U.S.A. 2016 General Election

[krbe 193]

7 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Measuring with two standards again are we? We all love our sovereignty, except when countries decide to use that sovereignty and do things we don't want them to. Same goes for democracy, its all great as long as people vote for people we like, but as soon as they vote for Hamas we decide that the people there aren't 'mature' enough for democracy.

Two standards? No, just a gentle reminder that while Barack Obama and his successor don't dictate the foreign policy of other countries some twisting of arms will take place.

If you're asking for my personal opinion on sovereignty, democracy and all that, the answer is that people may choose whatever they like; they will select the wrong choice, anyway. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Democracy?  Here we are again.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I remind you that the last country that had Democracy was Achaean Athens.  Democracy means rules by the demes (land owners).  The U.S. tried it for a while when only land owners had the franchise.

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal, but the definition of men at the time was land owners.

Democracy most not be confused with freedom.  Freedom as we see it today generally means freedom from want.  It also implies a duty of care which most people seem to have forgotten.  This duty of care is to guard freedom most assiduously, while at the same time making sure that others can get freedom if they want it.  Some people don't want the kind of freedom most of us have on this (North America) continent.  Further, freedom can only come from within a people, and cannot be imposed from without.  People who are given freedom quite often don't know what to do with it and mistake it for license.  A free people must be very careful to give examples but to avoid imposing freedom on anyone.

So, let's look at the current election circus.  Have any of the candidates promised to do anything to increase freedom?  curtail it?  Building walls surely curtails it.  Isolationism clearly curtails it.  What kind of people do you want in the top chair?  Any of the current set?  It will be interesting to see who among them survives the summer.

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

8 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Syria is going to be messy regardless of what any American president decides to do. Its a place where so many different powers and interests collide together, there simply is no alternative that isn't one giant mess. Advocating that local countries need to play a key role in fixing this is going to be messy, but what alternatives do you have? Get the US military involved? Well thats going to be an unacceptable $%&^!show (excuse my language). That would turn Russia, Iraq, Iran and every Muslim fundamentalist right against the United States. Don't get involved at all? Well that involves the least risk for the United States itself, but it would essentially be handling the reigns of this conflict over to Russia, Iran and Assad. Thats bad policy in the long term, it won't make Turkey (a very important strategic ally) very happy and it will end up messy as well. On top of that the US will be accused of starting a mess and then just walking away from it, as well as being unable to walk all the talk. So the diplomatic reputation, and therefor its soft power, takes a hit and diminishes.

Yup, it will indeed be messy no matter what. I can only speculate, that's all I was doing.

There are many alternatives and I don't really have a solution. Sometimes I think doing nothing is the best solution, other times I think the US should really commit themselves to destroying IS rather than this tepid one toe in approach. The Americans are in a tough situation because they've lost confidence in their ability to win a war. Iraq was such an embarrassment they're afraid of using military force despite the fact that now may actually be the right time to do so. They're also too focused on this idea of getting rid of Assad which is a huge barrier for terms of an alliance between them and Russia.

8 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Oh no, a carrier group carries an implicit political message. Its basically telling everyone in the region that the US watching and that its best to back down. Finally, Sanders never said he would never use the military, he says that others are far to quick with using the military since they often haven't exhausted all options first. And then they use it when it really makes no sense to use the military. The US military isn't an all powerful solution that can be applied to every problem. Advocating caution is sensible, and being cautious does not mean that he will never deploy the military ever.

Again, what good is a carrier group if no one thinks you really have the balls to use it? It's just like Obama with his "red line".

If the US military isn't an all powerful solution that can be applied to every problem then what is the point of a carrier group?

I concede that Sanders has indeed said he would be willing to use the military, but people do kinda see him as the most anti-war candidate. I just think it's bit dangerous how he supports the King of Saudi Arabia's idea of a religiously motivated war for the soul of Islam.

8 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Finally, Sanders in that scenario would be the president of the US, the supreme commander of the American military. He is not the commander of the Saudi Arabian forces. If Saudi Arabia agrees to send their own troops in, thats not his concern directly.

Sure, if Saudi Arabia decides to fight ISIS he can't command them not to, but he shouldn't be asking them to send troops and promising support in the first place. If you want to eradicate radical Islam then giving "support" to Saudi Arabia isn't a good idea.

9 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Basically, if the dollar is expensive, it becomes cheaper to import stuff from other nations, if the dollar is cheap, export becomes more profitable. And more profitable export leads to more jobs and more investment.

Yes, I get that argument, I've heard it often from low dollar apologists, but it isn't a universal truth of economics. There are of course acceptable norms in which a currency can fluctuate up and down.

9 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

 Although I don't really see a reason why the dollar would decrease in value all that much if Sanders were to be president.

I don't really know either, just something I made up from whole cloth for my super dystopian view of what could happen. You could make man dire predictions for any other candidate and they would be just as "valid".

9 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Yes, the debt is real, and its cause for a bit of concern. But what people call 'fiscal responsibility' is basically slashing in government expenditure until they gain more money than they spend, which is then used to pay off the debt, is anything but 'responsible policy'. Again, the government budget doesn't work in the same way as the budget of an individual household works. And just cutting programs left and right in order to decrease the spending can have disastrous consequences for the economy and your citizens. Just look at Greece, that was what these 'fiscal responsibility' people advocate and all it did was make the situation in Greece worse and worse. Hell, even the IMF is saying that all that budget slashing is stupid and has severe negative consequences.

There are right ways to do it and there are wrong ways to do it. I agree, if you just cut programs for the sake of saving money a lot of people who have are dependent on those programs will suffer, so there has to be a plan to transition. Just because 'fiscal responsibility people' worsened an already degrading situation in Greece doesn't invalidate attempts at fiscal responsibility. 

