They should be. And for the great majority of citizens, they should be calculated automatically along with taxes without the need for filing/paperwork. But we must think of the Intuit shareholders and the harm that that would cause them.
If someone in the coming years ran on taking down regulatory capture and returning that as social safety net funding, public goods, and lower taxes, and had the chops to actually deliver, they'd do well.
Though best to start local government first, obviously.
We're reaching breaking points in so many places...
“They’d do well.” That is not the lesson I’ve taken from the past 15 years of politics in the US and abroad.
Political candidates actually interested in taking on the very difficult and nuanced task of governing are routinely drubbed by edge lord culture warriors or candidates that simply promise the world without any regard to annoying facts like existing laws, budget deficits, or basic tenets of economics.
I definitely agree there is probably less disfunction and greater chance for reform at the local level.
As someone who formerly worked in this space, the issue is administration is orthogonal to legislature.
Administration and implementation is inherently technocratic in nature, but legislation is is often driven by short-term electoral needs.
This isn't to say autocracy is the answer (it isn't), but the dysfunction arises when people assume that every single administrative decision needs to be made by "elected officials" and constantly second guess administrators.
When administration from local to federal becomes politicized (as is increasingly the norm across the democratic world), implementation slows down severely because the "ideal" solution might not be political tenable.
A good example of this is welfare expansion in the US - the assumption is lower income voters who voted for Trump voted irrationally, but in action, the majority of Trump voters tended to be in the 25th-75th percentile income bracket, which in most cases put them outside of the bracket for a number of social services. Those services which were available such as the ACA/Obamacare have been protected by legislators for that very reason because they know they would lose their seats as a result.
You're in Japan so you've probably seen similar decisions being made with regards to Japanese rice protectionism [0] - unpopular with urban voters, but urban voters don't swing elections at scale.
Japan is 93% urban. 25% of the population lives in Tokyo! It's not that they can't outvote the farmers, it's a more complicated mix of agrarian nationalism that supports farm subsidies in a lot of countries, plus outright bribery with literal sacks of rice.
> administration from local to federal becomes politicized
Administration is politics. It's a mistake to go full technocrat and proceed without the consent of the administered. The problem comes when techocrats get rings run round them by misleading populists.
Japan is a parliamentary system, and the amount of Single Member Seats in the House of Representatives needed to flip an election are primarily small towns or rural.
This is what happened in the 2009 election when the LDP lost the farmer vote.
There's actually plenty of examples out in the real world with competent administration to learn from. Especially if you generalise enough to look at how pockets of competence work even in an otherwise abysmal system, instead of demanding overall competence.
What you end up seeing is those cases of "competence" only worked in cases where administration and legislation was aligned. But even in those societies you'd still see problems which are distinct, but problems nonetheless.
GP might be saying that analyzing _differences_ in how perf targets are met in say, VN&CL (or SG&CH IE&HK TW&SI KR&DK) might be most productive. As you mention, in particular, how are their sad paths ("problems") different? Or the same?
Now there are subdepartments of study devoted to this very question (empirical study of the legislative-administrative divide) , but in the US I'm hard-pressed to list the corresponding think-tanks :) I suppose some MBA level depts in the US will have to suffice
I wish in the US more areas of policy would be decided at the state level, and I wish more state government would flip coins to decide on their policy. (Even better, if we can push it down to county level.)
The first part is about subsidiarity, which is a good idea anyway. But together this is just a tongue-in-cheek plea for doing more randomised, controlled experiments. (Alas, we can't blind them.)
> I wish in the US more areas of policy would be decided at the state level, and I wish more state government would flip coins to decide on their policy. (Even better, if we can push it down to county level.)
The overwhelming majority of policy is decided at the state and local level in the US so long as it's not foreign policy or monetary policy related.
Whatever is decided on the Hill has no bearing once administration and implementation comes to play - which is overwhelmingly done by state and local government.
This is why the US has become increasingly dysfunctional over the past few years - state and local elections which were previously staid affairs became polarized partisan affairs because turnout is low and the overwhelming majority of decision making roles are elected.
Flipping GP's tangent on its head (after all states in the US are akin to countries in the EU/EA:)
If you can't blind them find them
I suggest that, absolutely, state governance has _already_ generated lots of excellent data >> federal level :) probably much more accessible than corporate governance data )
Of course YC's Seibel might have something to say here, it's probably not a new perspective
I wish you were right. NYC can't even charge people for their using their roads (whether that's driving or parking) without the state and federal governments getting involved.
The problem isn’t that such candidates would never accomplish anything let alone get elected due to the insurmountable amount of resistance from so many incumbents with a vested interest in that not happening, ever.
One of the biggest problem of a two-party system is that the two parties are thoroughly captured by lobbyists.
In a PR system, fresh parties do arise over election cycles, and it takes some time for them to be thoroughly infested. These can then push for some reforms that threaten entrenched interests, and sometimes succeed.
Most people don’t even know what regulatory capture really means. There’s no “brand” to rally around and I don’t know how you’d go about building one.
And without the concept spread through the population, where would you find the grass roots support you’d need for resisting the avalanche of interest-group pushback?
“Draining the swamp” or “revolving door” were sorta in the neighborhood, but still ineffective and counterproductive.
DOGE was a Potemkin organization. They destroyed USAID, smashed up a bunch of other institutions, then went home. Very little of which complied with Federal funding law, either.
I like my cliff. I earn enough that I and my family are ineligible for most welfare schemes. I do not want even 6 cents worth of SNAP. I spent my entire childhood on that, and it disgusts me. Thus, were this policy ever seriously proposed, I would do what I can to dissuade my legislators from voting it into law.
Right, so people who would use their trauma to prevent themselves from thinking logically about the problem and helping those in the middle instead of some arbitrary line your mind made up?
Never underestimate how many good policies go nowhere because some median voter is irrationally mad at them due to something that happened decades ago.
Because you live in a world where other people exist, and how they go about existing can impact you negatively, both directly and indirectly. The fewer people living in and dealing with poverty, the better off the everyone else is.
>so people who would use their trauma to prevent themselves from thinking logically
You're using your trauma here. You keep yearning for the kindergarten lessons to be true, that we're all the same people and we should all share and all the other nonsense that was only taught to you so that the elemntary school teachers didn't have a city-burning-down-riot on their hands every day.
Even if you insist that I'm the one being illogical here, it's wired pretty deeply into my brain, and I'm not going to change. Not only am I not going to change, I'm raising children to be like me, and one of the early and fundamental lessons is that fertility rates are top priority. Be fruitful and multiply. There will always be more like me than more like you, and it's only going to get worse (for you and those like you).
