Some Americans are obese and/or addicts, and you might think they'd spend their money badly. Others are not (and those others tend to have much higher incomes and thus pay more taxes).
Is there any way to take money from bad programs and redirecting them to less bad programs that does not involve cancelling programs?
And is there any way to cancel bad programs, in the current situation, that does not involve taking a flamethrower to a lot of things, and then reinstating the ones we shouldn't have burnt to the ground?
Because I think "you can't cancel any programs until you figure out a way to only cancel ones that should be cancelled and only redirect the funds to the best optimal use" is another way of saying, "you can't cancel any programs", which is another way of saying, "you can't fix this, give up, stop trying".
What makes you think that replanting will result in “good” programs? Why cut good programs? Seems arbitrary, especially when establishing a good government program is non-trivial.
The same reasons you think "tell Congress and the people Congress and the executive branch appoints to sort out what the good programs are ahead of time" will result in the good programs being kept.
If one is feasible, the other is feasible, because you'd be using the same sets of people to make the distinction. If neither is feasible...
Removing programs one by one just requires that the government can slowly change. Burn and replant requires the government can quickly change.
If one thinks the government cannot effectively quickly change (that is that ~600 decision makers their 300 million stakeholders will struggle with alignment the more complex the ask per moment) then it should bias one towards more incremental approaches.
I think it's plausibly easier to quickly change than slowly change the government, due to new bureaucracies being less ossified than old ones, although the transition costs are also higher.
Will the fire that burns the field also take all the terrible straw men with it? If so, it does sound a little tempting.
It's a safe assumption that the government of a country of 330 million people is going to be very complicated, have a lot of moving parts, and it's going to have quite a lot of parts that look bad to any given person. This is because 330 million is a LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE. They have different perspectives, different interests, different valuations of what's good and bad and every single one of them is working from a substantially different set of information.
A government full of programs that grew up organically, bit by bit, is certainly going to be messy and confusing and unpretty. But a government that results from burning everything to the ground and replanting[1] is going to represent exactly one small set of interests, perspectives and valuations. You'd better have really, REALLY high confidence that those interests are extremely well in-line with yours, and that the perspectives and valuations result from accurate information and sound judgement. Because if they don't, if they're hostile to you and yours or out of touch with reality, you literally just torched your safety net.
[1] Taking it on faith that the replanting happens.
A government opening to replanting promises to hear the concerns of people wanting programs reopened and to let them make their case. This would also weed out many programs with very weak cases.
"the nature of the Constitution is simply such that there is a better case for the president being able to spend less money than appropriated than more"
All around us are examples of success being achieved by pruning net negative options, redirecting, and slowly honing in on the optimal outcome – business, horticulture, evolution, science, navigation, health, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, that is not to say that there's never a place for catastrophic change – revolutions, forest fires, demolition, creative destruction. But the cost of that is enormous, total, and it takes a painfully long time to build back, and even longer to get to something like "thriving".
Like everything else, it's a tradeoff, and if you care about the outcome, you have to understand both sides of the ledger. It's not enough to be displeased with the status quo, and with the unbearable patience and work required to improve slowly. You have to understand the costs – not least in terms of patience and work – of burning it all down, building it back, and going without it in the meantime. If you want to get to success faster, you also need a crystal clear vision for what you're trying to achieve, that you can share with people and get buy-in for. Otherwise it'll just be more burning.
I don't know how you, personally, make that calculation. What worries me, however, is that I don't see a lot of evidence of people in charge making the calculation at all, nor sharing a vision or direction other than "not this".
The PEPFAR issue is a good example, as it looks very much like someone taking a torch to something they don't understand, with no clear goal other than to burn things down. Feels a lot like the summer of 2020, TBH, just with different players and methods. Just dumb iconoclasm.
I don't think it is feasible to expect our government to prioritize good programs. The best we can do is probably indeed to torch programs on the assumption that they tend to be bad and thus nothing is better than something.
PEPFAR was not established during the Continental Congress, as an inviolable part of the foundation of the nation, it was established in 2003 by George Bush during his first term. So if it is possible to create a good programme in the 00s it should also be possible to create good programmes in the 20s.
What sense I can make out of it is that there are complaints about creep, that it has expanded from "treating AIDS" to other areas and gone beyond its original remit. I can't speak as to how accurate that is.
But if I go by Wikipedia, PEPFAR itself was a replacement for previous efforts considered less effective. I'm sure the people involved in those programmes also complained hat they were doing good and closing them down would be a terrible idea:
"[Condoleeza Rice] also told [Bush] that HIV/AIDS was a central problem in Africa but that the United States was spending only $500 million per year on global AIDS, with the money spread across six federal agencies, without a clear strategy for curbing the epidemic."
So it seems possible at least theoretically to shut down one or more programmes and replace them with something better suited to the situation as it now is. PEPFAR itself has undergone that change, with a reorganisation in 2008 and expansion into new countries:
"When PEPFAR was signed into law 15 resource-limited countries with high HIV/AIDS prevalence rates were designated to receive the majority of the funding. The 15 "focus countries" were Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zambia. Most of the $15 billion for the program was to be spent on these focus countries, $4 billion was allocated for programs elsewhere, and for HIV/AIDS research (the other $1 billion was contributed to the Global Fund).
With the reauthorization of PEPFAR in 2008 there was a shift away from the "focus country" approach by authorizing the development of a Partnership Framework model for regions and countries, with the aim of ensuring long-term sustainability and country leadership. Through bilaterally-funded programs, PEPFAR works in partnership with host nations to support treatment, prevention and care for millions of people in more than 85 countries. Partnership Frameworks provide a 5-year joint strategic framework for cooperation between the U.S. Government, the partner government, and other partners to combat HIV/AIDS in the host country through service delivery, policy reform, and coordinated financial commitments."
I mean it is possible, but as Scott points out, is it a priority? What are the odds and the marginal gains of picking a program in the top 1% of success and improving it *further* rather than picking some completely disastrous bottom 1% shitshow that you literally couldn't make worse if you try?
Realistically, this is not a "we can make this better" thing, it's a "we don't care shit about some Africans dying of AIDS, we'd rather save the money even if it means then wasting on something completely inefficient".
1) replanting comes with massive overhead - most likely, most of the institutional knowledge is lost, and the knowledgeable and dedicated people no longer available, when you decide to "replant". Especially since the stated goal of Project 2025 is to replace employees dedicated to their respective institution (the so-called "deep state") with ones dedicated to the current president, so the best people wouldn't even be eligible.
2) who do you expect to do that? The current administration obviously doesn't bother to find out in advance what's worth saving, so why would they bother ro find out retrospectively?
>why would they bother ro find out retrospectively?
Presumably because people would notice that shit is hitting the fan, as they did in this instance, and because they want to not look like/be cartoon villains.
"because they want to not look like/be cartoon villains" - forgive me if I don't have a lot of confidence in that motivation, after Trump has threatened to invade a NATO ally and suggested to occupy Gaza (after expelling the Palestinians).
If anyone knew how to reliably create good organizations that infallibly and efficiently pursue their goal from scratch the world would be a very different place. "See how they go, weed out the bad and keep the good" is pretty much the state of the art.
The problems with trying to do a massive overhaul of an airplane mid-flight are pretty easy to understand. If you cancelled Medicaid tomorrow and it took you even a few months to stand up the new Good Medicaid, incredible amounts of suffering would happen in the interim. As we're seeing right now, the same goes for research spending, overseas deployments, etc. etc. etc.
This plane you can’t land, or at least you really really shouldn’t. And not even trying to fix things (i.e. “don’t do that while in mid-air”) is going to result in uncontrolled involuntary landing.
It’s a horrible set of choices, but sometimes you get those.
It would be nice to have a gang of maintenance people who could carefully and quickly swap out only the parts that need it, and a long term expert crew who could be trusted to advise and assist in good faith. Unfortunately the only maintenance gang the passengers are in the mood to give access, tools and materiel are ones that have never been anywhere near most of the crew, because the crew seem to have made a living out of getting the plane into this state and have no intention of stopping unless forced.
That particular maintenance gang are good at angle grinders and plasma cutters, and figure you can just wed back bits after determining they were necessary after all. But they don’t know what the long term expert crew know and they listen to the latter with skepticism and a jaundiced look at the written logs.
But the alternative isn’t some hypothetical better nicer maintenance gang from the Land of Counterfactuals, it’s no maintenance until the crash. Just look at the trend graphs.
Everyone is going to argue "But my program is a good program, not one of the bad ones!"
PEPFAR seems to be one of the good ones, and I think there is an obligation to help others. But I'm a Christian and I get that from divine guidance, something which has been sneered at as a source of moral authority and instruction. So if we're now asking the questions "Why am I obligated to help people who are complete strangers?" that's not a bad thing; when was the last debate about public morality? Just saying "Because we should" is not good enough: what are your reasons?
It would be wild if Trump, of all people, was responsible for kicking off a public debate about "why should we do good?" and getting agreement on a system of ethics for the state.
Well then you get into the question of “why try to be a good person if not because of the fear of divine punishment”? Which is a problem if you don’t believe in some sort of objective morality to ground everything.
The answer I’ve arrived that is that (most) people have a conscience either pre-installed through selection for prosocial behavior or socially conditioned into them, and said conscience must be appeased to remain psychologically stable. To do this, you can either do good (as defined in your own particular worldview but hopefully having something to do with reducing suffering) or you can do non-good and try to convince yourself it is good via a series of “copes” ie. faulty arguments that are intentionally under-scrutinized because they serve to appease the conscience. Copes are an inferior strategy for appeasing your conscience because deep down you probably are aware it’s cope. So the best way to live is to genuinely try to be a good person, and to do so in a logically consistent fashion, while avoiding “copes”.
Pretty much any argument one could deploy against PEPFAR strongly seems like cope.
I admit that the problem with this is there’s no known solution for convincing the general population to behave this way, but that applies to pretty much every framework.
Why be a good person without fear of divine punishment? Because cooperation beats defection as a long term survival strategy, as groups are stronger than individuals. That's your objective morality, if you need one. It isn't complicated, it predates religion, and it's almost certainly why we evolved to have the prosocial behaviors you mention in the first place. Apes together strong.
And then we hit the disparity between what is good for the survival of the species, and what is good for the survival of the individual, and bad actors arise and punishment has to come into play to ensure people keep playing nice.
The real problem is scarcity, as usual. Specifically scarcity of information. In a tribal society it's easy to watch for bad actors defecting and punish them accordingly, and unfortunately all our social mechanisms for dealing with bad actors revolve around that small scale paradigm. In a country of hundreds of millions and systems of endlessly increasing complexity, those social mechanisms collapse and bad actors run rampant without consequences.
I would say with AIDS, like with many other diseases, there is also a general selfish reason: because we want diseases to generally have as little a chance to spread and mutate as possible.
But the altruistic reason can very well be "because human life and prosperity is a terminal goal in and of itself". You don't really need any particular justification or rationalization for it. I like being healthy, I imagine everyone else in the world is also a sentient being like me since we're all built the same, I imagine everyone else also wants to be healthy internally. If I am in a position to make someone else healthy at tiny expense to me, why not do it?
If your aim is to cut all foreign aid programs, because their effect is net-negative, you gotta prioritize the most obviously net-positive programs first.
It's about divide and conquer. All programs involve the corrupt running net-negative/harmful/detrimental programs and the virtuous running their beneficial/net-positive programs. The corrupt will only care about their net-negative programs and not help the virtuous. Once all the net-positives are gone, you can then move on to remove all of them. The corrupt will not get any protection from those annoying, virtuous, altruistic saints, as they're no longer invested in protecting the rest of the foreign aid.
Then maybe once they're are all gone, their political power entirely broken, you could try rehiring the best of the saints and your entire foreign aid department might actually become a net-positive, trustworthy institution. Which at the moment it obviously is not, since it funds net-negative programs and everyone knows it. Obviously someone should go to hell for this, but since this is a democracy, sending them there before their natural death is not an option.
Imagine, you tried going after the net-negatives first. You're falsely assuming that those don't do anything and that you've got infinite political power to do whatever you like, in whatever order you like. But those programs convert money into clout and connections. Instead of saints, now you're fucking with a bunch of sociopath pull peddlers now. The first thing they do, is instrumentalise the saints for their PR.
And, no, you're not allowed to assume Hypothetical Optimised Congress where a majority, or even a plurality, of both houses is Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Or rather, feel free to assume whatever you want and do whatever you want with that, but it won't move me, or get me or the millions like me to listen, or believe you're trying anything but feel good about... feel good about what, exactly? Noting that someone will have to put PEPFAR back? Claiming that hypotheticals in moral reasoning don't matter because "it's all fake"?
Too bad, I was kind of hoping to discuss the pluses and minuses of the CATGIRL Act.
Seriously, I think the red team-blue team culture war is so ingrained at this point it's just going to swing back and forth until the Chinese eat our lunch.
Why do you think the White House will stop changing hands to the other party every 4-12 years? It's not Trump won in a true landslide. It was still a close election, just less close than is typical these days.
There are more or less stupid ways to cut government. The last time anything even halfway reasonable was attempted was in the 90s. It involved government audits and was headed by Congress and supported by the President. After that, we had a President who waged two massive wars that blew up the deficit (Bush), and then we had a half-hearted attempt by Obama in his second term to do the same thing that was done in the 90s. (the Republicans didn’t bite and Obama didn’t try particularly hard.) Neither Trump 1.0 nor Biden had any interest in taking on the deficit. What makes you think that haphazard cuts to government are the only, much less “best” way to cut government, when we have an approach from the 90s that worked well and has mostly just been left untried since then?
Who was it you thought would be trying it now? The minority party, who are too busy rabidly attacking everything they can reach in the majority party? Or the majority party, who haven't managed to even try this since the 90s? (And are also, with less urgency, busy attacking anything they can reach in the minority party.)
"Yes, we have this method, but it's impossible for any of the people who would have to try it to try it, any more than the second through ninth-best, so we shouldn't try this tenth-best method that does have a constituency and support and should give up instead."
Why does it have to happen this second? I’m not an arsonist; ensure the conditions are right (austerity Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader, austerity President) and one of the better methods will be viable. There’s already a reasonable constituency for this in Congress, we just don’t have a good President. I don’t want to torch the government right this second just because we don’t have the right conditions. Since these conditions have been achieved in the past (and probably will be again when Trump is out of office), I think it’s perfectly reasonable to achieve these conditions rather than flamethrower the government. You should try to explain why this needs to be done now in such a slapdash way, rather than being done later in the way I’ve described.
In the past, when those conditions were achieved, did the government shrink, and stay shrunk? And how often do the stars align for that?
And, if you had to put names to the people who are the constituency in *the current* Congress for this, who would the top... eh... twenty be? ("You don't know 20" isn't a disqualifier, by the way. But one Rand Paul and a half dozen fellow travellers doesn't qualify the careful-scalpel method as viable.)
Some things require constant attention - hot stoves and government deficits in a democratic society, for example. Neither one requires a flamethrower.
Freedom Caucus + New Democrat Coalition + Blue Dogs are a reasonable start, since these caucuses have a history of working for cuts to the deficit. These are about a quarter to a third of Congress depending on the year; non-caucus members have also joined these efforts when the conditions are right (that is to say, when they’re badgered by a Speaker of the House or a President of their party to vote for an austerity bill). Since many Republican and Democratic speakers have come out of these caucuses and tried pushing for austerity bills, I would say that the major missing piece is a President who can push for this and enlist his counterparts in the opposite party. Trump can’t do this because he’s polarizing, and Biden didn’t have any interest in deficit reduction, but it’s likely that if we elect a President who isn’t a warmonger, we have a reasonable chance of getting someone who’ll cut the deficit like Clinton and Gingrich did in the 90s. Not as fun as watching the world blow up, but green shade budget balancing rarely is.
Nothing is ever going to "stay shrunk". That's just not how it works. You have to keep doing laundry. You have to keep doing dishes. You have to keep brushing your teeth. And the government has to rebalance its budget.
Burning and replanting, as people suggest, certainly is a method, but even then you're not creating a new system that's going to be infallible forever - at best you're paving the way to have to burn and replant again later on.
I'm not going to claim to know that it's better or worse, but the argument that it doesn't "permanently fix" anything is invalid for every possible change.
I'm not an arsonist in the literal sense that I don't burn down buildings (after all, most buildings are privately owned rather than government buildings). But the government is not like a civilian owner of a building, it is based on taxation of the governed and only exists with out support, and is thus subject to the results of elections. The analogy would thus not be to torching someone else's property, but demolishing some of your own, which is an entirely standard thing to do over time.
Why is it impossible to figure out which programs are bad, then take a flamethrower to them? Even people who disagree about whether a program to bring broadband to the rural US is a worthwhile program can agree on whether it is an is an effective program.
The plan for progra would include a budget and a timeline .. You could use simple criteria for torching: torch programs that are both over budget and more than 40% behind where timeline said they would be. Those guidelines are imperfect, but certainly better than torching everything.
Maybe you're just somebody who thinks great big fires are really cool and thrilling?
Happily, they're not torching everything, and never have been. Pausing a lot of stuff. Pausing implies the strong possibility of unpausing, which is the difference.
Now tell me about how your method has less collateral damage, i.e. less PEPFARs cut (and then reinstated after enough screaming and/or lobbying for it before Congress) than the one they're using.
You are suffering a lapse of logic here. My proposal is not an alternative to what is being done now. It is also not a method I think is great. It is an alternative to your proposal of taking a flamethrower to everything. I made my counter-proposal because you said eliminating programs by identifying the bad ones was impossible in practice so we'd have to just resort to torching everything. Coming up with something better than torching everything's a pretty low bar to clear.
It'd take too long, and you might lose the House in two years.
If you don't burn the whole thing down, the agencies will simply stonewall you on every level, and can easily drag the process out long enough. A rough sketch of a strategy an agency could employ: first, the head of the agency simply refuses to follow orders to cut the programs. And when fired, will file suit against you saying you don't have the right to fire him. Some Liberal court, say, the Ninth Circuit, will rule in his favor, and reinstate him, and then he'll stay in place until the Supreme Court weighs in. If you have appointed an Acting head in the interim, he'd be hamstrung by someone filing suit declaring that he has no authority to issue any orders. The Democrats then drag out the confirmation process for your replacement nominee. Maybe get him "credibly accused" of gang rape or something, and have a long show trial. If you manage to get your guy confirmed, then the lower-level members of the agency don't implement his directives. Maybe someone leaks a damaging story about him to the press, and get him to resign (and then you have to go through the whole confirmation thing again). If they DO start cutting a program or two, they do it in gradual and easily reversed way that will take years to fully wind down. And you have to do something like this at every single agency you want to implement changes in. And when the administration changes, every last one of them moves quickly to undo all your changes in less than a month.
The deep state is better thought of as a leaderless resistance with many independent cells, rather than a strictly hierarchical organization that can be decapitated. It takes … cruder methods to fight such a foe.
That makes sense. But if we start by torching everything wouldn’t there be the same massive bullshit phenomena at work in setting up sparser and better programs, so that nothing much gets set up? Also it seems like a lot of the cleared ground and freed up money could end going to new “programs” that are really just little oligarchies run by Trump favorites. Jared K. could be put in charge of the Florida Seaside Improvement Program, in which he takes ownership of all properties they don’t meet some bullshit code, and flips them for a lovely fat profit.
If some individual program is really that good, Congress can legislate for it directly instead of setting up "independent" administrative agencies that inexorably go rogue to manage a whole bunch of them at once, the majority of which are bad.
