That's because we don't really have a left, not since Ronald Reagan. Clinton was more conservative than Nixon, and Obama was more conservative than Clinton.
Don't cry---run for office and do as great a job as Mamdani is doing, or find a Georgist who can and support them. Its pretty clear that people are open to giving alternatives a chance to show they can do better.
But. Mamdani just had a good PR campaign. The bar majority of the "good" work he has done was actually some by someone else, the state, former administration.
> But. Mamdani just had a good PR campaign. The bar majority of the "good" work he has done was actually some by someone else, the state, former administration.
PR and communications is a necessary component to demonstrate the value being delivered to your constituents, but the work must still be done. Mamdani is using his position and tenure to prove that Democratic Socialism can and does work, in one of the largest cities in the world, for other potential candidates, and for the voters who might support them. He froze the rent for over 2 million renters, and has recovered in ~$130M in wage theft for delivery workers from DoorDash alone. He's implemented universal childcare for 2-year-olds. He has established enforcement against deceptive and abusive landlord practices, hidden junk fees and misleading charges, and illegal auto-renewals and subscriptions.
"Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast." This will be the case study for every mayoral election over the next decade, and who to vote for: putting promise into practice.
(as of this comment, Mamdani polls at ~69% for favorability)
Agreed. There are multiple senses for "simple" and on of those senses is "small". It is actually a very useful sense too, as Solomonov/Levin/Kolmogorov/Chaitin-style inductive reasoning has shown.
And it is important not to just make snappy quips by equivocating.
Cyberphrenology. In any two random graphs, you'll find an isomorphic graph which is can be up to log of the size of the graphs.
And if the LLM has been trained up to the limit of what data it can hold, it is going to be random. Proof below if it isn't obvious.
The entire effort of all people who are trying to understand how LLMs work, how they represent their data, its all bound to fail.
Proof: a LLM is a very good approximation of the Solomonov/Levin/Kolmogorov universal probability function on tokens. As such, it will be random--pure white noise--because if you found any patterns in there, you could exploit the regularity and come up with a smaller set of weights for the same LLM.
There are no patterns there to be found. They have all been factored out by training the neural net until it couldn't learn any more.
Distillation is alive and well... Earlier work on model printing also found that it's pretty easy to find smaller sets of parameters which can replicate the behavior of the entire network with pretty good fidelity.
Large parameter counts give space to explore, and give routes out of what would be local minima in a lower dimensional space.
In other words, there's no guarantee that any given trained model is a minimal representation of its training set.
I'm not claiming any arbitrary set of weights is a minimal representation. But typically, if people could achieve the same quality of results with a smaller set of weights, or weights which have been quantized to lower bit representations, etc, they would have published the smaller one instead.
You kind of are claiming they're minimal, though. Because if they're not, your statement that "if you found any patterns in there, you could exploit the regularity..." implies nothing. Yeah, the patterns are there, and people are exploiting them.
Your socioeconomic argument just doesn't hold either. People don't delay releasing models until they've minimized it to the theoretical limit. They ship it when it's good enough for whatever job they're making it for.
No kidding. Clearly there's some redundancy, or however you want to frame it, in real-world released models. That still means your argument for why they can never be interpretable is based an incorrect premise.
If the weights arn't compressed, then a smaller set of weights would perform as well. Sure, you can always induce as much symmetry and patterns as you want by bloating the data set, but that hardly gives us insight into how a set of weights which is "as full as it can be" of information.
The point of TFA is that there are regularities you can exploit in the actually existing weights of machine learning systems, not in some hypothetically maximally efficient weights. The maximally efficient weights would indeed have no structure, but that’s not what anyone is working with.
You are not wrong. But this has by no means proven its up to the standard of being publishable in a machine learning journal. Its on arXiv.org, which, lets face it, at the end of the day is a vanity press.
Calling the arxiv a vanity press shows you aren't a researcher. In math and physics all the best stuff is on the arxiv and the general level is well above the level of most journals. Journals mainly serve as accreditation and many are basically mediocre - the review process resta more value than it adds overall.
What is your definition of a vanity press? Mine is that it will publish anything from anybody.
