment rule, which makes it very difficult to win a claim that the company's officers or directors acted inappropriately).

Federal agencies have their own internal embedded regulators who are responsible for investigating and eliminating fraud and waste. Federal agencies are subject to constant congressional oversight and can have their leaders called before Congress at any time to account for their spending, enforcement actions, and policymaking. Federal agencies are subject to all sorts of special rules and regulations about their spending and hiring. Publicly traded companies obviously have their own regulatory oversight, but the government can't closely review all of them all at once, and so things like fraud in federal filings or tax returns will often go unnoticed.
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The point about the post office isn't that the post office shouldn't try, within legal constraints, to be as efficient as it can be. (Which, by the way, it does have an incentive to do as an agency, because its budget is limited and set by Congress, and it has to use that budget to do all its work.

How does Congress determine a budget for the post office? Who/what do they go to for understanding the costs and needs of the post office?
 
superrific said:
Math, motherfucker. Do you know it? What country you from? Oh, the U.S. Never mind.
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Top 1% pay roughly 40% in income taxes and top 10% pay 75%. Maybe you don't know the definition of fair, and need a constant straw man to feed your liberal income inequality hatred.
 
Silence Dogood said:
Top 1% pay roughly 40% in income taxes and top 10% pay 75%. Maybe you don't know the definition of fair, and need a constant straw man to feed your liberal income inequality hatred.
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You originally referred to the “tax burden.” Individual income tax only accounts for around half of federal tax revenue. That’s without even considering state and local taxation.
 
superrific said:
Psst. There's a reason you can't give us any significant examples of doing more harm than good. You've bought a myth.

1. Looking at it as harm and good isn't even a very helpful framework. In many cases, the government is doing what needs to be done. Another poster mentioned mail service. Or park rangers. You can't have national system of parks without rangers staffing it. And there isn't anyone else to do it. It's not good or bad per se; it's necessary for the choices that people make. If you don't want to have national parks, then that can be your opinion. I don't think it would be popular.

2. In economics, there's a concept called "public goods." These are goods that have broadly positive impacts on society, but won't be supplied by the market because no market actor can capture all the benefits. A great example is the Erie Canal. Toll revenue can only capture the value of the canal transport. The economic explosion of New York can't be monetized. Another example is the interstate highway system. That couldn't be built privately. I mean, it could, but it would be much less extensive. All the economic growth the highway system pursued is dispersed throughout the population, and can't be recouped by the builders. So a private interstate system would connect big cities on heavily traveled routes. Would there be an I-85 or I-77? Almost certainly not.

Much of government spending consists in the provision of public goods. The ultimate public good, of course, is a military. Roads. Parks. Rural electrification. So on and so forth. There are a million examples. Fishery management to prevent overfishing.

You benefit from these public goods every single day, without realizing it. I don't know where you live. Say you live in RTP. A generation or two ago, RTP was a backwater. How and why did it change? First, a concentration of government funded educational institutions. Second, a quality highway (I-40, not much traveled back in the day). Third, research support. And it was those factors that led Cary to transform from rural outpost to vibrant suburban community. When I was a kid, people called Fuquay-Varina "the redneck capital of the world." Not so much any more.

So everyone who works in or around RTP has benefited from the public goods provided by the government. Let's say you run a restaurant in Cary. Your restaurant only exists because of I-40, because the RTP only exists because of I-40, and your clientele is only there because of I-40. You don't see the impact because it's invisible to you in daily life, but the government support was critical.

3. There are thousands of examples all over the country, in all aspects of life, of society benefiting from the government's provision of public goods.

This might be why I don't get bothered by "waste" in government like you do. Could roads be better maintained by private actors than the state DOT? Maybe. Let's assume the answer is yes. But we'd have many fewer roads. The choice isn't between "good road" and "bad road." The choice is between "road" and "no road at all." Are there inefficiencies in federal research subsidies? Probably. But again, the choice isn't "efficient funding" versus "inefficient funding." It's between funding and no funding.

No amount of cajoling or auditing or whatever can remove all of the inefficiency. Leaving aside the significant inefficiency in private companies (note: I earned 90-100K per year during law school for about 10-15 hours of week of work because Bristol-Myers' IT staff was unable to complete relatively simple IT projects, so they hired it out to me and I did myself what 5-7 IT people would otherwise do, and better), inefficiencies in government are going to exist. You can't motivate people to work 60 hours a week for many years on a government salary. Government employees punch out promptly at closing time. Fine. It can be annoying. But again, the choice isn't "efficient versus inefficient." It's whether the service exists at all.
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This is the superrific the world needs.
 
