Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
If you only take the raw number of employees across time then it's confounded by population growth and labor force participation. It's like not adjusting a monetary metric for inflation. So sure, the total headcount has only dropped slightly from the 90s, but if that's put into context then it's clear that the federal bureaucracy has been quite constrained as a percent of the overall labor force.
In terms of of whether using the term "budget" is correct here, you're slightly more correct but I'd say you're being pedantic. It should have been clear that I was talking about personnel budgets specifically, given the context of the sentence. Also, for the record "slashed" probably is less true than "constrained, especially in regards to inflation", but I digress.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
Oh goodness.
Yes, Trump's grand move is to empower Desantis, the man who tried to kill the king less than a year ago, with whom there's still bad blood privately, and who has only begrudgingly fallen into line. To replace Rubio... a senator who hasn't really made an anti-Trump stink since 2016.
Why not do this against Murkowski instead, a senator who voted to impeach Trump?
Alternatively, why not do this to a House seat, given that chamber is likely to be far closer.
And Rubio gets fired as SecState inside 2 years, probably.
Unironically plausible, given Trump is so utterly capricious with his nominees. Rubio could be setting himself up to get the same fate that befell Jeff Sessions.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
Unions could be a source of savings, but only like 1/3rd of federal employees are in unions, and part of what makes federal employment bearable is the benefits and job security that such unions have been able provide. If Elon thinks he can get a workforce that has private sector benefits + job security, but with the paylevel of the federal government, I have a bridge to sell him. The notion that there exists huge swathes of the government where employees sit around doing nothing simply because "they can't be fired" is illusory.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
No. He was willing to stay in dumb wars far longer than we should have (e.g. his endless delays on withdrawing from Afghanistan) because actually exiting would lock in the losses that had been practically inevitable for a long time, which "would look weak". One could say that being in the Middle East at all is a serious misallocation of American resources.
I don't deny the logic of not being seen as a pushover on the international stage, but Trump's fear of "looking weak" was far more driven by Fox News pundits than by actual geopolitical perceptions.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
He delayed endlessly, and if he were re-elected there was a good chance he would have delayed even longer past the date he had previously set.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
but I can't stop laughing at putting two executives in charge of the new department in charge of reducing redundancy.
This is a great, hilarious point actually!
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10d ago
I highly doubt Musk will be able to make much progress. He might be able to bag a few high profile wins in a few places at best, but he's not going to get anywhere near the $2 trillion mark he set for himself. There's not nearly that much fat to be trimmed before he'd inadvertently start chopping off bones that people care about and would complain about loudly, and Trump isn't going to let Musk cause too many bad Fox news cycles before he snaps and it becomes a battle of the egos.
If there's anywhere to improve government that could simultaneously reduce costs and improve outcomes, it would be paring back the army of contractors the government has leveraged as a bandaid when people want to get something done, but R's slashed budgets so much that nobody in the government has the competency to do them. But undoing that would mean hiring more government employees and probably paying them more as well, which strongly goes against R vibes and is thus unlikely to be considered.
It's simple: People falsely attribute policies they personally prefer to politicians they like the vibes of. This denial of reality isn't infinite, but it is very strong. Right-leaning isolationists tired of "forever wars" thus falsely think Trump shares their view, or is even an outright pacifist. They use ridiculously overfit evidence like "no new wars happened under Trump", and aggressively ignore everything else like Trump nearly sparking a war with Iran, entangling us further in Israel, not withdrawing from Afghanistan, sending weapons to Ukraine, wafflemaxxing on China, employing hawks like Bolton or Pompeo, etc.
Trump doesn't like war in and of itself, but he hates being seen as "weak" far, far, FAR more. Avoiding situations that "make us look weak" is the amorphous basis of his entire foreign policy.
Although I must say it's entertaining to watch people try to come up with ever more elaborate justifications to resolve their cognitive dissonance. The "4D chess" hypotheses are always worth a laugh.
Trump has a lot of flexibility given his nothingburger answers so far.
The worst-case scenario (for someone like me, who is pro-Ukraine) is that Trump caves to the Tucker Carlson wing and "forces" the two sides to negotiate by unilaterally demanding Ukraine surrender to Russian terms or face a complete cutoff of US support, or even levying sanctions against them. Trump has the space to simply declare Ukraine to be "Biden's mess", claim it was always rightful Russian lebensraum, that surrendering it will bring peace in our time, and throw them to the wolves. There might be some token concessions ("Russia must agree to play nice") that Trump would claim as "balancing both sides", and largely ignore the situation as it deteriorates like what happened with North Korea during his first term.
