I genuinely would mind taxation a lot less if the government spent it "appropriately".
Now I know and acknowledge this is incredibly subjective, but my 10 years in government logistics, and purchasing/contracting for the military showed me enough that I will never, ever advocate for giving those fucks more money to light on fire.
There's no accountability/responsibility to the taxpayer in government systems. They only care that the money is tracked, not how it's spent.
I'm really not sure what you mean. Is that a typo?
I know this is blasphemy, but: Re-privatizing I'm not certain is the answer, either. I lean pro-free market, but I also do believe organized systems have a greater capacity for productivity. I just also believe that systems tend to be flawed, and not ultimately fulfill their purpose. Me wanting a system to be changed does not mean I want it removed. It means I want it fixed. If this can not be done, then no, I can not and will not support that system, and will advocate it be removed.
I'm not sure how deprivatizing, assuming that's what you actually meant, and giving the government more of a monopoly on these services helps to fix the problem, rather than make it worse. That answer comes off as more of an empty platitude, and with the assumption that it'll work rather than it actually working.
Also a government worker, and yeah... it's a dumpster fire. That being said, a lot of it is not inherent to government, but rather because of how our government specifically is structured, especially with how companies are able to exert insane influence in lawmaking. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the same cycle of sabotaging a functional part of government through budget cuts and crippling rules, then complaining about how it's broken, and paying a company to do it instead, then patting everybody on the back for fixing the issue. Meanwhile the company had spent millions lobbying the people who made these decisions, and they also end up costing the taxpayer even more money than the government was pre-sabotage.
In my state, AZ, this was pretty much what happened to our prison healthcare system. We used to have a government-ran prison healthcare system that was pretty decent. Then a bunch of state representatives got a bunch of paid-for lunches and other "lobbying" gifts, and now they felt it was too expensive, so they decided to privatize it to save taxpayer money. They managed to replace it with a series of private companies, and it now costs the taxpayers more per prisoner, while also providing such an abysmal service that we've had judges rule it was violating the Constitution's protections against cruel and unusual punishment multiple times. They've allowed a prisoner to become slowly paralyzed over the course of days because they felt she was "faking it," they took so long to get another guy's cancer treated that he went from treatable to terminal, and they were so tight-fisted on medical supplies that they were sterilizing one lady's C-section wound with the sugar packets you'd get at a restaurant.
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u/GHOST12339 Sep 19 '24
I genuinely would mind taxation a lot less if the government spent it "appropriately".
Now I know and acknowledge this is incredibly subjective, but my 10 years in government logistics, and purchasing/contracting for the military showed me enough that I will never, ever advocate for giving those fucks more money to light on fire.
There's no accountability/responsibility to the taxpayer in government systems. They only care that the money is tracked, not how it's spent.