Silence Dogood said:
Simply stating Trump ran on cutting govt waste so it shouldn't be a surprise DOGE is looking into various departments.
Again, that's a gotcha game. You want to ignore the waste but make me explain that IGs are good and DOGE is bad. I can see that IGs are good in theory and perform a respected role but I can also see that our govt is hiding things and ripping the taxpayer off. So either the IG is missing things or our govt is ignoring the IG, none of which ever gets discussed on these threads. We have tons of Trump threads being bad, no threads on govt fraud waste and abuse. Why is that?
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First of all, it is a complete strawman to suggest that I or anyone else is saying we should "ignore the waste." Not one person has suggested that and you know it. The idea that our only options are "ignore the waste" or "let DOGE proceed smashing things with a hammer" is just a false dichotomy. The way to address government spending and supposedly unhelpful government departments is to have Congress pass legislation. Congress can eliminate USAID and slash its funding. Congress can add 20 IGs to investigate waste or cut 20 IGs or repeal the act that created IGs. If there is evidence that the government is "ripping the taxpayer off" or "hiding things" (something you have provided exactly zero evidence of, just like Musk and DOGE) then Congress can address those things. What we don't need is Elon Musk gleefully firing people and disappearing whole federal agencies when he has no clue what they do, just because he did a "Ctrl+F" search for "diversity" in government agencies and decided to eliminate everything it hit on. (See them accidentally firing the people who maintain nuclear weapons as an example.) Even someone as dense as you should be able to tell why giving total power to the richest man in the world to do whatever he wants in the federal government, which he does not understand at all, is a "cure" far worse than whatever disease you think you've identified.

As for "no threads on govt fraud waste and abuse" - give me a break. It's a topic we have been discussing CONSTANTLY over the last few months. You just showed up days ago and want to lecture us on what we are or aren't talking about?
 
superrific said:
Psst. There's a reason you can't give us any significant examples of doing more harm than good. You've bought a myth.

1. Looking at it as harm and good isn't even a very helpful framework. In many cases, the government is doing what needs to be done. Another poster mentioned mail service. Or park rangers. You can't have national system of parks without rangers staffing it. And there isn't anyone else to do it. It's not good or bad per se; it's necessary for the choices that people make. If you don't want to have national parks, then that can be your opinion. I don't think it would be popular.

2. In economics, there's a concept called "public goods." These are goods that have broadly positive impacts on society, but won't be supplied by the market because no market actor can capture all the benefits. A great example is the Erie Canal. Toll revenue can only capture the value of the canal transport. The economic explosion of New York can't be monetized. Another example is the interstate highway system. That couldn't be built privately. I mean, it could, but it would be much less extensive. All the economic growth the highway system pursued is dispersed throughout the population, and can't be recouped by the builders. So a private interstate system would connect big cities on heavily traveled routes. Would there be an I-85 or I-77? Almost certainly not.

Much of government spending consists in the provision of public goods. The ultimate public good, of course, is a military. Roads. Parks. Rural electrification. So on and so forth. There are a million examples. Fishery management to prevent overfishing.

You benefit from these public goods every single day, without realizing it. I don't know where you live. Say you live in RTP. A generation or two ago, RTP was a backwater. How and why did it change? First, a concentration of government funded educational institutions. Second, a quality highway (I-40, not much traveled back in the day). Third, research support. And it was those factors that led Cary to transform from rural outpost to vibrant suburban community. When I was a kid, people called Fuquay-Varina "the redneck capital of the world." Not so much any more.

So everyone who works in or around RTP has benefited from the public goods provided by the government. Let's say you run a restaurant in Cary. Your restaurant only exists because of I-40, because the RTP only exists because of I-40, and your clientele is only there because of I-40. You don't see the impact because it's invisible to you in daily life, but the government support was critical.

3. There are thousands of examples all over the country, in all aspects of life, of society benefiting from the government's provision of public goods.

This might be why I don't get bothered by "waste" in government like you do. Could roads be better maintained by private actors than the state DOT? Maybe. Let's assume the answer is yes. But we'd have many fewer roads. The choice isn't between "good road" and "bad road." The choice is between "road" and "no road at all." Are there inefficiencies in federal research subsidies? Probably. But again, the choice isn't "efficient funding" versus "inefficient funding." It's between funding and no funding.

