"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
by liberal japonicus
With the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three U.S. government employees in Benghazi, this interview (video below the fold) with Michael Lewis, based on his Vanity Fair article, seems to display a disturbing synchronicity.
lj doesn’t seem to have anything in the pipeline, so I’ll put this up. Yesterday I went to the CSA to get this week’s pick-your-own. I went out to the green bean field, lowered myself creakily to sit between the rows, and picked green beans by just taking what I could reach. I only had … Read more
by Doctor Science Yesterday I was achy and a little feverish, feeling like I was coming down with something brought in by Band Camp Girl. We seemed to be out of acetaminophen (I can’t take ibuprofen: one dose is great, the second makes me throw up), but I sent BCG across to the Chinese restaurant … Read more
by Doctor Science
In the comments to my previous post, McKinney TX mentioned his impression that
Public education, roads, police and fire protection, courts, life safety regulatory bodies and services(sanitation, clean water, food, public air travel, offshore drilling, etc) are miniscule gov’t outlays. Add in national defense, and it’s still easily affordable.
That can’t be right, I thought. What are the *real* figures?
Research happened. Most of the first Google results for “total government spending” and similar go to usgovernmentspending.com, a self-described “conservative” site that’s nicely data-heavy, but makes some odd choices — like making “pensions” a separate category. I went to the OECD and pulled some numbers for *total* government spending — that is, Federal plus state plus local. Going to the OECD means we can readily compare the US with other countries.
Summary: Many of the problems Americans think of as being characteristic of government per se (e.g. inefficiency and waste) seem to actually be specific to government in the United States. Overall, US government is either exceptionally inefficient, exceptionally ill-targeted, or exceptionally corrupt. Or a combination of all three.
Total spending at all levels of government for 2008