GOP Failure Watch Part III

Xanax, it might help.

 

The most common response when people hear what I'm doing is "so do you want to be a politician?" I've heard it hundreds of times. Poli Sci is the only program where that happens, and it's because politics holds this weird position in society where everyone is expected to have opinions on politics but nobody is expected to actually know anything substantive about it. After sociologists, psychologists, or economists publish a paper, and it gets reported on a news-aggregation website like Google, Yahoo, HuffPo, or elsewhere, compare the comments to a paper that gets reported by political scientists. People go absolutely bonkers over the results from poli sci papers but nobody blinks twice when psychologists do it. Even though the methodologies are identical in many cases. There's just something about reading that Democrats are the party of the rich that makes people say stupid, STUPID things like these things:

And before you all go patting yourselves on the back, it's not any better here. The last few posts from stanger and nice are chock filled with inaccuracies (btw, it's moniker), but if this were anything other than politics the arguments never even would have arisen, much less turned sour. JohnR said something recently about how being an independent was equivalent to being a Republican even though Independents backed Kerry 04 and Obama 08 and only supported Romney by five points.

The desperation with which most people here cling to their beliefs even in the face of evidence that disproves (again, we can never prove anything in the social sciences, only eliminate false hypotheses) those beliefs is staggering. Don't any of you wonder if you are wrong? I'm a big opponent of gun control, but most of the current policy changes won't do anything substantial. So I know that my belief in gun control isn't backed by systematic evidence. It's just plain laziness.

 

You do take things literally.

 

Late to the party, but on the topic of highway spending - building highways in West Virginia is good for the whole country, because we can get through the state in as little time as possible. And the highways in Virginia are pretty good, the problem is too much traffic because they don't build enough of them. Apparently people here prefer sitting in traffic jams to paying taxes. But you can count your money while you're sitting in traffic, so there's that.

 

They rather live in the burbs, spend 90-120 minutes commuting every weekday and then be too tired to enjoy their freedom on the weekends, than pay taxes and/or take the train and live in an urban townhouse.

 

The problem isn't building roads, it's dumping good money after bad.

http://www.nvdaily.com/news/2013/10/revival-sought-for-long-forgotten-highway-proposal.php

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/12/corridor.h/

 

Um, no.

My former spouse is a sociologist. Which back when she was in grad school, even to members of her immediate family, meant that she was going to become a social worker. Even now, people assume that being a professor = a teacher at a university.

 

Hell, I'll take even that.

 

But it's never that simple. If wasting a billion dollars results in great gains elsewhere, it's not really wasted. For example, are R&D costs for lines of research that never go anywhere "wasted"? To an extent, sure. But how do you fight that waste, exactly?

 

I'm guessing there's a long long post I can't see where Brummie completely misunderstands a point, tries to refute it with unrelated links, and then claims my posts are full of inaccurate information.

I'm willing to put money on that

 

You can't obviously.

Also...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ge...and_Money#Book_III:_The_Propensity_to_Consume

Book III: The Propensity to Consume
Book III moves to cover what causes people to consume, and therefore stimulate economic activity. In a depression the government, he argued, needs to kick start the economy's motor by doing anything necessary. In Chapter 10 he says,

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." (p. 129)​

In the past we've managed to create growth, employment and the subsequent tax revenues, by organising a nice war or two... we just need to try and do it without the 'shooting people' bit.

 

He's probably right, but the histrionic butthurt of the idea that people think differently than he does makes people not want to be right on occasion.

 

The wife and I did just that (roughly 150 minute daily commute) for seven years until about a month ago. It's unbelievable how much easier life got with our new much shorter 20 minute commute.

 

I wish you had, because then you'd be PayPaling me. Nah I just went on a short rant that I didn't intend very seriously, and he wheeled out the data, to show me as an example of fact-deprived prejudice.

Nope, it was my beating, not yours.

 

He makes me seem all warm and cuddely, doesn't he. Which, I suppose, is the indictment of our times (and this forum)!

 

R&D isn't classified as waste IMO, especially is it can pay dividends later.

The example in question, the Robert Byrd freeway system, has aspects to it that make sense but there have been sections that will probably never be completed and if they are, they don't lead to anywhere because the connectors in other states aren't even being planned. It's the perfect example of waste, same as a statue of Mr. Byrd would be.

 

Well, I'm not sure I'd go that far...

 

Let's say it never pays any dividends. How is that any different than a useless road?

Yes, that's waste. But again, if the price of that waste is, let's say, no government shutdown or debt ceiling crisis, I would argue that it's entirely worth it.

 

OK fern.

 

He said R&D that came to nothing. It it pays dividends later on, that's another thing obviously.

The amazing thing to me is that there's even an ARGUMENT about most of the expenditure and that it takes an individual to argue for the bulk of the spending. Any developed country should be spending on infrastructure ANYWAY, it shouldn't need someone having to twist arms to do it.

Why is it OK to spend BILLION of dollars in bank bonuses, to push up property prices to totally unsustainable levels or to waste on the military but to spend on roads, schools and hospitals, THAT'S a waste?

 

If the research has no benefit, it's waste.

I have no problems with spending on infrastructure if it's needed. Upgrading roads and bridges or building new has a positive effect, building a highway in the middle of nowhere that doesn't lead anywhere is a waste.

Billions on bank bonuses isn't government spending unless you are talking about the bailout which I didn't agree with in the first place. Military R&D has it's place and could be argued either way depending on what they are researching, and can show benefit to the private sector.

Wouldn't it have been better to use the money spent in WVA in, say, Minnesota, where their bridges are failing? But Robert Byrd wouldn't have had his name on it if it was in Minnesota. There is my point.

 

Could you please point out to the portion of the budget that you are discussing?



Yeah, I thought so.

 

How do you prevent that waste?

You're completely missing the point. Yes, there are better ways of spending that money. But again, there is a lot of opportunity cost to ensure that all money is spent as efficiently as possible. All enterprises big or small are going to generate waste. Eliminating waste entirely is neither practical nor even desirable, because the energy spent to eliminate it almost certainly greater than the waste itself.
So yes, you're right - there are better ways to spend some money the government spends. But the question is that in the overall scheme of things, what the harm is of the highway compared to the benefit obtained from it.

You're basically making an absolute argument without looking at context at all.

 

What does that have to do with government waste?