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Comment by mymllnthaccount | Hacker News Reader

It's so funny to me that people treat businesses and government so differently.

Want results from your start up? Find someone to invest in it.

Want results from a government program? Well, we need to cut out all the wasteful spending.

We can treat them the same: hold someone accountable when their project over-spends and under-delivers. Maybe even fire them. It would happen naturally in successful companies, but (at least in the US) there's often no accountability in government for setting money on fire.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/08/07/why-its-import...

It alarms me that anyone treats them the same. Government programs are a last resort to correct market failures. They’re completely different entities with different goals and structures.

Cutting out wasteful spending may make your shitty schools cheaper, but it will not make them better.

But it may free up money for things that will make the schools better. Maybe, it is easy to see a problem, hard to fix it.

If nothing else a tax break (even if it is only a few cents per resident) is a better use than some programs

> a tax break (even if it is only a few cents per resident) is a better use than some programs

Very likely so, but which programs exactly? (Are you uniquely well-qualified to make that determination? If not, who is, and how can we know that?)

That is an excellent question. I carefully did not answer it because as soon as I do, no matter how wasteful and useless the program someone will come to defend it and I don't want to get in that fight.

Identifying wasteful spending is expensive and inaccurate. An auditor will produce some number of false negatives (remaining wasteful spending) and false positives (useful spending that was cut). Both of these cannot be zero, and the closer you would like to get to zero, the more expensive the audit will be.

Additionally, the relative value of false negatives and positives, in something with as high a force multiplier as education, seems like it will probably fall on the side of false negatives.

Yes, but if you cut out the wasteful spending, you can redirect that funding to not wasteful things. What spending is wasteful is another question entirely.

Of course businesses and government programs are different.

If a business is not doing well, it will be defeated and shut down. If a government program is not doing well, it usually asks for more money.

Well, take something like Google: considering its size and amount of money it invests into R&D, you'd expect it to generate more product and technological innovation than it has. It's a version of the resource curse: when you have so much money you don't know what to do with it all, there are no real competitive pressures and corporate politics and bureaucracy take over.

Schools need more funding, but less on faddish well-paid DEI officers who focus their time on axing algebra because it's too hard, and more on providing healthy school lunches, well ventilated and comfortable environments to work in, and a variety of classes tailored to students' individual needs.

You're about to see a bunch more interest in cutting wasteful spending at startups. The macro environment in the last 10 years basically let people (both startups and government) get a lot of money for free. That's no longer true, and cost-cutting is important now.

> It's so funny to me that people treat businesses and government so differently.

As we should. Businesses are rewarded for efficiency. Government is judged on effectiveness. It is a huge mistake to conflate the two and judge them on the same metrics.

business: when it doesn't get results, budget gets cut

government: when it doesn't get results, budget gets increased

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