Improper payments are certainly a more legible area of spending to address. “Waste, fraud, and abuse” are to a large extent by design, so those payments would not be “improper” per se, so addressing waste, fraud, and abuse goes to underlying policy decisions rather than poor execution of existing policy.
What if the entire scheme is an improper payment—government never designed to withhold our money and pay us back in goods and services? Reason being we could not save and provide these for ourselves. And of course this has moved from saving to the crass act of borrowing from our children (grandchildren at this point) to fund the whole thing. And as for charity, yes, we were made to provide this ourselves at local and familial levels. So there may be—in the end—only waste, fraud, and abuse by spending dollar 1 on such activities.
I'm not sure I follow. You can make the argument that government services are mismanaged or of poor quality. You can also argue that all government spending is wasteful (or fraudulent/abuse). But its clearly not the case that it provides zero goods or services--however, poor they are.
On government borrowing, I tend to attribute it to a "fiscal illusion" rather than the scheme you're describing--although chronic borrowing is itself a deplorable scheme. Citizens want higher spending but they don't to bear the burden of that spending through higher taxes. Borrowing $2 trillion a year, as we are currently doing, allows citizens to enjoy a $7 trillion government at a cost of just $5 trillion in taxes--a true "bargain" from their perspective. As long as voters keep getting this discount on spending they will keep demanding more.
My argument is that government is providing goods and services that it should not—and so the first priority is to stop that provisioning rather than trying to reform it. I have no doubt they can “buy and furnish” goods and services. Deficit spending is shown in the academic literature to crowd private spending and slow growth. It soon becomes a positive feedback loop where a slower and slower economy calls for more and more government involvement and deficit spending.
Improper payments are certainly a more legible area of spending to address. “Waste, fraud, and abuse” are to a large extent by design, so those payments would not be “improper” per se, so addressing waste, fraud, and abuse goes to underlying policy decisions rather than poor execution of existing policy.
What if the entire scheme is an improper payment—government never designed to withhold our money and pay us back in goods and services? Reason being we could not save and provide these for ourselves. And of course this has moved from saving to the crass act of borrowing from our children (grandchildren at this point) to fund the whole thing. And as for charity, yes, we were made to provide this ourselves at local and familial levels. So there may be—in the end—only waste, fraud, and abuse by spending dollar 1 on such activities.
I'm not sure I follow. You can make the argument that government services are mismanaged or of poor quality. You can also argue that all government spending is wasteful (or fraudulent/abuse). But its clearly not the case that it provides zero goods or services--however, poor they are.
On government borrowing, I tend to attribute it to a "fiscal illusion" rather than the scheme you're describing--although chronic borrowing is itself a deplorable scheme. Citizens want higher spending but they don't to bear the burden of that spending through higher taxes. Borrowing $2 trillion a year, as we are currently doing, allows citizens to enjoy a $7 trillion government at a cost of just $5 trillion in taxes--a true "bargain" from their perspective. As long as voters keep getting this discount on spending they will keep demanding more.
My argument is that government is providing goods and services that it should not—and so the first priority is to stop that provisioning rather than trying to reform it. I have no doubt they can “buy and furnish” goods and services. Deficit spending is shown in the academic literature to crowd private spending and slow growth. It soon becomes a positive feedback loop where a slower and slower economy calls for more and more government involvement and deficit spending.