Sure, there's lots of good stuff on there. But there's lots which is not good. Publishing there is not doing science. Science requires peer review.
Its a wonderful resource, but when overworked journalists (or worse, AI) just picks up a paper from there and writes a breathless article on how cool this new idea is, it is misleading to the general public.
Worse, it can get the general public (and from the comments here, even people working in the field) to forget what science is and why arXiv is not a scientific journal.
In math and theoretical physics the arxiv is the default place to publish and where one goes to find the best and most current work. Papers take a long time to review (years) particularly hard and good papers and publication in journals mainly serves the needs of bean counting dean's and quality control morons in the administration. Actual scientific communication is via the arxiv. Self selection mitigates most ills you describe someone who regularly posts crap on the arxiv will do themselves damage professionally and disappear.
The pace of things is moving along so rapidly right now, I’m not sure that waiting for peer reviews is always a wise move. Doubly so if there’s a paywall; why limit your article’s impact by placing it where practitioners’ agents might not be able to access it? The rapid progress right now is challenging for conventional academic processes.
If the value of the paper is difficult to independently verify, for example, if it depends on the credibility of the author, then the academic ritual can add something. If it’s a mathematical result, one that can be automatically verified, or a machine learning technique that anyone can try with Claude code reconstructing it for them, this sort of pre-print publishing model is advantageous.
Because...science? It's not science until it passes peer review.
I'm not advocating that everybody stops posting to arXiv, and I'm not saying you can't find good stuff there. I'm just saying, it's a vanity press, there is absolutely no guarantee of the paper's quality.
And being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee. If we've learned anything from the non-reproducibility crisis, it is that a paper's origin story is no guarantee.
We all know that science is about experiments and evidence whereas peer review is a social process.
Confusing science with peer review is very unscientific. Galileo’s work did not pass the dominant socio-scientific review process of his day and we all know how that turned out. Peer review serves a purpose but peer review is not science per se — unless, perhaps, your field is sociology, and you study the social processes of science practitioners, so that peer review outcomes are the evidence that you use to study those social processes.
Peer reviewers don't generally reproduce the work in the publications they are asked to review, at least not during the review process itself. Neither do journal editors.
If you want a real vanity press, check vixra and its origin story.
ArXiv does have moderators and endorsers in each area, although they are usually light-touch, weeding out literally unreadable submissions, ones that so obviously ignore formatting guidelines that it beggars belief they could comply with a typical journal's rules, and ones that are clearly submitted to the wrong area.
Having a stable document early (a pre-print) tends to widen the scrutiny of papers that may ultimately be published to a journal whose editor's expertise lies in a very different area from the submission; this can and does lead to author corrections being made before journal publication.
There are plenty of peer-reviewed papers which are hot garbage that have found their way into prestigious high-impact journals like Nature and Science (see <https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...> for examples, and note none of the top 10 are in areas covered by the arXiv).
> being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee
Everyone in academia knows this, including the vast majority of famous professors from prestigious universities, because of online repositories like <https://retractionwatch.com/retractions-by-nobel-prize-winne...> (and much more sadly because of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>, lower-profile versions of which academic paper-writers -- and dissertation writers -- tend to encounter as they chase the history of the problem before them or read late citations to works they are relying upon). This particular part of your set of claims is is not a real problem in academia or with the arXiv in particular.
Finally, what value does publication in a predatory journal bring? Do you believe that peer review and editing were actually even performed in the majority of MDPI's most predatory journals, for example? <https://www.predatoryjournals.org/news/list-of-all-mdpi-pred...> Some papers published in some of their pay-for-publication open access journals don't even get submitted to the arXiv; one might hope this is out of embarrassment by the authors, although the (low) bar set by the arXiv itself is certainly a factor.
The remedy for a reasonably argued but wrong academic paper isn't lack of publication, failed peer review, or editorial alteration, but rather reply papers. That's the academic dialogue.
Thanks for this reply, your points are well taken and it really got me to think about this stuff.
I suppose you could view arxiv as being a way to let more people do a peer review on the papers, i.e. as one component of a more open and transparent peer review process. As such, it is certainly a welcome alternative to what the snootier journal reviews do, which is to put off reading your paper for a year, and then spend about 50 seconds looking for a reason to say "no".
