More frustrating, to me, is that some parts of the 9% include enforcement officers and mechanisms on payments and oversight of the rest of the budget. And, for some reason I can't really understand too well, it is a very popular thing to cut spending/funds for the likes of the IRS.
For my part, I've grown rather distrustful of any effort to make things more efficient. Generally, in all things, but particularly with the government. I don't necessarily want efficient; rather, I would prioritize completed. At the least, progressed.
You see this in corporations that have labeled some organizations "cost centers" versus the rest of the company. The spreadsheet workers love lowering the spend in cost centers. And then are rather flat footed when it comes to why places had those cost centers in the first place.
An aspect of spending on financial enforcement that most people don't understand but is well-understood by government auditors is that too much enforcement has a negative ROI to the government separate from the cost it imposes on the economy.
Most financial recoveries via enforcement is not waste or corruption in the traditional sense, it is from insufficient financial compliance processes. The requirements for these processes are fuzzy, so you can always squeeze a little blood from this stone if auditors try hard enough. People react to this pressure by engaging in ever more compliance activity, without much concern about its effectiveness for its nominal purpose. So far so good.
The government realized many decades ago, as an organization that buys trillions of dollars in goods and services from the private sector, that these compliance costs it was creating were effectively being billed back to the government, in many cases in excess of any value created by the compliance processes. In most cases, we are already way past the point where spending more money on enforcement is productive but it is politically popular so it happens anyway. The optimal amount of fraud and waste is not zero, and to the extent things look like waste it is usually because compliance processes have required it to look that way to avoid enforcement actions.
A much better approach would be to revisit the effectiveness and utility of the compliance processes the government creates through enforcement actions, which currently has few if any limiting principles in practice. These are not free, either to the economy or to the government which has to pay for those compliance costs when it buys things.
You are restating the optimization problem of how much to tolerate?
Agreed that it is common for folks to discuss eliminating fraud/non-compliance as the target; and the reality is that you should spend up against fraud/non-compliance up to the point that you do not lose more to those than you are now spending on fighting them.
This is unsurprisingly general in application. It explains why people neglect maintenance costs, for example. Since there will be some level of neglect that can be tolerated and the opportunity costs of constant maintenance checking can be severe.
Bringing it back to this, though, my understanding is that most increases of funding to the IRS has positive returns. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/irs-expects-to-collect-... is a quick find for what made me think this. I would not be shocked to know this is overstated, but would be a little surprised. Do you have contrary reads?
What we need is a legislative budget. Currently there is no limit to the number of laws a person may be subjected to. The amount of law increases every year and will continue to increase until the whole system collapses. We have seen this happen with the fall of the soviet union for example.
Personally, I think the limit should be 200k words. Perhaps half fed half state/local. Moby Dick is 206,052 words long. Even if the limit were a million words, that would be about the length of the harry potter series.
I'm curious what you are arguing here? Yes, the number of laws applicable to people has gone up. The number of things that people can individually do has also gone up. Networking effects are real and don't have a word limit on them.
For my part, I've grown rather distrustful of any effort to make things more efficient. Generally, in all things, but particularly with the government. I don't necessarily want efficient; rather, I would prioritize completed. At the least, progressed.
You see this in corporations that have labeled some organizations "cost centers" versus the rest of the company. The spreadsheet workers love lowering the spend in cost centers. And then are rather flat footed when it comes to why places had those cost centers in the first place.