This framing is a bit far from the actual motivating issue underlying the federal "budget" itself. I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country. If you frame it as simply whether to spend money on this or that or if you're getting comparable value to other countries, then it is inevitable for the sides to talk past one another.
I think it is more productive to understand the "federal budget is out of control" argument in its spirit and motivational effectiveness. The simple fact is that many people are unhappy about HOW the money is spent and would rather reserve the choices on how to spend that money to the households.
To respond to your specific callouts, the growth of federal programs in the post WWII era is a fundamental point of contention. Averages going back to the 1970s (pegged to GDP of all things) are somewhat beside the political point. The federal bureaucracy is enormous. The ancillary industries that service the federal budget is prone to grift, graft, and corruption. Anyone who has worked in or near Washington DC knows this.
I believe you are talking about Social Security, which is a bit different from "taking care of the elderly." It is more like a public pension. Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary. Your framing is already misleading but let's go on.
Combining "defense and veterans" is also misleading. I believe somewhere south of 5% goes to Veterans Affairs (if that much). If you think the US government should spend 15% of its budget on its war machine and the inevitable foreign wars that feed the military industrial complex, we can have that discussion. I don't think 15% of budget is an absurd amount to maintain a global empire, but I assure you it won't be cut all that much.
"Taking care of the poor and disabled" is also a misleading number. Much of that is towards the "welfare state" which is a very gameable and corrupt program. Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote. And if you think the corruption only helps the poor, you are ignoring the many services that benefit from a large pool of welfare recipients.
Health care costs in the US are too high, but there are many perverse incentives at work leading to those costs that would be tedious to go into here. You cannot begin to fix them without removing the main sources of cost. One is that the population is unhealthy, but also over-medicalized. If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day. You don't charge that kind of money unless you have someone by the short and curlies.
Corporations are the employers of the workforce. Many are also owned by you and me as common stockholders in our 401k and other savings. You say they are declining as a percentage, but that says nothing about what the optimal percentage is. Too high and you will choke off dynamism and job creation, and drive industry overseas. Who does that benefit?
But all this penny-counting is a distraction. The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie. As the recent political realignment suggests, most people don't want to be governed by this a federal bureaucracy (or civl service, if you prefer) that has its own political interests at odds with the rest of the population. Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption. It's useful to point out "waste" in terms of inefficiency, but more revealing to point out spending at odds with the values of the majority of the population. People may not want their tax dollars spent on projects they find diametrically opposed to what they value. They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network that extends well beyond any benefits that come back to them. It is at those moments that people start to think that the government isn't working for them. Is that so hard to understand?
I'm not sure what's unaccountable about a bunch of people who report to political appointees who have been confirmed by the Senate (a body elected by the people), who then report to the president and vice president (also elected by the people).
It depends how you word it. 'Would you rather put your money in stock indexes or pay out N shares of 1/N of your contribution to old people then hope and pray the same is done for you' ( which is more or less the realistic question for the middle class ) and I bet they'd say shitcan it.
The question isn't so much whether social spending is a personal investment but rather whether trigger pullers with badges and automatic weapons enforce it or the laborer personally invests as he sees fit in ways that enable social charity and retirement without the threat of imprisonment.
Sure but the question is about the law that the trigger pullers enforce. If the laborer can invest his retirement rather than having it taken, redistribute, then told if there is no Trump v2 maybe there will be something for him -- maybe he decides the rule of law is to put the power of social spending on the individual rather than a corrupt government who's treasury system is controlled by unelected billionaires.
> I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country
Is having a federal workforce that's managed by an unelected, and unaccountable, oligarch more in line with the best interests of any country?
> Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption.
Isn't putting oligarchs with significant conflicts of interests in charge of the federal bureaucracy also susceptible to graft and corruption? Isn't halting enforcement of the law banning Americans from bribing foreign government officials also susceptible to graft and corruption? Doesn't pardoning a former governor convicted of literally selling a Senate seat make us more susceptible to graft and corruption? Doesn't the Supreme Court continually narrowing the conditions for bribery, making all but impossible to ever charge someone for accepting a bribe make us more susceptible to graft and corruption?