But I had a narrow point to make when I said that arxiv is a vanity press: just because something is on there doesn't guarantee that it is correct, or even useful. It is a vanity press in the sense that it will publish pretty much anything--modulo obscenity and porn laws, and apparently also some sanity checking by arxiv moderators--but so does a vanity press for print books.
To your point of predatory journals, power-broker reviewers and such, yes, I have done my fair share of suffering from them. It slows down good research and passes through bad research. The system is badly in need of reform, and arxiv gives a much needed alternative.
But really, the problem is (as one of my profs said) that science is totally run on volunteer, unpaid labor. Peer reviewers are very busy, get paid nothing, it is mostly a distraction. This leads them to look for other ways of being compensated--e.g. the can try to be a power broker, a feared authority, etc.
The real solution would be to actually pay peer reviewers and fund them so they can actually reproduce the results. Here's how it could work: when a researcher submits a grant proposal, they budget for enough money to fund the research and enough money to peer review and reproduce it. If the research isn't good enough to warrant an attempt to validate it, then it isn't worth doing in the first place.
Thanks. Nobody ever admits when they are wrong on the internet, so I'm trying to be the change I want to see.
W.R.T. the grand historical tradition, etc, note that the great majority of people who practiced that were, like Plato, independently wealthy and otherwise idle. Those who didn't need any money.
That's why we give Judges, teachers, and Professors tenure, a guaranteed job for life. People are more likely to be fair judges of other people's performance when they don't need the money.
So I guess if you want a non-conservative fix, it would be universal guaranteed minimum income. Something we already have, BTW, but you have to be over 62 to get it.
We've tried to open it up to more than just the 1%, but we didn't really go all the way. It is really unreasonable to expect somebody who isn't independently wealthy to do free work. It is a lot of work to properly review a paper, and reproducing the results is something you simply can't do at all if you are supposed to already be working 70 hours a week generating your own research.
Of course a researcher paying reviewers would be a disastrous idea. But if the grant-awarding body would hire 3rd parties to validate that their money was actually well spent, I think it would be a win/win.
Thanks for the references on where paying reviewers has already been tried. I'd like to see others reproduce their success :-)
No paper is guaranteed to be completely accurate and correct at the time of publication; the remedy for honest errors is follow-on papers by the original authors or others in the field putting their names to formalized counter-arguments.
This is how the academic dialogue works, and it dates back to early durable records in the ancient world -- about as far before Plato as Plato's Academy is before today's universities. Innovations like academic journals come from "merely" four centuries ago, and pre-publication evaluation by peers about three hundred years ago. Anonymized pre-publication review is more recent still, and publishing schedules (as well as the needs of the submitter to have the submitted work dealt with in good time) don't admit a dialogue over some subtle point a referee takes some issue with. Moreover, such a pre-publication dialogue is generally non-public, and often also filtered through an editor. It can get messy [1].
As I'm sure you've discovered in your own post-secondary education, academia is very conservative (in the sense of "retaining what mostly works, even in the face of mounting scaling problems", foremost among those being the ever-increasing volume of publishable works generated by researchers).
Direct compensation of referees by journals has a number of pitfalls ranging from the fiddly details of how to deal with income tax liability pay (and credits towards future publication fees, etc) incurs to whether it compromises the objectivity of pre-publication evaluation (which is frankly already not very good in highly specialized areas).
Payment of reviewers by paper submitters is imho an even worse idea -- how do you preserve the anonymity of referees (especially with respect to the submitters)? Do submitters or reviewers have exposure to their (probably different) tax authorities for these transactions? (I can think of at least four national tax agencies that would view the received pay as taxable income, and also potentially subject to value-added tax on professional services. One already sees this problem with conference honoraria.)
Another -- one that already exists in the real world -- might be for institutions and grant-funders to build in support for peer review of others' work by project members. To the extent that detailed pre-publication review benefits academia, and societies that fund academia, as a whole, maybe referees should be rewarded (or even obliged) to do paid reviewing duty. One might compare the requirement to do pro bono work imposed on many practising lawyers by their regulating authorities (especially interesting are jurisdictions in which a party losing a court contest to a party represented pro bono usually must pay into a fund that supports the overall scheme).