9 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Ergo its possible that businesses and industries leave, but that under the right conditions, and a better educated workforce is a part of that, new businesses move in to fill the gap or to exploit new markets. Other businesses simply can't move to where its cheaper because that wouldn't fit their business model. Finally, at some point even the 1% will realize that the growing wealth gap is unsustainable and a direct threat to their own businesses and possible safety. They need a wealthy middle class or else there is no one to buy their products.

Under the right conditions it is possible, yes. What those "right conditions" are is where we differ. Yes, they need a wealthy middle class, but since we live in a globalized world they can look for them anywhere in the world, they're not limited to a single space, village, town, city, or country.

9 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

The quality of the American college system is just fine, and getting a college degree is, even with all the debt, still worth it from a financial point of view. The idea that the quality of American education is low is well, kind of a myth. American education still creates productive people.

Then why even advocate for free tuition? If there's no problem then why is there a problem?

I've seen many articles and studies showing that American education and it's value has declined, but of course there are still intelligent and productive people coming out of it. Exceptions don't disprove trends.

9 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

It does actually. You'll learn skills that aren't directly related to the classes you follow but that are still incredibly useful to have. Again, critical thinking, engaging with new ideas, networking, etc. Those things make everyone better people. 

All those can be done outside of University. People who went to College or University aren't inherently better or smarter than people who haven't. Do you really think you're a "better person" (whatever that means) than someone who didn't go to University? It's like saying you're a better person because you go to Church and believe in God.

9 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Sure, but Sanders good intentions are translated in fairly sensible policy and barring something extreme and unforseeable shouldn't lead us anywhere close to hell. Besides, I prefer good intentions over bad intentions or no intentions. 

Who has or doesn't have good intentions is a point of view. One could argue that Trump has good intentions. After all, he does want to Make America Great Again^TM .

In other news: Pope Francis questions Donald Trump's Christianity

Pope Francis said "a person who thinks only about building walls... and not of building bridges, is not Christian".

Uhm, did Francis forget that Vatican City is a walled enclave? Did he just disprove the Christianity of the Vatican?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

18 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

<snip>

Uhm, did Francis forget that Vatican City is a walled enclave? Did he just disprove the Christianity of the Vatican?

Those wall have been there for centuries.  They were put there to keep barbarian armies out.  How does that have anything to do with that apostate candidate?

[LexusInfernus 908]

43 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

Yup, it will indeed be messy no matter what. I can only speculate, that's all I was doing.

There are many alternatives and I don't really have a solution. Sometimes I think doing nothing is the best solution, other times I think the US should really commit themselves to destroying IS rather than this tepid one toe in approach. The Americans are in a tough situation because they've lost confidence in their ability to win a war. Iraq was such an embarrassment they're afraid of using military force despite the fact that now may actually be the right time to do so. They're also too focused on this idea of getting rid of Assad which is a huge barrier for terms of an alliance between them and Russia.

Assad is a big murderer than whatever IS did. We are just more afraid of IS because Muslim radicals are more scary to us than some dictator that butchers his own people. Aside from that, with Assad in place America delegitimizes itself in the eyes of people in the region. Worse, doing so may serve as an additional recruitment tool for Jihadists. And no, now is not the right time to get involved militarily. The US army is fundamentally incapable of dealing with the type of combat situations we can expect to occur there. Obama is right to stay out of it, and Sanders is right to advocate caution. 

43 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

Again, what good is a carrier group if no one thinks you really have the balls to use it? It's just like Obama with his "red line".

If the US military isn't an all powerful solution that can be applied to every problem then what is the point of a carrier group?

You could ask the same question about nuclear bombs. Why bother with them if you don't have the balls to nuke your enemies from the face of this world? Still, nuclear weapons are an effective political tool. 

Carrier groups are very capable when it comes to force projection. Its a sign of American military might that can get almost anywhere on the planet. Keep in mind, we are talking about 6 billion dollar nuclear powered floating airfields staffed with probably another few billion dollars worth military hardware that can deliver pin point accurate high explosive destruction, plus a small fleet to provide protection and supplies. Only a fool counts on an American president not using that kind of power when provoked. Which is why its often enough to simply send a carrier group somewhere, because the implicit message says enough: "Don't push us". 

As for the "Red Line" Obama would have attacked if he hadn't been upstaged by Putin like that. French bombers were already in the air and on their way to Syria when Obama called it off. Yeah, it was stupid, but then again Putin did quite a brilliant move there. 

43 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

I concede that Sanders has indeed said he would be willing to use the military, but people do kinda see him as the most anti-war candidate. I just think it's bit dangerous how he supports the King of Saudi Arabia's idea of a religiously motivated war for the soul of Islam.

Sure, but like I said, only fools trust in their enemies not attacking, so only a fool would assume that Sanders is to much of a pacifist to not use a carrier group when provoked enough. And fair enough, I agree that supporting Saudi Arabia, on anything really, is dangerous. 

43 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

Sure, if Saudi Arabia decides to fight ISIS he can't command them not to, but he shouldn't be asking them to send troops and promising support in the first place. If you want to eradicate radical Islam then giving "support" to Saudi Arabia isn't a good idea.

Eh, you gotta work with the tools you have. But like I said, I agree with you here. 

43 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

There are right ways to do it and there are wrong ways to do it. I agree, if you just cut programs for the sake of saving money a lot of people who have are dependent on those programs will suffer, so there has to be a plan to transition. Just because 'fiscal responsibility people' worsened an already degrading situation in Greece doesn't invalidate attempts at fiscal responsibility. 