Honestly, it seems strange to me to say that the current administration is reducing graft and corruption, when the policies of this administration and the current conservative Court all seem to be *pro* graft and corruption.
Eh, oligarchs are already in positions of significant power. If you're talking about Elon, then to be accurate, he is not managing the federal workforce, but rather overseeing an audit of it. He himself has no executive powers. Those reside in the elected official (the President). It is also the case that most of the federal workforce is already managed by unelected officials but they are accountable to the President (elected by the people). The problem becomes when the President's assigned administrators are met with widespread #resistance from federal career civil servants who choose to ignore the will of the majority, embodied in the person of the President.
This will all make more sense when you incorporate the concept of "lawfare" into your framework. Laws at this level are very often used as political tools. The courts are not immune to practicing lawfare, either.
The current administration is reducing graft and corruption of necessity because they are breaking up established patronage networks (NED, USAID) and Tammany Hall-style vote harvesting progams (welfare, immigration policy, voter id) that rely on graft and corruption to function. If you understand networks as political weapons then these acts can be understood as disarming your political opponents.
> I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country.
The word "unaccountable" gets thrown around a lot in these discussions. The leaders of these bureaucracies are ultimately appointed by and accountable to the President, who is in turn elected by and accountable to the public. In what sense are they unaccountable?
> Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary.
I'm talking about both Social Security (21%) and Medicare (15%). Historically, families were much bigger; you'd have many children who could all pitch in to help take care of their parents. Historically, people also didn't get treated for cancer, heart disease, etc.
Families, churches, and charities still exist, and still can help in this capacity. As a person with gradually aging parents, I fully intend to help my parents however possible, but I'm also glad that society (well, for them, Canadian society) sees fit to provide them some support too. And as a Christian, I'm both happy when I see churches serving the poor and elderly, and happy when I see society agreeing with these Christian values and also collectively striving to serve the poor and elderly.
> Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote.
If you're talking about welfare traps where government benefits disappear when your income increases over a (fairly low) threshold, disincentivizing extra work or raises, I fully agree that there are changes to be made.
On the other hand, if you think people don't work because they think they can live off government handouts, I'm curious if you've ever tried that, or put yourself in the shoes of someone who has.
> If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day.
Fully agree on Medicare negotiation. I've seen my fair share of hospital bills, and believe me, I wasn't laughing...
> The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie.
Only if you pretend that FDR, LBJ, etc. are not "American" (or perhaps, as American as apple pie - but maybe pumpkin?). Yes, there's always been a strain of rugged individualism in American political thought. We'll see where it leads, I guess.
> They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network... Is that so hard to understand?
What's hard to understand is how this (IMO) distorted view of the government has taken hold. The government may be slow at times, may be wasteful at times, but, til now, it's worked. Old people get health care. Social Security checks get cashed. National parks stay open. Science gets funded. Planes stay in the air. The US university system is the envy of the world. And so on.
What hasn't worked is that people's lives haven't really improved that much. Jobs have gotten worse - more part time, more "gig economy". Housing prices have shot up. Health care costs are out of control. Etc. But please, help me draw the line between excess government spending and all of these problems, because I can't seem to see the connection.
People voted for change, and now they're going to get it I guess. Let's see if it's the kind of change they wanted.
