You're talking around what they're doing. Yes I agree with all those things you're saying but they're not contrary to what I'm saying.

You agree efficiency would be good, but as I say this is not what the government is doing, blunt cuts to everything is not efficiency.

Yes competitive markets could be better but this is not the case here. As I say you could rely on some benevolent oligarch to pay the dividend down but that's not guaranteed. The proposed tax cuts are for the richest not the average person, they're also "less competitive", part of government is regulating the market to ensure it remains competitive as it's naturally not. Their actions so far are anti-competitive such as the removal of the CFPB which levels the playing field. The government also funds crucial high risk, low reward activities that are necessary to drive growth elsewhere (economic multipliers), they've made it clear they intend cutting these, such as cutting scientific research funding that wouldn't have been investigated otherwise.

Overall they are currently not doing anything that you mention.

> You agree efficiency would be good, but as I say this is not what the government is doing, blunt cuts to everything is not efficiency

But now you're talking about an entirely different question.

The original question was, should wasteful spending be cut in order to lower taxes? Now you're asking if the spending they're cutting is the wasteful spending. Even if the answer to that question is no, the solution would still be to cut the wasteful things instead of the worthwhile things, rather than to not reduce waste.

> Yes competitive markets could be better but this is not the case here.

Markets become uncompetitive as a result of the regulatory environment, via two primary pathways.

First, regulations exist that raise barriers to entry. Then the incumbents don't even have to do anything, they can just be terrible because it's too expensive for anyone else to enter the market to challenge them.

Second, a lack of antitrust enforcement. A couple of conglomerates buy the only two suppliers of some important component in the supply chain, are allowed to do this, and then leverage that into a vertically integrated market before someone else can spin up a new competitor, at which point the vertically integrated supply chains act as a barrier to entry and you have the same problem.

In the first case you have to get rid of the rules making it too expensive to create new competitors, which is one of the things being proposed. In the second case you have to break up the concentrated markets, which is another thing they're ostensibly doing (e.g. wanting Google to divest Chrome), though it would be more effective if the enforcement actions were more comprehensive, e.g. they should be divesting Android and no company should be running both a mobile OS and an app store.

> The proposed tax cuts are for the richest not the average person

The proposed tax cuts are approximately across-the-board. If you lower everyone's taxes by the same percentage, that percentage of $400,000 will be more than the same percentage of $40,000, so then people looking for a reason to object will compare the absolute dollar amounts rather than the percentages and feign shock that this is how taxes work.

Meanwhile tax incidence is complicated and who is nominally paying a tax and who is actually paying it are two different things, so that kind of comparison doesn't tell you much regardless.

> part of government is regulating the market to ensure it remains competitive as it's naturally not.

Corporations don't exist in a state of nature. There would be nothing to enforce their contracts or claims to property. Monopolization is always through the use of government rules.

The government does need to ensure that its rules don't facilitate monopolization, but that's often best by having fewer of them rather than more. Competitors appear whenever there is nothing inhibiting them. Notice that one of the best anti-trust rules is to make contracts that restrain competition unenforceable, i.e. have the government not do something.

> Their actions so far are anti-competitive such as the removal of the CFPB which levels the playing field.

CFPB was never an anti-trust agency. Its existence is controversial because it was an attempt to insulate the administrative bureaucracy from the political process. But that tends to do the opposite of an anti-trust agency: Adopt rules that prohibit an unpopular practice without considering why it was happening, e.g. because it was a trade off against the bank not making those loans to begin with.

Then fewer banks offer those loans and the people who need those loans end up paying higher interest rates or being forced into some worse situation because they e.g. have to pay $1000 to rent a car for a month because they couldn't get a car loan.

> The government also funds crucial high risk, low reward activities that are necessary to drive growth elsewhere (economic multipliers), they've made it clear they intend cutting these, such as cutting scientific research funding that wouldn't have been investigated otherwise.

This is a category of research, some of which is worthwhile and some isn't. It's quite plausible that a lot of money currently being spent on "research" is misallocated.

> Overall they are currently not doing anything that you mention.