Okay, yeah, that kind of thing could happen, but when the other guys take office, they're not going to pretend the Florida Seaside Improvement Program is a nonpartisan independent agency run by career civil servants the President cannot fire at will. They'll promptly remove him, and put their own guys in charge. That regular churn will keep it from becoming too much of a nuisance. They would be bad, certainly, but the alternative looks like permanent oligarchies telling you you can't build on your land because the puddles on it are "navigable waterways" or something (see Sackett v. EPA). The "fat profit" they make is negligible; if you like, you can think of the election as a bet that you profit from when your guy wins. In expectation, it basically evens out.
A stable america will slow the collapse drastically.
Nation states are decaying, but if the middle east drops the charade, then russia then china but it takes 100 years for europe and america to balkanize it will be allot less violence and maybe segments of international trade still work and we get to have chips to store all the ebooks.
"Jared K. could be put in charge of the Florida Seaside Improvement Program, in which he takes ownership of all properties they don’t meet some bullshit code, and flips them for a lovely fat profit."
While horribly corrupt, that (ironically) would be better than the infamous eminent domain cases where property was seized in the name of civic development, then nothing happened (save that some people made a tidy profit). At least flipping derelict properties means that those properties are now either repaired and improved, or demolished so building on the site can go forward.
"Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 5–4, that the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner to further economic development does not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
...After the Court's decision, the city allowed a private developer to proceed with its plans; however, the developer was unable to obtain financing and abandoned the project, and the contested land remained an undeveloped empty lot.
...In spite of repeated efforts, the redeveloper (who stood to get a 91-acre (370,000 m2) waterfront tract of land for $1 per year) was unable to obtain financing, and the redevelopment project was abandoned. As of the beginning of 2010, the original Kelo property was a vacant lot, generating no tax revenue for the city. In the aftermath of 2011's Hurricane Irene, the now-closed New London redevelopment area was turned into a dump for storm debris such as tree branches and other vegetation. However, as of May 2022, a private developer was building 100 apartments, a 100-unit hotel, and a community center on the property.
Pfizer, whose employees were supposed to be the clientele of the Fort Trumbull redevelopment project, completed its merger with Wyeth, resulting in a consolidation of research facilities of the two companies. Pfizer chose to retain the Groton campus on the east side of the Thames River, closing its New London facility in late 2010 with a loss of over 1,000 jobs. That coincided with the expiration of tax breaks on the New London site that would have increased Pfizer's property tax bill by almost 400 percent.
After the Pfizer announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle, in November 2009, in its lead editorial called the Kelo decision infamous:
The well-laid plans of redevelopers, however, did not pan out. The land where Susette Kelo's little pink house once stood remains undeveloped. The proposed hotel-retail-condo "urban village" has not been built. And earlier this month, Pfizer Inc. announced that it is closing the $350 million research center in New London that was the anchor for the New London redevelopment plan, and will be relocating some 1,500 jobs."
Again ironically, the dissent on the Supreme Court decision included some of the infamous horrible conservative judges:
"The principal dissent was issued on June 25, 2005, by Justice O'Connor, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas. The dissenting opinion suggested that the use of this taking power in a reverse Robin Hood fashion — take from the poor, give to the rich — would become the norm, not the exception"
Shortly thereafter (after Kelo), a little town in Texas boldly tried to take the farm/home, its acreage fronting the highway, of an elderly mother and daughter we knew* (which homestead was incidentally protected by a conservation easement) - because here was some undeveloped land and the town "decided" it needed a ...
Target.
Why? Why would any town "need" a particular store?
Because, you see, the town five or ten miles down the road had gotten a Target. And so this town wanted to grab that tax revenue from its own Target.
(This is how America comes to look so depressingly the same at every highway exit ...)
In a *very* rare sound move, the state Lege passed a law that takings of private property couldn't be solely for private benefit.
*Ironically, they had moved there after their original homestead was taken some decades earlier, to build a lake in Dallas.
Yup! I was thinking that that was probably a large chunk of the motivation for doing all of these very fast and crude cuts. Many Thanks for the detailed scenarios.
Grr, the amount of collateral damage being done is astounding. Even setting aside all the damages to NSF, NIH, and CDC, one of the actions was to offer a buyout to everyone in the CIA. Umm - do they _want_ to lose the people who interpret spy satellite photos???
Yeah, there _are_ time constraints :-( but I'm really leery of how they are swinging the chainsaw. "Move fast and break things" is only sane for a _very_ specific kind of company, and even there, the idea is normally to _build_ a replacement service/product _first_, and let the competition break the legacy product.
EDIT: One other thing: I find it very ironic that the Trump administration is more-or-less following a "tear-it-all-down (maybe we'll build back later)" policy - which is typically one of the marks of left wing campus radicals. And not to their credit either.
Many Thanks! Hmm... Might work, might not. Depends partially on whether they can manage to filter and rehire before people find other jobs or move on in some other way.
By "administration" you mean Trump? By "ambition" you mean "occupying Greenland"? Sure, hire those people exclusively, what could possibly go wrong!
Historical side note: in Germany, public officials and soldiers swear an oath to the constitution. They explicitly do not swear an oath to the current administration, or the current chancellor, or the current president, because the last time that was required, ...let's just say "bad stuff happened".
We've occupied Greenland so long that there's been time for the DEI-ers to meditate the change of name of our operation there. Ironically, to something much less cool. (More ridiculous goes without saying.)
What actually is the goal here? Are you trying to set up an effective government that does good things but *doesnt* have institutional memory, a core of workers with experience and the ability to fight back when someone tries to cut it down? If so, I think you’re imagining something that doesn’t actually make any sense.
It's way richer, allowing for a much better standard of living. I do not attribute that to the competence of the government.
And among the countries that have a standard of living anywhere comparable, the US government might be the least intrusive by a long shot.
None of my criticisms should be taken to imply that there is anywhere on the face of the earth that is better. The comparison is only between America as it is, and America as it could be (and occasionally America as it once was).
I would say this is the optimal time for Republicans to cut programs, controlling all three branches of government. Surely if they think USAID has a lot of waste they must have specific programs in mind already? If they don't it's just shouting.
This is going to depend heavily on definitions. Is an authority without appropriations a program? Is letting appropriations lapse and not providing more funds a cancelation? Where does imposing new requirements become a new program?
Now congress definitely prefers to be seen as doing stuff not not doing stuff. If you want a specific (unsure on how representative example), the 2024 WRDA (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4367/text) has specific authorizations and deauthorizations as well as a bunch of modifications you could look at.
That's kinda besides the point isn't it? During the budget cycle the executive requests funding for specific programs and Congress provides them some amount of deference. Probably even more deference if they explicitly calling out 'we don't want funding for program X because it is wasteful for reasons A, B and C'
"'Because I think "you can't cancel any programs until you figure out a way to only cancel ones that should be cancelled and only redirect the funds to the best optimal use'"
That would be an excellent argument if anyone were actually saying that. You'd be well advised to take it and put it on the shelf until you find somebody who is.
There is QUITE a gap between saying "don't ever do anything that runs the risk of cancelling good programs" and "don't cancel the programs that offer breathtakingly high cost-effectiveness at saving lives." This isn't a "oops, we thought this was somewhat net-negative and it was actually slightly net-positive" situation. This was a "literally ANY amount of effort would have determined this particular program was a winner" situation.
To say it a little pithier, you're claiming the argument is "don't ever shoot unless you can hit a bullseye" when in fact the argument is "if one of your first shots hits a child in the face, maybe we should take your gun away."
Now, there's an open question about whether cancelling a program like this was a result of incompetence (i.e. not doing the bare minimum research to understand how useful it was) or malice (i.e. seeing these particular foreigners dying as a good thing). I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which is more plausible. Any, y'know, which is scarier.
>There is QUITE a gap between saying "don't ever do anything that runs the risk of cancelling good programs" and "don't cancel the programs that offer breathtakingly high cost-effectiveness at saving lives."
Not according to Scott's reasoning. His example is a program of high effectiveness, but his reasoning is that since the money from the program goes back to the general pool, you need to compare the program to that, which would imply that we keep even programs of low effectiveness since they are still more effective than the general pool. He just doesn't spell this out.
Well, yes, if your goal is to raise the median effectiveness of the programs you start with the bottom 50-th percentile and replace THOSE, hoping the new ones will do better. That way median go up.
If you start with the very best odds are you won't be able to do better and median go down.
This analysis you could apply to any kind of utilitarian reasoning: "You say we should use criterion X to decide if we should do Y, but edge cases are hard to adjudicate, so you're basically saying we can't ever do Y; or you're saying we should grind through the data until all Knightian uncertainty is resolved and we can find the true utilitarian result."
Two issues with this:
1. Edge cases and acceptable risks are a pretty general feature of utilitarian reasoning, there are various ways of addressing them, there's no particular reason for Scott to spend time on them, and utilitarian reasoning doesn't commit you to a particular strategy for dealing with real-world uncertainty.
2. The examples Scott focused on are not edge cases, and he repeatedly made this point.
>This analysis you could apply to any kind of utilitarian reasoning:
Sure.
If you don't distinguish between action and inaction, then plain EA-style utilitarianism implies that if you don't immediately spend all the money you have (except that necessary for survival, staying employed, etc.) on helping poor people around the world, you are a horrible person for being complicit in their suffering.
There are ways in which EA tries to get around this. I don't find them convincing, but convincing or not, Scott isn't using them here--his argument is basically taking seriously the EA reductio ad absurdum that says you have to give everything away. Of course this argument applies to any sort of utilitarian reasoning about helping people. And that's what's wrong with it.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Basically, there are two ways to cut waste/abuse
1. Pause/stop everything and then restart those programs that can be justified
2. Audit all activities and stop those that are wasteful
Note that both methods are used by private companies: the second as part of the normal functioning of a company and the first in times of crisis. Both methods are legitimate and depend on the scale of the abuse, available time and available resources. I don't really have an opinion which way is more appropriate for the US at the moment.
It's not a time of crisis. Trump thinks it's a crisis, because he really likes saying "I will declare an emergency" and "the worst X in history," but our fiscal situation is not so dire that you can't wait a couple months to take the obviously good programs out of the firing line first.
If nothing else, the current budget funds the government through March. No matter what insanity you force through with executive orders, you still have to wait until March for the money to actually get redirected to the hypothetical better programs. May as well use that time to check if you're accidentally going to kill thousands of people.
But isn't Scott's counter argument just: foreign aid is ~1% of the budget, so if you want to cut a lot of waste you can do so without touching foreign aid, which we now contains one of the best programs the government has (PEPFAR)? Now, obviously I see why it is politically toxic to say "we're going to cut a bunch of government programs but not foreign aid" but cutting foreign aid can still be bad even if it is politically convenient.
The answer to your first question is No, but your second is yes. Plenty of presidents have created commissions with the goal to investigate which programs were bad, then based on their recommendations, canceled those. This is the only time I can remember a president canceling more, than reinstating the funding later. And that’s assuming he actually plans on reinstating any of the.
? The point is, all we should be doing is taking away money from *bad* programs! Not taking away monry from unusually-good programs for reason, like PEPFAR!
The people canceling the programs literally have the philosophy that the government sucks at allocating money, so they don't believe at all that the money would end up in the actual best program.
There is this pattern I've seen a lot in business and marriages and the like where one person will say "we need to do both X and Y. I'm going to do X, and leave Y to you." Where X is the fun and easy thing and Y is the boring difficult thing.
Even dividing the programs into "good" and "bad" is generally wrong. Some are more effective than others, but they're also generally working on different problems.
that does not involve taking a flamethrower to a lot of things, and then reinstating the ones we shouldn't have burnt to the ground
Is not an option.
As a rule, after you fire people, and blow up their programs, some you need don't come back, and it takes significant amounts of time for them to get back to work, (potentially years), and to rehire people.
In short, cancelling a program and reinstating it is a great way of turning good programs into bad ones.
In the meantime, the problem they were facing goes uncontrolled and gets worse, and now if it was a real problem you need to dig out.
In short, cancelling programs that you actually need really is prohibitably expensive, and cancelling ones that you do not still might cost money now to save money later.
I expect many readers will make very incorrect guesses about this article based on that summary, so I feel I should clarify that it's not discussing some sort of legal earmarking process, it's talking about illegally refusing to pay your taxes.
I consider this clearly unethical (except ~in situations where it would be ethical to violently overthrow your government) and I think a large majority of people would broadly agree with me.
I read through this. I wouldnt say the "you" in this sentence actually applies to most people who read it.
There is one weird trick to not pay taxes if you dont work for an employer, have no us based interest bearing accounts, brokerage accounts or property.
> I doubt anyone has a specific finite foreigner-to-American ratio which is more than 1000x
I genuinely think that if you polled Americans, most people would value an American life at more than 1000 Africans. Hell, there's people who would say that number is infinite, seeing as they see those lives as having less than zero value. There's people saying that in this very blog's comments section, you can't just pretend they don't exist.
I think we're agreeing. You're saying many people would say the number is infinite, I'm saying few people would say it's finite but greater than 1000x.
Blockade of Africa cost 2K Brits, freeing 150K slaves back in the early to mid-1800s so he might not be. Then again there are far more Africans as a percentage of world population than ever before, and people are far less Christian.
I think the big problem here is conflating "how valuable is this?" with "how much should the US government spend on it?"
As a human, I believe that Coca-Cola shareholders and Pepsi shareholders are equally valuable and worthy of respect. However, as a shareholder in Coca-Cola, I believe that the Coca-Cola company should spend one hundred percent of its money trying to benefit Coca-Cola shareholders, and zero percent of its money trying to benefit Pepsi shareholders. I have nothing against Pepsi shareholders as people (and I might even be one myself) but doing nice things for them is just not the job of the Coca-Cola company.
It's the job of a country's government to serve the interests of the citizens of that country, nothing else.
This just questions the legitimacy of taxation. The enterprise of taxation presupposes the legitimacy of the collective imposing their will on the country and redistributing their assets as they see fit, rather than just independently paying for things, individually.
It's perfectly fine to question the legitimacy of the enterprise from first principles and adopt an alternative more libertarian perspective in which taxation is inherently evil and should be minimized to the greatest extent possible, but that's mostly orthogonal to the matter at hand.
If collective imposed redistribution to foreigners is illegitimate due to the mechanism, then using that mechanism to direct funds towards domestic causes is similarly illegitimate.
Yes, taxation inherently has legitimacy problems that voluntary donations lack. That's why it is commonly justified with the claim that individuals can't purchase national defense, being a public good. Charitable donations are not a public good however, and the existence of them shows it's possible without a government taxing to provide it.
No, that's not all there is to that position. One can concede the legitimacy of taxation but still question the legitimacy of things that the taxes go to pay for. I for example question where in the Constitution charity of any kind is authorized, let alone charity to foreigners.
I think there's a good argument for saying that the government needs to stop being an organisation that just does whatever random thing people want it to do and focuses on things only a government can do. The point* is that if you've got an all-singing all-dancing flailing omnistate, it may as well flap a tentacle in a direction that saves 250,000 Africans instead of flapping it in a direction that does nothing.
In fact, some of the money Coca-Cola spends does also benefit Pepsi. For instance, Coke and Pepsi both pay various trade groups and lobbying organizations to make the market and regulatory environments more favorable for soda generally. That this benefits their competitors is not a disincentive, since it makes the pie for both of them bigger than it otherwise would be.
The analogy to PEPFAR is that the United States buys several things that are in the interests of its citizens, such as "soft power," a better global reputation, a more stable world, and national pride, for what amounts to a very small amount of money. The fact that Africans also benefit doesn't make those things not in the national interest.
Is a State not supposed to ever do anything based on ethical principles of any kind? A State that valued foreign lives at zero is not neutral. You could say it only values those as proxies for reputation and stability and pride but that's just the same argument you can make for individuals doing good. "Uhh I didn't do it for you, I did it because it makes ME look better!"
> A State that valued foreign lives at zero is not neutral
Again we're getting confused between values and responsibilities.
The fact that a particular institution doesn't do a particular thing does not mean that any of the people in that institution think it's a worthless thing to do, just that it is outside the scope of that institution. Fixing potholes in Buenos Aires is a fine idea, but not something that the Moose Jaw Macrame Society should be spending its money on.
A state doesn't exist because of ethics. A state exists because some entity will claim a geographic monopoly on violence. In the US, that entity is subject to elections.
There are also many places where we put in lots of money and gained gratitude, like Germany and Japan. But in any case, the recipients of the aid are not the only people we build up goodwill with.
Yes, those countries are great allies (maybe until three weeks ago). Rebuilding a first-world country is more likely to result in people seeing and understanding your contributions.
Bush said the Iraqis would welcome us with sweets and flowers. I don't think that worked out. How do Iraq and Afghanistan feel about all the blood and treasure we spent on them? "Oh, no, those are bad foreign intervention programs, not good ones." Sorry, like Scott said, you can't make the money flow to just the good interventions. Everyone thinks the foreigners will be grateful, but that has more to do with their ability to be like us in the first place.
Let's ignore Africans' ability to help us out if we needed it. Do they even have the desire to? How many countries have America Day celebrations for all the lives we've saved?
I think it's good to spend the money to save the lives out of the basic Christian duty like Deiseach said. But I see no evidence besides hopium that we're actually buying good will among them. More likely they see us as a bunch of foreign moral busybodies nagging them about their sex lives.
The US occupied Germany and Japan for years and essentially rebuilt their societies along pro-American lines, which TBH I think had a bigger impact on their subsequent attitudes.
There is a myth of the Marshall Plan that Tyler Cowen has written about, that our assistance to the defeated is why they recovered. In fact, we gave much more money to the UK (and forgave most of their war loans), while Germany was still required to pay reparations. The Ordoliberals of West Germany just did a much better job of running their country in the postwar era than Labour did in the UK.
A cursory search doesn't reveal any surveys of PEPFAR recipients, but they are presumably at least somewhat grateful the US provides the aid. Note that women and children are the primary recipients, and the latter are not generally grateful *to anyone*, even those who help them.
> When asked which country they perceived to be the best model for their future development, 33% of respondents chose the United States, while 22% chose China. Out of 34 countries surveyed, the United States surpassed China in 23 countries. Only 4 African countries (Tanzania, Senegal, Tunisia, Eswatini, Malawi, and Mozambique) ranked both countries equally. Compared to the results of the same question in the previous survey period (2014/2015), preferences for China and the United States as development models remained unchanged. However, the U.S. advantage increased marginally from 6 to 9 percentage points.
> Younger Africans (36% of people aged 18- 25) were more likely than older Africans (26% of people above 55) to prefer the United States as a model for development. While men (25%) and women (19%) expressed equal preference for the United States as a development model, men preferred China more than women.
Note that Africans don't see US-China influence as zero-sum. They welcome both.
I don't know if they'd go to *bat* for the US, but distance matters a lot - Mexico can send people to help us when a hurricane hits while that's a longer distance for any African nation.
I'm willing to leave the *ability* for Africans to go to bat for us off the table. Who knows what future thing might happen where we suddenly wish they have a bunch of goodwill for us? One reason to invest in goodwill is that you don't know how it will be needed. (And if they become merely "slightly below average economically," at 1.5 billion people that's an awesome trading partner.)
PEPFAR is very much the motte justifying some completely absurd, and much less useful/stability-increasing/"soft power" providing NGOs dancing around in the bailey.
Interestingly, I think the Coca-Cola corporation might spend a higher percent of its intake on foreign aid than the US government (see https://www.coca-colacompany.com/social/coca-cola-foundation , I must be getting something wrong but it really does seem to be 2% vs. 1%). But see also anomie's reply.
This seems misguided. Coca cola is essentially payed by investors to increase their value, and accordingly, that's what they should do. Not due to some inherent rule about valuing one group over another group, but simply because it was on that condition that they were granted the money.
