Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Apr 5 2022 10:47am)
We allowed companies to merge to basically infinity. There is no lower threshold for cost-to-benefit when they are as large as they are now. Even if they are only saving 0.01% the profit is so massive that it warrants a team of lawyers to save.
We also used welfare to subsidize those companies wages, instead of making them pay a living wage and benefits. We still have a garbage healthcare system purely to subsidize hospitals, pharma companies, and insurance companies even though the most conservative estimates say we would say hundreds of billions a year with even a generous national plan. We got rid of systems that worked amazingly, like a lot of what the post office did, for the same reason.
We spent like a drunken sailor on everything that pumped up corporations instead of the public good because a segment of the population (mostly boomers) wanted their pensions and retirement accounts to keep growing faster. Now we're living with the results. A fundamentally broken system with crumbling infrastructure and nobody willing to sacrifice for the greater good.
We spent like a drunken sailor on entitlements, war, and welfare. I say "war", and not defense, because defense spending as a percentage of GDP has actually been falling.
When you hand out welfare, you're impacting individual behavior. When you can get paid $100 for working, and $25 in welfare, it beats working for $110. You're changing how people value their time. That's not Walmart's fault. They're reacting like everyone else to programs the government implemented.
Quote (Black XistenZ @ Apr 5 2022 12:52am)
Overall public spending has been on the rise, but an increasing share of it is going into social programs. Iirc, public spending on infrastructure, research and education has been outpaced by GDP growth.
When entitlement and social spending make up such a large part of the pie, what are you supposed to do? It crowds out other forms of spending.