Stas Bush wrote:Admitting that US government spending is inefficient does not mean all spending is inefficient (especially as you admit that it's wasted on military misadventures and failed social policies).
This is about the U.S., with the whole argument being sparked by whether the government portion of U.S. GDP should go from 37% to 60% or more.
In cases where other governments do something more efficiently, that helps my prior points.
For instance, if one points to one of the school systems managing better performance for less expense per student than the $14000/year of U.S. schools in some states, that only leads more to a conclusion that there are better, effective problem-solving methods other than throwing vastly more taxpayer money at it here.
Stas Bush wrote:Sikon wrote:However, as long as vastly accelerating historical increase in spending beyond already $14000/year per pupil in some states is *assumed* to just be the primary solution despite past results, there's little likelihood of greater focus on politically-incorrect alternatives like more curriculum focus on fundamentals, school vouchers, or forcing unmotivated students to try with direct incentives.
Drivel. Effectiveness of spending matters. You just ignore this and assume any increase in government spending ineffective.
Enormous increase in government spending isn't a new idea but rather exactly what has been going on in recent years, although with little if any observed increase in reading and math scores, since the system is not managed well. In contrast, even most private schools used by the wealthy manage to obtain substantially lesser expense.
That's not surprising. After all, for example, if half of that $14000/year went to teachers paid $50000 per year, there could be a teacher per 7 students while allowing the other half of the funds for various other expenses from building maintenance to everything else. (Probably part of the organizational issue is that really far less than half ends up as teacher salaries). While the preceding is just an imprecise example, almost any reasonable figures would illustrate the same general idea. As much as Broomstick was outraged that I wouldn't support a rise to $20000/year or $25000+/year, an *assumption* of such rise being needed is practically as unsupported as $50000/year per student, disconnected from reality.
Stas Bush wrote:You then offer "politically incorrect" alternatives - one of them does not contradict the increase in spending (focus on fundamentals), it's a question of quality of the curriculum.
Part of the reason most students graduate with nearly no science knowledge is since not necessarily even several percent of a total around 15000 cumulative hours of education gets actually spent properly covering it.
Stas Bush wrote:The other, "school vouchers" and "direct incentives", do not make spending more effective, since it assumes a fucking schooler would make good, well-informed decisions. What a joke.
While polls indicate that most of the U.S. population would send their students to different schools if not for such being unsupported by the state, that doesn't mean it is an uninformed or illogical preference. On the contrary, higher academic achievement is well-known, like this random
example of reading scores averaging 280 instead of 260.
As for whether direct incentives can have an effect, when there are figures like 55% of those graduating not even knowing electrons are smaller than atoms, that implies a serious lack of motivation for spending much time at all trying to learn, yet the interesting thing in contrast is that nearly all of the population is capable of putting out effort under different conditions like the average worker on a job.
Stas Bush wrote:Sikon wrote:The cost of every additional trillion dollars spending should not be ignored.
Who the fuck said it's "ignored", you idiot? "Cost" of spending? There's only one question to answer. We have fund A produced as part of GDP. Fund A is produced in it's primary location (say Factory A). Fund A can be given to people as additional income, or to government as additional taxes. The government will then spend "A" for it's programmes, or people would spend "A" themselves on what they want.
The problem is that while the government can make strategic investments, develop infrastructure and the like, Joe Average who posesses a fracture of Fund A, is extremely short-sighted, ignorant and also very fragile when it comes to receiving economic fallout from his decisions, while the government is robust and can absorb damage.
In most societies, like the U.S., the government does not control the means of production, such as not operating factories.* When the government redistributes money, it can mean, for example, that company A has X less remaining net aftertax income from its growth beyond expenses of the past tax cycle, which can mean it gets Y less additional new facilities and capital investment or hires W fewer additional extra production workers. Meanwhile, the government uses those funds to hire Z more soldiers, teachers, social workers, bureaucrats, or others employed by the government. There is the cost of losing the former, but, to a degree, some of the latter are entirely needed.