Using a strict parallel, taxation shouldn't be used for anything tax payers don't want. That doesn't necessarily preclude programs to benefit outsiders, since unlike the case of investors, it's hardly self-evident that taxpayers don't support that.
Of course, the parallel isn't strict, since individual taxpayers don't get to decide whether to pay taxes or on what condition they'll pay.
But that only makes the analogy even less appropriate.
If Coca-Cola shareholders voted a resolution at a general meeting to pay a dividend to Pepsi shareholders then such a dividend should be paid. The interests of the shareholders are whatever the shareholders say they are.
The American people's elected representatives voted for PEPFAR. That means that it is in the interests of the American people.
The American people also voted for Donald Trump to be President, therefore whatever he does as President is also in the interests of the American people.
There's a Separation of Powers question to be argued in terms of who exactly has the authority to do what, but that's not what we're talking about today.
This is one question that bothers me a lot in the arguments against Trump's actions. Almost everything he is trying to do is something the Executive was directly or indirectly empowered to do.
I don't see any reasonable argument why a previous president (including the ones who set up the organizations Trump wants to change) had the power to do so, but Trump doesn't have the power to change or even remove those organizations?
I totally get why they don't want him to do that, but as Obama once said and conservatives have since run into the ground "Elections have consequences." Obama wasn't wrong, but just very shortsighted.
> I don't see any reasonable argument why a previous president (including the ones who set up the organizations Trump wants to change) had the power to do so, but Trump doesn't have the power to change or even remove those organizations?
The reasonable argument is that it is illegal for the President to do so. PEPFAR was not setup by a previous President, it was authorized by the US congress. It is still authorized by the US congress and the executive branch, according to the laws of the United States, is obligated to spend the money appropriated by congress.
If the Trump administration believes this program is bad, then they need to work with Republicans in congress to not reauthorize it in March when its current authorization expires.
1. Does Trump have the power to shut down a program that was authorised by Congress (ie the Separation of Powers question you have).
2. Do the American people think that PEPFAR meets the goals that they have for government spending? I think that's what Scott is trying to answer here.
I don't think there is - or can be - some external absolute measure of "the interests of the American people" beyond "what the American people want". But then, I also think that shareholder lawsuits to impose some external legal standard on what management does are bullshit. Pass a resolution at a general meeting and if they don't comply, then fire them, or sue them. But the purpose of a corporation is to do what the shareholders desire. The purpose of a government is to do what the citizens desire. There can be limitations on how easily they can achieve certain things, on how big a majority may be required to do certain things. But if enough people want to do something, then the government or the management should be compelled to do it.
Foreign aid does serve national interests - it's a cheap way to buy influence with other countries. Being known as "those nice guys who helped cure our AIDS epidemic" is useful when we need to ask a favor from another country.
I find this style of argument in favor of foreign aid much more convincing than the utilitarian arguments where we give foreigners’ lives inherent value. Still, I find it hard to believe that we get much value out of impoverished African nations. If they understood how much of a favor we are doing them by providing incredibly-good-value life-saving drugs, they would simply buy the drugs themselves.
Consistently acting like you consider lives to have inherent value, as opposed to making visible cynical Machiavellian calculations about who's more likely to be a worthwhile ally in the future, can be a useful strategy for building trust and gratitude.
Alice and Bob are going on a date at a restaurant. Bob is attentive to Alice's needs, but rude to Charlie the waiter. What can Alice infer about how Bob will act when Alice is in a less favorable negotiating position?
> I find it hard to believe that we get much value out of impoverished African nations.
Given that the land exists and is populated, would there be greater marginal benefit to American interests if the people there were slightly more prosperous, thus able to participate in international trade more than they currently do? Or worse off, and functionally unable to export much of anything but plague-stricken refugees or desperate violence?
Probably stuff like "okay, we will drop the charges against the senator's nephew" or "we will release the Marine from police custody, but he better stay on the base from now on."
I think this is what people are thinking when they assign an infinite foreigner/domestic value ratio. They think that those African citizens should rely on their own government to create programs to benefit those citizens. They form the meta-level belief about relative value from this object-level belief about accountability.
If someone in Africa was concealing a biological weapon which had previously killed roughly three-quarters of a million Americans, a virus that clearly poses ongoing strategic danger since there's still no reliable cure or vaccine, would you say mitigating that threat is sufficiently relevant to shared interests of American citizens for government action? Assuming a proven, cost-effective way to do so, which doesn't incidentally create any "negotiating with terrorists" type messes.
But Coca Cola funds all sorts of non-directly profit maximizing pursuits (scholarships, sport games, physical renovations, art galleries, etc). Part of it is that shareholders believe that such pursuit have uncertain but positive ROI at some future date, or some indirect contribution to current ROI (through marketing, consumer franchise, "goodwill", etc.). But also because they think it's a good in itself.
Same for USAID. There might be indirect benefits (creating a bit of goodwill goes a long way and might be cheaper than sending in the marines/directly bribing some generalissimo to pursue geopolitical objectives, stimying the creation of new viral variants might be cheaper than curing US citizens when they get infected, the data generated are a public good benefiting US citizens, etc), but also is a good in itself, just like the Coca Cola program for disadvantaged youth or whatever.
There is also an element of "isolated demand for rigor" (or as commonly known online, hypocrisy): no, after spending so much blood and treasure to save the poor minorities oppresed by the Axis of Evil, make sure Israelis sleep safe and sound, indirectly funding missionary trips so that the souls of heathen foreigners might be saved, etc, you don't get to act all principled about how it's treason to cheapily saving Africans from preventable death. Clean your own house first if this is really what you believe and not just some convenient debate pose.
You can't handwave away the people who think the amount is infinite. And in terms of taxation, I think zero dollars should be spent on charity, since that is a matter of voluntary donations.
There's also a non-zero number of commenters who see all lives having less than zero value. Pretty sure there's a few antinatalists around; there used to be.
Also the foreigner-to-American phrasing is better. If white Australians didn't speak English, Americans wouldn't care about them, either.
> There's also a non-zero number of commenters who see all lives having less than zero value.
Well yes, I'm one of them. I'm not an antinatalist, mind you. A few people having less children isn't going to make the death of humanity come any sooner.
I agree with the literal thesis, and that PEPFAR is very good and shouldn’t be cancelled, but I’m not sure “flowing to other programs” is the best way to think of spending cuts
I think a better model of cancelling PEPFAR would be that it relaxes *real resource constraints* a little bit by taking a bunch of labor and everything involved in the medicine supply chain and such that was formerly involved in administering the program.
Financially, this looks like people getting fired, the price of labor going down a tiny bit, and former PEPFAR administrators etc selling their labor to the next highest bidder. Likewise for other resources: demand for gas and everything else in the supply chain drops a bit, price goes down, and some marginal uses of gas etc become profitable or just barely cheap enough for an arbitrary consumer somewhere to purchase.
Also, to reiterate, none of this changes the conclusion for me. I think it’s good for the government to basically take up a PEPFAR-sized batch of real resources to use for PEPFAR
Scott's approach has the merit that it's making an apples-to-apples comparison. Even if you favor the programs being cancelled and the unspent money being returned to taxpayers, you could still achieve those cuts by ranking government programs on usefulness, and cutting programs starting at the bottom of the list.
How would you operationalize your model? It seems like it requires us to imagine what the typical private sector company would have done with medically experienced labor being fractionally cheaper. I'm sure that provides some benefits, but I'm not sure how you would calculate it.
I think it would be better if the Trump administration did that rather than acting chaotically. But since I favor ending most government programs, I'm not going to object when the chaotic process results in an end to some random program.
There's an old saying in state economics, 'Whatever we can do, we can afford'.
Money and budgets are abstractions, what exists in the real world is labor and resources and how they are directed. If there is idle labor that could be used to some good purpose, printing money to pay for that labor to stop being idle and start producing something is not lost money, it's money creating new value. And the money itself will flow back into the economy, activating more labor as it increases demand.
If there are people who want to run PEPFAR and are qualified to run PEPFAR and are otherwise going to be doing much less useful things, then paying them to run PEPFAR isn't a deadweight loss. It's creating value where none would otherwise exist.
All this would hold if the government didn’t increase spending to compensate. But also, each unit of gas etc. getting cheaper comes because a different American isn’t getting to use it. You’d have to argue the program employees were using the gas worse than the average American. Maybe so, if the program employees are richer than average, but I’m not convinced it’s a big effect.
If another program gets funded as a result, then the govt will commandeer those real resources instead. So it still matters where the money goes in the counterfactual.
Your framing is most useful in the general case where the legislature debates and proposes a specific level of spending which may be higher or lower to some previous amount.
This haphazard freeze with no changes in budget is a different thing
I am very skeptical of altruism, and very skeptical of charities. Don't charity workers and NGOs work for their self interest, much like politicians and everyone else? What if their best bussines model to maximize their self-interested profit is basically moral entrepreneurship, lying and even aiding authoritarian governments to get donations while pretending they "help" people?
Self interest is not reducible to economic profit. A person can have any reasons to prioritize their self interest in ways that have nothing to do with, or may even even require sacrificing, their access to economic resources.
"Don't charity workers and NGOs work for their self interest, much like politicians and everyone else?"
...not trivially, no? Just to give an example, I know lots of people who could easily get eg $500K working for Big Tech, who instead make $100 - 200K working at a charity because they really believe in the cause. I think I've heard the standard is that charities pay 30% less than for-profits for the same quality of labor, so if that's true then everyone working at a nonprofit is by that fact alone not working in their self-interest.
I agree with Eric that they will still prioritize something like "internal benefits they're getting", but those internal benefits might be the warm feeling of doing good.
I worked at NPOs/NGOs that were mostly state-funded and supposed to do "good things". I am so grateful to all German taxpayers! Best salaries I ever got. Often tax-free. Easiest work and most fun work, too. And I was just a small cog, the people up made more and had even more fun. (One of them greatly enjoyed to tell the local staff: "You are fired". In contexts, where you could never fire someone under German law.) - It was "culture", but conversations with fellow aid-workers: just the same.
If your social circle consists of people who have the luxury of getting to choose between a $500K job and a more rewarding/inspiring/enjoyable $200K job, consider that you might not have a very good handle on what life looks like for the modal taxpayer. Plenty of people are legitimately financially struggling, as are their brothers -- not everybody's brother is a successful real estate agent in Des Moines, even if all the brothers of all the people you know are.
Because of diminishing marginal utility of money, somebody deciding to sacrifice an additional $300K on top of the $200K they're getting either way, is arguably less impressive than somebody putting $50 in a collection box when that $50 is basically their entire discretionary spending for this month, after rent and food and basic necessities. Which is great if they're choosing to put that money in that collection box of their own free will, but it makes it a morally dubious act to argue that the government should take that $50 from them and spend it on a charity not of their choice.
Sure, that's perfectly valid and a great reason to not take $50 from poor people.
But not as an argument against those charity workers being generally less interested in maximizing profit for themselves which is what this comment thread is about, no?
They aren't as pure as heart as an impoverished person who gives away the shirt off his back, but nobody's saying they're Jesus... just that they are likely satisfied with the life quality they have and not grasping for more. In a world where many well-off people are decidedly not that, I think it's reasonable to believe they are genuinely trying to help people and not secretly get richer. Just because they don't have to give up their house and car to help people doesn't mean they can't be helping people at all. Yes, it's easier to be content with what you've got when you've got a decent life, but so many people who have decent lives are grasping and envious and not content at all.
Agree, it's tangential to the main point of the top comment of this thread.
But Scott's dismissing of the "don't we have a responsibility to help those close to us first" point by saying basically "nah, nobody close to you is actually in need of help, that's just fiction" rubbed me the wrong way a bit. So I wanted to respond to that, and a comment where he casually mentions his many friends who are either making $500k or voluntarily choosing to prefer their dream job at $200K instead, seemed like a good place to put that response.
So your aim was to talk directly to Scott, and you felt like responding to a comment of his was more effective than posting a comment on the essay, so you picked the comment to which it could be least tangential and tried to connect it?
“Self interest” includes more than salary—self righteous moral preening has a value as well…
Especially for a social circle where people’s Hobson’s Choice is between making $500k as an evil Meta PM or $200k + the Warm Glow of Self Satisfaction(tm) for maintaining some charity’s IT stack.
Do you have an actual set of reasoned or empirical arguments as to your position, or are you just trying to make yourself feel better about not helping others by casting people who do as just as selfish but dishonest?
Genuine question.
Secondary, does it matter? If we agree that helping others is, to a first approximation, good, then we're 90% of the way to agreement and we're just discussing strategy. If we don't, we're operating from such radically different moral precepts that I don't think meaningful discussion can occur.
Well, there's public choice theory. We have to assume everyone works for their self-interest and therefore organizations work more for their own continued existence and socioeconomic gains of its members than any causes, therefore if there any perverse incentives, like bussiness model I mentioned, they act accordingly. See the Rescue Industry, for example, and plenty of goverment programs that have long outlived their purpose.
Why do we have to assume that? Because there's a lot of obvious examples of people doing the opposite. For example, I'm arguing with you rather than doing the work I should be. That's obviously against my socioeconomic interest, and yet, here I am. Otherwise smart people buy lottery tickets. People buy games on Steam they never play and they know this.
So you can twist the evidence to suit your theory, or you can update your theory to fit the evidence.
Either way, I'm concluding you have no actual basis and are just trying to make yourself feel better.
The people PEPFAR is supposed to help are the American people. Any US government program that is not supposed to help the American people is by definition waste. Maybe the mechanism by which PEPFAR helps the American people is by helping foreign people, but this is only a means to an end, not an end in itself.
“Any US government program that is not supposed to help the American people is by definition waste.”
That may be true according to your philosophy of government, but it certainly doesn’t say that anywhere in the US constitution. You can debate whether “promote the general welfare” in the preamble of the constitution actually means “promote our own welfare”, but nothing in the actually effective parts of the constitution is designed to prevent the government from engaging in foreign projects with the goal of helping non-Americans.
“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and GENERAL WELFARE OF THE UNITED STATES; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States”
Emphasis mine of course. I did check this before making my original comment.
Anecdotal data point: my wife spent a year in Tanzania to get a village school going. Salary: 1000€/ month. Does that sound like "self-interested profit" was at the top of her list of priorities?
I think you should just move to Tanzania? I mean, I don't know you or your life. But immigration to Tanzania seems pretty easy, and the pound goes really far there. Probably it would cost much less than 1000 pounds a month!
I suppose my comment was too oblique? It was heartfelt - I've been planning to go to Tanzania for about a decade (as you might guess from my user name), and given the likely duration of my trip, it will probably cost > 1000€/ month.
But beyond that, my comment answered the rhetorical question "Does [getting paid 1000€/ month to work in Tanzania] sound like 'self-interested profit' was at the top of her list of priorities?" No shade on FluffyBuffalo's wife, but my answer is a resounding "uh, yes", at least to me.
You’ve got one hypothetical but I’ve got another. What if the best business model to maximize self-interested profit is to honestly identify suffering people and propose effective means to help them? Did you ever think about that possibility?
I don't think such business model exists. Because charities want donations, they don't necessarily have to help people to get them, they could just pretend they do and get more publicity and power.
I believe The Wealth of Nations is where he gives the famous “invisible hand” argument that the profit motive can in many circumstances direct many people to do the thing that is most sociallly beneficial.
The profit motive can direct people in such a way, but not by first identifying "suffering people". The price system doesn't require that a producer know about suffering, but instead what people will pay.
Charities that only wish to serve their own interests do so best by spending tons of money on publicity, so that everyone knows their name and thinks of them when a charitable topic comes up, and goes to them first when they want to make donations or find a partner to work with.
Thus, the charities that everyone has heard about, are definitionally the worst ones who spend the most on publicity and influence instead of charitable work.
It's easy to get that filtered evidence and think that all charities are bad.
But there are lots of great ones that don't spend their money on publicity, so you don't know anything about them.
The money saved would not "go into the federal discretionary fund budget... from there, it would be go to the same kinds of programs the rest of the budget goes to". Mechanically that is just not a correct explanation of what would happen to the money. If Trump and Musk simply withheld all PEPFAR payments, the money would simply sit in a federal account doing nothing at all*. Economically, its value would flow through to Americans broadly in the form of reduced inflation (and consequently reduced interest rates).
At the next budget, Congress would be able to retroactively rescind the funds and they would, under the budget scoring rules, become available to "pay for" some other spending increase or tax cut Congress wanted to do without increasing the deficit. (The same thing would happen if, instead of an improper cancellation by Trump, Congress simply repealed the program.)
You might quite reasonably believe that Congress will not choose to allocate this money to the best possible use, but the next use of the money *would* be deliberated, and it would *not* be some kind of automatic flow through to other discretionary spending. At the present time, the most likely use would be to offset a small part of the extension of the 2017 tax bill (TCJA), parts of which are due to expire this year. Congress would therefore need to find fewer other spending cuts or fewer other tax hikes in order to meet whatever deficit target they set during the tax negotiations.
* I realized this might be insufficiently forceful. The money would sit in an account *and would not be legally available for any other spending*. Trump (unless he broke the law) would not be able to simply move the funds to some other part of the "discretionary" budget. The discretionary budget is not called that because the president has discretion to assign the funds willy-nilly, it's just called that by contrast with Social Security and Medicare, where the spending amounts are determined by the program formula and not by a statutory authorization of a specific total $ amount.
I grant that you're right about the Trump/Musk situation, but "At the next budget, Congress would be able to retroactively rescind the funds and they would, under the budget scoring rules, become available to "pay for" some other spending increase or tax cut Congress wanted to do without increasing the deficit." sounds to me like they would in every meaningful go into the discretionary budget. Am I misunderstanding something?
Yes. They could also go to tax cuts or deficit reduction. And not only could, but it's extremely likely that they *would* go to a mix of those two things.
They could also be used to pay for program changes to entitlement spending, although that is considerably less likely.
Under ~no circumstances would they flow to a program like BEAD which has already been allocated a specific pool of money that is unlikely to be increased.
I've changed the wording from "discretionary budget" to "pot of spending", which hopefully makes it clearer that the pot could also be used for tax cuts.
But I want to make sure this is just a semantic distinction - would you agree that if the government spent $1.5T this year and $1.4T next year, then you should think of 93% of PEPFAR as being used in spending rather than the tax cuts/deficit reduction, and the other two things are only important if the size of the federal budget changes in an unprecedented way?
The reason the distinction is important is that the merits of tax cuts, and separately the merits of deficit reduction, are unlikely to be similar to the merits of the average discretionary spending program. (Different individuals will likely disagree as to whether tax cuts are better or worse than the spending.)
Doesn’t this just come back to the point that out of all the things to cut, PEPFAR should probably be pretty low on the list? Not to mention I think you’re vastly overstating the “inflation benefits” you get from this money not being spent. Not only is a lot of this money going to foreign countries, but the Fed is doing monetary offset anyways. I’m thinking like a 1 basis point effect on interest rates at the most lol.
Depends no? If they cancelled $100B of spending and then didn't touch anything else I'd say 100% of PEPFAR went to tax cuts. If they cut $500B of spending then only 20% of PEPFAR went to tax cuts.
Foreign aid is one of the less inflationary forms of spending, given that it's spent overseas by/helping foreigners and it's a small percentage of total spending.
Money "not spent" in Africa, reduces inflation in Africa and slightly affects exchange rates. It does not (for the most part) reduce inflation in America.
The AIDS drug for Africa seems extremely cheap per life saved.
As a citizenist, I put a higher priority on my fellow American citizens' lives and well-being, but I'm not an ideologue about it. We can save a whole lot of foreign lives for not much money, so that's a good thing to do.