It kinda does. The Fiscal responsibility argument is essentially that government budgets ought to operate in the same way you and I set up our personal budgets. And I can understand why that sounds attractive because its extremely difficult to explain to anyone who isn't an economist why its okay for governments to have so much debt. But the fact remains that government budgets do not work in the same way a normal persons budget works. Debt is not the same kind of problem it is for normal people, and if a government operated its budget in the same way a normal person would, the government would be unable to do a lot of its tasks and fail at its responsibilities. So yeah, the fiscal responsibility argument is basically bad economics. 

43 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

Under the right conditions it is possible, yes. What those "right conditions" are is where we differ. Yes, they need a wealthy middle class, but since we live in a globalized world they can look for them anywhere in the world, they're not limited to a single space, village, town, city, or country.

Sure, but the growing wealth gap is not an exclusive American problem. It happens on an almost global scale. Besides, an American middle class would still be a lot wealthier than a Chinese or African middle class. At the current rates it would take forever for those places to catch up. Finally, if you are a capitalist 1%'er you want to expand, grow. Sure, you want to make money of middle classes somewhere else, but why destroy the middle class at home? It only cuts into your own market. 

Finally, there is the issue of security. A growing wealth inequality cannot be sustained forever. Already people are getting angry about this. For now, those people that are really angry are still voting for Cruz or Trump. For now, those people still trust the political process, they still have faith that democracy will get them the people in charge who look after them. This is of course no longer true in the United States, but most people don't see it yet. But that won't be forever. More and more people are catching on, the trust in the government erodes more and more, until at some point there are enough angry people who don't trust the government and who don't trust the democratic process. And those people might not stop at simply demanding policy reform, those people might go on until the 1% doesn't exist anymore. 

It is therefor in the best interest of the 1% to act now and put an end to the ever growing wealth gap. Not just in the US, but globally. It makes economic sense and it makes sense from the point of their own safety. 

43 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

Then why even advocate for free tuition? If there's no problem then why is there a problem?

I've seen many articles and studies showing that American education and it's value has declined, but of course there are still intelligent and productive people coming out of it. Exceptions don't disprove trends.

Even if education is worth the money, its high cost do act as a barrier, holding back people who might benefit from it but who simply cannot afford the high costs. Furthermore, starting out your working career with crushing debt is bad for the economy. Instead of being able to afford a house and fully participate in the consumer economy, people with debt are spending at least parts of their first paychecks on paying back their debt, and that means they can't buy stuff. 

Also, I don't think that America's education has declined, I just think that in absolute and relative terms, the quality of the education elsewhere has increased more. That may make it seem like American education is getting worse because they are no longer number 1. On top of that, measuring the quality of education between different countries is difficult. Sure, you can look at performance on standardized test scores, but those measure only what a test can measure, and usually thats just raw knowledge. The Chinese do tend to excel at these things, being good at cramming large amounts of data into the heads of their students, but at the same time all that data is useless if you don't really know how to engage with it. If that is the case, is Chinese education better than American education? 

43 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

All those can be done outside of University. People who went to College or University aren't inherently better or smarter than people who haven't. Do you really think you're a "better person" (whatever that means) than someone who didn't go to University? It's like saying you're a better person because you go to Church and believe in God.

Sure, its technically possible to pick up those skills somewhere else. It just hardly ever happens. I won't say that I think going to uni has made me better than people who haven't gone to uni, but I know for a fact that going to uni has made me a better person than what I would have been if I had not gone to uni. And I think that is true for everyone who gets an education beyond high school. 

43 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

Who has or doesn't have good intentions is a point of view. One could argue that Trump has good intentions. After all, he does want to Make America Great Again^TM .

He wants to do it by being racist and xenophobic, by pandering to some of the basest instincts of people. His actions betray that his intentions are only good for very specific people. His view on how a great America looks like is exclusionary to a lot of people. 

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

17 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

It kinda does. The Fiscal responsibility argument is essentially that government budgets ought to operate in the same way you and I set up our personal budgets. And I can understand why that sounds attractive because its extremely difficult to explain to anyone who isn't an economist why its okay for governments to have so much debt. But the fact remains that government budgets do not work in the same way a normal persons budget works.

Yes I'm aware that governments have a whole bag of tricks to mitigate the effects of debt, almost to a point where money isn't even real, it's just numbers in a computer that no one really has to care about until some distant time in the future. But fiscal responsibility isn't just about debt, it's also about not wasting the tax payer's money. If you're spending money your country doesn't really have on programs that aren't performing well then it is an economic burden on the people. Your assumption is based on the idea that all government programs are worth the money you're spending, and that would be great. The social good those programs would do would outweigh the debt you incur and would justify the taxes you have. You can't just spend spend frivolously. There has to be a point where you evaluate the cost. 'Cutting' isn't inherently negative. If you can make programs run more efficiently for less money isn't that a good thing?

17 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Debt is not the same kind of problem it is for normal people, and if a government operated its budget in the same way a normal person would, the government would be unable to do a lot of its tasks and fail at its responsibilities. So yeah, the fiscal responsibility argument is basically bad economics. 

Well of course you'd have to restructure. It wouldn't work with the system the US has now. It's not something you can just switch to in the blink of an eye, there has to be a transition. And there has to be flexibility, after all a government is a massive entity, its finances are more like that of a large business. Many governments, the world economy even, depends on the success on the US economy and its dollar since it's the world reserve currency, so there's a lot of interest in keeping it afloat. However, should that change, should there be a shift, the high national debt could lower your credit rating, drive up interest rates, and negatively affect the value of your currency.

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

18 hours ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Those wall have been there for centuries.  They were put there to keep barbarian armies out.  How does that have anything to do with that apostate candidate?

Is that a serious question or do you not see the connection and do I have to explain it?