Personally I think it would be more useful to everyone to have a solid reply paper published in due course than a blocked initial publication. My ideal is that referees aim to help submitters not accidentally professionally embarrass themselves.
Then on your reproduction idée fixe, supporting the generation of papers which confirm reproduction is something that societies could certainly work on. Many incentives to write and submit papers calling out flaws in others' work already exist, and of course could be expanded. I don't think any of that should be done with masking of the participants. Additionally, reproduction of results is often less interesting than (sometimes much) later testing of published results in significantly different ways.
(Indeed, foundational papers from more than ninety years ago are often re-proven by modern-day experiments, both as a side effect of (or opportunity arising from) pursuing the primary research goal, and as a way of testing e.g. new metrology technology, new computational tools, mathematical advances, and so on. Also, some of those foundational papers simply could not be tested with great accuracy with tools existing at the time of publication. Their publication, however, tended to drive the development of such tools, and in modern days such foundational papers are found to be good only within certain limits that could not have been explored closer to the time of publication.)
What am I missing here? Seems like an AI detection program would be as useful as a program which could tell whether John Henry used a sledge hammer or a steam hammer to lay a section of track.
Or whether your CPA did your taxes using Excell or just a big piece of graph paper and counting on his fingers.
What we should be doing is making tools which can tell when an AI is hallucinating, or the output doesn't really solve the problem the user wants to solve.
There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method.
What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.
You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."
I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.
By the time Trump leaves office, the whole federal government will be completely trashed, up to and including the East Wing of the White House being torn down to a hole in the ground.
I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
> I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
^^^ 1000% this right here. Right there with ya (sadly)... Not at all the world we were promised as children. "Star Trek" vs "Mad Max"/"Terminator"? Humanity chose the latter. We ain't gonna survive long enough to escape this planet.
Citizens United ruined the great american experiment. if you have seen the chart of campaign financing since CU, you would understand. Politicians have zero need to represent citizens because they know unlimited funds are available for marketing to keep/earn your seat.
America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
And the primary reason for people voting like this is the ungodly sums of money spent on elections, combined with the media apparatus built up by the right.
I don't think any democracy could survive Fox News. Unfortunately the global right is colluding to export this concept across the globe...
If money won elections, then the outcome of every election could be predicted with accuracy based solely on the relative spending by or on behalf of each candidate.
In reality, that's not how it works. There are countless examples of candidates who outspent their opponents and lost.
Money gets you reach. It doesn't get you guaranteed results.
Besides, the voters don't get any of that money, nor do they even know most of the time who got more financial support. They'd be insulted by even the slightest suggestion that money is driving their vote.
I didn't say that money wins elections, but nice try.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives could affect more voters with the same amount of money, since spreading bullshit is much cheaper than proving it wrong. The right can flood the zone with a firehose of lies, and even if they literally admit these lies, their voters go along.
I...didn’t say you did say that? No need to be defensive.
But a reasonable interpretation of “the primary reason for people voting like this is the ungodly sums of money spent on elections” is that such a direct causal link exists.
If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
Then I must admit I'm unsure how to interpret your objections, since I understand you to be arguing against the position "The group spending the most money must always win elections". If you're not assuming that I'm taking this position, why bring it up?
> If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
As a thought experiment, assume we're playing gods and decide to simulate a bunch of universes almost exactly like ours, so we can reliably study how civilizations develop (free from the influence of random chance). Then we evaluate how many of these civilizations had periods of strong corruption, loss in quality of life, and all the other negatives we're experiencing this decade.
My argument is: you'd find a correlation between these periods, and the relative amounts of wealth invested into politics. Note this doesn't imply that bigger sums of money must lead to victory - especially if the thesis mentioned in my first reply is correct, which I very much assume it is.
I'm not sure. On the other hand, there're plenty of corruption and loss of quality of life where there's not much money in electioneering, or not even a democracy. Take Russia, for example, or any of a number of African or Central American countries.
I sympathize with your point, we should still blame the voters, but the 1% wouldn't be throwing billions of dollars into politics if they were seeing zero return on their money.