It would be nice if the unpleasant and unhealthy Southeast African male penchant for "dry sex" was also somehow deterred, but letting their poor wives die from AIDS is too high of a price and doesn't seem to have been very effective of a deterrent.
Presumably, Musk and Trump are canceling stuff willy-nilly and then seeing which policies are most vociferously defended and which ones aren't.
I strongly agree with your presumption here, particularly given that Musk has had about two weeks to look over things from the inside, which is a laughably short period of time to consider an agency with tems of billions in funding (i.e, equivalent to a Fortune 500 company).
Well, *someone* tried to cut all federal grants at once, and did cut the entire foreign aid program, including medications for hundreds of thousands of people.
I don't want to sound bad, what exactly do we earn by spending billions saving poor 60 IQ people on another continent from their own terrible practices? People have a point when they say money could be used to improve the lives of millions of americans which are more productive, if only government was way more efficient at least.
I am not saying nobody should help them, I am just thinking if we assume that if the purpose of government programs is to improve the lives of Americans, either directly or indirectly, spending billions on saving Africans from themselves doesn't make that much sense to me
You're arguing that people should only work to their specific self interest, which brings me to the question I raised above. For convenience:
> Secondary, does it matter? If we agree that helping others is, to a first approximation, good, then we're 90% of the way to agreement and we're just discussing strategy. If we don't, we're operating from such radically different moral precepts that I don't think meaningful discussion can occur.
Or alternatively, let us posit this scenario: let us assume that A Country could increase the general wealth of its citizenry by 1% by, say, burning the Kuwait oil fields and thus improving the price of oil that the US exports at the cost of devastating the local environment and Kuwaiti economy.
Or, if you like, the Kuwaiti oilfields have already been set alight, should A Country intervene to mitigate the damage if the outcome is the same as the above scenario?
Have you never heard of reputational effects? The U.S. takes a great many actions in the world that are unpopular but (in its judgement) advance its self interest. Other countries often have choices about whether to help, stay neutral or oppose such actions. Insofar as people other than you DO care about human lives (and I assure you that some of us do), spending a small amount of money to save a large amount of lives seems like the kind of thing likely to pay for itself many times over, in terms of reduced costs derived from general goodwill.
I've seen this argument advanced a lot recently, but I've not seen any examples given of this goodwill having manifested in the real world. Granted there may be a few here and there, but I'm highly skeptical that the returns add up to much
Honest question, have you been looking? Perhaps read up on your history and learn a bit about how international politics went from about 5000 BC up through the 1940s or so. The U.S. position in the international order is really, REALLY exceptional, and it's not just because of having the biggest economy or the biggest military:
"I'm highly skeptical that the returns add up to much"
How much do various U.S. military operations cost? How much are its trade agreements worth? How about its intelligence services? Diplomatic corps? The collective budget (and value in the case of trade) of all of that is HUGE. Even slightly more friction in a few places--worse trade agreements, less efficient military ops, bad intelligence causing poor decisions--could add up to billions easily. Counterfactuals--bad things that DON'T happen because of goodwill--harder to account for, but given how many capital-T Trillions the U.S. spent because of ONE terrorist attack when a handful of militants in the Middle East got mad enough to actually do something, even small likelihood reductions for things like terrorism and war come out to pretty good deals.
"if we assume that the purpose of government programs is to improve the lives of Americans" there is the assumption though!
I think when your country is the richest country on the planet, you can think about whether to help other, poorer countries rather than just your own citizens. A company should be interested in its own growth and profitability all the way until it becomes extremely successful, but that at that point, it should consider giving some of its money to charity, and many do. I think of the US government the same way. Our foreign aid budget is like 1% of what we spend money on. When you're the richest country in the world, you should start thinking about helping other, less fortunate countries. Your primary concern should still be your own citizens, but you can afford to spare some thought and money for others.
I agree with Milton Friedman on corporations: they should disburse their money to their shareholders, and then let those shareholders donate to charity if they want to.
'General Welfare' can mean a lot of things. I don't know that this is so obvious a point.
If a large percentage of Americans want us to help other countries, and I think they do, would it not be to their "General Welfare" to have the government do that? And, can you not say it promotes positive relationships with other countries to provide them AID, which promotes the general welfare of the united states?
A quick google shows we provided foreign aid to Venezuela in 1812 to recover from an earthquake. Surely if this was some constitutional issue the founders would have cared about it at that time, since many of them were still alive.
Forty years ago I used to be strongly in favor of stockholders over stakeholders (e.g., workers, the community that grew up around the factory, etc.), but then I saw what first Michael Milken and then the outsourcers to China could do when unrestrained by anything other than the letter of the law (and sometimes not that in Milken's case). So, now I have more mixed views on the topic.
Is just perpetuating something more valuable than other possible uses, like say - within Africa - actually curing river blindness or something?
Or if HIV is a permanent part of human experience, is it good for a program to have no possibility of ever ending, no way that responsibility can be transferred so that it will not be reliant on the fortunes of one country?
I don't have any opinion about this program, and am quite prepared to believe it is an effective use of the US treasury. And perhaps it is useful more broadly, globally, because it keeps the viral load down so that HIV doesn't spread as much as it used to via international travelers (a flight attendant, I believe, did more than his part, at the start; and perhaps the West owes reparations for that)?
But the "forever" nature of it is concerning, perhaps, to an effective altruist. When the Yankee do-gooder population is no longer big enough to persuade others of the value of such forever programs, what will their sudden cessation look like?
I noticed in the local municipal budget the other day, a fixed item: housing for people living with HIV/AIDS. I actually hadn't heard much about AIDS in a long time - it used to so dominate the obituaries of young or "young middle-aged" men, whether stated or not. (That was back when newspapers and paid obits still existed.)
So I was surprised to see that all this time later, when we are assured that living with HIV and passing it on to others is no big deal, or at least without stigma - that this relic of the 90s hangs on. Presumably forever. But will it? There's a lot of talk about what Americans (Yankees, in truth) should do with their dollars. But where I live, it would make far more sense to ask, what is it that Mexicans value and will want to fund?uses, like say actually curing river blindness or something?
I don't have any opinion about this program, and am quite prepared to believe it is a great use of dollars since everyone says so. And perhaps it is useful more broadly, globally, because it keeps the viral load down so that HIV doesn't spread as much as it used to via international travelers (a flight attendant, I believe, did more than his part, at the start; and perhaps the West owes reparations for that)?
But the "forever" nature of it perhaps ought to concern the altruist. When the Yankee do-gooder population is no longer big enough to persuade others of the value of such forever programs, what will their sudden cessation look like?
I noticed in the local municipal budget the other day, a fixed item: housing for people living with HIV/AIDS. I actually hadn't heard much about AIDS in a long time - it used to so dominate the obituaries of young or "young middle-aged" men, whether stated or not. (That was back when newspapers and paid obits still existed.)
So I was surprised to see that all this time later, when we are assured that living with HIV and passing it on to others is no big deal, or at least without stigma - that this relic of the 90s hangs on. Presumably forever. But will it? There's a lot of talk about what Americans (Yankees, in truth) should do with their dollars. But where I live, it would make far more sense to ask, what is it that Mexicans value and will want to fund?
I don't think the reason people in Africa rely on the US for AIDS medicine is that they don't care about each other enough, I think it's more about how the US is insanely prosperous compared to Africa (and uniquely so for a country of its size).
PEPFAR costs something like $21 per year per US citizen, which is pretty trivial for a country with a per capital GDP of $80k but less so in, say, Zimbabwe, which has a particularly high HIV rate (22%) and a particularly low GDP ($2.5k).
Also the entire world population with HIV is around 39 million, which is only like 12% of the population of the US. So it's about 58 times easier for the US to pay for HIV treatment for the entire world than it is for Zimbabwe to pay for it for their citizens.
Firstly, it looks really nice. Even if everyone is ultra-cynical, no one seems to want to stop being a hypocrite. They all dress themselves up as democracies or supporters of world peace and welfare. Saying you saved millions of lives from a disease in a foreign nation is status-raising.
Secondly, it buys influence and networks with local leaders. If the US had an Africa strategy to bring the nations into alignment with it, this would absolutely be a part of such a thing. I don't think it does, but it does generate positive feelings and counteracts China's influence. If you are an American citizen, you benefit from Pax Americana for every country that subscribes to it, even if you see dollars going out each year.
"... the average respondent thinks that the United States is a meddlesome busy-body that only occasionally considers the needs of other countries…and that the United States is thus a force for good and peace and they like it very much, thank you."
The above article discusses the fact that, historically, superpowers tend to wind up opposed by large chunks of the world in a logical balancing response, but the US is military allies with a huge chunk of the world, trades with a huge chunk of the world, and can throw its weight around powerfully against e.g. the Russian economy.
This has tremendous benefits for US citizens, and I would argue that purely out of self-interest it's definitely worth 1% of federal expenditures
The Copenhagem Consensus has developed a easily understood cost benefit analysis and made specific recommendations for enhancing human flourishing at least dollar cost. It might pay to explore the website.
He developed it to argue for ways " enhancing human flourishing at least dollar cost". Sorry, if you favorite project did not make it to the top. As you are not the only one who believes it should so very obviously be on top, Lomborg wrote some books explaining how to address climate change - and how not to. You may also read this blog and Scott`s writing in other places to see why not everyone here believes in "I want you to panic".
My answer got out a bit too early. Anyways: Scott is “Rationalist”, to a large part, ie part of a community that worries about AI becoming an existential risk. Climate change is seen as real (by me too, also by Lomborg, also by Matt Ridley) and as a serious issue to consider (by those 3 guys, too), but NOT as an existential risk to humanity or even modern human civilisation (same here +BL +MR). Scott rarely touches the issue directly, as lots of other cover it competently (eg: BL +MR). And he is wise enough not to claim warmer winters are on average better than colder winters. His posts about why more people die in winter did touch the topic a little, but he came up with seasonality of flu as the most plausible reason. Nor did he ever wrote - Greta forbid - “more CO2 has lead to a greener planet earth”. He DID write recently he does not really care deeply whether there are 97 kinds of squirrel in the Americas or 79. Matt Ridley would loudly disagree!
Or maybe he first drank tea. What matters: are his conclusions broadly correct. Epistemic helpless, but they make much more sense to me than what I got to hear from the other side. Which is: what we got on TV, what we heard at school, what was and is written in text-books for teenagers I had to work with - and Greta/Last Generation/ Klimakleber on and over the top.
When you are several trillion in the hole with blowout deficits each year, doesn’t all money saved (unless it cuts directly into revenues) automatically go into the worthy cause of pointing the ship in a smarter direction than furiously digging yourself into a bigger hole? Mix them metaphors!
You’re talking about spending money you don’t have - it’s all money you can’t afford that you’re borrowing.
I’m highly pessimistic about politicians and spending also - but I would have had the same assumption about Javier Milei before I saw what he did. That shocked me enough to realise that my previous assumption that political systems were so broken they had no chance for course correction wasn’t always going to hold.
It’s pretty grim when clear thinkers like yourself can’t even conceive of the possibility that the most indebted nation on earth could possible stop spending and start cutting without catastrophe forcing it on them. It’s like it’s not even on your table of possibilities.
Its like an alcoholic open to any solution to his problem that doesn’t involve changing his exponential intake trajectory.
In this specific case, house Republicans have said that they intend to pass a budget extending Trump's existing tax cut (TCJA), cutting other taxes, and adding new spending (e.g. on border security). Extending the TCJA costs ~500 billion per year by itself; the other stuff is expected to be expensive but the details aren't negotiated yet. Conceivably they will find enough pay-fors to offset all of this but it isn't expected.
The US isn't Argentina. It's biggest budget slices are for Social Security and the military. Not surprisingly, these also have very large and powerful constituencies who will electorally punish anyone who tries to reign them in. It's not impossible to fight them, but you need a lot of political capital to try. Republicans do not seem particularly interested in cutting spending on either, and I suspect Trump isn't going to break on that.
Foreign non-military aid is a very small amount of the overall US budget. You could double it to account for military aid or whatever and that would still be true (and not for nothing, but most people would not consider sending aging weapons overseas to count, so it's less than any nominal dollar amount you'd see).
The only way any of this makes sense is for DOGE to say to Congress in 8 months "look, we cut a trillion a year of spending and the world blamed Elon for it and thinks it's already done. Now all you have to do is ratify it by passing a reduced budget"
This way, Congress avoids most of the incentives that normally make it politically dangerous to cut programs, because Elon already did it.
The programs being cut currently are irrelevant on the scale of the US federal budget. There is absolutely no way that Musk can cut $1T dollars from the budget without major cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and/or defense. And if any of those are cut you better believe Congress will not "ratify" it because a LOT of voters depend on those programs and will be very upset if they are cut.
Should I link to the US debt clock? If your conclusion is “this is fine and will continue to work well indefinitely” when you look at it, then our perceptions are too far apart to reconcile.
Or maybe you think “it’s a lil high, I’m sure we’ll ease up before disaster strikes”? Either way we’re poles apart.
The U.S. is 237 years old. To the best of my recollection, the national debt has been a number than most people would consider large for every single one of those years. Even among the earliest policy thinkers of the U.S. there were those that argued that it *should* be large.
So if you think the U.S. is headed towards immanent disaster because of its debt, could you please provide more specifics than "hey, look, big number?" What size of number will cause the disaster? What form will the disaster take? Will it be sudden or gradual?
Yep. Republicans are going to do their best to collect as little tax as possible without actually touching big ticket items. Unless you think DOGE are about to be getting into any military systems any time soon?
I don't have specific answers to those questions and I doubt anyone truly does since the exact context of the current world economy has never occurred in history.
Basic theory of MMT: government debt for any large Fiat currency is not the same as your credit card debt. Modern governments don't collect taxes and then then spend what they collect. They create as much money as they think should be spent, them they delete some of the currently circulating money by taxing circulation.
There has literally never been a government who could print currency and who didn't have debt, because without debt there is no money. Government debt bt is literally just all the money ever created, plus interest, minus all taxes ever collected. Unless you want a straight up contraction of total currency, the number will keep growing.
“Basic theory of MMT” this is like barging into a medical argument and saying “basic argument of homeopathy”. There is not a single serious person who should be convinced by arguments from MMT… particularly after 2020-2022.
-It answers the question of why national debt can be dangerous, but not the way people think.
-Why do you think the pandemic era challenges MMT? A huge amount of money was printed, it wasn't used to build productive capacity, taxes remained low, and then we got inflation.
-Are you confusing MMT with the policy preferences of MMT advocates? To use your tortured medical analogy, it's like arguing against medication because you dislike pharma lobbyists.
Jefferson paid off the US government's debt. This did not eliminate currency, although of course we weren't on a fiat system then. If the current government decided to pay off all its debt, it would probably take a long while, but that wouldn't eliminate currency either.
It took me a while to figure out the answer to this question! People don't talk about it much, they usually leave it as a sort of vague disaster.
(TLDR: if debt climbs out of control, governments have to choose between a "debt crisis" and "hyperinflation", both of which are serious disasters for citizens.)
The first problem is that the more debt an entity already has, the riskier it is to lend them more money. So the higher US debt-to-GDP rises, the higher interest rates investors demand to convince them to buy US bonds. Those bonds backstop other investments (since nobody will give you a 2.5% 30-year mortgage when they could get a 4.75% 30-year T-bill), which is a direct cost paid by citizens. Homeowners literally pay more to the bank each month, the higher debt-to-GDP goes.
The specific disaster that happens when debt-to-GDP rises too high is that the country has to spend most of its incoming tax money on servicing the debt (paying interest to the folks who hold treasury bonds). Which means they have to issue even more bonds to get the money to actually pay for stuff. This cycle compounds. It's paying off one credit card with another credit card, basically. Eventually, there is no longer anybody who wants to buy US treasury bonds, no matter how high the interest rate. The market "bottoms out".
At this point the US must simply stop paying some bills. Maybe they stop repaying T bills, in which case their rating tanks and they can no longer raise money that way. Maybe they stop paying the military, or social security. This is one possible disaster. (Right now, the US spends as much to service the debt as we do on the whole military, if you want a sense of how far along this process we are.)
There's a way to get out of this bad cycle, though! The Federal Reserve can buy the T bills. And they don't care what the interest rate is on them, since they print money for free. (They don't actually print the money for this; they increment one bank account without decrementing another one, which they're allowed to do because they're the Federal Reserve. Anybody else who did it, jail.)
But this makes all the other dollars in existence less valuable. Which also helps the interest rate / bond problem, since all the US debt is denominated in dollars. You can "inflate it away". But this kind of inflation is essentially a tax, since you're debasing all the dollars your citizens hold.
So, basically, if the debt gets big enough, policymakers have to choose between two disasters. Either "the government can't pay its bills" (ie debt crisis) or "everybody's money is worthless" (ie hyperinflation).
The debt is mostly held by the US citizens and companies and the debt/gdp ratio has been pretty stable post-covid. It's still a good idea to reduce deficits somewhat but it's not a catastrophic situation.
At what point does it become a catastrophic situation, and how many decades away is that?
If debt of 125% of GDP is not too bad, what about 250? 500? 1000? There must a limit somewhere beyond which you run out of people willing to lend you money cheaply.
I don't think it's a helpful framing of the problem. It's just not the right KPI to track. Japan's ratio is over 200% and it's still not a failed state. It's not exactly a success either but so are many countries with 50-100% ratio.
The inflation on the other hand is a real constraint, and it's caused by extensive spending as we saw in the last few years.
Step 1. Allow the TCJA tax cuts to expire this year, like the Republicans who passed them intended.
Bam, $500 billion off the deficit in one shot, starting this year. All the Republicans have to do is keep a promise from Trump's previous term - that these tax cuts were just a temporary stimulus and not a permanent loss to the government's revenue.
If the budget is in such a crisis, why are Republicans still trying to cut taxes further? What reasoning puts "cut PEPFAR" or "give Elon Musk root access to the Treasury computers" higher on the list of things we should try than this?
So rather than reducing the deficit by cutting spending, the plan is to just keep increasing taxes forever? And then one day the income tax rate will be 100%, and the government will deign to give some tiny fraction of that money back in the form of inefficient government programs that exist mainly as sinecures for the friends and family of government bureaucrats?
If spending cuts are impossible and spending increases are inevitable, then spending will increase until it consumes all available resources. Since living under the boot of a parasitic bureaucracy that sucks you dry for all eternity would be very bad, it stands to reason that any policy that cuts spending in any way is worth doing.
The blob has had decades to do this responsibly and they've made negative progress. Clearly the only path forward is to do it irresponsibly.
"If your household is over budget, you can address that problem either by spending less or by earning more income. It is tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that by analogy, the government can address its budget problems either by spending less or by raising taxes. But the analogy fails because raising taxes is not like earning more income; it’s more like visiting the ATM.
The government is an agent of the taxpayers. Raising taxes to pay for government spending depletes our assets just as visiting the ATM to pay for household spending depletes our assets. That’s not at all like earning income, which adds to our assets. "
This form of argument feels like an all-purpose argument against ever doing anything at all. Someone tries to raise taxes and you can say "Why raise taxes instead of cutting spending?" Someone tries to cut spending and you can say "Why cut spending when you could raise taxes?"
The proposition on the table right now is cutting spending, and that's a great idea. Raising taxes may also be necessary at some point, but that's a different discussion.
One thing I do think is that the goal should be to cut down the Government to a size where it's doing its actual job efficiently, and then figure out how much tax needs to be raised in order to fund that government, rather than to see how much money can possibly be squeezed out of the people and then try to think of ways to spend that money.
A few days ago, the online Right was in favor of the government hiring more Air Traffic Controllers. Eventually, somebody on the Right will realize that instead of canceling programs, we can put our guys in charge of them!
