[Plantagenet]

I was hoping you'd step into this discussion. I have a hunch you've got some good insight that will come out, if you can let Obama go. I know you haven't yet, but you still made a good point.

Thanks. I like your comments as well. I've been out of the country for a bit so I haven't been commenting much but I'm back now.

It will be hard for me to let go of Obama but I'll try.

I wonder if you can just cut the inflow of money and see good results?

I agree with you that spending more money isn't directly correlated with success. But I'm not sure that cutting money will immediately improve things either. The problem, as I see it, is that certain kinds of cultures get set up with patterns that are hard to change. Right now some government workers are used to holding their internal meetings at posh hotels in Hawaii, and traveling to week-long overseas conferences on the taxpayers dime, and not being held responsible when they pollute rivers or fail to detect poison water in Flint, etc.

Just cutting the money will lead to grumping and low morale. I suspect it will be necessary to take drastic steps and also trim dead wood and fire bad workers to motivate the rest.;

How can we reform government so that it better watches out over itself? Should it be a pure appointment process, or should more people be elected? What happens if bodies within the government do point out excess now? How could it work so that excess is curbed, but not function? What about agencies that do the equivalent of research, where it can appear there is no real goal or purpose until experiment causes it to materialize, like DARPA? When do you say when under all the various circumstances? Can you stop wallowers beforehand, or do you have to let them engorge themselves for a bit, so that they stick out like ticks and can be plucked off?

Good points. Certainly the bad government workers who "stick out like ticks" should be plucked off and fired. The problem now is that they are NEVER fired. Even the morons who polluted the Animas River weren't fired. Its nutso.

Cheers!

[KaiserJeep]

Does this discussion have an actual purpose? Are you simply entertaining one another with nonsense, or are you serious?

If you are serious, you are talking about amending the US Constitution. This is the bare bones description of two ways to do so:

AMENDING THE U.S. CONSTITUTION:
Article V of the U.S. Constitution provides two paths for amending the Constitution:
Path 1:
o Step 1: Two-thirds of both houses of Congress pass a proposed constitutional
amendment. This sends the proposed amendment to the states for ratification.
o Step 2: Three-fourths of the states (38 states) ratify the proposed amendment,
either by their legislatures or special ratifying conventions.
Path 2:
o Step 1: Two-thirds of state legislatures (34 states) ask for Congress to call “a
convention for proposing amendments.”
o Step 2: States send delegates to this convention, where they can propose
amendments to the Constitution.
o Step 3: Three-fourths of the states (38 states) ratify an amendment approved by
the “convention for proposing amendments,” either by their legislatures or special
ratifying conventions.

Might I make a suggestion: As a first step to changing government, we need to dump the Federal legislators we have. Use Path #2 to establish term limits for Congress Critters and Senabores, and only when you have dumped all the "power and privilege" geeks and the "How much are you offering?" criminals, only then can you set about serious reforms.

If you are serious, and interested in the process, start by reading this:
http://www.ncsl.org/documents/summit/summit2013/online-resources/SenDavidLong.pdf

If you want the "real deal" by the man who's idea it was, read Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Number 85.

[vtsnowedin]

Just cutting the money will not work. It has been tried and that is how we have a 19 trillion dollar national debt.
Amending the constitution to set term limits and change Congressional pay setting is an idea I support but have little hope of ever seeing it accomplished.
Other civil service law and rules on the other hand should be much easier to change and is where I hold out the most hope for improvement.
We shall see if the Trump administration is up to the task. I won't bet the rent on it.

[KaiserJeep]

The problem with the US debt is deficit spending, and nothing else. Governments can easily spend more than revenues, and most do. Nobody has done so on the scale of the USA because we are "the" reserve currency of the world.

If you cannot live within your means, you will eventually go broke. Not only do we need to spend less, we need to pay that debt down to zero. If we did so, I believe prosperity would then exist.

I admit, that is probably a minority opinion.

[Plantagenet]

As a first step to changing government, we need to dump the Federal legislators we have.

Thats unlikely to occur. Even in "wave elections" the percentage of federal legislators defeated in elections is small---the same old dinosaurs in Congress are back every time. Heck, the Ds in the House just re-elected Nancy Pelosi as their leader, and she's been in Congress since like FDR.

Rather than fantasizing about unlikely things like amending the constitution or dumping current legislators, the best chance to reform government today comes from top-down changes ordered by the executive branch. For instance, Trump is considering cutting federal staffing numbers and perhaps even federal pay to make the government run more like a business, i.e. be more efficient. That sounds good.

Hard to know what is actually going to happen until Trump finally takes office, but at least Trump is aware that the government is inefficient and needs reform.

Cheers!


Donald Trump takes the oath of office in 3 days…..

[yellowcanoe]

The problem with the US debt is deficit spending, and nothing else. Governments can easily spend more than revenues, and most do. Nobody has done so on the scale of the USA because we are "the" reserve currency of the world.

If you cannot live within your means, you will eventually go broke. Not only do we need to spend less, we need to pay that debt down to zero. If we did so, I believe prosperity would then exist.

I admit, that is probably a minority opinion.