[LexusInfernus 908]

34 minutes ago, MilitantRadical said:

Yes I'm aware that governments have a whole bag of tricks to mitigate the effects of debt, almost to a point where money isn't even real, it's just numbers in a computer that no one really has to care about until some distant time in the future. But fiscal responsibility isn't just about debt, it's also about not wasting the tax payer's money. If you're spending money your country doesn't really have on programs that aren't performing well then it is an economic burden on the people. Your assumption is based on the idea that all government programs are worth the money you're spending, and that would be great. The social good those programs would do would outweigh the debt you incur and would justify the taxes you have. You can't just spend spend frivolously. There has to be a point where you evaluate the cost. 'Cutting' isn't inherently negative. If you can make programs run more efficiently for less money isn't that a good thing?

Well this is a little more complicated than 'the government shouldn't waste money'. Obviously, it shouldn't, everyone can agree on that. But how do you define waste? When is money wasted? The problem with the government is that its not the same as a private business that operates on profit. For a business its very easy to define waste, everything that costs more than it produces is waste and can be cut. Everyone accepts that because everyone accepts that private businesses want to make a profit and as such limit their operations. But a government? Aside from the fact that governments aren't there to make a profit (well, that depends on the country, but ideally they shouldn't) their function is also a public one. Once they start slashing budgets in the same way a private business can it will affect peoples lives in a very direct way.

That rule that says public buildings should be wheelchair accessible? Eh, from an accounting point of view it costs money and only helps a tiny percentage of the general public. Its a waste of resources. And suddenly in our efforts to combat waste, everyone in a wheelchair will have a difficult time getting into public buildings. Is that acceptable? Or how about that public transit station in the far corner of the city. Its used by only a few people and it generally costs more than what it makes by sending a bus there. Lets drop that station from the bus routes. And suddenly public transit is a lot harder to access for a bunch of people, restricting their mobility and their access to the wider world. And imagine how people would react if the government suddenly started behaving like this, cutting services and rules deemed too expensive left and right, affecting the lives of a lot of people in a very direct and negative manner. People may accept this type of behavior from businesses, but from their own government? 

So what some people call waste is actually the government looking out for its citizens. Yes it costs money, and from a business accounting point of view, that money is spend inefficiently. But the point of those programs and those rules that introduce 'inefficiency' or 'waste' is usually to protect or help people and help level the playing field. If you want to know what happens to countries where the government start acting like an accountant, you need only look at the UK under Thatcher. Entire regions in the UK are now piss poor ghettos deprived of almost all access to money, jobs and opportunity, while London has become a massive resource hog where most of the work and the money goes to. Why? Because it was basically only 'efficient' to maintain a lot of key services in the London metropolitan area. 

Anyways, if you are still worried that despite the governments need to spend money less 'efficiently' it still wastes money on things it shouldn't have to waste money on, keep in mind that the government does constantly evaluate its own programs. Thats what the bureaucracy is for, to combat needless waste (yeah that may come as a shock to people). 

[Sabretooth78 808]

3 minutes ago, LexusInfernus said:

 Thats what the bureaucracy is for, to combat needless waste (yeah that may come as a shock to people). 

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." - Author Unknown (?)

[LexusInfernus 908]

1 hour ago, Sabretooth78 said:

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." - Author Unknown (?)

Hehehe yeah I know the joke. 

But basically, every time the government comes up with some new rule or law, it needs some type of institution to check and make sure that rule or law is implemented correctly by the responsible authorities and if they aren't secretly doing something completely different. Its why they want receipts and forms of everything, its a way to make sure that the money the authorities get to implement some type of policy is actually spend on implementing that policy instead of hookers and blow. 

A strong stable and professional bureaucracy is key to any modern state's effective continued operation. And while people may complain whenever they have to deal with an unwieldy bureaucracy, its important to remember that basically all those 'silly' procedures exist to combat some form of fraud.

That said, I agree that sometimes a bureaucracy has to implement some silly procedure simply because their political masters are paranoid about some non existent problem. Voter ID fraud and mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients for example, are a waste of everyone's time and money. Incidentally, those procedures were all set up by people who run with the 'small and fiscally responsible government' campaign promises.    

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

3 hours ago, MilitantRadical said:

Is that a serious question or do you not see the connection and do I have to explain it?

Sorry, I left the out.  On the other hand, there are lots of walled cities in the world.  For The Donald to attempt to build the Great Wall of Mexico is about as likely that Hadrian's wall kept the Pictish tribes out of the south.

I just can't image this clueless creature as POTUS.

[AkemiAzula 280]

When playing SC I acted like a businessman and my cities turned a profit.

Is a nation not similar to a city?

And many an underused transit station was removed for the greater benefit, just as IRL.

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

12 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Well this is a little more complicated than 'the government shouldn't waste money'. Obviously, it shouldn't, everyone can agree on that. But how do you define waste? When is money wasted? The problem with the government is that its not the same as a private business that operates on profit. For a business its very easy to define waste, everything that costs more . 

It's always more complicated but it's not like we can just write out entire essays to each other. Well we could, but you know what I mean.

You judge waste by the results. For example if you spend billions of dollars trying to bring peace and stability to a country (Iraq) and after 10 years it's worse and the people hate you more than before you even came, then you've wasted money. If you spend millions of dollars on a website (the Obamacare website) and it is a complete disaster at launch, are forced to pay millions more to repair it when you could have built it better and cheaper, then you have wasted money.

Money is wasted when the result doesn't meet the expectation of public good. I agree that it is more nebulous than a business. Some investments are indeed without reward like your example of the wheelchair ramp, but other things like education for example, you expect to get something back. You expect that education to give people the ability to rise, to help them get jobs so that they're labor and creativity can fuel your economy. If the amount of money you spend doesn't match the projected result then money is being wasted. And sure, it isn't always about how much you spend but how you spend. Government agencies and individuals within them aren't immune to greed either.

