promethea.incorporated

collapsedsquid:

@socialjusticemunchkin

I want to do the numbers properly sometime, but at a glance pretty much every government’s budget feels like an innocent-hurting version of the silly budgeting meme and there would be plenty of things to cut and reallocate way more optimally if only voters would stop acting like voters and states would stop acting like states.

The government:

Crucial governance stuff: $50
Badly implemented but theoretically laudable redistribution: $1500
Buying votes from assholes: $3600
I dunno, cops or something: $200
Help me budget this, my poor people are dying

Me: spend less money on buying votes from assholes. also UBI.

The government:No

Around 3/4s of the federal budget is social security, defense, medicaid, and medicare.  So, it’s mostly redistribution and defense, which is a mix of crucial governance stuff and buying votes from assholes that’s not easy to disentangle.  (I would argue that there’s a fair amount of buying votes from assholes with how medicare is implemented too, either way it’s not easy)

Getting buy-in is also what a state or any theoretical non-state political body has to do, even in the absence of democracy.  If you have a theoretically optimal government but it’s not actually achievable, then it’s not optimal at all.

And then there’s the Keynesian issue of whether stuff like defense and those other misc programs actually benefit the economy through increasing employment and demand, which is a whole other mess.(That I’m not qualified to argue)

The US could afford to cut defense a lot by reducing inefficiency in the Pentagon, and stopping the practice of listening to bushes and getting stuck in deserts without exit strategies. And not buying votes from assholes with “must create jobs in the defense industry”.

Social security, medicaid, medicare etc. I’d simply replace dollar-for-dollar with a basic income, except for a basic public health insurance for catastrophic conditions; Europe and Singapore can produce far more cost-efficiency so the same (or let’s face it, way better) health outcomes for poor people could be achieved by implementing a non-bullshit system, and the savings could be passed onto the basic income.

Then there’s corporate welfare which by a quick calculation is at least $80B directly and who knows how much indirectly, which needs to go. All the grants for renewable energy etc. could be replaced with a carbon tax.

Then there’s land and natural resources; a land value tax is not a bad tax, and natural resources most naturally belong to everyone, so basically sell a sustainable amount of groundwater etc. to the highest bidders and put the proceedings into the basic income. Solves the drought in California and gives free money to poor people.

Putting all that together; $2.3T from various forms of means-tested welfare (including state budgets though), $200B from defense, at least $100B from corporate welfare and other sources, the total that I could “trivially” reallocate to a basic income would be, at above $2.6T, pretty close to what would be needed to provide all adults $10k a year and all children $6k. Subtract public healthcare reform from that, but also account for the fact that a non-bullshit system would benefit everyone massively.

In fact, if I assume I could make public healthcare twice as cost-efficient by importing a healthcare czar from a country with a better system, just the healthcare savings and welfare alone would be around $1.5T in the federal budget, no need to touch the lower levels of government; not that far from the estimated $2T for a basic income to all adults. Save a bit on defense, get some more income from somewhere and one is already really really close to affording it.

The keynesian issue would be solved by just giving people the money to use on the things they want to use it on, instead of robbing them and giving money to cronies who sure “create jobs” for a certain value of creating jobs, but who also destroy value compared to just letting people choose what they actually want. It would be such a horror, people would use the money on things like affordable housing, instead of buying the latest gadgets for oppressing people.

Democracies have the predictable problem with voters voting in bullshit, and that’s why I don’t really believe in democracy without a strict constitution saying that whatever the voters want to do is probably not allowed, and that tax money should just be given to people instead of implementing degrading and humiliating means-tested programs.

Democracy is the government equivalent of duct tape for engineering; use it if you must, but for the sake of all that is good don’t use it any more than is absolutely inevitably necessary, and specifically don’t try to build your entire system out of duct tape. If I was the Everything Czar of the US, I could fix Everything (although a lot of people would yell at me); but I can’t do it, so I need to find a non-state solution to poverty and other bad things.