It's not enough to put "our guys" in charge of them, you also have to purge them of any potential dissenters. When most of the people working at these agencies have liberal/establishment sympathies, it makes more sense to just shut down the entire agency and rebuild it from the ground up.
That makes sense, the problem is with stuff like the FAA planes can fall out of the sky in the meantime, making your administration much less popular.
Not that that's what happened with the recent crash--those were all Biden appointees. I think the thing is you just don't have enough conservatives who really want to work for the FAA or HHS to actually staff those agencies. Frankly working in government has been so left-coded within living memory that I doubt you could find enough conservatives to staff those agencies--smart, competent people with right-leaning sympathies tend to go into the private sector where the incomes are much higher and the ideology's more friendly.
I don't think government work is actually "left-coded". It's just that constantly attacking government tends to make government employees not like you, regardless of their politics. A lot of the people Trump is purging are Republicans, just not full-Trumpist Republicans.
Political appointees are a small part of the federal workforce. Most of the permanent bureaucracy is staffed by careerists who are hostile to the right. Left-wing employees are attracted to work in governments & non-profit organizations, right-wingers are drawn to other fields. In our electoral system the parties tend to trade off power, so any temporary Republican appointee will eventually be replaced.
If this had anything to do with deficit reduction, maybe I’d agree with you, but the deficit is not going to decrease. Republicans are in power currently, and they have been ideologically opposed to deficit reduction for forty years (because that money could instead be used for tax cuts). Congress plans to greatly increase the deficit this year.
And when it crashes and burns - the analysis will still favor the “we can’t do anything and should never try to retrench” crowd. Because those expressing the view that you just did, were “the naive” ones.
Yes, all cancellation of spending goes into deficit reduction, and deficit reduction is not the worst possible goal. But is $6 billion of deficit reduction actually as valuable as several hundred thousand lives? You might think that most congresspeople and most voters have drastically undervalued deficit reduction, but that’s still a very different question from whether PEPFAR itself is less valuable than deficit reduction.
This would be a much more convincing argument if the current administration were working towards some sort of fiscal tightening more generally. But in reality almost everything else they are planning is making the the US fiscal position much worse (by orders of magnitude more than what we are spending in foreign aid).
Congressional Republicans (with the administration's fervent support) are working on extending the TCJA, adding a projected $4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years
If this aid is really effective, maybe people who share your view and private charities will step in to fill the funding gap in the absence of sending tax dollars.
Yes, but this makes the counterfactual of the US Government cutting the program less bad, because it effectively sucks money from causes that are significantly less good (as Scott himself noted, charities have extreme disparities in effectiveness).
You can use that argument anytime anyone stops doing some good. If I stop feeding my children, you could respond it's not as bad as it seems, because someone else might step up to feed them.
Scott insists on the actual counterfactual of where the money would go. I think it's reasonable to symmetrically insist on the actual counterfactual of where the money would be taken from, because in this specific instance there is common knowledge that there's an issue here and AIUI sufficient interested charity throughput to actually replace this 100% (in many cases there's not, which is the key difference between this and your generalised form).
Is the actual counterfactual of where the money would go still worse than the actual counterfactual of where the money would be taken from? Entirely possible! To use Scott's numbers, one charity is typically 100x as efficient as another, so if this is 1000x the marginal government spend, and it's one of the most efficient charities, the marginal charity getting pulled to pay for this is probably still 10x the marginal government spend! But I like being fair, hence insistence on applying the same scrutiny to "where it'd be taken from" as to "where it'd be going".
It's less bad to the extent that private charitable giving is efficient, always going to the charity that is most worthwhile and most badly in need of money. Since we know it's actually very inefficient, we should expect private giving to only make up a small fraction of the difference.
Presumably the life-saved/dollar ratio isn't as good for AIDS charities as it is for malaria charities, since the EA recommendations are usually about malaria.
Malaria charities in terms of the literal bednets are probably much less regulation-intensive than medicine that may need to be taken on a particular schedule, so that could be one component of the difference.
Excellent argument. So excellent that it can prove quite a bit more than you appear to have intended. Let's apply it elsewhere:
Some people say the U.S. military budget is absolutely vital for national security. I say, if that's true, then well-meaning private citizens will certainly step in to fill the gap. Why not slash it to zero? I'm sure you can fill in the blanks for every other item in every other budget (federal or otherwise) and draw the correct conclusion.
None of this is necessarily incoherent, BTW. If you want to be an anarcho-capitalist, that is certainly a thing you can be. But if that's what you want, you ought to do so with courage, consistency and forthrightness.
>I say, if that's true, then well-meaning private citizens will certainly step in to fill the gap. Why not slash it to zero?
Because then you have to legalise private citizens having thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, which won't end well.
Military and police are actually much more of a problem to substitute with private entities than anything else on the table. There is a reason that people who want to take chainsaws to the government usually don't want to take chainsaws to *that*.
Not so. You could cut the (tax allocation for its) budget to zero, leave it legally under the government control, but solicit charitable contributions to pay for the program. Which isn't quite full ancap, but it still matches the original argument well enough.
There is a fairly-significant difference between "cut a government program, let private actors do it independently" and "keep a government program, but make taxation for it voluntary". Among other things, willingness to pay for stuff tends to correlate with control over that stuff.
There's more of a risk of some military taking over and then setting taxation to whatever it wants. If we cut the governments charity budget to zero, there isn't an equivalent risk that the government will be taken over and the charitable budget reset.
- Gun manufacturers - $100M in inducements (this might be state-level)
Many of these are things that some folks on the political spectrum might disagree with their tax dollars being spent on. Their arguments for disagreeing may be very similar to the arguments against foreign aid ("it's not the job of the federal government to distort the free market system through subsidies"). And they could also argue that if these are so valuable, charity would step in.
So - imagine a Democratic president deputizing a businessman (say, Mark Cuban) to go in and, without congressional approval, halt distribution of these funds because we need to stop the spending and we might as well start somewhere. Would you consider that lawful?
I wasn't making an argument for or against any use of government funds. I was suggesting to Scott that the people he is worried about due to the lack of government-funded aid might still get help from another source.
Yes, you were. Again, your argument Proved to Much. Anyone could say the same about any government program at any time for any reason, and it would be every bit as valid as what you said. You like it, you fund it.
But then again, the opposite is equally untrue. We obviously wouldn't want the government to intrude on every possible cause. Therefore there is some category of "things that are reasonable to be handled by the government" and there is some category of "things that are reasonable to be handed by individual citizens". You are not arguing principles, you are arguing which category this particular thing should belong to.
My bet is that people would actually pay for it willingly because the alternative is to be taken over by China and Russia. I'm ~99% sure it would be fully covered by voluntary "donations" by citizens who's tax bill is now $0.
Yeah, I agree, but instead of PEPFAR, it's specifically about funding the police wherever you live. If we just cut all the funding to them, then surely private citizens will step in to fund it.
My comment is about something that is happening already - PEPFAR funding is paused.
I’m not advocating for or against funding it, or for or against libertarianism. I’m not advocating anything.
I’m speculating that if this is really a great cause then maybe other charities or even the people who currently work for PEPFAR might find a way to keep it going without federal funds.
Wouldn’t great causes that need funds attract more donations than others?
No, that's not how the real world works, just as in the real world, even though the police are a worthy and important way to spend government money - that provide a value sufficiently high it might even beat out PEPFAR! - if we cut it then it just gets cut and not replaced.
I have no idea how you would even go about transferring all PEPFAR employees and medical supplies from the government to a private charity, and even if people figured it out, it would take a bunch of time, during which those babies would still get AIDS.
Transaction costs are a thing! It takes time to spin up a website saying "we need X money to meet a surprise shortfall," it takes time to find interested donors, it takes time to re-hire the staff who got fired, and that may not even happen because some people are going to say "fuck this I'm going to work a job where my paycheck isn't at risk when a billionaire throws a tantrum."
And Elon Musk can hack off bits of budget much faster than you can spin up replacement private organizations. Are you going to propose an emergency fundraising drive for every single good government program to get cut? What if it's something that's still good but not as attention-getting as lifesaving AIDS drugs?
Yes, they would in fact do so, as proven by hundreds of years of precedent in places without organized police forces. Just look at how early American settlers defended themselves against various bandits.
Settlers versus bandits isn't the same as urban crime. A city is an insanely dense region full of strangers; a bandit is one of the handful of strangers you'll see in the nearest few kilometers. There's a reason we transitioned away from mob justice to police departments alongside the spike in urbanization, and it's that police departments are much, much better at handling "find the guy who did this" and "stop the guy from doing this" when there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people within a few kilometers of you.
If Jeff Bezos woke up tomorrow and said "fuck Amazon, I'm firing everyone and deleting all the code off our servers and leaving everyone's packages stranded in random warehouses," you wouldn't go "this is fine, Amazon is very profitable, so someone will step in to build a new online everything store."
(And, uh, also in this hypothetical Walmart.com doesn't exist.)
Probably someone would eventually build a new everything store! But that would take years, and it would probably be more expensive and less good than Amazon for a very long time. You definitely couldn't just pick back up where Amazon left off: key people would have already gotten a different job; the servers would have been rented to someone else; neither the vendors nor the customers trust your new Nile.com.
PEPFAR is really good not because helping with HIV/AIDS is a particularly good thing to do; actually, it's kind of mid, and a lot of economists complained back in 2004 that it was a waste of money. PEPFAR is really good because it's an unusually well-run program, because it was George W. Bush's pet project and he really, really, really wanted to make it work. "End PEPFAR, private charity will do it" is like saying "end Amazon, someone will eventually make Nile.com"-- except that capitalism is beautifully efficient and someone will make Nile.com, but rich charity donors keep going "save millions from a horrible death? Nah, I'd rather buy my alma mater a really ugly new dorm."
Also, the U.S. government actually does have an advantage at working with other governments, as PEPFAR does. It is called "diplomacy" and the State Department, which houses PEPFAR, specializes in it. Some large funders, like the Gates Foundation, are basically countries, but the vast majority of private charity doesn't have the level of soft power the U.S. does.
Bezos/Amazon is WAY above replacement. He/it is unusually successful for a reason. This isn't true for all tech CEOs though, Ballmer was below replacement and once he stopped running Microsoft they started doing better.
But the question isn't whether we should replace the head of PEPFAR. The question is whether, if you completely destroy an organization, it doesn't matter because someone else can start a new organization to do the same thing.
> It’s a little unfair to focus on BEAD or other especially bad programs, because money gained by canceling a good program will on average be redirected to a merely average program.
I disagree. The government isn't great at keeping their priorities in order. In fact, I'd say they're pretty terrible at it. But I still think they do better than chance. With the money they have now, they're trying to fund the most important things. They're failing horribly at it, but the things they're funding are still better than the things they're not funding. The fruit they've taken is, on average, lower hanging, so if you give them extra money, the fruit they use it to pick probably be higher than the average one they picked so far.
In short, the money will be redirected to a somewhat worse than average program.
Look. The requirement to be a conservative voter, nowadays, is to be entirely immune to when liberals say that if you don't obey them millions will die. That's a card you have played too many times. If we didn't vote for Obama/Biden/Kamala Trump/McCain was going to nuke the earth. We've heard it. If we didn't pass the Green New Day / Diversity Enhancement the Nazis were going to resurrect and invade Poland. We heard you. Any minute now.
But we no longer believe. That's the crux of it. We no longer believe you mean the things you say, when you tell us that, conveniently enough, the world is arranged in such a way that after we finally win the right to run stuff we have to do the things you want us to do or we are monsters. We are over it.
The problem of lying to us is not that we stop believing 'that specific lie'. It isn't even that we stop believing some percentage of a lie, such that the next lie can become 10x bigger and have the same effect. It is deeper than that.
Y'all said Trump had a piss tape and you were going to show it to us. You said he was in the KGB, and conveniently fell silent when Putin waited till losing control of one of the two countries he was ruling to attack the Ukraine. You said he was (somehow) also a Nazi (one of those communist nazis I guess) and would attack China. You said he watched 7 hours of tv every day, and had lost the ability to tell if it was real or not. Just an absolute firehose of lies.
Your team says a lot of stuff. I'm not gonna make the abortion comparison, but obviously you see where that goes, as far as us believing your motivations.
So we get a turn to be in charge, right? The bullet is blocked by a miracle and our guy gets to be the leader. He immediately is like 'lets not give billions to democratic grifters, shut it all down'. And what we expect from the guys who have proven, over and over, that they lie in order to become more powerful, is that a lie will happen such that he won't be allowed to use the power he got elected to have.
So, sure. He can't cut the gov or millions of babies will die. He can't not do green stuff or Mumbai will flood and millions of babies will die. He can't stop paying the Ukraine army or Russia will win and millions will die. Nothing stops you from saying that. Kamala didn't get to win but Trump has to do everything she would have done.
But, if you mean it. If you've always meant it. Then show us the piss tape. Show us his Russian spy badge. Roll up his sleeve and show the Dark Mark. Like, you endorsed the bad guys from your IRB nightmare post, I credit you with believing what they say. So in your world there is a piss tape, yeah?
Or, if your position is more nuanced, then say that. Say that you guys lie for power, and that this particular statement isn't one such lie. It is different from how we have to pay for the people to who hate us and think they are better than us in a billion other ways. This one is real. It goes to something that matters.
Like, you've always struck me as sincere. You have, I dunno, capital, here? Like, if you mean it. If you mean it this time, and you'll admit that the rest is tactical, but you genuinely think that if we don't obey you this time there will be seven figures of death, then say so do the betting market thing, and I'll buy it.
Because, like, take a sec and become us for a sec, and this is bullshit, yeah? The gov is doing something with millions of dollars that saves millions of lives? Pull the other one, right? The gov can't make a train station with a hundred times that money. There are liberals with that money from hell to breakfast, and they are somehow stopped form doing it privately (Cuz, like, if this was real, the whole maleria net thing doesn't make any sense)? Like, EAs would have been all over this.
I don't think you are insincere. You've always been a straight shooter. But I think you are being fooled. Can you genuinely look into it? Like, you get that, from someone outside of your POV, this is exactly what your team WOULD say, just to keep our money flowing to your pockets for a few months longer? "Yup yup, working folks gotta keep on paying the rich guys or they'll stop saving poor babies."
I don't believe them. They are always lying in order to hurt people and enrich themselves. But I might believe you.
From some kind of abstract perspective where all liberals are a perfectly coordinated team, you're not wrong. I've said basically this same thing in some of my posts.
Still, I will say, with 100% sincerity, and am happy to bet you via any mechanism you want if you can come up with this, that I think 100,000s of people will die if they actually cancel this one. (if you don't believe me, believe Trump/Musk, who apparently figured out that they made a mistake and restarted).
I think these two facts (liberals often like, PEPFAR is genuinely good) are both true. So what do you do about it?
I think there are two ways you could interpret your concern.
First, conservatives literally have no way to sort through the film of lies. They're in a state of total epistemic uncertainty and they should just assume everything is a lie. I think this is false. There are plenty of smart conservative doctors and epidemiologists - some of Trump's recent appointees are in that category. Or they could notice that PEPFAR was started by GW Bush - hardly a bleeding heart liberal. All of these things would have taken a few days to check.
Second, you could interpret it as karma coming home to roost for liberals. I think the people who suffer when you cancel a program that saves millions of Africans mostly isn't liberals, it's Africans. I think because of the everyone-is-trapped-in-a-trauma-based-political-psychodrama issue I've written about elsewhere, people can think things like "Ha! Killing these five million people really showed those liberals who's boss!" without noticing that this is kind of insane, and also all of those liberals have nice jobs and are still sipping champagne regardless.
Thanks for responding OP. I have read your stuff since the livejournal days. I used to give money when the NYT doxxed you. I stopped as we got more different, but I remember you fondly. That's why I answered instead of just rolling my eyes.
If you are saying this, and Trump and Musk came around, then I guess it's true. I can't claim that that's why Trump/Musk changed their minds, but I think the bigger version of this (the truth saying liberals said they really meant it) is probably what got through to them. It is important to have voices like you on the other side who aren't liars. If you'd destroyed your reputation doing piss tape stuff I wouldn't be here. I don't matter, but I mean I as in guys like me.
About your two ways, it's the first one. I've worked ten hour shifts in a gas station. I don't have the time to sort out what liberal is lying about what. I know you guys, as a team, will lie for power, and the ones that don't do it go along with those who do. I'm not judging, that's how we work too.
So what I do is I trust our leaders to work it out. It sounds like in this case they did. I hope you will keep on trying to make sure they don't get stuff wrong, and I hope they will stop all the waste that's going on but keep doing good stuff like this thing.
I appreciate you - I hate preaching to the choir because it's useless, but everyone speaks such a different language these days that I don't know how to get people with really different starting assumptions from me to listen. I guess keeping in touch with some of them are still around from when people were closer to being on the same page is the best I can hope for. Thanks again for commenting.
You shouldn't. They didn't reassess because they were convinced by sound argument, they got scared by the bad press and cucked on the ruthless dismantling of the administrative state they initially embarked on.
They dropped Matt Gaetz based on the same kind of bullshit, and the woman they replaced him with will be nowhere near as effective as he would have been.
No, I agree they're doing far more than I expected, but I'm not going to pretend that when they're forced to walk back a move, that it was part of an unseen grand strategy, or that they changed their minds after Liberals convincing argued for their side: they retreated because their enemy successfully repelled their attack. That's fine, they're fighting powerful opponents, well-entrenched over decades, and it's unreasonable to expect flawless victories.
But I agree it's a retreat, not a rout, so "cucked" might be too harsh.
I think you shouldn't discount this being part of the plan.
> On Jan. 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for lifesaving medicines and medical services, ostensibly allowing for the distribution of H.I.V. medicines. But the waiver did not name PEPFAR, leaving recipient organizations awaiting clarity.
On Sunday, another State Department waiver said more explicitly that it would cover H.I.V. testing and treatment as well as prevention and treatment of opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times. The memo did not include H.I.V. prevention — except for pregnant and breastfeeding women — or support for orphaned and vulnerable children.
Although PEPFAR is funded by the State Department, roughly two-thirds of its grants are implemented through U.S.A.I.D. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neither organization has released funds to grantees since the freeze was initiated.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Rubio appeared to blame the recipient organizations for not acting on the waiver, saying he had “real questions about the competence” of the groups. “I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” he said.
I don't think Trump is worthy of any trust. He has shown himself repeatedly to be a liar so shameless that even the professional lying class (politicians) was outcompeted by him.
PEPFAR played into GW Bush's "Compassionate Conversative™" Evangelical persona. His was economically liberal in his spending (e.g. Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, Healthy Marriage Initiative).
Spending money on saving innocent third world victims of AIDS plays into the White American Evangelical worldview similar to how Abortion is about how women and babies (fetuses) are the innocent victims of the abortionists or society who should be saved.
It's just one of many Conservatisms (e.g. fiscal conservatism, moral conservatism).
>I think because of the everyone-is-trapped-in-a-trauma-based-political-psychodrama issue I've written about elsewhere, people can think things like "Ha! Killing these five million people really showed those liberals who's boss!" without noticing that this is kind of insane
I think they *do* recognize it as insane, but that cuts from both sides. Either they get held hostage by infinite debts and people without skin in the game (they'll have their cozy jobs and champagne regardless), or they call the bluff and let the people they *can* hurt be hurt. If there was a more direct mechanism that didn't look like an endless, grinding civil war, they'd take it. If there was a direct system of compromises and tradeoffs- "we'll approve funding to save X African lives if you send Y DEI admins to work in the salt mines and gulags," they'd take it.