12 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Lets drop that station from the bus routes. And suddenly public transit is a lot harder to access for a bunch of people, restricting their mobility and their access to the wider world. And imagine how people would react if the government suddenly started behaving like this, cutting services and rules deemed too expensive left and right, affecting the lives of a lot of people in a very direct and negative manner. People may accept this type of behavior from businesses, but from their own government?

Your example is binary. Not all cuts have to be made in such an on/off way. Good cuts come with restructuring and reforms to provide the needed service. It's got to be surgical. It's not something you go at with a hacksaw or an axe.

12 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

So what some people call waste is actually the government looking out for its citizens. Yes it costs money, and from a business accounting point of view, that money is spend inefficiently. But the point of those programs and those rules that introduce 'inefficiency' or 'waste' is usually to protect or help people and help level the playing field.

Just because a government program or agency has good intentions doesn't mean it's doing good (well). NSA Prism program, you know, just looking out for our citizens! Just because a government is spending money on a problem doesn't mean that problem is being solved. You're assuming that government is inherently benevolent and would never be self serving, or that it is just infallible, that it's impossible for it to make mistakes and to spend too much money on the wrong things in the pursuit of the "public good".

12 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Anyways, if you are still worried that despite the governments need to spend money less 'efficiently' it still wastes money on things it shouldn't have to waste money on, keep in mind that the government does constantly evaluate its own programs. Thats what the bureaucracy is for, to combat needless waste (yeah that may come as a shock to people). 

Do they grade their own homework too? A+ right?

Yes, the ideal, perfectly functioning, well oiled, finely tuned bureaucracy would keep itself in check, but no government, left or right wing, is that incorruptible.

[LexusInfernus 908]

7 hours ago, MilitantRadical said:

It's always more complicated but it's not like we can just write out entire essays to each other. Well we could, but you know what I mean.

You judge waste by the results. For example if you spend billions of dollars trying to bring peace and stability to a country (Iraq) and after 10 years it's worse and the people hate you more than before you even came, then you've wasted money. If you spend millions of dollars on a website (the Obamacare website) and it is a complete disaster at launch, are forced to pay millions more to repair it when you could have built it better and cheaper, then you have wasted money.

Sure, but you can only judge it to be a waste AFTER you already spend the money. At that point, the money is gone and we can all agree that it has to be done better in the future. And as a politician, you can promise to do better in the future, but that isn't something you can guarantee. And Obama has tried to do better in some respects. You mentioned Iraq, that was a waste of money and lives, which is why Obama pulled out, and which is why he is now so hesitant to interfere in Syria again. He has remembered the lessons of Iraq, he has remembered what an utter waste that was and through his promise to do better, he isn't sending the army into another mess. Because he judges that interfering in Syria would cause a similar mess and therefor end up a waste. Something his 'fiscally responsible' opponents seem to have forgotten, given their 'lets blow sh** up' campaign promises. They are essentially all vowing to ignore the lessons of Iraq, ignore the fact that it was a waste, and basically do worse. 

As for his website, well I doubt anyone went into that project with the idea 'lets build a website as incompetently as possible and spend millions of dollars on a product that doesn't work!' And in the governments defense, yeah that was a show of incompetence, but honestly the private sector sucks at building websites as well. Just look at the SimCity launch disaster. Or when Valve started Steam. Or when Diablo 3 launched. Or the GTA V online launch problems. Plenty of examples to be found in an industry that produces software. 

7 hours ago, MilitantRadical said:

Money is wasted when the result doesn't meet the expectation of public good. I agree that it is more nebulous than a business. Some investments are indeed without reward like your example of the wheelchair ramp, but other things like education for example, you expect to get something back. You expect that education to give people the ability to rise, to help them get jobs so that they're labor and creativity can fuel your economy. If the amount of money you spend doesn't match the projected result then money is being wasted. And sure, it isn't always about how much you spend but how you spend. Government agencies and individuals within them aren't immune to greed either.

Well that is a very economist view on education. Sure, it should be part of the view, but I think a huge component of education can't be expressed in terms of how much an educated workforce adds to the economy and at what point you have the 'optimally educated workforce to money spend on education ratio'. Education has economic benefits, but I think the real issue there is one of morality. Education has an uplifting function. It makes people better versions of themselves by giving them better intellectual tools to interact with their surroundings. The value of such a thing cannot be counted in money or economic growth. In that sense, you can't spend to much money on education ever. But I get your point, if you spend money you do expect to see some result, and I agree with that. 

7 hours ago, MilitantRadical said:

Your example is binary. Not all cuts have to be made in such an on/off way. Good cuts come with restructuring and reforms to provide the needed service. It's got to be surgical. It's not something you go at with a hacksaw or an axe.

I agree. But there are plenty of feedback loops build into the policy process. A good government checks to see if the programs they are trying to implement have the desired effect, and if possible those programs get adjusted. 

7 hours ago, MilitantRadical said:

Just because a government program or agency has good intentions doesn't mean it's doing good (well). NSA Prism program, you know, just looking out for our citizens! Just because a government is spending money on a problem doesn't mean that problem is being solved. You're assuming that government is inherently benevolent and would never be self serving, or that it is just infallible, that it's impossible for it to make mistakes and to spend too much money on the wrong things in the pursuit of the "public good".

No, I don't assume that the government is inherently benevolent. I'm saying that the government ideally is inherently benevolent. And I know that the ideal state of government can be achieved and maintained through active citizen participation in the political process, through such simple things as voting and protesting in case a government does something exceptionally bad. A democratic government can only do bad things if the voters don't care enough to adres these issues during elections. 

7 hours ago, MilitantRadical said:

Do they grade their own homework too? A+ right?