I agree that relatively few people see government deficit spending as a problem even if they understand the downside of taking on too much debt as individuals. Government debt has been viewed very differently than personal debt because it is typically measured as a percentage of GDP instead of in absolute terms. In a growing economy it is only necessary to reduce the annual deficit as a percentage of GDP to below the economic growth rate for the accumulated debt as a percentage of GDP to start dropping. Therefore, it is possible to run smaller deficits while reducing the debt as a percentage of GDP. Of course this is all predicated on having a healthy growth rate which really hasn't been the case since the financial crash in 2008. Since a return to robust economic growth in the developed countries of the world is not likely to happen, the easy way to deal with government debt is no longer available. The large deficits that many countries are running right now are really going to hurt in the future.

[Newfie]

I think there might be something to learn from the school reform debate.

Our inner city high schools are a mess. It's a multidimensional problem but it has some correlation to government bureauocracy. Focusing on that part you have strong school teachers unions and it becomes difficult to fire anyone no matter the cause. They become just so much dead wood and hang around spreading vibes like bad apples. Demoralizing the good workers. Same with mass transit agencies.

Reducing money didn't work, the good guys leave and then you have the dregs just waiting out retirement.

Magnate schools, special program public schools, work fine but they are only for the gifted and receive special funding. My daughters school was very competitive, like college. 13 applications for ever seat.

Charter schools run by private groups can do OK. But they are also selective. The public schools are left with a very difficult population and under funded.

I did see one guy who was able to turn an agency around. David Gunn. He was pretty special, very news savey. Had his henchmen run rough over the workers. But he also made a lot of very reasonable and very public promises to the riders. That actually helped morale, gave folks a sense of a mission. But he also put a LOT of personal effort and attention to detail into making things right again.

[KaiserJeep]

Newfie, you gave me my first laugh today, thank you very much.

mag·nate
/ˈmaɡˌnāt,ˈmaɡnət/
noun
a wealthy and influential person, especially in business.
"a media magnate"
synonyms: tycoon, mogul, captain of industry, baron, lord, king, magnifico;

Thus a "magnate school" would be a school for producing little clones of Donald Trump. The "magnet school" program is one where select above-average schools concentrate in one area of expertise such as Science, Arts and Music, Public Service, etc. Students interested in such careers are then attracted to that school, as a magnet attracts iron filings.

[Newfie]

Hey, as long as I'm around and provide humor I'll consider that a job well done.

I'm almost always working on an iPhone 6. You should see some of the "corrections" I get let alone my simple typos. Actually you can usually decipher a typo, close enough. The replacements? Lucky I'm not in jail.

[evilgenius]

Ok, yes, I was talking about government reform that required a Constitutional amendment to work, but that was only because I realized that the idea I proposed required it. We don't have to limit this thread to those kinds of proposals, I hope.

The other day I was talking to someone at work about this kind of thing. I told him outright that I was a bit liberal and I didn't like how inefficient local government was. He countered with how you would have to call him a bit conservative and he didn't like it either. Neither of us are registered with a particular political party. We are both registered as independents. I don't know if aligning with a party makes a difference. It's good to get it on the table, in case people think there might be hidden agendas at work or something.

I pointed out in our conversation how there are various places in the city where the same kinds of problems happen continually, several places on the roads. We drive, so our conversation was more about government and infrastructure. For examples I cited one where a left lane that must turn left runs parallel to a lane that goes straight for a distance. People, being people, are always trying to race down the left side as far and fast as they can and cut in ahead of as many people in the straight lane as possible. At another location people who want to go straight are getting stuck in a set of left turn lanes and trying to get over into the lane where they can go straight. This happens at every light change. The lights don't flow smoothly so as to clear traffic, and the signage that should let people know that if they are in the left lane they will have to turn left ahead is inadequate. I don't bring these up in order for the thread to solve them, but as examples of how government can have a blindness to things that go on for years. The conservative said that he thought they raise the level necessary for them to become involved up to that of somebody having to die before they will look into anything. I think, maybe, it is more like a rate of death because people do die at these places, one just last summer. They changed the light timing a little bit in response, and made it worse for everyday driving.

When pressed on issues the governments here tend to cite money as a reason why they can't do anything. They say that people won't pay for a solution. The funny thing is that there is never much talk about alternatives that might not cost as much as what they believe must be the solution. They don't seem to be very creative. With big highway projects it takes more than a decade of talking and wrangling to come up with official lists of alternatives. Those alternatives tend to be obvious. There is seldom a novel approach offered as an official public alternative. It's hard to get there. You have to get through many different picket fences, and those in power don't like to confront those things. Another case in point would be how long it took to get roundabouts into the state traffic infrastructure. People here debated over them as if their viability hadn't been proven in Europe for decades. They had to reinvent the wheel. By people I mean both whatever local government and citizens who had objections and were very vocal about it.

What I'm getting at is that there seems to be something wrong with our basic idea of government. It lacks, in a fundamental way, the element of husbandry. It's not always out there making certain that it is looking out for the people. It doesn't listen. It has no concept of the continuity of its purpose. It is very grounded in the election cycle, and the mechanisms those who are insulated from that cycle, civil servants, use to operate outside of it. It doesn't see anything in the community other than what either the normative narrative would compel it to accept from history, you see the scheduled repairs alright, or the loudest voices call for. It's not out there looking to see what it can do better or fix. It is not truly responsive to the people as they live their real lives.