Comment by s1artibartfast
2 months ago
You don't have to have a PhD in macroeconomics to have useful policy insights.
For example, I wish someone could convince my city to stop planting a specific high maintenance tree on my street that constantly clog sewers and crushes cars.
Policy is far from perfect and there is plenty of room for improvement.
Assuming that you are correct, you have observed (a) one or more problems (b) a proximal cause of the problem(s) (c) a potential solution. Congratulations!
None of that can be said for making a facile observation about US government spending.
I can think of dozens of similar examples from my local government where entrenched local incentives or disinterest lead to completely wasteful outcomes. All of my friends in government have stories of egregious waste, 8-9 digit programs where not even the people working on them think they are effective.
I think the salient observation is that there are abundant opportunities for improvement and cost saving if there is a stakeholder that actually cares about cost savings.
You've already started from a couple of assumptions that I don't believe are true.
> there are abundant opportunities for improvement and cost saving if there is a stakeholder that actually cares about cost savings.
This fails to explain why private corporations (which presumably have from one to millions of stakeholders that care about cost saving) would waste millions of dollars. The idea that "for profit" organizations have some builtin magic trick that means that they improve and save money in ways that other sorts of organizations cannot is just demonstrably untrue.
What is true, of course, is that no matter what the type of organization, if there are people who care about and are empowered to meaningfully tackle waste and inefficiency, then things can improve. And this happens, both in government and non-governmental organizations. You don't hear about it much, for broadly the same reason you don't hear about for-profit organizations wasting money: it just isn't news.
The second assumption that I think you're making is that "wasteful outcomes" are by definition a bad thing. The problem is that government often is tasked with tackling problems where wasteful outcomes are a more or less builtin part of the way things get done, and we accept that (sometimes) because the full cost (not just financial cost) of trying to reduce waste is higher than the waste itself. A typical example: yes, there's no doubt that some government benefits go to people who are not eligible for them. However, the task of identifying all those people has many costs, both direct and indirect. The whole system becomes massively more invasive of everyone's lives when one of its prime directives is "make sure that not one cent goes to some not entitled to it". So most societies accept that there will be a level of waste, which is made up for by the benefits of treating things as if they are closer to a universal benefit.
There are plenty of other examples of this in different domains where the government operates.
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On the other hand, you need empathy and common sense. And a good understanding of humanity.
Which I doubt many politicians have it.