Yes, the ideal, perfectly functioning, well oiled, finely tuned bureaucracy would keep itself in check, but no government, left or right wing, is that incorruptible.

Oh hardly. The government isn't one large single entity, like some kind of hive mind. If you have one department checking the work of the other department, you can be sure that they will be critical of the others work, even if it was only because they are rival parties fighting for political favor from their masters. And when checking the work of their masters, you can again trust them to be critical because bureaucracies are filled with experts of their respective fields, often people with much more actual experience, who view their chosen masters as upstarts who will be gone after the next election. Hence the bureaucracy's tendency to curb political plans designed by their masters. 

And no, you need to work pretty hard at it to create a bureaucracy that is corrupt. It usually happens under authoritarian systems because they run on fear and because authoritarians have the tendency to only promote people based on how well they can lick their masters backside and not their actual competence. Hence an authoritarian bureaucracy is usually filled with incompetent idiots at the higher levels of the bureaucracy. 

All you need is a professional bureaucracy which is staffed by people chosen on their relative merits and not their political leanings or ability to suck up to those in power. It won't perhaps be perfect, but corruption will be limited and rare, not to mention punished when found. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

As far as government waste of resources is concerned, it is a problem with a lot of hard core precedent.  Scratch almost any government department and suggest an improvement to save expense and the answer you usually get is "No way.  We've always done it this way, and we are not going to change."

There are some interesting standards in the ISO book called the 9000 Series for Quality Assurance.  I worked on them as an editor for a while, and they have been published.  Many companies I've talked to use them.  The big issue in these standards is the statement "Quality is conformance to requirements".  If you do what the specification says, and only that, you have a quality result.  Of course the problem is getting the specification right in the first place.

Let's take Mr. Lincoln, for example.  He stated that 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish ...".  If this is the statement of requirements for the U.S. government, then you have no quality in the government now.  The present plutocratic oligarchy does not resemble Mr. Lincoln's specification at all.

Of course, this leads to much waste caused by, among other things, the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.  A horrible example occurred recently when the FAA forbade overflights of U.S. territory by private pilots on the excuse that U.S. Airspace is a defense zone and that pilots flying from, say Windsor, Ontario to Saint John, New Brunswick would have to take a round about route through all Canadian airspace and not use the great circle route that passes over part of the U.S.  This cost a lot in extra time and fuel.  It would seem that nobody ever told the FAA about NORAD among other things.  This was rescinded after a month of screaming by various pilot's associations and other interested parties, but it should never have happened.  Fortunately, Canada is not in the tit for tat business or we could have slammed the door on U.S. overflights of Canadian airspace.  Since this was issued in a NOTAM (notices to airmen), it passed through several hands, all of them unaware of the implications.  I truly hope some heads rolled downhill.
 

[Sabretooth78 808]

Canada for President 2016

 

[GreekMan 246]

yaayyy! bush is out!!!! i didnt like him one bit. wasn't very likable 

[LexusInfernus 908]

Great, the last somewhat sensible Republican candidate quit. Now all thats left are idiots, clowns and madmen. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, I guess that leaves it up the electoral college to sort out the mess, eh?

[krbe 193]

Just learnt something new: In 2001 the 1979 Export Administration Act expired; Pres Bush declared a national emergency(!) as the unhindered access to American markets by foreign vendors constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat similar to the one posed by the situation in Ukraine, North Korea or Syria. Is there any serious discussion about such issues during an election campaign?

[Larks2242 251]

On 2/21/2016 at 1:44 AM, GreekMan said:

yaayyy! bush is out!!!! i didnt like him one bit. wasn't very likable 

#NoBush2016 is done, Now for #NoClinton2016!

20 out of the last 28 years have had a Bush or Clinton at the helm.

[Sabretooth78 808]

14 hours ago, krbe said:

Just learnt something new: In 2001 the 1979 Export Administration Act expired; Pres Bush declared a national emergency(!) as the unhindered access to American markets by foreign vendors constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat similar to the one posed by the situation in Ukraine, North Korea or Syria. Is there any serious discussion about such issues during an election campaign?

Guffaw?

Honestly, I've never paid too much attention to presidential campaigns (at least from the televised angle) and I've "only" been old enough to vote in them going back to 2000 but I'm inclined to say no.  They seem to tend to revolve around shallower (not to say always unimportant) topics that tend to get people riled up.  Talking about export tariffs and such would probably be as interesting to most of us as watching CSPAN - something I admit I wouldn't watch either (granted as I've alluded that isn't saying much).

13 hours ago, Larks2242 said:

#NoBush2016 is done, Now for #NoClinton2016!

20 out of the last 28 years have had a Bush or Clinton at the helm.

I doubt I'll vote for him but I'm pulling for Bernie for some reason I don't fully understand.  I think it's similar to that feeling some people describe when they talk about a restrained urge to just swerve their car into oncoming traffic - completely irrational yet at the same time irresistable.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Be interesting if it came down to Bernie vs. Trump, eh?

I know the American people have finally gotten around to being pissed off with the antics in Washington, but going all radical may lead to some kind of dictatorship.  The Donald has only one management method "My way or the highway."  Does anyone really want this kind of personality in the Oval Office?

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

On 2/20/2016 at 8:11 AM, LexusInfernus said:

Sure, but you can only judge it to be a waste AFTER you already spend the money. At that point, the money is gone and we can all agree that it has to be done better in the future. And as a politician, you can promise to do better in the future, but that isn't something you can guarantee.

Well yeah. Of course you can only judge after the fact.