What they're doing right now is investigating how the money is being spent, with some level of "stop doing things for a minute until we figure out if we should be doing them". To long-term reallocate it requires the Congressional budget process, which hasn't happened yet, and will ideally be happening with the benefit of more time and information.

You're getting caught up in the noise, as I say take a step back. Theoretically what you say makes sense but again my argument is this is not the reality.

For every single one of those points.

The whole inefficiency argument is futile if it's just a ruse to cut bluntly.

Your point on the CFPB is moot, anti-trust and regulation are two sides of the same coin, the point is to level the playing field. It ensures consumers are treated fairly. Anti-trust law and evenly applied consumer law means there isn't captured supply or captured demand.

It is possible some of the budget is missallocated, but again practically (by your own admission) some of the correctly allocated budget is being cancelled.

This is not how government is intended to work, there are checks and balances intentionally. You cannot cut off and investigate, you investigate then cut off or else this process can be abused. The current evidence already indicates this may not be in good faith (see Verizon contract cancellation). The court is already blocking many of these actions.

You're being very generous to them, a good analogy they have catchy marketing materials with great use of jargon and theoretical whitepapers, but client experience with the product is very different.

> The whole inefficiency argument is futile if it's just a ruse to cut bluntly.

Not necessarily.

Suppose you have a slew of programs and 50% of them aren't worthwhile. You cut all of them. This is bad in the sense that the other 50% of them were worthwhile, but the net effect of this is actually zero because eliminating the benefit of the good half is canceled by eliminating the losses from the bad half.

Meanwhile the good programs get reintroduced again over time, if they can be justified. But then they have to go through the process again and get subject to a reevaluation that they wouldn't if they all just continued on through inertia, which allows the bad ones to be filtered out. Then the short-term result is a wash and the long-term result is net positive because the worthwhile programs come back and the unjustifiable ones get filtered out.

This becomes net positive not just over time but immediately if you can produce even a slight bias toward removing net-negative programs over net-positive ones.

> Your point on the CFPB is moot, anti-trust and regulation are two sides of the same coin, the point is to level the playing field.

"Level the playing field" means that each competitor is on equal footing, instead of rules that e.g. favor incumbents or larger companies.

Most "consumer protection" laws like that are actually either Faustian bargains or bad trade offs with high memetic fitness. The rule sounds good because it's presented as a free lunch rather than a trade off against an undisclosed cost.

This is a Faustian bargain when it's an attempt to mitigate the consequences of an uncompetitive market without actually restoring competitiveness, because leaving the market uncompetitive is going to cause the consumer to get screwed in a hundred other ways regardless of what rule you pass. In that case you need to restore competitiveness rather than trying to mitigate uncompetitiveness. The mitigation -- purposely -- erodes support for the actual solution by making the abuses just tolerable enough to stymie a revolt, while still being worse than the actual solution.

It's a bad trade off when the market is competitive, companies are offering both alternatives and some consumers are willingly choosing that option because of some countervailing benefit like lower prices or better interest rates. The market was already providing both alternatives and some consumers were willingly, purposely choosing that option for a reason, so prohibiting it is a harm.

> This is not how government is intended to work, there are checks and balances intentionally. You cannot cut off and investigate, you investigate then cut off or else this process can be abused.

Checks and balances are generally about preventing the government from doing something unless there is broad consensus, because the government is a monumentally dangerous beast and having it do nothing is far less dangerous than having it do something bad. "A major part of the government doesn't want to do this, therefore it doesn't happen" is checks and balances.

> The current evidence already indicates this may not be in good faith (see Verizon contract cancellation).

There is obviously a potential conflict of interest when the government changes suppliers and the new supplier is associated with a government official, but that isn't the end of the investigation. The next question is, what are the terms? Is the government paying Starlink more or less than they were paying Verizon? If it's more, now you have a real objection. If it's not more, what's the problem? In that case they would be saving the taxpayer money, which is what they're supposed to be doing.

> You're being very generous to them, a good analogy they have catchy marketing materials with great use of jargon and theoretical whitepapers, but client experience with the product is very different.