But Trump's not naturally anywhere near as pacifist as his supporters make him out to be. He could also decide to just muddle along like he did with Afghanistan. He might make a few incendiary tweets, claim the Europeans need to do more, but he could change his mind back to supporting them when he gets a call from Lindsey Graham or some Polish politician.
The path he takes is very uncertain as Trump has always been a waffle, and it may literally come down to whoever talks to him last getting their way.
Conditional on Trump forcing a truce, my modal scenario is actually that in a year's time a stronger Ukraine steamrolls a weaker Russia
This would be a very unusual scenario. The war so far has been completely dominated by hard positional fighting akin to WW1. Unless there's some new innovation that's on par with the tank, I doubt either side would steamroll the other without some massive force-generation problems making one side particularly brittle.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
17d ago
I definitely think it'll experience something of a modest second-wind, but that it won't be nearly as prominent as during peak woke of the 2017-2020 era. Thermostatic equilibrium is one of the most enduring phenomena in politics that's survived even the extremely polarized environment of the US. Trump will try to crack down on immigration in a hamfisted way, somebody will take a picture of a migrant child in a cage or dead in the desert or whatever, and public opinion will swing back towards being somewhat pro-immigration.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
17d ago
For what it's worth, I'll cop to the fact that I would have lost the bet. Selzer had a pretty stellar record before, but this was a massive, high-profile mistake that she'll likely never recover from, at least not fully.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
17d ago
Fantastic set of posts, reported for AAQC.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
18d ago
I was talking about polls here, not modelers like Nate Silver. Polls don't estimate win chances, they estimate win margins. They had a lot of egg on their face for stuff like Wisconsin in 2016.. Polls underestimated his support in most swing states in both 2016 and 2020.
I agree that Nate Silver didn't get it "wrong" in 2016 as popularly perceived, as they're doing something different.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
19d ago
Polls are always off to some degree, and it's often explainable to their weighting factors, e.g. in 2016 they didn't take educational polarization into account sufficiently. It's also pretty clear that many polls are herding this year, and the fact they're weighting on previous elections (which AFAIK wasn't standard practice before 2024) is another potential avenue for a bigger-than-average miss. Much of the industry is just really, really worried about underestimating Trump for a third time in a row, and as such they might be overcorrecting.
The initiatives against voter fraud won't amount to much because there's never been much evidence for widespread voter fraud despite countless fishing expeditions trying to find some. It does exist in isolated cases, e.g. an old black women voting once for herself, and once for her dead father whose house she's now living in. But beyond individual incidents like these, there's not much else.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
19d ago
It just means the left took stuff like J6 seriously, while the right tries to memoryhole it as nothing more than a few folks strolling through a building.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
19d ago
The media exists to make money, with the partisan slant being a secondary consideration, caused by the leanings of the reporters themselves. If the media was as coordinated and hated Trump as much as some would claim, it wouldn't have given him so much free air time for his entire political career.
I agree journalism could use improvement, but I haven't heard of any reasonable propositions to do so. Most people who want to change it can only think of replacing it with something like Catturd, i.e. the same problems as before, amplified significantly, but it agrees with their sectarian ideology so they claim it's "better".
"Disbanding" the media would be a terrible idea.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
19d ago
If new regulations are coming down the pipe, they can make certain products or even entire sectors less desirable. The issue is that this can be priced-in by competitors long before the regulations actually hit, which can hurt the ability of slow-movers to reposition. If you think e.g. oil companies were going to get hit by a bunch of new environmental regulations, institutions might want to offload their stakes before their competitors to get the best price. A good real-world example of this is what happened to ESG funds. They used to be a hot thing during peak woke, but the industry really started backing off once Republicans started making a stink. I'm not sure how much actual regulation happened, as just the threat of it was enough to strangle the baby in the cradle.
Knowing if there's a 50% chance or a 90% chance that these things will happen absolutely makes a big difference. I was at a gathering of many of the chief risk officers of big financial institutions, and the election was easily the most-discussed topic in terms of worrying potential outcomes.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
19d ago
Polls have long weighted their results, but there's ways to do it well, and ways to do it poorly. The goal is to calibrate demographic metrics based on likely voter data to create a facsimile of a perfectly representative sample. Getting it correct makes for more accurate polls. Getting it wrong in an innocent way can lead to mixups like 2016, where there was insufficient weighting by education especially in swing states.