It only will make sense when you reintroduce the idea of "the political" into your framework. Without that, a government is simply a territorial administrative apparatus or provincial satrapy. If your parents are Canadian, perhaps you are as well (or at least very familiar with Canada), and can relate to a government seeing its population as simply interchangeable units of administrative responsibility managed by a hedonic rationalism. I think Canada is a great example of what US voters in the last election don't want to be. It's kind of a nice, albeit cold, place but very authoritarian and prone to treating its identity as something of little value and an embarrassment, except contra the big bad United States next door. Canadians look at our health care system and school shootings and suppose their system is obviously better, but Canada comes across as very naive and ungrateful for the benefits it receives as our northern neighbor. I suspect there are many Canadians who also don't like their government's policies but are at a loss on how to effect change because their government is less susceptible to populist political waves than the US.
The government works in some areas and not in others. Our once envied university system has become a human gristmill cartel, indenturing a generation of our youth under debts they will never dig out of because of perverse incentives engineered via vast federal spending programs. Foreign students may still come for the prestige but many diplomas are effectively worthless and many schools properly should be mothballed. In any case, measuring a government's worth by how many people receive benefits is a pretty pathetic standard. It's beneath human dignity to have such meager aspirations for a country.
Unaccountable civil services aren't hard to understand in history. Like a military that is ostensibly under the control of the king or president but not really, so have civil services sometimes constituted as separate government that can just ignore the commands of elected representatives of a people. Laws can and are passed to entrench the civil service even deeper, making it hard to fire any but the top-level appointees. These can try to get the institution to do something differently but if the institution is unresponsive they can rant and rave all day, the careerists can just wait them out. It's not hard to understand if you study incentives. They are deeply misaligned and it is only because the administration learned some of these lessons the first time around that they came in with a much more effective game plan this time. You can see how dramatic actions are required to overcome the institutional resistance. I'm sorry that good people have/will lose jobs, but government should not be a tenured jobs program. The taxpayer doesn't have that luxury, why should this subgroup? Why should we all engage in a fantasy that federal employees aren't people who, sometimes despite the best of intentions, are going to pursue their group interests even at the expense of other groups? Huge pots of money are going to attract huge pressures from outsiders trying to access funding. Many of the high profile grants to ridiculous projects are not surprising when you see these institutions as participants in political patronage networks. There has to be some way to officially distribute the money. Have them dig and fill holes or put on puppet theater for the blind. It doesn't really matter.
Keep in mind there is no ultimate fix for this. All institutions decay and need to be replaced from time to time. Getting upset about this particular patronage network being disrupted is the wrong worry unless you were a particular recipient of its largesse. If not, then you might come out better off at the end of the day.
It sounds like you have a fair bit of pride in the US, and a fair number of grievances as well. Goodness knows there's plenty of grievances to go around, and I can hardly fault you for having pride in your country and desiring to see better days for it.
So, I suppose I'll just hope (against hope) that you're right in your optimism about these changes.
I'm a Canadian expat who's lived in the US for many years, partly for work and partly because of the relationships built up over these years. I can only laugh a little and shake my head at your notion that Canada is authoritarian. I suppose it all depends on how you define freedom, and whose freedom ultimately matters.
You posed the original comment in one frame (costs). I responded with a different frame (politics). If I have a hope from interacting with you and others about our political moment (or history in general) on HN it is simply that you may broaden your horizons on the role and function of government to be more than as a sort of beekeeper of the hive. I have personally done very well materially under late stage global liberalism and have nothing to be resentful about. But even so I find the its ideology inhumane and offensive in the nose.
> Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption
Does it look like we're going to less of that though?
Also, just looking at the numbers, I wonder if a few percent savings in the federal budget could possibly translate to positive changes for the working class. Maybe part of the population will be happy to know they don't fund hypothetical gender studies anymore, but let's hope the cuts don't affect them negatively.
Inevitably, there will be eggs broken to make omelettes. I will consider the realignment successful if there is a reset in the current grift industrial complex and some interregnum until new patronage networks are established and corrupted that will, in their turn, be destroyed to make room for the next generation. If you think the issue is the amount of money spent on "gender studies" you really don't understand the far greater value of what the education of our children should consist in and who gets to decide what that education will be. Those are battles worth fighting over. Penny pinching is missing the point.
