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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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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.

There's not nearly that much fat to be trimmed

The fat to be trimmed all comes from stuff like unions and other special interests, and you'd have to break those before you can actually cut the fat. When unions have rules like "Only janitor union members can clean floors, and only food sector union members can peel fruit", at small locations you can easily end up with multiple employees where you only need one. But you can't actually fire either employee until you get rid of the union rules, because those jobs do actually need doing.

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.

R's slashed budgets so much

Wut

Ahem

I'm talking about money to government employees, not all federal outlays (which are dominated by boomer entitlements like Medicare and Social Security).

That's not a problem of budgets, though. That's just a head count. Of course, it's also highly confounded by general employment in the denominator; surely, you wouldn't say that looking at the spike in that plot in 2008 is because they suddenly decided to hire a bunch more government workers. And oh wait. Ahem, I think they say.

I can't find it right away, but Tyler Cowen recently shared an image showing the extremely different composition of the federal workforce over the years when binned by location on the general schedule; far more folks on the higher end of the schedule. This is likely much more directly in the control of the bureaucracy. Additionally, if your complaint is that entitlements are getting in the way, I'm not sure who's to blame for that.

These are both complains about how the budget is spent, not that the budget has, itself, been slashed. The latter just simply isn't true.

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.

Where is your evidence that the personnel budgets have been constrained, specifically, especially given that I mentioned a significant shift in the composition of the workforce by pay scale?

Here

The total percent of government spending that's going to its employees has dropped precipitously, from about 35% in the 60s to ~18% today.

That again suffers a denominator problem. That other sorts of spending have exploded doesn't tell us much about what you're making claims about. Perhaps something like this would show the precipitous decline that very neatly corresponds to some notable R actions taken? (Click max x-axis, I don't remember how to embed that into the link.)

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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