No amount of cajoling or auditing or whatever can remove all of the inefficiency. Leaving aside the significant inefficiency in private companies (note: I earned 90-100K per year during law school for about 10-15 hours of week of work because Bristol-Myers' IT staff was unable to complete relatively simple IT projects, so they hired it out to me and I did myself what 5-7 IT people would otherwise do, and better), inefficiencies in government are going to exist. You can't motivate people to work 60 hours a week for many years on a government salary. Government employees punch out promptly at closing time. Fine. It can be annoying. But again, the choice isn't "efficient versus inefficient." It's whether the service exists at all.
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Totally agree super. I went to UNC in the mid 70’s. The main road from Chapel Hill to Raleigh and it wasn’t four lane. The government does undertake work that grows our economy because the private sector can’t for a variety of reasons, mostly economic. In addition to working in textiles I also worked in health care on the finance side. Anyone who thinks the government doesn’t track costs and asks for justification of billing rates has never worked with health care agencies. I shudder to think of the horrible damage that will be done to our country if Medicare and Medicaid are privatized.
 
lawtig02 said:
As this thread gets longer, it's worth remembering DOGE is, in many ways, one of Trump's biggest feints. It's not that we should ignore it, as the very concept of DOGE is creating a horrific precedent, and it's adding tremendously to the disinformation storm that Trump is using to cover his consolidation of power. .
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I'd agree with that, in principle. Having outside people, who have no real understanding of government budget/spending processes, cutting employees and programs isn't good.

Maybe this will be a wake-up call for all of government, including Congress, who's involved in the continuing deficit and ever-growing debt and hasn't shown any concern about spending despite Americans clear concern about both for decades. One of the things Trump ran on was improving government efficiently and cutting costs. He announced Elon to run it before he won in November.
 
Silence Dogood said:
Beat Kamala by more than 2M votes probably more if California could count in a timely manner, won all the swing states, dominated electorally, and outperformed polling data.

No body voted for the inspector generals were trying to defend earlier either.
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Trump won the popular vote by less than Hillary did in 2016 and she lost.
 
ZenMode said:
The point about the post office isn't that the post office shouldn't try, within legal constraints, to be as efficient as it can be. (Which, by the way, it does have an incentive to do as an agency, because its budget is limited and set by Congress, and it has to use that budget to do all its work.

How does Congress determine a budget for the post office? Who/what do they go to for understanding the costs and needs of the post office?
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My post was imprecise - I apologize. What I should have said in this regard is that the Post Office can only spend the money it brings in via revenue, and if it can't cover its operating costs with revenues it relies on money appropriated by Congress. Which just serves to further highlight the overall point that the post office has every incentive to be as efficient as possible while providing the service it is legally obligated to provide. There is no easy lever to pull to make the post office more efficient than it already is.
 
Silence Dogood said:
Top 1% pay roughly 40% in income taxes and top 10% pay 75%. Maybe you don't know the definition of fair, and need a constant straw man to feed your liberal income inequality hatred.
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This you?

You said Republican tax policies overwhelmingly favor the rich. How is that possible when lower wage earners received a tax cut.

Nothing there about fair. Just math. Also, your statistics are bullshit.
 
ZenMode said:
I'd agree with that, in principle. Having outside people, who have no real understanding of government budget/spending processes, cutting employees and programs isn't good.

Maybe this will be a wake-up call for all of government, including Congress, who's involved in the continuing deficit and ever-growing debt and hasn't shown any concern about spending despite Americans clear concern about both for decades. One of the things Trump ran on was improving government efficiently and cutting costs. He announced Elon to run it before he won in November.
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Let's see what the deficit and debt look like in January 2029 before we even speculate whether this will be a "wake-up call" for anyone.
 
rodoheel said:
First of all, it is a complete strawman to suggest that I or anyone else is saying we should "ignore the waste." Not one person has suggested that and you know it. The idea that our only options are "ignore the waste" or "let DOGE proceed smashing things with a hammer" is just a false dichotomy. The way to address government spending and supposedly unhelpful government departments is to have Congress pass legislation. Congress can eliminate USAID and slash its funding. Congress can add 20 IGs to investigate waste or cut 20 IGs or repeal the act that created IGs. If there is evidence that the government is "ripping the taxpayer off" or "hiding things" (something you have provided exactly zero evidence of, just like Musk and DOGE) then Congress can address those things. What we don't need is Elon Musk gleefully firing people and disappearing whole federal agencies when he has no clue what they do, just because he did a "Ctrl+F" search for "diversity" in government agencies and decided to eliminate everything it hit on. (See them accidentally firing the people who maintain nuclear weapons as an example.) Even someone as dense as you should be able to tell why giving total power to the richest man in the world to do whatever he wants in the federal government, which he does not understand at all, is a "cure" far worse than whatever disease you think you've identified.