However, one of the issues can be if that goes too far. To take an extreme simplified illustration, 100 workers at a private company's factory helping support 1 bureaucrat can be fine, while, at the other extreme, those 100 workers having to support 150 bureaucrats would have major tradeoffs. Even soldiers, teachers, firemen, or others instead of bureaucrats is a similar idea. Those on welfare or retirement living off the funds the government redistributes from those currently working are again a similar situation. None of this is wrong in itself, if simply occurring to an appropriate degree, but it is important to keep relative numbers under control.
In the more specific case of discussion here, the private portion of U.S. GDP declining by more than a third from the current 63% to under 40%, with the rest being government spending, would be a huge change. Then the topic gets into cost versus benefits.
* I'll skip making this segment of the post very long to cover everything, not bothering to be nitpick-proof. There are some exceptions, but mostly the U.S. government and its workforce can be best described as providing services, rather than as producing stuff.
Transportation includes some infrastructure construction, but such is a small amount of government spending, about 4.5%. If government spending goes from $17200 to $28000 per person annually in the future, little of that total will have to do with additional road maintenance costs per person.
I would also like to encourage a thought experiment to readers. Ask yourself this: Given what many assume about low tradeoffs, why don't you think the U.S. government should produce computers, food, and so on? After all, don't you think it could deliver lower prices and innovation more efficiently without taking a share as private profit? Understand why that typically isn't desirable, especially as judged from history, and you would see why the standard American philosophy is to use government spending when necessary. Use it in cases where private industry couldn't or wouldn't do the equivalent, yet be cautious about unlimited government growth.
Potential for inefficiency isn't surprising in an organizational setup where those in some positions are not at all worried about getting fired for low performance. Nearly guaranteed lifelong employment in many government career jobs is a great strength in ways, but like much in the real world sometimes comes with tradeoffs too. The voting public unfortunately can't even be bothered to learn almost any relevant figures for judging performance, but there is some justification for nevertheless a frequent popular perception of high waste and for disapproval ratings of Congress usually hanging around the 80% range.
Even as a commie, you yourself described a different but sometimes slightly analogous situation in another thread:
Stas Bush wrote:But eventually, the level of laziness and slacking became so atrocious that the Secretary General Andropov in the 1980s had to start special campaigns against slacking workers. Entire shifts of workers were found at either cafes or cinemas relaxing all day long by special "anti-slack" squads from the KGB, which sought to root out slacking. This was a nationwide event.
Ultimately, the USSR fell apart not in small part due to the complacency and laziness of it's own population that thought all the Soviet goods were given to them for granted, and were in no way bound to the centralized authoritarian economic planning apparatus that kept the giant nation alive.
From here.
The main thing that slows exponential growth of spending is the degree to which some of the public still appreciates issues with it growing too much, making politicians pander to such a little to maximize their chances of getting re-elected. Otherwise, there's not much to control it.
Congressmen are mostly not mythological 100%-altruistic humble public servants but ordinary individuals biased towards decisions which place more power and money under their control. More than 60% of senators are millionaires, with a median (not the mean) net worth of
about $1.7 million each. Such is bipartisan, with the top 10 being 7 Democrats and 3 Republicans. Actually, that doesn't concern me in itself, even though some senators starting from little wealth before taking office didn't really become millionaires from savings under their comparatively small official salary alone. However, the point is that they are human, however much they may be skilled at making election promises and emoting to voters.
The average human tendency outside of atypical individuals is for someone to seek far more money under their control, whether or not strictly needed. Observing how they do such for personal income should make it not a leap of faith to realize they have the same natural tendency to want more public funds under their power too, to rapidly expand spending, justified or not, efficiently or not. Besides, even when partially altruistic, anybody with a large ego will tend to think the country is better off with more money directed according to his self-perceived great skills. The public has to be a watchdog.
Often in the private world, in the case of a competitive environment without high barriers to entry, companies tend to keep up efficiency because the inefficient ones get outcompeted and crushed by their competitors. However, the ordinary nature of government is to be a non-competitive environment, whether contractors winning bids through lobbyists or a bureaucrat knowing he keeps his job either way. Government can be made efficient if but only if sufficient efforts from the top down are made to keep it that way with stringent oversight. The very top of government power is fundamentally the general public, the voter.
