All I said was they probably could've done some good slashing around in the DOD. Nothing more, nothing lesee. Take your strawman and get lost.

Of they just don't fundamentally trust the institutions.

I bet there isn't a single person in this country that can't pick a subject they care a lot about on which the government actively gaslit them in the last ~5yr.

That kind of tarnishes what the .gov has to say on every other subject.

> I don’t think it’s party willingness to deal with government efficiency, I think it is more accurate to say that neither party thinks that government efficiency is a significant problem.

That wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making was that Bill Clinton was able to balance the budget _and_ keep the programs he wanted to not because it was something he originally wanted to do.

He did it because the Democrats lost power in the midterms to Republicans who ran on balancing the budget.

He was looking at either not being able to do anything he wanted and possibly vetoing a Republican agenda that the American people just voted for or changing his own agenda to more closely align with that and work with the Republicans to make sure programs that Democrats really wanted weren't cut but still balancing the budget. He did the latter and it's largely used as a point of pride for the democratic party but they ignore the fact that it was only achieved through compromise.

A more modern opportunity/example for this would have been if Biden, after the midterms, chose to work with yhe Republican congress on immigration reform and get something done that everyone could live with.

Instead he doubled down and made the situation worse, supercharging the issue in the next election leading to the election of Trump on largely that platform.

I'm not blaming just the Democrats for this, neither party would do it, it's just the example that came to mind.

> In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.

There's not really a good example of this in practice. Healthy social programs in other countries are typically funded largely through pretty substantial middle class taxes.

There simply aren't enough rich people and corporations to yax to fund the rest of the country.

The desire to tax the other to fund my benefits is the problem. Instead of looking at poverty and wanted to do something about it, we look to other people and tell them they should do something about it.

That's really a matter of accounting.

Under some accounting systems if you have a financial obligation and that obligation is forgiven, then it's an expense (e.g. bad debt expense) for the forgiving party and income for the party that is forgiven.

A big tax cut like this is forgiving the dues everyone owes for living in a society. It's only really a pure loss of revenue if you believe that taxes aren't an inherent part of the social contract.

At least empirically I agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature is nasty brutish and short and that there are no, for example, big tech companies in anarchies. So in both theory and practice taxes are conceptually subscription fees that arise with the social contract in exchange for protection, public services, and the protection of rights. In this sense they are debt and cancelling the debt is an expense.

Of course I recognize that in practice the government does not treat future tax revenue as receivables in terms of accounting. But there are sufficiently many games and white lies in the bill to make it appear budget neutral that I don't think anybody really believes the actual budget accounting is what's driving the bill. It's a political bill and politically I think it's reasonable to consider it an expense.

Precisely right.

Adherence to internal procedure becomes ever more important as organisations grow larger, eventually becoming by far the most critical requirement for all work, internal or external. Cost, efficacy, customer happiness, etc... become distant secondary requirements, dwarfed by the mountains of procedure, policy, and paperwork.