On 2/20/2016 at 8:11 AM, LexusInfernus said:

You mentioned Iraq, that was a waste of money and lives, which is why Obama pulled out, and which is why he is now so hesitant to interfere in Syria again. He has remembered the lessons of Iraq, he has remembered what an utter waste that was and through his promise to do better, he isn't sending the army into another mess. Because he judges that interfering in Syria would cause a similar mess and therefor end up a waste. Something his 'fiscally responsible' opponents seem to have forgotten, given their 'lets blow sh** up' campaign promises. They are essentially all vowing to ignore the lessons of Iraq, ignore the fact that it was a waste, and basically do worse.

Indeed many Republicans who preach fiscal responsibility also advocate for war and more funding of the military. That's how you tell the difference between a someone who is serious about fiscal responsibility and someone who is just paying it lip service.

On 2/20/2016 at 8:11 AM, LexusInfernus said:

As for his website, well I doubt anyone went into that project with the idea 'lets build a website as incompetently as possible and spend millions of dollars on a product that doesn't work!' And in the governments defense, yeah that was a show of incompetence, but honestly the private sector sucks at building websites as well. Just look at the SimCity launch disaster. Or when Valve started Steam. Or when Diablo 3 launched. Or the GTA V online launch problems. Plenty of examples to be found in an industry that produces software.

I never accused anyone of intentionally screwing it up. Games, websites, and applications are different ballparks. Games like SimCity, Diablo, GTA, and services like Steam are global platforms. They have to function for millions of people all round the world connecting at the same time and that takes a lot more bandwidth than logging on to a website. When Valve started Steam they were quite a small company. Heck, most game companies, even Rockstar, are small compared to the US government. However I agree that launching a service online can be very difficult and it could have happened anyway had they outsourced the website to a private company, but now we're getting hypothetical where anything could have happened.

On 2/20/2016 at 8:11 AM, LexusInfernus said:

Oh hardly. The government isn't one large single entity, like some kind of hive mind. If you have one department checking the work of the other department, you can be sure that they will be critical of the others work, even if it was only because they are rival parties fighting for political favor from their masters. And when checking the work of their masters, you can again trust them to be critical because bureaucracies are filled with experts of their respective fields, often people with much more actual experience, who view their chosen masters as upstarts who will be gone after the next election. Hence the bureaucracy's tendency to curb political plans designed by their masters. 

And no, you need to work pretty hard at it to create a bureaucracy that is corrupt. It usually happens under authoritarian systems because they run on fear and because authoritarians have the tendency to only promote people based on how well they can lick their masters backside and not their actual competence. Hence an authoritarian bureaucracy is usually filled with incompetent idiots at the higher levels of the bureaucracy. 

All you need is a professional bureaucracy which is staffed by people chosen on their relative merits and not their political leanings or ability to suck up to those in power. It won't perhaps be perfect, but corruption will be limited and rare, not to mention punished when found. 

Yeah but you're still describing an ideal system. It isn't that hard for a bureaucracy to become corrupt. I think we can both agree that there is plenty of corruption in the US government, in many governments. Plenty of political appointments are made on how well someone can "lick their master's backside" or kiss-ass. Of course if you have the perfect bureaucracy where everyone is being kept in check, where there is a balance of power, then there is no reason to complain about the "bureaucracy", but if the people who are supposed to be watchdogs are corrupted by external forces or just self-interest, then the bureaucracy just grows and sucks up resources that could otherwise be put to good use or saved.

[LexusInfernus 908]

Just now, MilitantRadical said:

Well yeah. Of course you can only judge after the fact.

Well then, if thats the case, then promising to be fiscally responsible is a bit of a false promise. You can't be sure that any policy you support is fiscally responsible until after you spend the money, and then the only way to achieve less government spending is simply doing what the government already does, evaluate policies and cut/improve the ones that are not optimally efficient. Or, as what most politicians actually do, use 'fiscal responsibility' as an excuse to cut programs they don't like for ideological reasons without people being able to call them out on it. 

Just now, MilitantRadical said:

Indeed many Republicans who preach fiscal responsibility also advocate for war and more funding of the military. That's how you tell the difference between a someone who is serious about fiscal responsibility and someone who is just paying it lip service.

Fair enough. 

Just now, MilitantRadical said:

I never accused anyone of intentionally screwing it up. Games, websites, and applications are different ballparks. Games like SimCity, Diablo, GTA, and services like Steam are global platforms. They have to function for millions of people all round the world connecting at the same time and that takes a lot more bandwidth than logging on to a website. When Valve started Steam they were quite a small company. Heck, most game companies, even Rockstar, are small compared to the US government. However I agree that launching a service online can be very difficult and it could have happened anyway had they outsourced the website to a private company, but now we're getting hypothetical where anything could have happened.

Eh, I know plenty of smaller websites run or created by big corporations that are terrible to work with. The many websites that are used by universities come to mind. 

And the ObamaCare website also required millions of people to be able to login at the same time. Even if the website itself uses less bandwith, I think the fact that so many people tried to login at once was what killed it. Hell, you can take down almost any website if just enough people try to access it at the same time. Its basically what a DDoS attack simulates right? 

Just now, MilitantRadical said:

Yeah but you're still describing an ideal system. It isn't that hard for a bureaucracy to become corrupt. I think we can both agree that there is plenty of corruption in the US government, in many governments. Plenty of political appointments are made on how well someone can "lick their master's backside" or kiss-ass. Of course if you have the perfect bureaucracy where everyone is being kept in check, where there is a balance of power, then there is no reason to complain about the "bureaucracy", but if the people who are supposed to be watchdogs are corrupted by external forces or just self-interest, then the bureaucracy just grows and sucks up resources that could otherwise be put to good use or saved.

Corruption in the US is almost a non issue. Sure, sometimes it happens, but most of the time, the system works as intended. 

[krbe 193]

7 hours ago, Sabretooth78 said:

They seem to tend to revolve around shallower (not to say always unimportant) topics that tend to get people riled up.  Talking about export tariffs and such would probably be as interesting to most of us as watching CSPAN - something I admit I wouldn't watch either (granted as I've alluded that isn't saying much).