They're humans. Humans are imperfect and reality is complicated. A lot of people want them to fail, which is ridiculous. Let them succeed if they can manage it. Maybe they won't, but they're the ones who won the last election so they're the ones who get to make the attempt right now.

Your last point is the basis of my argument. Humans are imperfect and reality is complicated.

Cutting and reintroducing programs has real implications in the short term for those individuals at the receiving end, even if it is ultimately reintroduced in the long term. People have monthly mortgages and have to eat daily.

This also goes for the second point. It is not a Faustian bargain as there is no such thing as a perfect market in the real world, primarily because of imperfect information. Humans are also a resource interacting in that market, leave it to the free market and people will literally die, as resources can be made redundant/obsolete in the market. This is simply untenable and no market can ever truly be laissez-faire.

Your comment on checks and balances is exactly my point, the government cannot willy nilly go in a different direction, the scale of government means there is inertia and displacement that can impact individuals.

Our governments ever since the enlightenment have been crafted with progressivism in mind. What point is a market in a democracy if it is cruel and serves only a select set of individuals, a lottery rather than there to improve the human condition.

I would never want someone to fail so long as they're acting in good faith and it doesn't screw me or others over. But in the same breath if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck...

> Cutting and reintroducing programs has real implications in the short term for those individuals at the receiving end, even if it is ultimately reintroduced in the long term. People have monthly mortgages and have to eat daily.

The same goes for the programs or rules that should be removed. The existing social assistance system has overlapping benefits phase outs that prevent lower income people from making a little more money because they money is then lost to the phase outs. It's a poverty trap.

Likewise, a lot of poorly-crafted regulations destroy jobs and then people can't make ends meet because they're unemployed or had to take a job with lower pay. These people have to eat too.

> It is not a Faustian bargain as there is no such thing as a perfect market in the real world, primarily because of imperfect information.

It isn't expected to be perfect. It's expected to be better than the alternative.

The general problem is that imperfect information applies more to the government trying to make rules for strangers than it does to people who are steeped in the details of their own lives. Nobody has perfect information but people know their own lives better than members of Congress do.

> Your comment on checks and balances is exactly my point, the government cannot willy nilly go in a different direction, the scale of government means there is inertia and displacement that can impact individuals.

The issue is that it goes in both directions. If the inertia is in the wrong direction then there needs to be a way to promptly stop it.

Whereas if the government doesn't prohibit you from doing something which is nominally bad for you, you still have the option to not do it of your own volition. If it's actually not in your interest to do it.

> What point is a market in a democracy if it is cruel and serves only a select set of individuals, a lottery rather than there to improve the human condition.

A lottery is better than the house deciding when to put their finger on the scale.

You're describing problems that don't exist or at least are a lesser problem than those that do.

You can't genuinely tell me someone on food stamps is/should be more worried about being caught in a poverty trap than ensuring they have their next meal.

Those steeped in the details of their lives will intuitively know they're been screwed, doesn't mean they have the information on hand to resolve this. Take a job negotiation for instance, in theory they know they're being given a low ball offer, but the risk/reward with a lack of perfect information means they won't take the risk and will just accept the offer. Much like taking action against a bank instead of the CFPB, they probably would win but they could also go bankrupt if it doesn't go their way. (The stakes are much higher for them than those with money and power, and thus unbalanced).

And if the scale is naturally leaning with no finger on the scale? (As I say imperfect market and world).

Sadly not everyone has a golden spoon or the starting capital to leverage their position in the world.

You speak from a viewpoint of privilege.

> You can't genuinely tell me someone on food stamps is/should be more worried about being caught in a poverty trap than ensuring they have their next meal.

Absolutely they should, because the poverty trap is the reason they're in such dire straits.

You have someone who works but doesn't make a lot of money, so is eligible for all of these programs. They don't have the capacity to become "rich" in any feasible way, but there are ways they could make $10,000 or $20,000 more than they do now, with some trade offs like accepting a job with higher commuting costs or moving to an area with a higher cost of living etc.

But if they take the higher paying job, they lose their benefits. The other job paid $15,000 more and required them to increase their costs by $5000/year, but that would have left them $10,000 ahead, until making more money causes them to lose $12,000/year to benefits phase outs and higher taxes.

