20% and no more with a suggestion how to achieve the impossible

29 Mar 2011. I keep arguing -- to no avail -- with my liberal friends about taxes and spending. None have changed their views nor am I innocent, for neither had I to this point. Something is amiss. Being fiscally conservative, for smaller government and less authoritarian oversight I am going to change my mind before them (to show who are really the inflexible ones). So I accept that we should assure care for the needy. We should provide for the national defense. We should assure the highest quality education (here however I can’t resist making the point that since the 1070’s doubling of real dollar expenditures on education has had no effect on student achievement. Here we can halve expenditures without affecting outcomes. Why not?) We should ensure that health care is affordable. We should ensure that the United States has the highest levels of individual freedom in the world. Ditto for private enterprise. No one should go hungry. Everyone should have adequate (not audacious or lavish) shelter . As the fiscally conservative person I am I merely say that local, state and federal governments do this without taking more than 20% of gross domestic product. This is a lot of money and it grows as the economy grows.
How is this to be achieved. It’s really simple. Make those in government who want to do more find a way to do it. That is, make it part of their job expectations to become more efficient, delivering better and more services for lower and lower costs (so more different things can be done). This means those who spend the money not only have an incentive to reduce fraud waste and abuse (the usual boogey men) but also have an incentive to finding better and cheaper ways of doing what they are doing. In other words, government has to be ruthlessly efficient, thoroughly modern, willing to change, open to new ideas, honest. One way to make these incentives real is to tie pay to a percentage of the savings that efficiency, speed, and simplicity that the changes introduce into the system. I think government workers are like all people; they want to be secure, well-off, not harm others. Providing them a means of increasing their pay will work wonders. Further, if the pay raises of individuals are linked to the savings they are personally responsible for creating, then you will really see hustle. In fact, some individuals could become exceedingly rich in government service (save a billion get a $100,000 raise, and provide $999,900,000 to apply to other programs). There is a downside I have to mention. A lot of people who aren’t interested in finding faster and cheaper methods of doing things is going to get pretty envious of someone who is. Further, applying this method to local and state governments is going to create a lot of problems for the public service union leadership. That’s okay. Everyone needs a problem or two to work on. It makes life interesting.