> If you think the issue is the amount of money spent on "gender studies" you really don't understand the far greater value of what the education of our children should consist in and who gets to decide what that education will be.
I can't parse this sentence at all. Are you maybe able to better articulate your point?
Many people got a chance, during the pandemic, to see that contemporary K-16 education consists of a lot of political ideology (aka indoctrination). Many thought their kids were learning useful skills and were shocked, shocked, to find that they were being groomed to reject the worldview and values of their parents. They didn't like it no matter what it cost. It became a hot-button issue and an own-goal by the cultural gatekeepers, who consistently present themselves as our betters. Framing this as a cost issue is missing this critical fact. A majority doesn't care what it costs. They don't want it even if it's free.
Considering the way things have played out, if they were trying to indoctrinate the kids all this time they must have been doing a pretty bad job! Its not like the dems have much good will with the kids or the left in general right now.. What a screw up! Only thing worse than facism is inpet facism perhaps, good to be out of the woods there.
Ok but what is the argument though? Culturally the left is weaker than it has ever been, to say the least!
Possibly to preempt: I hope you can also understand that saying something like "look at these certain kids at a liberal arts school and their crazy ideology" is not going to be a satisfying argument by any measure. It really shouldn't be whichever side your on. We need to strive to be rational and look at actual data or otherwise evidence as much as possible.
And again, the "left" that is probably in your mind absolutely hate the Democrats, so its just strange they could be cunning enough to come up with a whole nefarious plan to indoctrinate the kids but at the same time be dumb enough to still presumably shoot themselves in the foot about it.. It just doesnt add up!.
Also, I'm sorry, I don't want to be bugger in case english isn't your native language, but the subject and point of your first sentence is ambiguous and again hard to parse.
I would distinguish between "the left" as a political persuasion and as a political movement, and between "the left" and "liberalism." Both versions of "the left" could further split into "left progressivism" and "left socialism." Or again, as "Progressives" and "Socialists" (or Communists). "Progressives" in my ontology are "left liberals" (as opposed to "right liberals/libertarians").
By "the left" do you mean "socialism" or "progressivism?" If socialism, then both as a political persuasion and political movement I agree that "the left" "hates" the Democratic party. For one, the Democratic party is not socialist. Two, they compete for mindshare and the socialists always lose. I did not bring up the "left/right" dichotomy in my comments and don't believe they are that helpful in the current context. That said, the socialists don't really matter. Socialists don't/can't/won't/shouldn't hold power so their only function is as a faction within the broader "left coalition" that has broken down since the 1990s when global liberalism reached its apex. That coalition is dominated by "left liberals" (aka Progressives). These are not all that different teleologically from Communists, but seek to push forward a type of Whig history. The representative expression of this Whig history is Obama's "The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Sometimes, it doesn't bend fast enough and has to be bent by technocratic governance. And this can't be limited to the borders of a polity or nation, but logically requires a global scope. It is both interesting and convenient that such an ideology happens to provide cover for the administrative actions of global empire. It would be hard to convince the individual people to act against their better judgment. Much better if they believe they are a force for good. Hence the role of indoctrination towards ideological conviction. You see the effect when this fails while the government persists in the later stages of Soviet and Communist governance. The people just didn't believe it anymore. If interested, you can read a sociological study of this effect in Timur Kuran's "Private Truths, Public Lies".
Nobody is "cunning enough to come up with a whole nefarious plan to indoctrinate the kids." Holding to such formulations is obtuse and a trivial form of casuistry. Ideology and its supporting indoctrination programs are emergent in the modern era. That said, plenty of past Propaganda Ministers have existed who did take an active role in managing popular opinion. They don't call themselves that anymore, but they still exist. (Interesting books have been written on the topic[0].) In the modern context, propaganda may seem subtle until some kind of crisis occurs when all points converge and you get those hilarious memes of all news anchors somberly enacting the same exact text at the same moment. It is at those times that one sees behind the arras and understands that "news" is not organic nor is it independent. Editorial boards collude regularly to shape public opinion. (I would call it a subtler version of Pravda but people who lived under Eastern European propaganda have scoffed at the heavy-handedness of our version compared to the actual Soviet programs.) The breakdown of this function/ability is one of the more interesting phenomena of our current times.