Citizen's United was decided in 2010. Hillary Clinton out-spent Trump by about $500 million in 2016 and lost.
The reality is that spending can keep a candidate from losing an election for dumb reasons (e.g. lack of name recognition), but it can't win an election by itself. There are plenty of examples of the bigger spender losing, both before and after Citizen's United.
// America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy. //
Well, that's the kicker. We actually did vote him in. TWICE. It would be great if we could blame some cabal or coup or something. It would get us off the hook.
But the sad fact is that Trump--after sending cop-killing goons to the capital to try to steel the last election--we voted him in by a margin of 53%.
I don't understand how US Republicans talk about fiscal conservation, yet allow rampant profligacy. They must have a different agenda than the one they speak of.
"Talk" and "Walk" aren't the same word although they rhyme. And they only refer to Democrats, who are the only ones with agency in government (Murc's Law).
When they engage in financial conservation it's cover for destroying programs they don't like. The fact that they are cheering on yet another incredibly stupid, expensive, and pointless war proves that they are not "fiscal conservatives."
New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral, the electorate will be angry they don't have cake (unless the taxes are applied disproportionally to the top income and wealth percentiles), and we'll be right back to irresponsible policy. I don't have much hope for the US, but at least the bond market are the adults in the room currently. Congrats to those who strip mined the country successfully.
I'm old enough to remember when people said that the debt Ronald Reagan racked up would never be repaid. Which means I also am old enough to remember Clinton turning record deficits into record surpluses.
I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds?
Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that.....
The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.
US throws off ~$5T in profits per year to shareholders. It can be paid back, you just have to go after it. It's a choice not to. Forward curves go up because we choose to not reduce the debt? All consumer borrowing costs go up accordingly (consumer debt and mortgages are priced off of US treasuries)? A crisis occurs and there isn't any borrowing capacity left to get to the other side? Sucks to suck, try to suck less in the future. Natural consequences are an important component of the learning process.
Can't mortgage the economic future of the US forever (which is what treasuries are, borrowing against future US taxpayer revenue), as the bond market is actively demonstrating. Something will give, even if that is "monetizing the debt" and a soft default, with US purchasing power rapidly declining (you thought everyone didn’t like inflation before? Hooboy just wait). Pick your crisis adventure, the message is this fiscal policy is unsustainable.
The system as it works is made to cause partisan balance to stay close to the competitive 50/50
That may make it seem like nothing every changes, and much wind is spent on it. Real change is often so deep and slow that it just isn't even news. That's because politicians don't usually lead, they follow
It really already did lose its reserve status, in a manner of speaking. There isn't ever going to be a gold standard again (even if there is, would the actual gold have the sort of real life uses it had when the gold standard was around? Not like people fill teeth with it anymore unless you are some sort of thug).
Gold is a useful element, for sure, but there's no where's near enough of it to serve as a reserve currency. E.G. the U.S. reserves are worth about $1.2 trillion (changes each day, of course). Compare that to a national economy which has a GDP of over $30 trillion.
All these old gold bugs just can't wrap their heads around what exponential growth really looks like. But we can grow our productive capacity far, far faster than we can grow the supply of gold.
The East Wing argument is such a weird hill to die on. Even Obama era staffers admitted it was embarrassing to welcome foreign dignitaries to a muddy patch of grass rather than a fit for purpose room.
It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House.
Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton.
Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
The major issue with the East Wing was how it was done, not that it was done ("it": renovations in general, possibly even tear down and full rebuild). Also the costs have been ballooning and the "no taxpayer funding" claim turned out to be a lie.
Really? Wasn't it supposed to be 100% funded by Trump's cronies, who of course were doing so completely out of the goodness of their hearts. Why did that shift to 'majority' private funding? Also, if the funding is so on the up and up, why has Trump refused to release a full audit?
How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different.
But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.
No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.
There's a long history of the reflecting pool having severe algae issues dating back to the early 2000s. Obama spent $30m on repairs that ultimately failed. Is your argument that the pool continuing to fail as it has done under successive governments is exclusively the fault of the admin that has far larger and far more serious points to criticism them on?