Now suppose you remove the benefits and give them the money back in the form of lower taxes. It wouldn't even have to be all of it -- there is a $10,000 surplus to be had by getting rid of the poverty trap. If they lose $12,000 in benefits but got even a $3000 tax cut they'd be $1000 ahead of the status quo, because then they could take the better job.

Meanwhile in terms of the government budget, revenue neutral would be to give them a $12,000 tax cut even against the income from the higher paying job, and then they would be $10,000 ahead of the status quo because you removed the poverty trap.

> Take a job negotiation for instance, in theory they know they're being given a low ball offer, but the risk/reward with a lack of perfect information means they won't take the risk and will just accept the offer.

"Low ball offer" implies an offer below market. Someone would take this offer, why? There is more than one employer. Below market by definition means the other employers are offering more. Unless that employer is offering some countervailing benefit, there is no reason to take it instead of going across the street. Even if you need money right now, there are many jobs that will hire anyone with a pulse with no expectation that you stay there any longer than it takes to find a better job. How is any employer supposed to force you to take their job for below-market pay in the absence of a cartel?

> Much like taking action against a bank instead of the CFPB, they probably would win but they could also go bankrupt if it doesn't go their way.

You don't actually go bankrupt from filing a claim in small claims court. And then you stop using that bank and leave bad reviews so that other people stop using that bank.

But that isn't even most of what CFPB was doing. It was often things like banning aggressive collections practices even when the bank was going after someone legitimately in default. Obviously nobody likes debt collectors, but if more people borrow money and don't pay it back then the banks either have to charge higher interest rates or stop making those loans. Pretending you can ban those practices without any trade off is screwing the people who need those loans and don't default.

> And if the scale is naturally leaning with no finger on the scale?

Then someone is still putting their finger on the scale while pretending they're not, and you should be trying to stop them from doing that rather than using it to rationalize further corruption.

Bias doesn't balance. If Republicans are diverting money to affluent retirees, you can't counteract that by having Democrats divert money to healthcare companies, you're just taking even more from the people the money is coming from, which is ultimately the working class.

> You speak from a viewpoint of privilege.

This is an appeal to emotion, not an argument. There are a wide variety of policies that are intuitively attractive because their first order effects seem good until you consider their ultimate consequences. Many of those policies get enacted because they don't work, or even do the opposite of what they're claimed to do (e.g. rent control), when the people who benefit from the problem have a more sophisticated understanding than the people being impacted by it.

Assistance programs also tend to be implemented in ways that satisfy a politician's checkbox to claim they did something without actually doing something. For example, if you have no dependents, do you know what the maximum income is before you're ineligible for the earned income tax credit? It's equivalent to working full time for less than $9/hour. That's less than the minimum wage in two thirds of the states. So if you make even minimum wage you get zero and the maximum you could possibly get without dependents is only a few hundred dollars a year. EITC is potentially one of the strongest, most efficient methods of transferring wealth to the working class and we've set it up so that hardly anybody receives it. Less than 10% of the population is eligible for it at all (and those mostly as a result of having dependents) and most of them only get a pittance because they're almost but not quite making enough for it to to be fully phased out, despite still not making very much. It exists because every single economist on both sides thinks it's a good idea and then the phase outs are set to neutralize the benefit because politicians don't want something that allocates money to actually helping people when they could be allocating that money to their cronies.

Meanwhile money gets allocated to things like government housing projects which seem almost purposely designed to shovel money into the pockets of connected contractors while making no dent in the housing affordability problem and concentrating poverty into areas that then become slums controlled by gangs. People are finally starting to realize that these programs are net negative after decades of evidence that they're a disaster, but even now, when they try to remove their funding, we get articles like this, interviewing people who are obviously sympathetic as if the existence of people who need help is a way to justify a program that doesn't work:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/affordable-housing-thr...

Taking money from programs like that and giving it to people as actual money is a good thing whether in the form of lower taxes or otherwise. The way to solve the housing availability crisis is by building more market rate housing.