All that is to say that the process of indoctrination is not all that mysterious, but its conspiratorial aspects, while real, get too much attention imho.
[0] For examples, see Walter Lippman's "Public Opinion", Edward Bernays' "Propaganda", Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent", Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda", Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy Incorporated", Martin Gurri's "The Revolt of the Public", etc...
Ok yes. I definitely understand and agree with minimally this point that, indeed, such a formulation of indoctrination is silly, and that, yes, what you call left liberalism (many might call the same thing neoliberalism) is the operative ideology of the day and as such squirms itself explicitly and not into things like education and the media. I agree too that global empire is important here, but it seems strange to me to characterize liberals as somehow distinctive with regards to needing people to "believe they are a force for good." It's kinda always like that right?
I know it has broader use, but "indoctrination" to me has a connotation of force, of some active aligning of the subject's consciousness with a particular belief system/conviction, especially when invoked in this particular context (and just, you know, the way TV republicans talk about it right now). Propaganda is more broad though, certainly. A lot of what, at least, Chomsky talks about is the propaganda of distortion and omission: its not about telling people what to think per se, but making sure they don't think about XYZ, or at least don't care too much about it. This kind of propaganda feels like the truly distinctive thing about the emergent modern liberal order: they don't need us to fight any wars, there is no more communists really, they don't actually care if we are woke and think the Iraq war was a terrible crime, they just need us to go to work and then later order stuff from Amazon. This is ultimately I think why, yes, the conspiratorial aspects are hugely overblown: it just seems so strange to look around our world right now and believe that what's important is what everyone merely thinks. It's clearly "what we do anyway" that matters!
I think in this its somewhat too optimistic to think what we are seeing is any kind of "breakdown" between the ideological levers neoliberalism employs and the people who, e.g., watch the news. It is not like there is something else disgruntled citizens can flock to, and the system has proven at this point it can tolerate and/or incorporate every atom of dissent quite efficiently. It's a well oiled machine that Obama and Trump and all of them always slot into quite well at the end of the day. Why else is it that everything always seems to resolve down to inane culture wars that go back and forth contesting rights and privileges that ultimately do nothing to actually push the needle of our collective freedom or prosperity?
But this all truly begs the question for me: what were you even talking about to begin with? What, in this vein, did parents realize about their child's education during covid? If it isn't the silly conspiratorial stuff, I just can't imagine what you are talking about, much less how any of this situation is actually going to change with simply a new president or budget cuts.
The thing I was talking about was what I said. Parents expected classroom education to be somewhat like what they had experienced in school. Reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, but also something vaguely pro-American. The forms of myth-building that took place in the 80s and 90s were, if not more true, then quite a bit less overtly political. Having the kids home on zoom classes was the window into progressive indoctrination technique.
I wouldn't subsume progressivism under neoliberalism. I would class neoliberalism as the "new world order" or post-war consensus of global power, first during the Cold War, and then with the unipolar US hegemony. Very much about geopolitics.
Progressivism is what is being taught to kids in school and it effectively just is one side of the culture war. Simply put, I'm referring to egalitarian identity politics. It refers to a way to think about people, their place in society, new values, etc... the contrast might be the old "melting pot" values their parents were taught. Or, further back, an identitarianism centered around ethnic pride in tension with a "civil religion" defining what it is to be an American. You can quibble with the truth of these claims but there must be some governing myths uniting a people or else what are they? The myths being promulgated to children (indoctrination) are "far left" progressive (aka "woke").