The African lives are as much pawns to the champagne liberal as they are to the heartless conservative.
I agree that liberals cry wolf way too much. The reason that crying wolf is bad, though, is that occasionally a real wolf shows up, and if you don't have credibility no one will believe your warnings until it is too late. In the case of PEPFAR, there is indeed a wolf at the door. There's a lot of good evidence that it is an effective program that has saved a lot of lives.
PEPFAR is also a bipartisan program, it was started by Bush, and Obama, Trump (the first term), and Biden each saw no reason to mess with it. So this isn't a case of Democrats demanding Trump implement a Democratic agenda, it's a case of them asking him to leave a Republican program in place.
If you want me to establish that I have a nuanced and credible position on this, I am happy to denounce other times that liberal/leftist/Democrats have used histrionic language about stuff. For example, the Green New Deal was a terrible idea, there are many ways to ameliorate climate change that are friendlier to the economy. Reopening schools after the vaccine became widely available was a no-brainer and it's ridiculous how much resistance it received in the name of "saving lives." "Defund the police" was just stupid.
Their slippery slope argument turned out to be at least somewhat true, but I admit the trans nonsense is more of a culture war distraction than a real problem in society. And it seems to be losing influence. It was just so insane that it's gone on for so long, and part of the reason is that post-vibe shift, gay marriage culture warriors were a movement without a cause.
"The requirement to be a conservative voter, nowadays, is to be entirely immune to when liberals say that if you don't obey them millions will die. "
Well, yes, clearly. I suspect you have not quite thought this all the way through though. Because the result of this reasoning isn't "we're awesome and perfect and nothing ever goes wrong." The result of this reasoning is "we *consistently*, *predictably* do dumb things that kill millions of people, because we've decided that ignoring anyone outside the group who warns us about ANYTHING is the One Absolutely Indispensable Badge of Group Membership." See, some fraction of people on the liberal side DO listen when sober and sensible analysis says "hey, this is a big danger that will kill a lot of people." And you know what they do once they've listened. They REPEAT IT. And then you hear "wow, the liberals are saying something will kill millions of people again" and not only do you ignore it, you assume anyone who doesn't ignore it, and assume they're one of the liberals.
I mean, not to point too fine a point on it, but we literally saw this play out EXACTLY five years ago. A dangerous virus, spreading quickly was reported on by a lot of very different, very politically heterogeneous experts from all across the world. Liberals (and basically anyone not locked into the conservative infosphere) largely listened, took it seriously and tried to do the unity-in-a-crisis thing to save as many lives as possible. Conservatives saw the liberals saying stuff, screamed "FUCK YOU, YOU CAN'T TELL US WHAT TO DO!" and did pretty much the opposite of everything that was expected to have helped. A million Americans died. A million AMERICANS. The people you loudly claim to care most about. Some of them would have died anyway, of course: other countries with more unity and better leadership still lost people. But the U.S. got hit disproportionately hard. *Especially* the red areas.
I didn't want those people do die. Nobody I know wanted those people to die. But when you decide that it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for anyone outside your circle to communicate important things with you (which is what you have basically said), then any important knowledge that doesn't *start* in your circle can never, ever get in. Including new things that we learn about the world, even important, urgent things like "hey, this plane is going to crash."
I'm scared, Walter. I'm scared because it feels like tens of millions of people are living in an entirely different reality than me, and because when I try to talk to them about basic, simple, bedrock pieces of reality to try to establish some common ground, they repeat utter nonsense, or call me names, or stick their fingers in their ears or whatever. Sometimes they crow and revel about the utterly stupid things they've done. Sometimes they gloat and smirk about how they're going to harm my friends and family. I don't know what happened to this people, but I sure wish I could reach them. Probably you feel the same way (if about different people), but insisting "I will never, ever so much as consider what anyone even slightly aligned with them tells me under any circumstances" certainly isn't going to fix it.
Reality always has the last word. You can't win an argument with reality. No matter how aggrieved, how hurt, how righteously angry you FEEL, no matter how stridently you argue against reality, it will not budge. The BEST possible outcome is that you get nowhere and look foolish. The worst possible outcomes get entire chapters in history books, with somber memorials and days of remembrance.
>A dangerous virus, spreading quickly was reported on by a lot of very different, very politically heterogeneous experts from all across the world. Liberals (and basically anyone not locked into the conservative infosphere) largely listened, took it seriously and tried to do the unity-in-a-crisis thing to save as many lives as possible.
No. Neither side came out looking great, but the progressive blob has a greater counterfactual death toll to answer for.
Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit. Progressives balked at that and called the people proposing it Sinophobic and paranoid. *That* would have saved a lot more people than any lockdown after accounting for the whole "yes, welding everyone into their homes would stop transmission, but it would also lead to everyone dying of starvation" issue. And the misery of losing international transit would have been far less than the misery of lockdowns; ditto the economic costs.
I remember. When it mattered most, the conservatives were the ones taking things seriously and the progressives were the ones ignoring reality. Their blob gets a better grade than yours.
The masks I was considering and are still strictly less of an issue than the quarantine. Quarantine would have saved everyone; masks and other NPIs saved some, by spreading the infections out to unburden hospitals and to move some infections after the vaccine, but not all (I don't think bringing R under 1 was ever feasible, in hindsight - not without the shit the PRC got up to, at least, and even they eventually fell short), and at greater cost (including in deaths, because of the drug overdoses).
The correct immediate reaction would have been to call President Xi and say in suitably diplomatic language, “In an autocracy, bad news can travel slowly up the chain of command, but this virus is a serious threat and it is in both our interests to get it quickly contained. We will happily send our best virologists to assist you.” Just because that’s what Obama would have done if he were still President doesn’t make it a bad idea.
I don’t know which progressives called shutting down international transit Sinophobic and paranoid. A web search suggests that any who did did not use the word “Sinophobic.” In any case, I would think that the person to answer for the death toll would be Trump, not unnamed progressives. After all, progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opposed Trump’s corporate tax cuts, but that didn’t stop Trump.
I remember Pelosi visiting SF's Chinatown in early (Feb?) 2020 because the Republicans were saying anyone traveling from China is more likely to have been carrying the new virus. I think they said "racist" in general though, and not specifically "Sinophobic."
She visited Chinatown on Feb. 24, saying that people shouldn’t stay away from Chinatown due to the virus. She seems to have stuck to a positive message, not criticizing Republicans at all, and saying nothing about Trump’s travel restrictions.
Sample quote: “We want to be vigilant about what might be on the horizon -- what is out there in other places. We want to be careful how we deal with it (coronavirus). But we do want to say to people, come to Chinatown. Here we are, again, careful, safe, and come join us.”
For context, here is what Trump tweeted the same day: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
> Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit.
And who was President in early 2020 with the power to do this? How exactly is it the fault of progressives that Trump didn't do the thing you think was called for at the time.
"serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit. Progressives balked at that and called the people proposing it Sinophobic and paranoid."
Hmm.
I was living and working deep in the heart of "blue" America throughout 2020, and was/am well networked in progressive circles due to the work that I do as well as my family background. Literally no one I knew was opposing shutting down international travel at that time. Also they were all canceling all international travel personally/professionally -- I knew multiple people who took significant $ losses backing out of previously-booked international trips during that year.
So I'm puzzled...progressives during 2020 "balked at" shutting down international travel? Which progressives?
Also -- wasn't Donald Trump the president throughout 2020? With Republican majorities in the Senate and on the Supreme Court? And a slight Dem majority in the House having zero self-identifying progressives in its leadership?
If formally shutting down international travel was the serious and correct reaction...which party during 2020 had the capacity and hence responsibility to make it happen?
> Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit.
Possibly, but I think the devil’s in the details here.
What date are you talking about? Would such a shutdown include Canada and Mexico if they didn’t follow suit? How long would you give them to adjust?
Covid started adding up in early March 2020 – if you had timed this too early (reports from China started late December, I think), you would have a lot of angry people and little to show for it for a pretty long time…
Late or early January? Late January would already be stretching it, but early January seems frankly unsustainable given the mood at the time.
Businesses would have been yelling their heads off (remember how North America is very integrated economically), and no one would have bought the cost-benefit analysis.
I doubt that it would have been politically feasible to contain an outcry that big for even a month without clear rationale, let alone more.
I agree, disagreements about what seems like pieces of bedrock reality can be unsettling. There's a much more unsettling thing however: when tens of millions of people seem to forget what opinion they had and vehemently argued for about said pieces of bedrock reality just months ago. It's one thing to realize that some piece of reality is not as bedrock as you thought and change your mind about it, but what were your expressed and recorded beliefs about it should really not be debatable, and yet...
In that case the liberal opinion did a 180 degree reversal (complemented by complete retrograde amnesia) in literally less than a week, Pelosi hugged Chinamen on Feb 24, on Feb 28 everyone got upset about Trump calling Corona a hoax (fake news btw, he did not) and suddenly it was a big deal.
Again, it's one thing to believe that the fact that masks don't work against Covid is a piece of bedrock reality. It is even understandable to get morally outraged at people who insist on wearing masks in the time of shortage and kill someone's grandma by doing so. Maybe even do a little harassment for the greater good. And, separately, it's understandable to change your mind and come to believe that you're killing a grandma by *not* wearing a mask outside and that's bedrock reality, bud.
But the amnesia accompanying this shift in progressive opinions is genuinely scary. How can you have a real discussion about what is true or not and what is likely true versus bedrock-reality true with people who genuinely don't remember their own beliefs from a week ago? Who believe that certain things are true because it's a moral thing to do, and since they have always been morally correct, their memories of their past beliefs change as necessary?
From Europe here, but it's the same: the amount of political, media and public amnesia around all things COVID disturb me a lot, at least as much as how quickly and deeply democratic governments went authoritarian without any noticeable institutional resistance (make you wonder what distinguish liberal democracy from authoritarian regimes deep down....).
I sorted the 3 in term of more and more surprising: politicians doing 180° is no surprise, kind of part of the job. Traditional Media not that surprising, not after their full support of government message during the first peak. Public, that's more surprising, I guess I was naive about the percentage of people still exerting a modicum of self-honesty and critical thinking. I knew it was likely small, but that small? I don't think they do not exists, but it's clear they do not exist enough to be visible even on non-traditional media.
I think at least part of the explanation (for the almost complete media support, and initial public support) is not only fear, it's the World savior mentality, especially the variant "we can save the world from apocalypse if we accept suffering a little now" mentality that is a hallmark of western thinking since the beginning of Christianity, at least. Media jumped on this nice story, maybe because encouraged by power in place, but also because it's just the kind of feel-good story they just love (we will win against an inhuman enemy with the strength of our altruism, resilience and unity - basically the plot of any apocalypse-porn blockbuster)
Still, I think Public amnesia is largely unwillingness to explicitely discuss what happened, rather than true amnesia, and that the COVID episode significantly hit the "suffer now to save the world" western meme. Because global warming and ecology is largely using this meme, and it's popularity is in free fall...
Watching the two sides both 180 in regards to quarantine was disheartening, because it feels like everyone just wants to make whatever political argument is most convenient for them in the moment. About the only consistent thing was the left crying racism as per usual...
Numerous cost-benefit analyses have been done since showing that "do nothing at all" was in fact the right approach. You would've been right if the pandemic was at least 3-5x more deadly, but COVID simply wasn't deadly enough to warrant doing anything about it.
This is a great comment and anyone from the left wing who is still going “but how could ANYONE vote for TRUMP” (most of my family lol) would do well to read it.
I do think though that we as the conservative team should try and sort out truth from lies. Just because the mainstream media etc bullshits constantly and distorts in order to mislead, doesn’t mean that literally everything they say is false. This is a trap that conservatives can fall into. For example, I am a doctor and I can tell you with some confidence that Covid vaccines work to prevent severe Covid infection. I am also confident that climate change is real, although exaggerated.
With the PEPFAR thing, it’s early days but it seems like it’s the one decent program in all these billions of dollars of waste, fraud and corruption that the government has been up to - so obviously the media are harping on it constantly. Fine, OK, if it’s a good use of taxpayer money hopefully Trump/Musk will reinstate it. But talking about it is a distraction from USAID funding Internet censorship or gain of function research in the Wuhan lab or torture training for repressive Latin American regimes backed by the CIA or Islamist terrorist groups.
Tucker Carlson tried that with the Daily Caller early on, believe it or not. He couldn't make any money and it wound up doing the usual report-lots-of-crap-and-the-occasional-actual-liberal-malfeasance conservative-media thing.
This is kind of what Richard Hanania was getting at with the Elite Human Capital thing (though his exact definition of it sounds suspiciously similar to himself). Liberals read, conservatives watch TV. There just aren't enough people on the conservative team who care enough or want to work for it to make a right-wing New York Times with strong journalistic standards (outside of their usual ideological blindspots, of course) a viable entity.
Some of it's ideological capture and assortment over the years, but I honestly think too many bright conservatives are busy raising kids. Which, I mean, obviously is necessary for there to be a next generation, but it gives the left an asymmetric ideological advantage.
Conservatives also have the largely unacknowledged problem that their intellectual tradition no longer has a strong basis underneath. God has been dead for more than a century now, nobody seriously thinks that there's a coherent universal ontology with religious dogma at its center, and separate magisteria/god-of-the-gaps replacements are clearly inadequate. Until this is acknowledged and dealt with, conservatives have nothing to entice secular intellectuals with.
That is a good point. I think some are trying to do it with various forms of nationalism or fascism under another name, even if it was kind of a flop in 1945.
I think pre-2020 Jordan Peterson had a potential to create a new foundation for modern conservatism... but then he went to Russia and got his brain replaced, and he just isn't the same person anymore. :(
What other conservative intellectuals are there? Theodore Dalrymple comes to my mind; any other examples? My rule of thumb is "a person who could write a guest post on ACX without dramatically lowering its quality level".
Hanania, kind of? But all of them have been reluctant to explicitly come to terms with the problem I pointed at. Of course, doing so isn't easy - replacing the basis of your ideology is about the most anti-conservative thing imaginable! But still necessary, I claim, if conservatism has any intention to provide serious challenge to progressivism/utopianism.
I don't think the problem is a lack of human capital for conservatives. The problem is that a conservative who doesn't support Trump 100% in every way is called a "Democrat" nowadays.
Republicans *had* a lot of human capital pre-2016, but they were all excommunicated or silenced.
Who is y'all? I never made that claim, or any of the other claims you list in that paragraph. To the best of my recollection, neither did Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
On the other hand, it was Trump himself who claimed on November 21, 2015: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering. So something’s going on. We’ve got to find out what it is.”
He later claimed explicitly (on ABC’s This Week) that he saw this on television. If this were true, the footage would have been saved on video. I’m still waiting for the video tape.
For that matter, I’m still waiting for the Weapons of Mass Destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
I know there are a bunch of nuts on the political left; mostly I ignore them. You should, too, rather than dismissing an entire half of the political spectrum.
On the other hand, honest conservatives like Daniel Larison during the Bush years or Liz Cheney more recently, are the fringe conservatives.
I think it's worth noting that the average liberal (I don't know if I am the average liberal, but I'm close) would say the same thing in reverse. You said that Iraq had WMDs; you said that deregulation would be a good thing and then we got the 2008 bank crisis; you said Mexico was going to pay for the wall; you said covid was going to kill a negligible number of people; etc, etc. (Those last two "you"s were specifically Trump.) Hell, I could go farther back: Ronald Reagan's first big debut in politics was arguing that medicare would lead to a communist-style tyranny and destroy freedom in the U.S.
I appreciate Scott's efforts (and willingness, and ability) to talk sense across these lines. But I think that part of that is recognizing that the amount of lying on BOTH sides has been crazy. Obviously we have different views about the balance: I think there's been more lying on the conservative side, you'd probably say the reverse, so let's just say it's both and remind ourselves of the fundamental attribution error (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
That said, I don think that there is a distinction worth making: namely, distinguishing mainstream voices from fringe ones. On my side, neither major politicians (Biden/Pelosi/Obama/etc) nor journalist voices (your pick of NYT columnists) said anything about a piss tape. But it was Reagan who said medicare would end American freedom, Bush who said Iraq had WMDs and Trump who said Mexico would pay for his wall. I am not saying that all liberal lies are from fringe voices (the covid messaging was pretty deceptive at times, although not always), and am certainly not saying you couldn't find lunacy on the fringe right far beyond what even Trump says. But it's an important distinction to make, I'd argue.
But fundamentally, we live in a polarized society in which each side sees the other as fundamentally unconcerned with the truth. The response to this should not be to dismiss everything the other side says, but to read/listen to both sides, and decide each individual issue on the merits as best as we can (with, of course, a recognition that there are also both genuine mistakes and reasonable beliefs which change with new data as well as lies at play.)
>I think it's worth noting that the average liberal (I don't know if I am the average liberal, but I'm close) would say the same thing in reverse. You said that Iraq had WMDs; you said that deregulation would be a good thing and then we got the 2008 bank crisis;
I think this strengthens their point: The cons had a string of failures that discredited them back then, the libs became ascendant, and had their own string of failures and now we're here
>Ronald Reagan's first big debut in politics was arguing that medicare would lead to a communist-style tyranny and destroy freedom in the U.S.
I mean, if you add Social Security to that, I'd say you shouldn't count it out yet.
The sad thing is that the Clinton emails fiasco really was a disqualification; but our standards have dropped so much since. Never thought I’d find myself wishing we could go back to Bush.
PEPFAR's not our team! It's your team! George W. Bush is not a liberal!
Until Trump noticed PEPFAR, PEPFAR was a bipartisan program because it was extremely popular among conservative evangelicals, because it was created by a conservative evangelical president in response to conservative evangelical concerns about the global poor. The liberals haven't done anything a tenth as good. I don't know why evangelicals have gone insane, but the liberals are just stewarding the program until the evangelicals return to their senses and start gloating about how the conservative concern for government efficiency saved millions of babies while the libs were fussing around with DEI for shrimp.
The Republican base has become increasingly isolationist since the 2010s at the least. RINO is not a new insult.
My point is, if you squint your eyes to see things how the populists would, you can understand why they regard PEPFAR as liberals spending money to help foreigners instead of Americans.
If you say "PEPFAR is not a populist program," then I'm not going to write a long screed complaining about that. But it's insane to have a definition of "liberal" in which George W. Bush is a liberal. Especially if you're also (correctly!) criticizing liberal fearmongering about McCain and Romney. There is no world where Mitt Romney is a true conservative non-RINO and Bush is basically a Democrat.
What? Romney is a RINO too. You have to realize that Trump (and by extension, the new Republican party) aren't conservative, they're revolutionaries. Anyone seeking to protect the old order is an enemy.
First, I will just point out that "people make overstated and hyperbolic claims about the policies of their political opposition" is not some unique pathology of the left. Everyone does it, all the time, throughput human history.
But to respond to one specific point
> he won't be allowed to use the power he got elected to have.
He was not elected to have this power. He was elected President of the United States, which under our constitutional system does not have the power of the purse. PEPFAR is a program authorized by the US Congress and the President does not have the legal power in our system to just decide he doesn't like the program and refuse to spend the money. It's current authorization expires in March, if he believes its a bad program then fine, he can use his influence to get congress to not reauthorize it. But what he is doing now is very clearly illegal.
No, he was elected President in the normal way that people are elected President. People had all sorts of reasons for voting for him, but the question on the ballot was definitely not “Should we give Donald Trump dictatorial power not beholden to any law” If that WAS the question on the ballot and a majority said yes then that would something different.
It doesn't matter if it was on the ballot or not. Democracy is a system of compromise, not justice. It prevents conflict by making sure the minority does not needlessly waste their lives fighting fights they cannot win. Thus, the majority always has the final say.