Stas Bush wrote:Sikon wrote:In the end, a few thousand dollars additional government expenses per person means a few thousand dollars less remaining original private income per person on average
That means a few thousand in dollar equivalent per capita additional government services - like, say healthcare, education and transport - being available to the same "average person".
You do realize I lived through it here, the increase from $13700 to $17200/year government spending per person between 1992 and 2008 (the former figure converted to today's dollars)? Seriously, if I got the equivalent of thousands of dollars additional annual transportation benefit, like having my car's insurance and gas for free, I would have noticed, to say the least!
I can imagine cool things that could have been done with the extra increase of spending in theory. Since the trillions of dollars cumulative increase amounted to specifically $44000 per household (in 2008-dollars) over the 1992-2008 period, only counting the extra beyond 1992 levels of spending, technically we might have had something major. In alternate reality, there might have been a fairly extensive automated personal-rapid-transit rail system for that expense. However, a hypothetical like that has nothing whatsoever to do with what actually gets accomplished when rather looking at history.
Roads are about the same as they were at 1992 levels of government spending per person. Life expectancy has been nearly flat. So was educational performance; reading scores, math scores, etc. Were there some benefits from the extra spending increase? No doubt. However, nothing proves that they had equal or greater magnitude than the extra $3500/person expense, making its average efficiency rather unimpressive.
Most people don't even realize that government spending increased by $3500 per person annually (even after adjustment for inflation and population growth). That's partially because the increase has been paid largely by means other than personal income taxes alone, from taxes passed onto the cost of goods to deficit spending. (As an extreme illustration of a principle, technically the government could maintain current spending yet cut income tax rates meanwhile to 0% simply by increasing deficit spending above its current large percentage of the total, yet that obviously wouldn't make such at all free while causing misc disastrous effects).
As explicitly stated in my post on the first page of this thread, nevertheless there are of course some specific increases in government funding in some areas which can have a good benefit to cost ratio, worthy of support, just not the average congressman's extra funding allocation in recent history.
A point is to question the assumption that government expenditures should be increased from $17200 per person annually to the equivalent of $28000+ per person annually, as in this argument about whether spending going from 37% to 60+% of GDP would be desirable. While the $11000+ per person additional annual government expenditures would give more benefit than the previously discussed historical $3500/person annual spending increase, being 3.1+ times times as much, the cost to the private sector is far greater too. The benefit to cost ratio doesn't look too good.
Stas Bush wrote:Sikon wrote:The E.U. has average GDP per person of $32700 (2007, PPP), compared to the much greater U.S. $45800 of economic output per person.
And yet, the EU has a higher HDI, especially EU First World nations.
The U.N.-published HDI which I've read (made by Europeans IIRC) was based on factors even including such as the percentage of women legislators. While equal rights for women is important (although legally protected in the U.S. anyway), whether that figure is XY% or WZ% of the legislature at a time may have much lesser overall effect than factors like GDP/capita.
The U.S. gets lesser points on infant mortality partially because we have far more drug users of illegal narcotics from cocaine to heroin, a chief cause of low-birth-weight high-mortality babies, unlike relatively more homogenous European countries. A year ago, I killed a thread with an article discussing causes,
here. Plus there are details to consider of how different countries do statistics, like the article
here talks about the minimum birth weight for what statistics count as originally live births.
Of course, there are nevertheless some weaknesses in the U.S. healthcare system.
However, overall U.S. HDI relative to European countries all depends on how much the author of a HDI weights different factors. While GDP is concrete, overall quality of life, human development indexes, happiness or utility is more subjective. My utility is higher here.
Stas Bush wrote:Of course, you would gleefully ignore the fact that the EU includes many Second World nations by now, or worse-off First World places, which would be damaging the average statistics, and also the fact that GDP per person is not the only measure; you totally ignore the GINI which any utilitarian would use combined with the general GDP stats.