Culture is downstream from politics. The changing of the political order can absolutely change the culture. Trump 1.0 wasn't able to do it because the entrenched neoliberal (global american imperialists) forces were too powerful and the Trump admin too inexperienced, naive, or infiltrated with enemies and grifters. It happens to be the case that the domestic politics of the governing class of the Global American Empire is Progressivism. Progressivism is not itself neoliberalism/imperialism/globalism, but is used as a tool of domination by the imperial administration abroad. Hence why we teach Progressive values to Afghani women, or insist on sexual liberation policies in exchange for Western foreign aid.
The players from 2016 are a decade older and wiser. Trump 2.0 came in with a new playbook and flooded the zone to blitz the "deep state" before they could muster. Will it succeed? TBD. Lawfare and friendly judges are being rallied in opposition to Trump 2.0 as we speak. The entrenched interests see themselves as the defenders of the unipolar US hegemony, and Trump as a harbinger of declining US power abroad. It's not just that they believe he'll be bad for the existing revenue sources (forever wars, multilateral trade deals, human trafficking), but that he's bad for the Global American Empire. They see him as an existential threat to US global dominance. Hence why the most extreme Never Trumpers came from the foreign policy establishment (State Department, CIA, DoD). The budget cuts are to neuter Trump's political opponents, which will change the culture if successful. I've commented about this elsewhere in this thread.
This all makes sense I think but its hard for me I guess to actually see what the substantial content of the progressive "myth" would be if you insist on completely separating it from liberalism/its late-capitalism context. It just feels a little neutered by your rendering: that progressivism is simply all that it says it is, that its detachable from its historical context, that it exists as simply "bad" culture.. It just sounds like the stuff of the Art critic or the cultural opinion piece. How can we separate the parent's shock or revelation about their child's education from their broader economic insecurities or feelings of powerlessness otherwise? Especially in the moment of covid. Or how can we separate deport-them-all-nationalism from such kinds of insecurity? It doesn't seem, to say the least, true to history as we know it to isolate out a superstructural cultural moment like this from the state and economy where it emerged, and try to reason about it, say that it is anything at all but a certain refraction or consequence of all that is going on underneath. I guess in this I do reject that culture is downstream.
Like if we can both agree on the ultimate arbitrariness of the myth, of the myth as a function, it seems dissonant to take it so seriously on its face, to see something distinctively dangerous or not about it. Ultimately these kinds of concerns about wokeism or whatever is precisely the same absurd impulse from the other end that celebrates the fact of more queer prison guards or whatever.
Just to say, I would wager however successful Trump is with his stuff, the people who are worried about their kid's education are probably going to stay worried, even if they are worried about something else. As good capitalists like to say, there is no free lunch, and the country's debt crisis and waning global hegemony will continue to push austerity, insecurity, and sacrifice onto the people that deserve it the least. Its hard for me to see anything else add up here, even if, yes, he is successful in "dismantling" (read, consolidating) the empire. Apple pie pull-up-your-bootstraps optimism is dead, its not coming back. No one but the elderly even want it. We all broadlt, have no real opportunity or access to know what we really want. Much less what we need.
While I am personally grabbing my popcorn for more catastrophic failure that has nothing to do with people's feelings, its an amusing thought to me that maybe Trump will ultimately teach a lesson to his followers that leftists (not progressives) have already learned over and over again: disappointment. If anything, there is a maybe going to be an elegant kind of karma to it all...
Otherwise, fascinating to hear this viewpoint, thank you.
I think of Progressivism as being independent of Liberalism because I see progressivism as being about "things getting better" (Whig history) while liberalism is about "maximizing human liberation".
I personally don't think there is enough agreement about an ordering of values to take "getting better" at face value. Rather, I see Progressivism as presupposing quite a lot of unspoken values that it assumes all reasonable people share. When people turn out not to share that order of values, Progressives don't have any mechanism of reconciling that except to dismiss such people as simply invalid and atavistic. They believe right-thinking people are progressives, by definition. Evidence contrary to human perfectibility are merely obstacles to be overcome. Just progress harder!
