better analogy: the majority of fouix-gras birds would prefer not to be force-fed and caged.

The people working in the bureaucracy do not have the authority to overhaul it.

Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly.

The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.

Some companies manage to maintain war chests, others have some insane "we had EOY leftover budget so we spent it on another redesign" craziness going on. Ditto with the "we must spend it, otherwise we'll get less next year". Where do such terrible incentives come from?

That seems like a difficult position to make coherent. The comment seems to start by arguing that government spending should increase as much as is reasonably possible because it draws resources away from billionaires.

Then the second half seems to be a complaint that increasing government spending has created a resource for billionaires to draw from to enrich themselves.

It seems that if you believe the first, the second is hard to complain about. There is a social contract that the billionaires must fund [yea much] government. They are. If they then pay a little extra tax and it goes in a circular loop back to them, which is weird but I'm not sure how you are arguing it to be a problem - clearly under this frame they are going to be worse off than when they started, so they have been taxed some amount. The question is whether that amount is reasonable or not, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with whether they have a custom of a ceremonial handing of some billionaire money to the government to be handed back to the billionaire on top of their taxes.

Increase in GDP is created by inflation and increases in productivity.

Government budgets should increase with inflation but there is zero reason for them to partake in the increase in productivity. Increases in productivity should, generally, also be applicable to government programs and, as such, they should get relatively cheaper over time, not more expensive.

If we want to _add_ programs, government budgets should increase in kind but the efficiency of government should rise over time as the things required to run government become cheaper. This rarely happens though because government programs don't have the same incentives that lead to increases in efficiency.

It's funny you're so against billionaires scooping up that money but want the government to scoop it up instead. Government is just big business with guns.

And here we have a double demonstration of both stupid and malicious.

> If economy grows by roughly even percentage each year same should be true about government budgets

Stupid. For the purposes of this discussion, the government exists to provide services. The cost of those services, in general, decreases with economic productivity.

> Otherwise you just leave money on the table for billionaires to scoop up and sit on.

Both stupid and malicious. Mind-bogglingly stupid, because that profit isn't just captured by the wealthy, but by all economic classes. Malicious, because you'd rather sabotage the economy than let some people take excess profits based on their wealth alone.

When did I ever try to justify those budget increases or cuts? You need to improve your reading comprehension.

Or just actually deliver what people need faster and better?

Well if our choice is a hypothetical fire all the political operators or fire randomly then random will leave more political operators.

> DOGE toppled existing incentive structures

DOGE attacked organizations investigating companies owned by Musk. Nothing else.

> DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, yes

> emphasising cost reduction

no.

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I don't know anything much about the history of Sanders's rhetoric specifically, but: Inflation and economic growth mean that "millionaire" very much doesn't mean what it used to N years ago, and more so the larger N is. (And Sanders has been around for a while, so N can be pretty big if you're comparing early-Sanders with late-Sanders.)

If you believe something along the lines of "the richest 1% of society, the ones who have > 10x more wealth each than a typical upper-middle-class person, have too much money and too much power and we should change that" -- which I think is the kind of thing Sanders believes -- then talking about "millionaires" was a reasonable way to express that 50 years ago; these days what we need is a word whose meaning is more like "person with $20M or more"; give it another 50 years and "billionaires" might express roughly the same meaning that "millionaires" did in 1975. (Or, of course, there might be a huge economic crash, or a currency devaluation, or a technological singularity, or something.)

So someone could switch from complaining about "millionaires" to complaining about "billionaires" just because the way the meanings of those words have shifted means that the best word for pointing at a particular social issue used to be "millionaires" and is now "billionaires".

Because we really only have "millionaire" and "billionaire" and, more generally, numbers spaced by powers of 1000, the sets of people you can talk about pithily change over time. So, at the moment, you can talk about "millionaires" and be referencing something like the top 15% of US households (so if you're wanting to engage in some hostile rhetoric, pointing it at "millionaires" is probably broader than you want for several reasons); or you can talk about "billionaires" and be referencing something more like the top 0.0003% (so if you're wanting to raise money by redistribution, "billionaires" is probably much narrower than you want).

I suspect there are a few good PhD theses to be written investigating questions like "do populist-leftist movements have more success in places/times where some handy term like 'millionaire' picks out roughly the top 0.3%-3% of the population than in places where there's no word that does that?".

(Note: numbers above are in the right ballpark but I make no claim that careful calculation wouldn't change them somewhat.)

You probably meant to write "millionaire himself", and I don't know if it's true, but yes, same principle