As for "no threads on govt fraud waste and abuse" - give me a break. It's a topic we have been discussing CONSTANTLY over the last few months. You just showed up days ago and want to lecture us on what we are or aren't talking about?
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Ok, that's a reasonable take, the problem is if our govt was serious about anything we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. I gave a Social Security improper payment example earlier in the billions. That should be eye opening. Elon doesn't have total power, thats fabricated. In the private sector and in sports firing individuals happens and no one bats an eye. In govt the sky is falling and govt won't function correctly. Why do you guys clamor to love big brother so much? Its odd.
 
superrific said:
This you?

You said Republican tax policies overwhelmingly favor the rich. How is that possible when lower wage earners received a tax cut.

Nothing there about fair. Just math. Also, your statistics are bullshit.
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www.ntu.org

Who Pays Income Taxes?

(PDF) updated December 2024 Taxes will dominate Congress’s agenda in 2025 as lawmakers confront the impending expiration of key provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). These expirations will spark intense debate over the future of the tax code, and will undoubtedly feature...
www.ntu.org www.ntu.org

In 1980, the top marginal income tax rate was 70%, and the wealthiest 1% of earners paid 19% of all federal income taxes. Over the decades, their share of the income tax burden has consistently grown, even as top marginal tax rates were reduced significantly. At the same time, the tax share of the bottom half of earners has sharply declined—from 7% in 1980 to just 2.96% in 2022.

The newest data reveals that the top 1% of earners, defined as those with incomes over $663,164, paid nearly 40.43% of all income taxes—marking a significant drop from the previous tax year, as the economy improved in the wake of the pandemic and economic shutdown. This was a drop of 5 points (12% lower) than in 2021 when the top 1% paid nearly 46% of all income taxes. Similar to prior years of data, the amount of taxes paid by this percentile is nearly twice as much as its share of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI), underscoring the progressive nature of the tax system.
The top 10% of earners bore responsibility for 76% of all income taxes paid, and the top 25% paid 89% of all income taxes. Altogether, the top 50% of filers earned 90% of all income and were responsible for 98% of all income taxes paid in 2021.

The other half of earners, those with incomes below $46,637, collectively paid 2.3% of all income taxes in 2021.
 
lawtig02 said:
Let's see what the deficit and debt look like in January 2029 before we even speculate whether this will be a "wake-up call" for anyone.
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According to Google, the debt was $36.22 trillion on Feb 14th.

This post has been bookmarked for follow up.
 
ZenMode said:
I'd agree with that, in principle. Having outside people, who have no real understanding of government budget/spending processes, cutting employees and programs isn't good.

Maybe this will be a wake-up call for all of government, including Congress, who's involved in the continuing deficit and ever-growing debt and hasn't shown any concern about spending despite Americans clear concern about both for decades. One of the things Trump ran on was improving government efficiently and cutting costs. He announced Elon to run it before he won in November.
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A wake-up call for Congress? Surely you're not serious. Congress does not have any institutional will of its own; it has the individual wills of the people serving in it which are widely diverging and often diametrically opposed. Slightly more than half of the members of Congress are more than happy for the President to take the heat for making cuts so they don't have to risk their own reputations and electoral prospects to do it. (And some of them are conservative enough that they're perfectly happy for Trump to act like a king anyway - as long as they agree with the things he's doing.) As I've argued in another thread, if you want to change the incentives for Congress, you have to get rid of the current version of the filibuster, which requires you to have a super-majority to pass any legislation and has encouraged the growth of inertia and inaction in Congress. It is simply politically easier for Congress to do nothing than to do anything thanks to the perverse incentives that the current filibuster provides.

I do think, and have said for months, that our best hope for the near-term is for Trump to break things so badly and so quickly that his administration becomes super unpopular before it's really had time to complete the radical Project 2025 overhaul of government it contemplates. But in the long term nothing is going to be fixed unless and until we can get Congress back to a place where it actually has incentive to pass legislation. That incentive does not exist right now, because the silent, pro forma filibuster insulates any individual congresspeople from the electoral consequences of blocking legislation.
 
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