I do not agree that myths are arbitrary. They must be adaptive or the people that hold them will not survive. I believe the recent rejection of progressive politics "at the polls" was akin to an immune response by the American people rejecting a non-adaptive myth (egalitarian identity politics) that was intuited to be suicidal.
I don't completely separate Progressivism from Liberalism. I see substantial overlap to the point they could be described as converging on a point from two separate directions. Progressivism requires a standard to measure progress. Progressivism is essentially egalitarian or horizontally oriented. It wants to level everything and deny that anything is inherently better than anything else except egalitarianism itself. The levels of bad faith entailed in the Progressive mindset are not worth mentioning in this context. The principal tool to achieve this leveling is something akin to deconstruction (Derrida) or generally suspicion of any hierarchy of values. All identities are of equal value. (Just think of horizontal vs vertical systems of value. They are almost metaphysically opposed.) This deconstructive instinct can't exist as a purely negative force. There must also be some measure of improvement (because things get better). But these measures can't be based on quality (that would be hierarchical). They must be based on quantity. The OP in this thread exemplified this with the framing of the question in terms of various hedonic measures in an accounting ledger. Because a dollar is a unit of measure divorced from and changeable to any good, costs are a natural metric for a Progressive. It is a utilitarian calculus. To the Progressive, only a lunatic would ask whether a benefit is good. It is good by definition. More services for more people. The greatest good to the greatest number. (Just don't dwell for long upon who decides what those goods are and how they are measured.)
The way this converges with Liberalism is interesting. Classical Liberalism (what people now call Conservatism) was a series of liberalizing reforms that released the individual from obligations and duties that were historically centered in kinship bonds and fealty oaths, and then in a very stratified quasi-caste-based social order. If you were the son of a peasant or artisan, you were likely to die as such. Formal privileges calcified over time and offered few opportunities for ambitious youth to advance. The rise of a dynamic commercial class, yada yada yada, you know the story I'm sure. The logic of liberalism is the breaking of bonds on the individual. At first these were legal or broadly social, but over time the logic of liberation politics seeks out new bonds to break. The teleology of liberalism is complete liberation of the individual from anything outside the self's free choices ("the only thing forbidden is to forbid"). Again, the many bad faiths of such a position need not be dug into here. Long story short, liberalism to the left is the continuation of liberation politics to their logical conclusion. Conservatism (classical liberalism) is just left liberalism with the breaks on. (Libertarianism is Anarchy with the breaks on.)
Both Progressivism and Liberalism converge on the "atomized individual". Liberalism does so because it rejects any constraint that could create obligations on individual within a group that is involuntary. All actions/decisions redound to a choice, and the choice is an expression of the will of the individual. Hence the individual can never be truly "bound" but is like a noble gas, completely free. Progressivism also produces atomized individuals, but by a different method. Within Progressivism, all identities are equal. If everything is equal and nothing is better than anything else, then by what means can we choose one or another except by personal taste or affinity (my "identity" from the Latin "idem" meaning "the same" or what I consider "the same as me")? Progressives resort to a utilitarian ethics (most good for the most people) but constrained by the essential need to not elevate anyone above anyone else. If one person or group gets some goods and another doesn't then that first group is "made better" by the benefit (originally beneficium: a privilege granted). But that cannot be allowed. It doesn't make sense, but it feels good to some people.
I sense you consider yourself a "leftist" (perhaps in the worker's cooperatives sense, like Mondragon). While I think it is natural to want these social/political efforts to work, I personally reject their viability completely. I believe leftism has no non-totalitarian or anarchic outcome. Forced collectivization is inhumane. Anarchy never works in practice. There will always be leadership in larger organizations and the interests of leadership will diverge from the non-leaders. Some have called this the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Anarchy is simply a transitional stage between non-anarchic social orders. True anarchy would be simply horrific to most people involved. It wouldn't last very long before serious people simply took power and put things back in order.
