Why more Americans Are not mad at the complete waste of our tax money is beyond me
For a billion dollars, other countries are successfully building entire transit systems, high speed rails, other infrastructure, or running massive welfare programs.
We should be getting so much more.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Basically stable since WWII, which is kind of nuts considering it's still only just below the level necessary for a World War, and on top of that real GDP per capita has increased, so this is a huge increase in taxation per capita over time even adjusted for inflation.
And yet with a much smaller budget the WPA and so on did more, which does quite imply that the problem is government efficiency rather than government revenue.
And to use your direct comparison, can you imagine what the data would look like if the US economy actually pivoted to a war footing with the existential urgency akin to that during WWII (which was vastly more expensive than WWI even)?
The federal highway budget is $60 billion. It probably isn't spending the money particularly efficiently, but it's also only 1% of the federal budget.
> Most government interaction is now possible online which requires expensive staff and infra to maintain, but is certainly an improvement over having to do everything in person.
Shouldn't this result in lower costs? You need a $100,000 system administrator instead of two dozen $40,000 clerks, but that doesn't sum to a larger number.
> And to use your direct comparison, can you imagine what the data would look like if the US economy actually pivoted to a war footing with the existential urgency akin to that during WWII (which was vastly more expensive than WWI even)?
It's not obvious that it would dramatically change, because the US already maintains an enormous standing army, and much of the other expenditures are in the nature of assistance for low income people, which would be displaced by those people getting drafted into the war, or obviated because they're meant to offset e.g. high rents, which would decline with local demand if 10% of the population left the continent to go fight in a foreign land.
Exactly. Some have pegged me as a low-tax libertarian apparently, but I'm objectively not. I frequently vote for tax increases, because I think it's fine to support collective infrastructure.
What I don't like is being gaslit.
As an example, I voted in favor of the California High Speed Rail. To this day, I am desperate for a fast train between LA and San Francisco (despite no longer living in california, it would be mega useful for visits, since my company is in the bay and family in LA).
That was over ten years ago. At the time, the funding measure approved was supposed to fund the project.
The rail is still not built, and I recently read an article talking about a new ballot measure to 'fund high speed rail'. It's like... no... we were completely lied to. What happened to all that money? This is actually not okay. The citizens were completely misled as to how much that cost. Someone somewhere should be facing repercussions, yet if you so much as point this out, you'll be accused of being a member of the wrong party. God forbid
This is the sort of rhetoric from pro-waste activists that just sends me over the edge.
Actually, no. The federal government today is less pleasant to interact with due to the online systems. However, the online systems are supposed to make it cheaper. If you're saying we're paying more for worse service, then we should axe the online systems. Duh.
The few times I've had to interact with the feds, I now just escalate direct to my house representative and get a person on the line who can actually fix something directly. Much more pleasant. And if that's cheaper, we should do that.
As it stands you can only lament the status quo, which appears to be a form of wrong-think at HN, a site for entrepreneurs and innovators...