Just to be pedantic, a majority of Americans actually voted for someone other than Trump for President.
> It doesn't matter if it was on the ballot or not.
Of course it matters. People were voting for a President, a job which is supposed to be defined by our laws and have limited powers. If he is doing things that are explicitly not within legal power of a President then that is not what people voted for. Imagine you voted for someone to be the treasurer of your town. If they then proceeded to steal all the town's money to build themselves a mansion, would you just shrug and say "well the people voted for him"?
Wait what? He won the polular vote this time. Are you saying that the vote was rigged?
Edit: Huh, apparently he was a minority majority. Well, third party votes are equivalent to not voting, so I don't see it as particularly relevant. If they wanted a voice, they could've had it.
> If they then proceeded to steal all the town's money to build themselves a mansion, would you just shrug and say "well the people voted for him"?
If doing that was part of his political campaign, yes, yes I would.
This is a helluva comment which has way more salience than I (as a firm Never Trumper) would like. Any objection if I share it to my Notes feed and -- maybe, if I have the nerve -- with a few close relatives?
I think the best way to think about that is that reducing the debt is a federal program that we could spend money on. It’s not the least valuable program to spend money on, but I don’t think there’s any clear indication that it’s *so* valuable that it’s more worthy of funds than the *average* federal program.
>but I don’t think there’s any clear indication that it’s *so* valuable that it’s more worthy of funds than the *average* federal program.
I think there's plenty of indication:
* Debt to GDP ratio is the highest it's been in a long time
* Interest on debt is becoming the largest item in the US Budget
* This, if unadressed, is likely to trigger a debt crisis which would, at best, greatly reduce Americans' purchasing power, through debasement of their currency.
Unless, by virtue of them being the biggest, you consider the average federal program to be Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense Spending, it does seem better than average (and even then, I definitely think you could do with some cuts to social security, but that's very unlikely to happen)
Given the benefits of reducing the debt, I agree it’s quite valuable. But again, you have to compare the cost. It’s not cheap to reduce the debt by a trillion dollars a year. And is it *so* beneficial that it’s worth cutting a trillion dollars of other programs? Some of those programs, yes. But again, this is one priority among many.
Convincing Rebublicans that they should do that would be a good first step. Right now their plans are to massively explode the deficit, and the only disagreement is "how high?"
It’s useful to think of cutting debt as just another program to fund. It’s a better program than some, but not the very best program to fund. I don’t think there’s any reason to think it’s better than the average government program, even though it’s surely better than some.
Does it bother you even a little bit that PEPFAR was yoked to a lot of idiocy so it could be used as a distractor to prevent the idiocy from being threatened?
Is it really the right response to such a thing to acquiesce to this trick in order to avoid a potential temporary slowdown in the good aid programs in order to separate them from the bad ones they have been yoked to?
Do the tricksters who do this bear the moral fault or do Elon and Trump bear the moral fault for not respecting the PEPFAR human shields? (And whose fault was it that those PEPFAR human shields had been corralled into such an extremely time-dependently sensitive relationship to USAID that their health was actually threatened by a few days of administrative confusion?)
If you mean that the same government that did PEPFAR also did lots of idiotic things, trust me, the government that's canceling PEPFAR is also going to do a lot of idiotic things.
If it were me, instead of canceling everything the first week, I would take two months to ask people which things were idiotic, then cancel the idiotic ones (doesn't have to be some kind of sinister hard-to-interpret experts - I could have told them this one myself). I'd even be fine if they erred on the side of canceling too much, as long as it's an error and not the intended outcome!
Not just “the same government”, but the same AGENCY (USAID), which was a slush fund for things like color revolutions and laundering money to politicians’ cronies, AND WHICH TRIED TO block access to information about its own disbursements to Trump’s incoming auditors (the only reason an immediate *suspension* of USAID activity was needed was that mutinous resistance was occurring, a thing Trump had vowed would be immediately nipped in the bud this time around).
Man, you parse this differently from me. To me, color revolutions seem like a CIA/DoD project meant to help the American people by screwing over its enemies. I think it's slightly dangerous to the charity arm to force it to also prop up our country's own selfish interests, but I hardly think it's treason or anything.
I strongly disagree with this statement about "color revolutions". The two I saw closest (in Ukraine) had not much CIA/DoD/xyz in it - esp. not direct and not directly relevant. Oh, one of my friends taught some of the students who started a demonstration on Maidan. Oh, his salary was mostly paid by a western NGO? So what? Your politology-students are angry about their gov. - you let them have a discussion, they ask for advice, you shrug and tell them: One option is to do a protest (fun fact: they knew anyways). - To twist that into "CIA staged 2014" is ... stinky BS. What I see from far - Belorus or Georgia - looks same.
Also, I doubt US-agencies are competent to do relevant stuff there - just far too slow moving. It has been some decades: how much CIA involvement in the protest in East-Germany 1954 (or 1989/90) ? How much DoD in Prague 1968? In Budapest? Even Solidarnosc? Even the Arab spring - oh sure, facebook and phones were invented by the CIA. (Edit: US-agencies was "USAID", slip of mind)
The CIA used to help overthrow socialist governments in Latin America all the time. The point was to win the Cold War. That ultimately did happen, though was it caused by the CIA? Eh, who knows?
Not an expert, but heard it often and sounds likely to me. Monroe-doctrine and all. "Indochina" is obviously also a clear and - not so subtle - example, though outside the Americas the US agencies famously blundered their "help" (similar: Africa). We can assume the US tried as hard as it could in Iraq before and after occupying/liberating it - no one seems to care to tell THAT story, as nothing had come out of it (similar: Iran). - In modern day Europe, they seem to have learned not to mess things up. Sending peace-corps volunteers to Ukraine did not "trigger" any revolution - it's what you do; my country sent me to Russia and Ukraine to help teaching German. Made me a spy or an agent for system-change? Wished it did. ;)
I think that people in Eastern Europe are quite capable of hating Russia even without CIA involvement. It may sound weird to edgy right-wing Americans who take their information about the world from Russia Today, but maybe reading about Holodomor on Wikipedia could be a good starting point.
Some fraction of USAID money (on the order of ~$500 million? So a lot to a normal person; not a lot in the scale of the US government) was going to NGOs that promoted illegal immigration, teaching them the magic words, etc.
I wasn't arguing that the DOGE shut it all down and restart method was correct; my comment was aimed just at Scott's, that some fraction of the "charitable arm" is acting against American interests and in ways many Americans might call treasonous.
I think he's taking an overly-rosy view and it doesn't help his case.
In left wing spaces right now all the news is "PEPFAR gone, millions will die!" In right wing spaces the news is "USAID paid $1.5 million to a Serbian NGO to promote DEI in Serbian workplaces, $70,000 to produce a DEI musical in Ireland, $2.5 million for electric vehicle subsidies in Vietnam, $47,000 for a 'transgender opera' in Columbia, $32,000 for a 'transgender comic book' in Peru, $2 million for transgender clinics and 'LGBT activisin' in Guatemala, etc". It's pretty obvious that the funding freeze is all about cutting off patronage funds to left wing NGOs and programs like PEPFAR were just caught in the crossfire. Definitely a point in favor of taking time to figure out the bad ones before shutting everything down, but the Trump admin seems to be going with a "move fast and break things" strategy.
> in favor of taking time to figure out the bad ones before shutting everything down
I don't see it. If you care about cutting off patronage funds to your enemies' allies, and don't care about PEPFAR one way or the other, what's the problem? Of course the other side will wail about PEPFAR, because they want both, and it's not politically advantageous to publicize the patronage.
The problem is that it allows your political opponents to accuse you of killing hundreds of thousands of Africans. Even if you don't care about PEPFAR including it in the blast radius give your opponent's ammunition to use against you. I can see the advantages of moving fast and broad, but one of the disadvantages is that it takes media focus away from the patronage funds and towards programs that are more popular and you weren't planning on cutting anyway.
It's also a problem that delays in funding might actually "kill someone" at which point your political opponents now have martyrs to try to beat you over the head with. (It would also be a moral problem to do something that results in people dying when you could have done it in a way where they don't die, but I wanted to focus on the political problems. Especially as we don't know if anyone is likely to die from doing it the fast and broad way.)
> The problem is that it allows your political opponents to accuse you of killing hundreds of thousands of Africans.
And again, why would Trump's base care about this? They already have majority power, they have no reason to care what the minority thinks of them. If they do resort to violence, well... Now you have an opportunity to purge the opposition.
Trumps base may not care, but many Americans will care and their votes count to. The Democrats want the average American to see Trump as causing chaos and disaster, and PEPFAR disruption is a decent weapon for that purpose. The Republican's have a small majority in the House and an alright majority in the Senate because the average American currently prefers Republicans. Giving your opponents ammunition to change the average American's mind about that is always a problem. It may be worth the cost, but it's still a problem.
Some of the chaos has been bad enough that even congressional Republicans criticized it. And I'm sure there's a lot more they're too afraid to say.
People who signed up for "boo trans people" or "boo inflation" aren't going to like it when the checks stop going out. It might be fashionable to hate on government in the abstract, but when confronted with the actual reality of destroying government, you're going to lose support VERY fast.
They were going to accuse you of something like that whatever you did. The details don't seem that relevant. I actually heard a lot more about his DOGE team accessing the Treasury's database than about PEPFAR, so they seem to have assessed (correctly, imo) that their target audience cares more about that than the deaths of "hundreds of thousands of Africans."
I don't think them getting martyrs to use as a weapon helps them all that much. They seem to have made a lot of hay out of the physical appearance of his DOGE team, and I think that's hard to top.
Yes, the enemy will always attack you. That doesn't mean that you should make it easier for them, or that making it easier for them to attack you isn't a problem.
> It's pretty obvious that the funding freeze is all about cutting off patronage funds to left wing NGOs and programs like PEPFAR were just caught in the crossfire
Why is that obvious? The most likely explanation is that they did what they want to do. If they cancelled PEPFAR it's because they wanted to cancel PEPFAR.
> In right wing spaces the news is
I'm willing to believe we spend money on dumb stuff but I have seen many cases of conservatives making lists like this and then when someone investigates it turns out to be a mischaracterization of something way more sensible. Like I remember awhile back someone saying they were spending money on, like, "the sex lives of worms" or something, and it was really a program to figure out how to sterilize some invasive species that was killing crops, or something like that.
>The most likely explanation is that they did what they want to do. If they cancelled PEPFAR it's because they wanted to cancel PEPFAR.
I agree: the best explanation for why they are making sure PEPFAR isn't canceled with the rest of them is because they didn't want to cancel PEPFAR.
>I'm willing to believe we spend money on dumb stuff but I have seen many cases of conservatives making lists like this and then when someone investigates it turns out to be a mischaracterization of something way more sensible.
Everything listed could be a lie but the point would remain: the Republicans are not crowing about cancelling PEPFAR, they're crowing about cancelling "dumb stuff". Even if it's not true it tells us what the Republican focus is on the whole funding freeze.
My understanding is they un-cancelled PEPFAR because a bunch of evangelical Christian groups actually do care and raised a big stink and that's their constituents.
> the point would remain: the Republicans are not crowing about cancelling PEPFAR, they're crowing about cancelling "dumb stuff"
"The Republicans" could mean various things. If it means the rank-and-file ... perhaps it's what they're focusing on, but rank-and-file partisan types tend to, in the first instance, ignore negative news about their side. And given my point about evangelical groups at least some Republicans are pro-PEPFAR. But if "the Republicans" means *the people in charge* on the Republican side, apparently what they wanted is to cancel PEPFAR.
>But if "the Republicans" means *the people in charge* on the Republican side, apparently what they wanted is to cancel PEPFAR.
The Republican's in charge are the ones who are crowing about the "dumb stuff": that list I quoted earlier is from a White House press release, and Republican congress-critters have been repeating the same list of items in speeches for the last few days. What evidence do you have that what the Republicans really wanted to do was cancel PEPFAR? The only evidence you've presented is that PEPFAR funds were frozen along with all other funds in USAID. The fact that PEPFAR has been cleared to keep existing while all the "dumb stuff" is getting cancelled is strong evidence that the "dumb stuff" was their aim and PEPFAR wasn't.
This is about on par with saying "occasionally cops kill innocent people, so we should completely defund all of law enforcement, and maybe hire some of them back in a few months"
That seems to be what the Trump admin is doing. They froze everything and are now vetting one by one. Programs like PEPFAR have passed and won't be shut down.
Like you said, they froze *everything*. Musk bragged about feeding USAID "into the woodchipper", and they've shut down many other things too, like most science funding, even completely non-objectionable stuff.
At some point, they might try to restart some of that, but shutting something down for weeks causes irreparable damage even if you *don't* lock everyone out and try to destroy the whole organization. When you stop paying people, they're forced to look for new jobs so they can eat and pay rent. When you stop paying for medicine, people die. Food aid rots in the ports (this is something a REPUBLICAN senator criticized Trump for) etc.
Something similar is playing out with the deportations (which I totally support, so I'm not even endorsing the should-be-criminals-only view).
A local reporter actually did some actual reporting - went down to Home Depot where the illegals stand at the edge of the parking lot under what little shade there is, and hope to get picked up for day labor. They all said there had not been much work the past few months; that was what they worry about. Asked if they were worried about being picked up by ICE, they said (in Spanish) no, that they believe ICE would focus on criminals, and since they weren't criminals, they didn't feel they would be in its sights.
Meanwhile, the high schools are letting the kids out to protest, probably permanently; and there's a protest at the Capitol, and much hand-wringing because deportations are such an existential threat to the entire Hispanic population lol.
I'd like them to be more specific: tell us the names of Tren de Aragua members, for instance, that they wish to remain here. Or which Chinese traffickers of indentured slaves.
Are you asking why Trump and Musk yoked PEPFAR to other programs in their cuts? Or why PEPFAR is run out of an agency that does foreign aid?
As for your last question about whose fault it is that PEOFAR recipients are in a time-sensitive relationship with medication, I think it’s the HIV virus’s fault. No human decided that you have to take the medication regularly - everyone would rather have a medication that works long term and allows big gaps between doses.
That’s a strange way to misrepresent what I am saying.
I am NOT SAYING that PEPFAR aid recipients don’t have to take their medication every day!
I am ONLY SAYING that it’s extremely unusual for patients who have to take a medication every day to be vulnerable to a few days of administrative confusion-normally they BOTH have a reserve of spare pills available, AND their doctor or clinic doesn’t suddenly lose access to all drug supplies from all suppliers if some faraway organization has a change in leadership.
This isn’t a few days - it’s supposed to be a 90 day pause, and the officials were told to stop sending supplies. The clinic probably has supplies for a week or two, but if the staff isn’t supposed to come into the clinic that’ll cause problems.
It was fully resolved within a few days. And the USAID is not the only supplier of those medications, they are available everywhere for people who can afford them, and doctors and pharmacies everywhere are used to dealing with insurance changes and administrative changes and other hiccups in such a way that it takes much more than a few days for any patients to “run out” of necessary meds.
The 'idiocy' as you call it is the entire point of foreign aid.
Foreign aid is not about deadloss charity, as Scott frames it here.
Foreign aid is about soft power projection across impoverished nations around the globe.
It always is and always has been a tool for statecraft, either by being used directly as leverage in negotiations to get favorable deals and considerations from poor nations, or as you say as a mask for more sinister operations that need to move a lot of money in foreign areas without a lot of scrutiny.
We can talk about whether the US should be projecting soft power in these ways, but if we want that discussion we should have it openly. Pretending that PEPFAR being associated with such things is a knock against the program is missing the point; that is what it was created to do in the first place.
One day you're going to be diabetic, and your insurance company will say they're pausing your insulin for six months to "review, validate, and prioritize", and then six months later they'll send your corpse a nice letter saying "we decided insulin was necessary after all!"
I think probably what they actually did (pause it for one day, realize they made a huge mistake when everyone screamed really loud, restart it) was fine (though I'm not sure! Probably there were real disruptions to a program that 100,000s of lives depend on!). But this only worked because lots of people screamed really loud, and I am proud to be one of those people.
My point was that you do this once when you discover that, in among the wonderful things you’re doing, there is some serious amount of very dubious, wasteful, even damaging activity as well. Given the fungibility of all the resources that are going into this scheme if you don’t pause, etc., then you’ll never have the opportunity to fix anything. It rather looks like DOGE has revealed a specific trigger point with regard to USAID that deserves this kind of once-in-a-lifetime response.
The question remains: Why do you have to just pause everything while you review, when you can't even spend the money the pause presumably saves until the next budget decision? The disruption and uncertainty the pause causes cannot possibly be worth whatever its benefits are, especially if the reviewers are that uninformed about what the stuff they're reviewing is doing.
Because of enemy action, obviously. You can't review hostile bureaucracy in a timely manner while it runs as usual, as it will obfuscate and frustrate you at every turn.
How? Why does pausing the programs magically make the "hostile bureaucracy" unable to stymie your efforts? Are you just going to fire everyone while you review? If so, how do you plan to restart the good programs with nobody to run them. None of this makes sense
You put everyone on paid leave, lock them out of their paperwork and computer systems so they won't be able to interfere with the review, then fire those who deserve it, and everybody else resumes work. Also, people will scream with righteous indignation particularly loudly about actually valuable programs (as we witness here), which would also provide useful evidence.
That's a fully generalized counterargument to any institutional or policy change that can potentially cost lives in the short term. Including, say, a hypothetical scheme to replace insurance with whatever policy that ends up lowering the cost of and increasing the availability of insulin in the long run.
This matches very well with my intuition, which has long maintained when someone utters a sentence of the form of "we should stop funding X and give that money to Y instead," the only correct way to interpret that sentence is "we should stop funding X." They do not care about Y. If they cared about Y, they would just be advocating for Y. The only reason Y is in that sentence at all is to try to make X look worse by comparison.
Also I'm no expert but I don't think government processes (outside of *maybe* two items both in the discretionary budget of a single agency) actually allow you to just take money from one place and move it to another. You can argue for funding Y. You can argue for cutting funding to X. But they are separate arguments which stand or fall independently (which is as it should be).
The analysis about what would happen with this hypothetical unspent money is essentially incorrect.
If the US did not spend that $6 billion dollars, that would not result in the federal government spending that $6 billion elsewhere, because congress hasn't authorized more money for those other programs. The marginal effect would be to reduce the federal deficit by $6 billion dollars. This means that the treasury would borrow $6 billion less that year in order to have enough money to fund what it does spend money on.
This means that investors who buy treasury bonds in order to finance the US' deficit spending will instead invest their $6 billion elsewhere. Who are these investors buying treasury bonds? Some of them are:
- The Federal Reserve. If the Federal Reserve buys $6 billion less in treasury bonds in a year, that means that the money supply is effectively reduced by $6 billion, resulting in a tiny amount less inflation. This means that everyone who holds cash sees the value of their cash increase (or, decrease less) ever-so-slightly.
- Institutional investors like banks, mutual funds, pensions. If these investors buy $6 billion less in treasury bonds, that means they're investing their money elsewhere. Then the marginal change is to increase the amount of money invested in other similar low-risk investments in the US. Think more loans for (and thus lower interest rates for) mortgages, state and municipal bonds, corporate bonds, etc.
- Foreign investors. They will invest their money in something else, possibly not in America.
So, in summary, the actual marginal consequence of not spending that $6 billion dollars is that that $6 billion will be invested elsewhere, in similar low-risk investments such as mortgages, state and municipal bonds, corporate bonds, and foreign government bonds, by investors who would have otherwise invested purchased treasury bonds. There may also be a slight rise in consumption if interest rates on investments are lowered some. You may or may not think that those uses of the money are more valuable that PEPFAR.