But with degrees of freedom comes the ability to misuse it, where pollsters can coax their models to produce results they think are "better". Or they can just not release results that show something they think is strange. No matter what happens, polls should still show something resembling a normal distribution. They should create their model first, then enter in their results and see what pops out. The fact they're not getting a normal distribution is evidence that they're looking at results, then tweaking the model and rerunning afterwards, effectively mangling the results into whatever they desire. The fact that this is very prominent around a few polling houses and not others should be an indication that something is wrong.
Selzer isn't a coward by releasing a Harris+3 for Iowa, but whatever the reason for it and I have my speculations, she'll get a double digit miss as a result.
I'd gladly take an even-money bet that Selzer is off by less than 10 points.
it's just the fact that they, be it big media, three letter agencies, George Soros, etc, were able to brainwash the country
If that succeeds, it's over, we're no longer a democracy. If people will rubber stamp whoever the CIA tells them to
This post is beyond goofy. It's like a perfect personification of the Dale Gribble voters Hanania rails against.
Do you have any evidence the CIA or George Soros is "brainwashing" people to vote for Harris?
I'd say it's pretty close to even, certainly the closest (polls-wise) that we've seen in decades. Nate Silver has an almost perfect 50-50, while betting markets have 55-45 in favor of Trump. I trust Silver a bit more than the betting markets, which have a record of being slightly R leaning. There was a Romney whale in 2012, and a 35% chance for a Trump win in 2020 was a bit too high IMO given the polls. Silver might have a slight D bias, but it doesn't matter much in any case since they both pretty much agree with each other (the betting markets have mostly converged with Silver over the past few days after being too pro-Trump for a bit).
Anyone who has a high degree of certainty on this election outcome is either a fool, a charlatan, or a grifter. You should knock them down a peg or two in your mental map of who to trust.
Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results? Which side do you think will struggle more if they lose?
Republicans will absolutely, 100% throw a fit if they lose. That's practically guaranteed. Trump has been laying the groundwork for it for a while now, as have pro-Trump accounts like Catturd (who's a good barometer of the online right). Trump said the vote was rigged when he lost the Iowa primary in 2016 (with little evidence), he said it was rigged in 2020 (with little evidence), and so of course he'll say it was rigged now if he loses. Republicans will squint, say something like "the media is biased, so yeah, I guess the election was stolen" while ignoring all of Trump's actual claims.
I'm not sure if the Dems would go the same way. I'm sure there will be some who want to escalate given what Republicans have done, while others will be more along the lines of "we cannot become that which we hope to destroy". The jury's out on which side will win.
As to whether either side could actually steal the election, I'm doubtful. Trump is more committed, but also highly incompetent and he doesn't have the levers of government at his disposal like he did in 2020. The Dems are more competent and control the presidency, but are less committed and so I don't there will be enough of a consensus to take drastic action.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
19d ago
The point of estimating the election winner is that the election can be quite impactful (for regulator policies, culture war stuff, gambling like you mentioned, etc). If e.g. you work in a financial institution and you prefer one candidate over the other, knowing whether they have a 90% chance of winning or a 50-50 chance can make a huge difference. It's also a good chance to test Bayesian reasoning capabilities, as there's a correct answer at the end that you can check your work against (and the work of those you follow).
You're correct that most prognosticating won't have a material impact on the result, but that's a non-sequitur since that's not what people are trying to do when they're predicting who will win.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
20d ago
She also does midterms and a bunch of other stuff, and I'm pretty sure she started in the 90s sometime and only became well-known in 2008 after a few runs having relatively robust results. You can cherrypick anything she's gotten wrong, but she has one of the best track records of any pollster bar none. It's clear that some around here are only questioning her because they don't like the result she's getting, rather than for any relative inaccuracy.
I'm not sure what your chart is supposed to be showing. You should be able to share it by pressing the button in the bottom left that says "share links". That's how I did mine.
The best comparison would be to compare a government position to an equivalent private sector position (controlling for things like title inflation, responsibilities, etc.). I don't have that data on hand, but if I did, I reckon it would show government compensation (ex. benefits) is slightly lower than the private sector.
The notion that government employees are vastly overpaid by hiding salaries in higher pay grades seems farfetched to me. I don't doubt there's more federal employees on the higher end, but that's to be expected given change in technologies. If they e.g. wanted to digitize a federal service, they'd need to hire a computer programmer, which isn't cheap.
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