While the E.U. includes some countries of lesser development than others, that affects its overall GDP per capita only a rather moderate amount, because the bulk of its population is in the few largest countries. The top five E.U. nations with the largest economies had a 2007 GDP per capita of $33200
(PPP): Germany, U.K., France, Italy, and Spain. It's barely more than the overall E.U. $32700 average (versus U.S. $45800 GDP/capita), since the overall E.U. average is pushed down a little by its small less developed members but also pushed up by Norway being lucky enough to currently have a lot of oil exports.
Stas Bush wrote:Sikon wrote:Would one rather live in the U.S. or in Europe?
Are you asking me? Europe, of course. The US healthcare system is a maze of fucked-up Social Darwinism. In fact, the entire US economic ideology is monumentally shifted to Social Darwinism, which manifests in many sectors. I've been to both US and Europe - even shittier European nations - and I'm pretty confident Germany is better than the US in all regards, from social policies to work and benefits and medicine, and education.
Even if you visited a portion of the U.S. once, which varies greatly by locale, much of your complaint seems based on what you've heard from some people rather than personal experience.
Admittedly, there are some weaknesses in the U.S. health care system. Ideally, some basic coverage could be extended to the currently uninsured; since they are only 16% or so of the total population, such technically could be done for around 2% of GDP or less, a relatively small change. Besides, with people not left on the streets bleeding to death, suffering a heart attack, having a baby, etc. even if they are uninsured, hospitals already often end up spending money on their care anyway but in a disorganized manner. For example, public hospitals in cities along the Mexican border have heavy medical bills from immigrants relative to limited local funds at the county and state level.
Nevertheless, other matters are far more the differences noticed by most people between the different countries; my life doesn't revolve around health insurance alone.
But if an European prefers living in Europe, good for them. Every country has its mixture of advantages as well as disadvantages. Clean, cultured, with less of an obesity epidemic, and other favorable terms can be used to describe Europe.
Ordinarily I wouldn't "bash" Europe in particular, rather having a live and let live attitude. However, supporting that a third of income in my country, 23+% of an original 63% non-government GDP, be lost/transferred from private ownership while heralding the highest-tax states of Europe as a model is naturally going to lead to pointing out disadvantages.
That would mean becoming more like Europe economically, so the topic of how much there are tradeoffs involved is rather relevant. Such might actually be more percent government than even Sweden, which seems to appear
here to have about 50% of its GDP government, except possibly that figure could be inappropriate depending on if there are state or local government expenditures not counted or how much if so. (After all, the CIA world factbook displays
only the federal portion of total U.S. government spending in the case of the U.S.).
In an imaginary ideal world, people would be able to choose what they wanted on the individual level, "voting with their feet" (as opposed to a individual vote only having a chance comparable to a lottery ticket for deciding the election). To a very small degree at substantial difficulty, that sometimes happens. In
1996, 148000 people decided to immigrate from Europe to the U.S. Some go the other way, although whatever small number immigrates from the U.S. to the E.U. is hard to find, too little to appear on typical lists on top countries of origin. It must be small since only 9000 Americans immigrated even to Canada in 2007 (while 24000 Canadians immigrated to the U.S.).
The statistics support anecdotal impressions. Most Americans who visit Europe don't see immigrating there as a desirable goal, seeing the prices of almost everything as expensive especially after all the taxes. They see job opportunities usually as rather limited in wages relative to the cost of goods, and there is high unemployment, like the CIA World Factbook
last shows 8.5% in the E.U. versus 4.6% in the U.S. in 2007. Of course, the language is often a factor too, although the U.K. is english-speaking after all.
Stas Bush wrote:Of course, capitalists or their descendants would be more at ease in the US, but since I'm not one, can't really comment on their worldview.
Correct. Although my own judgement of my probability of becoming rich would appear overoptimistic to someone on the internet, in any case I'm happy to have all the opportunities for enterprise here. Such is possible in Europe too of course but with some more difficulties.
Stas Bush wrote:since I'm not one, can't really comment on their worldview.
Here's part of one capitalistic worldview:
In the political realm, success is determined by how well someone can appeal to voters, from emotional appeals to being perceived as like the common man. What is needed for those gaining power in government is a lot more like used car salesmen than based on actual ability aside from that involved in getting elected. However, the economic realm is sometimes different.