It may be there is no return to optimism. I try to be dispassionate about The Great Wheel. Empires rise and fall. But I'm still a citizen and love this country. I want to see it prosper. If the US loses its hegemonic ability to project power globally, that may mean life as we know it changes. It may mean a much less stable world. If China+Russia becomes a true global competitor to the US in the next 20-50 years, Americans may lose some of the privileges we've enjoyed to date. We can probably survive the debt crisis if we maintain the dollar as the global reserve currency. I believe people on HN are not doing their intelligence justice to have such childish ideas about Trump. People want to frame him as some kind of PT Barnum huckster. Go back and look at the political cartoons of Lincoln or Reagan and try to read them as anything other than the resentment and buffoonery of enemies. It's a mistake to think that the personal merits or faults of the man are the determinants of his value. He is clearly a man of destiny. What that destiny is, we will have to wait to see, but when a man of destiny appears on the world stage, a "world-historical figure", I'm absolutely here for it.
There will always be grift in a dynamic system. The problems occur when the grifts become formalized and encoded in law, as has been the case since at least 9/11. When that happens the institutions can't be reformed but must be replaced by a new institution or by complete personnel turnover. Over time, the energetic/ambitious/idealist contingent who achieved the revolution/coup/realignment/reset will grow old/wealthy/corrupt or be shoved aside by sharp-elbowed opportunists, hard-nosed pragmatists, or soft-shoe careerists. The process will repeat.
I think it is more productive to understand the "federal budget is out of control" argument in its spirit and motivational effectiveness. The simple fact is that many people are unhappy about HOW the money is spent and would rather reserve the choices on how to spend that money to the households.
To respond to your specific callouts, the growth of federal programs in the post WWII era is a fundamental point of contention. Averages going back to the 1970s (pegged to GDP of all things) are somewhat beside the political point. The federal bureaucracy is enormous. The ancillary industries that service the federal budget is prone to grift, graft, and corruption. Anyone who has worked in or near Washington DC knows this.
I believe you are talking about Social Security, which is a bit different from "taking care of the elderly." It is more like a public pension. Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary. Your framing is already misleading but let's go on.
Combining "defense and veterans" is also misleading. I believe somewhere south of 5% goes to Veterans Affairs (if that much). If you think the US government should spend 15% of its budget on its war machine and the inevitable foreign wars that feed the military industrial complex, we can have that discussion. I don't think 15% of budget is an absurd amount to maintain a global empire, but I assure you it won't be cut all that much.
"Taking care of the poor and disabled" is also a misleading number. Much of that is towards the "welfare state" which is a very gameable and corrupt program. Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote. And if you think the corruption only helps the poor, you are ignoring the many services that benefit from a large pool of welfare recipients.
Health care costs in the US are too high, but there are many perverse incentives at work leading to those costs that would be tedious to go into here. You cannot begin to fix them without removing the main sources of cost. One is that the population is unhealthy, but also over-medicalized. If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day. You don't charge that kind of money unless you have someone by the short and curlies.
Corporations are the employers of the workforce. Many are also owned by you and me as common stockholders in our 401k and other savings. You say they are declining as a percentage, but that says nothing about what the optimal percentage is. Too high and you will choke off dynamism and job creation, and drive industry overseas. Who does that benefit?
But all this penny-counting is a distraction. The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie. As the recent political realignment suggests, most people don't want to be governed by this a federal bureaucracy (or civl service, if you prefer) that has its own political interests at odds with the rest of the population. Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption. It's useful to point out "waste" in terms of inefficiency, but more revealing to point out spending at odds with the values of the majority of the population. People may not want their tax dollars spent on projects they find diametrically opposed to what they value. They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network that extends well beyond any benefits that come back to them. It is at those moments that people start to think that the government isn't working for them. Is that so hard to understand?