I don't think I was clear enough -- what I react to here is that Congress decided they'd let a piece of legislation expire, which of course is the legislature's prerogative.

But then Pres Clinton (sorry about the mix-up, was reading a lot of stupid notices at the time) decided that the mere fact that things may be exported from the US is an 'extraordinary and unusual threat'. It basically keeps a general system of export licences (which the Congress apparently didn't want).

The question is more whether there are any discussions as to the powers of the president -- if the situation where something might be exported without a licence is an extraordinary and unusual threat it's difficult to see which situations are not. For example, the fact that foreigners may access US servers might be an extraordinary and unusual threat which the president promptly must regulate without any checks and balances.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Starting to wander a little far afield, are we not?  Can we return to the candidates remembering the derivation of the word from the Latin "candidus" meaning pure/unstained.  Are any of them really candid?  I am afraid they all will say anything if it gets them applause, and will change their spots quicker than a chameleon.  Is there any wheat in all this chaff?

[MilitantRadical 2,844]

2 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Well then, if thats the case, then promising to be fiscally responsible is a bit of a false promise. You can't be sure that any policy you support is fiscally responsible until after you spend the money, and then the only way to achieve less government spending is simply doing what the government already does, evaluate policies and cut/improve the ones that are not optimally efficient. Or, as what most politicians actually do, use 'fiscal responsibility' as an excuse to cut programs they don't like for ideological reasons without people being able to call them out on it.

Huh? You've turned things inside out here. You can't be 100% sure a policy you support is fiscally responsible, but that isn't an excuse to just spend, spend, spend and wait until something goes wrong. Just because there are uncertainties doesn't mean something is a false promise. A government can fail at being fiscally responsible just like they can fail at any number of things. Fiscal responsibility ≠ spending no money. It isn't the promise of spending no money, it is the promise of spending better and spending less.

You don't go and do surgery on a perfectly healthy person. You don't give medicine to someone who isn't sick. 'Cutting' as a measure of fiscal responsibility is a medicine, it is a surgery. Obviously you don't suggest doing it until something is wrong. But you do try to give advice and create policies with the goal of mitigating disaster in mind

It requires that something be wrong first, yes. You can't have a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Of course the doctor will tell you don't smoke or you'll get cancer and the fiscally responsible person will say "don't overspend or you'll go broke", but once it has been done, once the patient is sick, then you have to go in there and operate. Yes, if you take out the vital organs they will die, the body has to maintain its functions, but you have to take out the cause of the disease.

The policies and programs people are suggesting to 'cut' don't have unknown results. It's already quantifiable. Yes if you want to achieve less spending you have to evaluate the policies you have and cut/improve them if they're not efficient. That is the goal (ideal) of fiscal responsibility.

4 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Eh, I know plenty of smaller websites run or created by big corporations that are terrible to work with. The many websites that are used by universities come to mind. 

And the ObamaCare website also required millions of people to be able to login at the same time. Even if the website itself uses less bandwith, I think the fact that so many people tried to login at once was what killed it. Hell, you can take down almost any website if just enough people try to access it at the same time. Its basically what a DDoS attack simulates right? 

It's all hypothetical yes. Done any number of other ways it could have resulted in worse or better outcomes, we don't know. Point is, you asked how to measure waste, maybe the ObamaCare website wasn't the best example, but what happened could be considered waste.

4 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Corruption in the US is almost a non issue. Sure, sometimes it happens, but most of the time, the system works as intended. 

Right...

1 hour ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Starting to wander a little far afield, are we not?  Can we return to the candidates remembering the derivation of the word from the Latin "candidus" meaning pure/unstained.  Are any of them really candid?  I am afraid they all will say anything if it gets them applause, and will change their spots quicker than a chameleon.  Is there any wheat in all this chaff?

Not helping. Candid does come from "candidus", but "candidus" doesn't specifically mean pure or unstained, it also means shining white, bright, clear (in every source I checked). It comes from the word candeo which means brilliant, glittering, illuminated, which is where I assume we get the word "candle" and "incandescent". "Candidatus" means white robed, dressed in white, and would refer to the politicians/senators who wore white robes. In this instance the "candid" word root does not refer to moral character, simply the color of their clothes. This is where we get the word candidate. Although I guess you could make the argument that they wore white to symbolize being pure.

Sanders seems candid, but a fool can be candid. Trump seems to be candid at times, but a douche can be candid too.

So back on topic.

Did anyone watch Hilary's Nevada winning speech? As a piece of grand political theater it was really good, and that's coming from someone who doesn't like her. And that dress contrasted with the people in blue behind her - what an image! Trump's SC victory speech, if you can even call it that, was nowhere near as good.

 

 

[GreekMan 246]

yes! i lthink a lot of Americans want a president with some balls....to take charge and to say something and not be afraid of the backlash...

dont be so surprised if trump wins it all. a lot of people are tried of the same old crap in Washington. many are tired of both parties and trump is there proving that there is someone that can do something about the crap that goes on in DC...

im really going to be happy when obama is gone. he is nothing but a whiny b word....he complains and always blames the republicans....its old

STFU obama!!! go away for good and take the clintons with you!!!

[Duke87 1,070]

11 hours ago, LexusInfernus said:

Corruption in the US is almost a non issue. Sure, sometimes it happens, but most of the time, the system works as intended. 

Bribery in the traditional sense is rare and highly frowned upon in the US, but we have plenty of classier forms of corruption all over the place. See: every industry lobbyist that gets laws written in a way that protects the interests of large companies instead of protecting the interests of the general public.

I suppose it's fair to say that the system usually works as intended, but I do at times question its intentions.