Stas Bush wrote:Sikon wrote:...but there are some factors which have historically contributed towards one 4.5% segment of the world's population causing so much of its progress.
Yeah, some of them have been actually colossal US government spending, especially on military technologies or civilian hi-tech. Space Race, Cold War.
This argument has been about whether U.S. government spending goes from 37% to 60+% of the economy.
If such occurs, a very small if any percentage of that extra government spending increase would be space or military R&D beyond current levels. The preceding would correspond to the equivalent of around $3.2 trillion or more additional government spending per year in 2008-dollars, upwards of $30 trillion extra per decade. For so much as 1% of that to be extra towards the $0.017 trillion/year space program is rather unlikely. In fact, the space program is one of the few things actually getting its funding relatively decreased over recent years, in the inflation-adjusted and population-adjusted terms usually used in my post. That's despite the huge overall increase in government spending elsewhere.
The European Union with more government as a portion of the economy than the U.S. doesn't tend to have more of a space program.
***************************
Darth Wong wrote:Sikon wrote:When it comes to technology, innovation, business, and entrepreneurship, if the European Union was the equivalent of the U.S., they should be managing more since their total population is 60% greater.
But that's not the case, to say the least, whether one looks at computer technology, software, medical breakthroughs, movies, or almost anything. Pretend the U.S. didn't exist for the past half-century or rather that it caused and produced no more than Europe. How much would be missing? List any top ten or top one hundred new technologies and advancements of the past few decades, observing which country caused the most by far.
You don't seriously think that's a fair comparison, do you? The last half-century is overshadowed by the consequences of WW2. It would have been completely impossible for Europe to perform as well as the US when it was forced to struggle so hard just to rebuild itself from a shattered husk, whereas the US enjoyed an enormous economic boom from the rest of the entire world becoming an "emerging market" for its goods and services. As time goes by and those lingering consequences fade, the US lead in many areas shrinks. Just look at the auto industry for an excellent example of this: they used to essentially control the global market, and now they've shrunk dramatically and painfully.
Admittedly, the U.S. has had advantages, of course. However, it's now been 63 years since the end of WWII, with the last half-century beginning 13 years after the end of the war, and European GDP was relatively soon significantly above pre-war levels.
Let's use the example of a technological race of the 1970s and later, after Europe had a generation to recover from WWII: personal computers
Look at relative innovation in that case. Not only is the comparison obvious in the early years of PC development, even in 2001
data, there had been only 63% as many PCs obtained in all of Europe, which relative to their greater population means around 40% as much per capita.
Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Dell, Seagate, Texas Instruments, Heward Packard, Hitashi, Toshiba, Sony, etc. ...
The U.S. and Asia utterly dominate there compared to Europe.
In contrast, the auto industry is to a degree an European strength, the most major and well-known product they export here. However, in general:
- 1. Europe is more comparable in production of established technologies than in total amounts of innovation.
Although lesser GDP per capita and due to having 60% more population, the total economic output of the E.U. all combined is slightly greater than the U.S. as measured by GDP. Yet someone would have a rather hard time arguing that they do more innovation and advancement of new technology than the U.S.
- 2. The "rise" of the E.U. over the past couple of decades isn't a matter of relatively high overall economic growth as much as it is 27 nations grouped together now forming a larger group than they did before. Specifically, for example, the largest five European economies actually have been relatively decreasing from being 85% as much as U.S. GDP in 1988 to being 74% as much as U.S. GDP later in 2007 (PPP). Over the past couple of decades, the U.S. actually is gaining on the individual top European nations of Germany, U.K, France, Italy, and Spain, yet that is masked by the E.U. as a whole adding more countries.
I'd like to put something here to demonstrate what I know from a lifetime of keeping up with new tech development, how much more of the top advancements per year occur in the U.S. than Europe even in recent times. Unfortunately, there isn't a convenient database to reference. Anybody who looks at publications like
Technology Review can see patterns though. Admittedly, that's a U.S. publication, although discoveries or new technologies worldwide get covered, but really the trend applies across a wide variety of sources.