The argument is that massive fuckups are solely the responsibility of the party that initiated them when said party goes out of their way to avoid the established mechanisms for proposing, approving, and implementing those plans.
If there's a problem with a plan then there's a problem with the plan. If there's a problem with the implementation then there's a problem with the implementation.
But when you bypass that entire process and go roll out a bunch of changes and efforts that you claim will be flawless and dole out no-bid contracts that balloon past their estimates despite ending in complete or near complete failures then that's entirely on the leadership that kicked it off.
There is no transparency here and it's not even possible to point to specific things that went wrong because it's effectively all undocumented and intentionally done outside of the existing systems and rules. And it happens again and again with different projects.
Each time it's the leadership's fault because they chose to step outside the normal processes and accountability leaving us with no way to learn from mistakes made during the exercise beyond "the processes exist for a reason, stop ignoring them".
Don't forget the part where you then direct the DOJ to arrest and prosecute citizens inspecting the botched repair to THEIR POOL(as in the people's pool) so everyone in the admin can CYA and save face.
This started long before Trump. Ironically things quite stable under Clinton. 2nd term Bush not so great, 2nd term Obama not great, Trump post covid not great, Biden was terrible, Trump 2.0 terrible.
The only real solution is to enforce the actual debt ceiling, the begin lowering it a few hundred billion each year, destroying things we don't need. Require all new spending be funded by the 2.5x destruction of existing spending and departments.
I loathed the actions of DOGE but believe that "government efficiency" (yeah, lily oxymoronic) should be baked into everything the government does, most importantly, even the programs that one supports.
That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.
The Democrats have, in the past forty years, been the only party to have consistently been able to reduce the deficit, even creating a surplus by the end of Clinton's presidency.
They've also been the only party to have successfully reduced the cost of government and made it more efficient in the process. Clinton's bipartisan National Partnership for Reinventing Government was what DOGE claimed to be, as it sharply cut the number of federal government staff without affecting delivery. [0][1]
Obama and Biden were less effective than Clinton, but still drove the deficit down toward the end of their terms, and Obama in particular tried to implement a series of reforms to improve efficiency such as creating 18F which saved a bunch on government software contracts in the years it was active. The Republicans have not seriously done anything similar, and DOGE doesn't count because from the start it was clear it wasn't a serious attempt to reduce actual waste but an ideologically-motivated exercise run by unskilled and inexperienced people.
This isn't to say Democratic administrations have been all good or that the Democratic Party hasn't also loved its pork, but overall at least when in control of the presidency the party has tended to stabilise America's finances, improve tax revenue collection, make government more efficient, and reduce deficit spending far more than the Republicans have.
The Democrats retain at least some elements of their technocratic side, but the Republicans have gone all-in on populism and thrown theirs out.
The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does. For example, the overhead for Social Security is between 0.5% and 1%. I.E, less than the mutual funds in my 401k charge per yeah for "administrative fees."
When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff.
That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
Correct. It's also often forgotten how much the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) had done to make government more streamlined and efficient between 1993 and 1998. That took care of pretty much all the low-hanging fruit that those behind DOGE falsely believed was still there.
This isn't a refutation or even an argument. If something was obviously incorrect, you would think it would be trivial to prove wrong. But, evidently not.
The idea that the government is inherently inefficient is an idea that GOP just made up ~50 years ago to justify tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts which, by the way, got us into this debt mess. This all started with Reagan, who royally fucked our government fiscally.
The only people who have been able to control the deficit are, surprise surprise, democratic administrations. Just look at the numbers, ignore the propaganda. This stuff is cut-and-dry.
The Department of Defense has never received a clean opinion on a full financial audit. Since starting comprehensive yearly reviews in 2018, the Pentagon has failed eight consecutive enterprise-wide audits due to scale, missing records, and untrackable assets.
The only propaganda I see here is coming from those who are so out of touch of reality that they firmly believe there's a chunk of the uniparty that doesn't increase the deficit.
When things are monitored to such a degree that a startup I was at couldn't bring doughnuts to a meeting because NASA was gonna there and that could possibly be a bribe, I don't know about efficient, but there's a reason why DOGE couldn't really find any waste.
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