Please stop being the highlight of zero sum thinking.
Let's make up a hypothetical example. The government says you have to install a safety rail and the amortized cost is $1 a year.
You: OMG, this is going to cost $100 over the next century, a huge loss, I am destroyed.
Reality: Johnny doesn't fall of the equipment being coming paralyzed (costing you an immediate $200 in lawsuit and payout fees) and is able to produce economic product over the next few decades bringing in $400 to the economy. Net win for everyone.
That's where the money comes from. Or would you rather be like Russia where you have a giant potential economy that outputs less than Italy and doesn't give a damned about corruption and has terrible quality of living standards/longevity?
They beat out Seattle, that spent $250,000 on a portable toilet a few years ago.
On my own street, the city water outfit installed a fire hydrant. It cost $10,000, including architectural drawings of the installation. When the crew came out to install the hydrant (the main water line runs under my property) I asked them if they'd seen the drawings. They said "what drawings?" They'd never seen nor talked to the engineer, nor had any idea there ever was one. I asked them what the hydrant cost. They said $2,000. They had a machine on the back of the truck that was able to dig the hole, drill the main, and clamp on the new hydrant in 15 minutes.
This was 20 some years ago, back when $10,000 was real money.
The IRS now requires any business that sends out payments to an individual of more than $600 per year now has to file 1099s. The threshold used to be $20,000. A lot of ebay-ers are in for a big surprise. Do you have receipts for what you paid for items you sold on ebay?
The guy installing the meter was told where to install it, they are not the architect that make sure it actually works if they install top many so it's not a surprise.
It's no different than me 20 years ago installing a server for a client. I would go out slap it in and turn it on. I did not architect the applications on it, nor configure the firewall rules on the router for it to work.
News articles are written about exceptional things, not the mundane.
I saw the drawings. As an engineer, I can assert they were completely custom made and completely unnecessary. You don't need architectural drawings to determine if the flow is sufficient.
Besides, everyone knew the flow was sufficient because it would be the only hydrant upstream of a flow reducer in the main line. I.e. there was plenty of pressure in the line.
The drawings were completely superfluous to a bog-standard install.
> News articles are written about exceptional things
That's true. The hydrant wasn't in the news. Want another one that wasn't exceptional enough to make the news? A nearby one mile stretch of road has been undergoing repaving for THREE YEARS now.
BTW, did you read the article about SF? It blames the permitting process which takes forever and $$$$. That affects everything in SF.
Anecdotes about corruption and mismanagement do not address the underlying point that government spending is not zero-sum.
That hydrant was probably too expensive (maybe; insufficient data to say for sure). The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.
You can believe the government is efficient if you like. The fact remains that there's been massive growth in government, and that is going to be paid for out of the economy.
Maybe I've just spent too many years in government contracting, but when I hear that a government program is growing, I hear economic stimulus, not pulling something out of the economy.
China's GDP growth consistently out-paces the US. Canada continues to do well. Germany has consistently positive GDP growth with a few exceptions related to international downturns. And, of course, if you're talking about countries that use economic stimulus, you'll have to include the United States, which has the largest GDP in the world. I think your claim requires a tighter definition of "economy" and "do poorly" to hold merit.
Everybody is doing more poorly than growth estimates, but (a) COVID just happened and (b) everyone always does worse than growth estimates; growth estimates are the rewarded metric and therefore incentives are high to over-estimate it in extrapolation as another form of incentive (i.e. aim higher than you want to hit).
Regardless of personal beliefs, there's the other issues here. First, what does "massive growth in government" even mean? Do you mean in government meddling in people's personal lives, like restricting bodily autonomy for women or banning books? Yes, I agree. Do you mean in government spending? Sure, agreed, the numbers agree. But you seems to be referring to some other kinda vaguely defined concept of like... government bureaucratic-ness? I'm not really sure what you mean and how to measure what you mean.
The second issue is your overall thesis seems to be "the government is inefficient," which is fine to say and to criticize, it certainly is inefficient by many measures, but I feel like you're hinting at some kind of alternative that I can't possibly guess at. Usually these discussions take two routes: the capitalist one, wherein you argue that private industry is more efficient, which even if we accept that efficiency is the only valid measure of how we should choose to do things (amazon builds road faster and cheaper than government: then puts a toll on it so only the rich are allowed to use it. this is bad), is probably not true[0] or possibly the opposite of the truth. Maybe you're more anarchist in your leanings, in which case you're arguing for more distributed and local management of these kinds of services? That could be a really interesting conversation, is that what you're suggesting?
yes, government spending increases, always. I'd need to be convinced this is inherently bad lol
2. the amount of interference in the workings of the marketplace, usually called "unfunded mandates" where they put burdens on businesses
What about subsidies, when businesses only exist because of government intervention at all? What about Harley Davidson? The banking sector?
> A much more limited government.
How limited? Is it allowed to prevent monopoly? You seem to know enough about the subject to know that making the state too limited will merely lead to the establishment of state power by monopolistic corporations instead, from plenty of historical examples.
Caltech basically ran on government money so you can thank them for your entire undergraduate education (yes I know you paid tuition but it was no doubt minimal)
Let's make up a hypothetical example. The government says you have to install a safety rail and the amortized cost is $1 a year.
You: OMG, this is going to cost $100 over the next century, a huge loss, I am destroyed.
Reality: Johnny doesn't fall of the equipment being coming paralyzed (costing you an immediate $200 in lawsuit and payout fees) and is able to produce economic product over the next few decades bringing in $400 to the economy. Net win for everyone.
That's where the money comes from. Or would you rather be like Russia where you have a giant potential economy that outputs less than Italy and doesn't give a damned about corruption and has terrible quality of living standards/longevity?