I'm assuming that Congress has some idea how big the existing deficit is when they decide whether or not to pass new bills, and that eventually cutting old programs makes them think they have room to pass new ones.
I think this is the right way to think about all government spending. But unless you’re someone who thinks that this alternative is better than almost *any* government spending, it would be surprising if it turned out to be better than PEPFAR.
The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Niger is 5.79, its population has increased from 11m to 27m in 25 years and and the country imports 41% of its food.
Thus, while canceling PEPFAR and allowing people to die of AIDS now seems harsh, one could argue that the demographic landscape is already incredibly unsustainable, and all PEPFAR may be doing is kicking the demographic can down the road slightly until extreme civil strife and/or famine absolutely ravage the region, and enormous numbers of people die in various nasty and brutish ways.
It could be argued, that in the long run (generations), that if we feel we must interfere - lowering the fertility, raising the drought resistant food output, and letting AIDS run its course might be a more pragmatic approach.
If Niger has a food supply problem, why not address that, without touching PEPFAR spending? The idea that, because there's a risk of famine, one should hope for a plague to forestall it is pretty wild. There isn't a famine now, so it's like if Scrooge had said, "If they are not going to die, they had better do it."
You've glanced up against a controversial take here :
Implementing agricultural reforms, administering health care, fostering cultural change in family planning - it all sounds a lot like we're taking over Niger?
I didn’t say anything about fostering cultural change in family planning. And we’ve helped many countries, including with technical innovations, without “taking them over.” I don’t even know if Niger is at risk of famine as you say. What I’m saying is that “if a famine is coming let AIDS run its course” simply makes no sense, because the reason to prevent famine is to prevent people from dying horribly and needlessly, which is the same reason to prevent plague.
(4) DOESN'T SAVING THE LIVES OF POOR PEOPLE JUST CAUSE THEM TO BREED AND CREATE MORE POOR PEOPLE? I think this is false for places like India and South America, which have below replacement fertility rates. It's more true in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are still above replacement, but getting less so - their TFR will be below breakeven in about a generation.
I think in the sub-Saharan African case, there are two opposite effects. First, giving an individual more money causes them to have more kids. Second, making a country richer causes the people there to have fewer kids (this is why Congo's TFR is 6 and Singapore's is 1.04). All charity is some combination of helping individuals and making a country richer. Even curing disease is like this, partly because its long term goal is to eliminate the disease (which would be great for the country) and partly because raising a potential worker to age 25 is a big investment, having that worker die at age 25 means you have to write the whole thing off as a loss, and that's as bad for GDP as losing any other big investment. I don't know for sure whether these two effects cancel out, or which one is more important.
If you told me the pro-fertility effect was stronger, I would count that as mark against global health programs, but not an infinitely large one. A lot of this is driven by what I said before about imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents just as much. If I can prevent that at the cost of pushing back the sub-Saharan African fertility breakeven point six months or five years or whatever, I still think that's a good trade. If you disagree, there are lots of non-sub-Saharan-African-global-health charities you can donate to.
>A lot of this is driven by what I said before about imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents just as much
That seems like a dubious assumption for numerous reasons. But a steelman version would be something like:
>Imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents at least a tenth as much.
You can make arguments about the extreme effectiveness in PEPFAR, even with significant adjustments for differences between populations.
>DOESN'T SAVING THE LIVES OF POOR PEOPLE JUST CAUSE THEM TO BREED AND CREATE MORE POOR PEOPLE?
That claim also sneaks in the assumption that life as a poor person is so bad as to be not worth living. Why exactly is more poor people a bad thing, if they live happy lives and only cost a trivial amount of resources? If the population of Africa was 4x what is is now, and PEPFAR cost 0.4% of the federal budget, it would be...still a pretty good deal?
Maybe the "vast swaths of poor people" argument would make sense if foreign aid was on the verge of crippling the American economy, and we just couldn't bear the cost, but come on. PEPFAR is like $10-20 per year per American! The demographic explosion that's going to bankrupt is, unfortunately, well-off geriatrics in Florida collecting social security checks and using Medicare.
Most of the starvation in Africa happens in conflict prone regions where it is difficult to import food. In relatively peaceful areas, people in general are not starving.
It will be very interesting to see how the demographic transition plays out in SSA considering the association in many SSA cultures between fecundity and social status. It would be wildly interesting if the TFR there ever went as low as South Korea's.
"Many studies (n = 48) found that having many children can bring social status and prestige to families and communities."
"Second, making a country richer causes the people there to have fewer kids (this is why Congo's TFR is 6 and Singapore's is 1.04)."
The non-3rd world did not have children in a negative resource environment for decades. It is immoral behavior toward their own children, stop enabling it. If you disagree, there are lots of sub-Saharan-African-global-health charities you can donate to.
...and Niger's per-capita GDP is also up 4.4x from 25 years ago. It may be hard for you to believe, but most of Africa is on the same upward economic trajectory as much of Asia in the mid-20th century.
Plus, if you were truly humanitarian-minded and worried about population growth, you'd advocate for additional funding for family planning, not mass death and suffering. "Letting AIDS run its course" is ghoulish and sadistic when it can be treated for a trivial amount of money.
Malthusian arguments have just never been proven true in reality.
Every person who survives is another laborer with the potential to contribute to the economy.
If you randomly kill 10% of the population, you don't suddenly make everyone else 10% richer because now there is more to go around. You at teh very least shrink the economy by 10% because you killed 10% of the workers, and more likely you shrink it by 40% because critical people in a pipeline or supply chain being lost disrupts the entire chain, and people are displaced because their family lost a breadwinner or they are leaving work to go into mourning, or etc.
And this is only exacerbated if instead of killing them immediately, you give them a slow wasting disease that kills them over years during which their family has to care for them and provide for them.
So, no, letting people die to avoid famine does not work, and making people healthy and strong does not create famine. It is just straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly good to save people from death and disease.
My family is in danger from the national debt. So's yours. 60-80% is a safe debt-to-GDP ratio. The US is at 123%. This article reads like it comes from an alternate universe where governments never have debt crises. Where interest rates don't affect anybody's lives. Where no country has ever played chicken with macroeconomic forces and ditched just a smidge too late.
Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts. If I thought there was any hope of decreasing the debt, I'd . . . well, I'd hope it would go for the worst government programs first, but I'd understand if they wanted to give everything a haircut. Getting rid of the best ones first, not touching lots of the stupid ones, and we all know they'll increase the debt anyway just seems dumb.
Trump would do the tax cuts whether or not PEPFAR or USAID or whatever is defunded. When/if the debt goes up it would go up by an amount less the amount of whatever is defunded
I should be less flippant. Your ethical calculus ought to account for the fact that government spending influences macroeconomic reality, and that macroeconomics poses real danger to real people. There is an actual, real, not-hyperbolic trade-off between spending money on foreign aid and reducing the danger of economic catastrophe for US citizens by paying down the national debt instead. In the case of PEPFAR, it seems like the trade-off is obviously worth it.
"Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts." Many who are right of center believe that tax rate cuts can improve the debt, (in specific situations and in general; in short term and long term contexts). If you have some specific reason to believe that those crowds are wrong, or that Trump is not amongst them, do tell. Otherwise this seems to be a bit unfair, no?
The Laffer Curve is real, but I don't think even Art Laffer himself is claiming that we're on the right side of it (admittedly, the tax code is complicated so some tax/benefit combos might be).
The only time we balanced the budget in my lifetime happened after Clinton raised taxes in 1993. He got punished for that in the midterms and no president since has dared taken a similar risk.
Taxes are not the only reason it went down, but GOP appeals to the Laffer Curve always ignore this one spectacular exception.
Interest rates were much higher then too, as was interest as a share of GDP.
I disagree. I believe Trump cares about debts. I even believe that Scott believes Trump cares about debt. I believe it is a rhetorical excess to say otherwise. Of course, there's a long list of priorities, and caring about debt (or changing debt by a marginal dollar) may be differently prioritized for him than for others, but to say he doesn't care (at all) strikes me as disingenuous. I mention it because Scott seems to want to evangelize to "the other side" and rhetorical excess that impugns the motivations of other side strike me as counterproductively divisive. One way for me to have indirectly made that point would be the Laffer curve. There's a nice article written by a Trump senior policy advisor arguing we are on the inefficient side, suggesting that the concept may be resonant with at least parts of Trump's circle. But the Laffer curve is just a tool to have made the point, and a bit beside the point. Incidentally, to clarify - I do believe that for many prospective marginal proposed changes in tax policy that we are on the right side of the Laffer curve (particularly when adjusting for effects after including growth), and that is not a rhetorical excess on my side.
FWIW Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio is over 250% and they seem to be muddling along okay.
The thing about debt to GDP is the context in which it occurs. If there were a a large country out there with a huge surplus, I'd be more worried. But China, India and pretty much of all of Europe have ratios above 75%.
The only countries with low ratios are economic weaklings like Russia and Afghanistan.
Japan is an interesting case! They get away with it because people there save a ton of money, much of it in the form of government bonds, and international investors use them as a stability hedge. They've also got a ton of deflationary pressure, so interest rates stay really low despite super inflationary monetary policy.
But other countries can't get away with that kind of thing. Even developed nations like Greece, for example. When the 2008 crisis hit, they were running a 129% debt-to-gdp ratio and had a huge unaccountable public sector. They went into a recession, lost a quarter of their GDP over 4 years, unemployment went to 25% and they had to be bailed out 3 times in a row.
So the interesting question is, how much leeway does being the world's reserve currency actually get us? And will we continue to be able to maintain that advantage in the face of BRICS? When the next economic downturn comes, are we going to be like Japan or like Greece?
I just think the chance that we're the next Greece is non-zero, and so it's wrong and bad to treat government spending programs as though they only trade off against other government spending programs. By all accounts, macroeconomic trends are cyclical, which means another 2008 is coming at some point; and every dollar of government deficit spending, no matter which program it funds, trades off very concretely against my personal safety from that coming crisis.
Goldman Sachs predicts a 15% chance of recession in the US this year.
Your family is also in danger from HIV taking over the world, and also from climate change, and also from asteroids. It’s true that the government debt poses *some* danger, but it would be strange to think that *this* danger is more pressing than several hundred thousand lives per year, especially when you are only averting $6 billion a year of the debt.
No, we in the US are not in danger from HIV taking over. Decades ago health authorities scared Americans into believing it would crossover to the majority population who didn't engage in IV drug use or sex between men, but it never did outside of sub-Saharan Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fumento#Heterosexual_AIDS Infectious diseases have more externalities than other health issues, but HIV specifically has limitations which prevent it from becoming endemic in the larger US population.
First of all, people have been making that exact argument for my entire life and probably before that, close to a half century at this point. No one has ever done anything to address the 'problem, and no crisis has ever emerged. It's a bunk argument that doesn't understand how the finances of a sovereign nation with fiat currency works, especially not if that nation is the US with all its unique advantages and relationships.
Second, as Scott says in the article - if what you cared about is the national debt, you'd be arguing to cut huge amounts in military spending or etc., not chiming in when someone says foreign aid is good.
We should cut huge amounts of military spending. I'm chiming in because I think Scott's ethical calculus should account for the risk of the US not being uniquely invincible to macroeconomic forces, as you both seem to think it is. 2008 seemed to showcase a distinct lack of US macroeconomic invincibility, to my memory.
And Clinton worked really hard to address the problem of the national debt. It was one of the signature achievements of his presidency. Look it up. It's not something Rush Limbaugh invented to scare you.
"I am happy to “concede” that if you face a choice between saving a stranger and saving your brother, save your brother! Or your cousin, or your great-uncle, or your seven-times-great-nephew-twice-removed. I’ll “concede” all of this, immediately, because it’s all fake; none of your relatives were ever in any danger. The only point of this whole style of philosophical discussion is so that you can sound wise as you say “Ah, but is not saving your brother more important than saving a complete stranger?” then doom five million complete strangers to death for basically no benefit while your brother continues to be a successful real estate agent in Des Moines."
This a million times over. Most debates with the "intellectual" right could be entirely dismissed by some version of this paragraph.
Right. But most people are not effective altruists. Most people are selfish. They care about their brother in Des Moines (assuming he didn't beat them up growing up or marry a much hotter spouse) but caring about people halfway across the world or shrimp is really much more something you do when you've got enough to spread around.
What if your brother has a passport and a libido? What if viruses are contagious? PEPFAR tamps down a global pandemic, which benefits everyone on the globe. Also, since what has happened here is political smoke and mirrors and zero actual change to the foreign aid budget (since Rubio is taking over their budget and absorbing it into State Department) we have near zero information about what Rubio will decide to do with PEPFAR in 90 days. Since PEPFAR buys the political support of African nations, and since Rubio and the administration remain interested in the deployment of power and influence internationally, my guess is that after missing three months worth of doses, little if anything about PEPFAR will change. The USAID “closure” is bureaucratic reorganization not shrinkage.
I'm saying why few people care, not why I don't. Your argument is excellent on the actual merits. I just think most people are too stupid or self-absorbed to care. We just got a president elected who promised to control inflation with tariffs.
A million times not this. How can anyone possibly on the same page advance that Singer point about the drowning child, and condemn another hypothetical as "all fake"? Have you ever seen a child drowning in a river, and do you realistically ever expect to? Whereas this is really about spending money on PEPFAR vs spending money on something else, and I can easily see myself spending money on life saving medical treatment for my children. So it turns out not to be all fake at all.
I'm pro PEPFAR, I donate monthly to an African children facing charity, but good causes are not helped by bad logic
Scott is a doctor, and his other lifesaving credentials are well-established. I know I've personally physically intervened to save a few lives (and many other, more minor acts of goodness towards strangers).
None of them were literally drowning children, but I don't take that to be your point.
None of that detracts from my point that there's a proximity element to moral obligations whether that's genetic or physical or (in the medical case) physical plus professional. We can argue that there shouldn't be, and about whether this principle justifies ending pepfar (it doesn't). My objection is purely and simply to shouty moral philosophers like Singer inserting fallacious analogies into the argument and getting away with it.
Are there any people who would be buying life-saving medication for their children if it weren’t for the dastardly use of a tiny fraction of the federal budget to save lives in Africa?
I could imagine there are people who would be buying life saving medication if they didn’t have to pay for social security, or for the military, but the amount they are paying for PEOFAR isn’t realistically affecting this.
I am that winner of life's lottery, a rich Englishman, so my share of PEPFAR is £0.00. But anyway people's money is their money; your "not very much" claim sounds no different from saying shoplifting from the supermarket is ok because what difference can it make to Walmarts bottom line?
As to your "hypothetical" point my children might not be ill yet but there's no guarantee they won't be, so perhaps I am building a contingency fund. Secondly I and most people would if necessary sell my house to save a child. As you don't seem to buy the proximity argument, have you already done that for the sake of these African children?
You're literally making Scott's point for him in answer to the key paragraph. Americans have made the reasonable decision, through their reps, to spend something like 0.3% of the budget of the richest nation in history to save the lives of 100s and 100s of thousands of poor people, mostly children, in destitute countries. Your dumb philosophical intellectual games and feeling of superiority are just you masturbating to your small mind in the corner. And Trump doesn't get to undo that decision by himself. He's not king.
So how does that work? President George W Bush initiating the scheme was a reasonable decision made by the American people via their reps, but President Donald Trump putting it on hold is something completely different? Was Bush king to a greater extent than Trump?
>But anyway people's money is their money; your "not very much" claim sounds no different from saying shoplifting from the supermarket is ok
Moving goalposts generally means you've conceded that your first argument was wrong.
We were talking about saving a foreign life vs saving your child's life, and whether this argument falls to Matt's objection about hypothetical vs. real-life harm.
If you agree that your objection to Matt's point was invalid for the reasons I gave, and instead want to start arguing that all taxation is theft so all government programs are immoral, then we can do that but I'm literally just going to link you to Scott's Non-Libertarian FAQ.
Both rude,and illogical. I wasn't making a new point, I was responding to your claim that there is not very much money at stake.
Which raises another issue. I donate, completely outside the tax system, to charities which benefit African children. You can claim not to believe that, but then we can have a bet about it under which the loser makes a large donation to a charity which benefits African children. I suspect that you would find that bet unappealing. Being an arse on the internet is not a substitute for putting your hand in your own pocket.
I think "taxation for foreign aid is theft" is a much more defensible claim than "all taxation is theft". With taxation for something like national defence, there's a plausible reason why all citizens have a moral duty to pay -- namely, that all who choose to live in a territory are choosing to benefit from their defence. Whereas if a program is used exclusively by Africans, then there isn't a clear reason why the obligation to pay for it should fall on people living in the US.
I feel like this accounting relies on much more paternalism than we should be comfortable in a democracy, and certainly much more than the type of libertarian who thinks any taxation is theft should accept from their government.
My formation is that in a democracy, the government largely does things that the citizens want it to do. And we judge what the government does by how much it satisfies the citizen's preferences about what it should do, rather than by some set of proxy measures of who it helps and how. In that sense, a preference to help citizen and a preference to help non-citizen are not qualitatively different from each other, they're just preferences to trade off with everything else.
I think that your formation relies on a sense that how it actually works is government takes you money and then uses it to care for you. This is more paternalistic because it implies that you are not a party to deciding how the government operates or what you it to do - the government succeeds if it uses your money to benefit you materially, and fails if it uses your money in ways that don't benefit you. To me this removes the role of democracy and citizen's preferences.
TBH, I immediately start by questioning the estimates of "lives saved" by any of these programs, or foreign aid (occurring private efforts) generally. The sources of the data are exactly the same NGOs and foreign governments who are receiving the stream of spending and goods. In areas where corruption is a way of life and no one can really audit the books.
So it works out to
1. NGO with a stake in the whole system does a small study in one area, reports some number that may or may not generalize (spoiler: it never does) about lives saved per dollar spent.
2. More NGOs, aid organizations, etc multiply that estimate by the top line spending number, not counting the 90+% "overhead" (ie bribes, kickbacks, normal overhead, political donations (I repeat myself)) and come up with BIG-NUMBER of lives saved, which is why no one can ever think of doing anything about these funding streams, including looking into them too deeply, because "think of the children".
Forgive me for being cynical, but all the incentives and evidence I've seen points to this being another Washington Monument strategy.
Such numbers (“25 million lives saved!”) — which this author cites without an ounce of skepticism — are no doubt cooked up in the same manner a methhead concocts his drug of choice. How in the world would such an organization ascertain this figure in the first place? HIV doesn’t always lead to AIDS, and even AIDS does not exactly kill one instantly… Anti-virals, moreover, don’t cure anyone of HIV or AIDS last I checked. Is this organization simply administering anti-viral drugs to symptomless HIV-positive Africans and then patting themselves on the back for saving black lives? I wouldn’t be surprised. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if in reality this much vaunted program doesn’t take more African lives than it saves. A disturbing thought, certainly, but there’s no end to the disturbing realities one can find these days if one goes looking with open eyes.
I don't know who you'd trust - I can find you statements confirming it by the New England Journal of Medicine, National Institute of Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, US Department of State, etc.
Also, it matches our evidence that AIDS deaths are going down in Africa (ie five million more Africans are alive than we would expect) which is really hard to fake (where do you hide five million Africans?)
I think if you spend about an hour researching this, you would find that there's basically universal consensus that what I say is true, and not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it. If you're not going to do an hour of research, why are you risking 5 million lives on your level of certainty that everyone else is wrong?
A quick look at the ungated pieces (FOX and wapo, both opinion pieces) reveals that they make assertive statements without actually citing primary sources. Credibility: 0. Those sources that are cited are exactly the same groups that have large, even existential incentives to...round up...their numbers. I'm not accusing anyone of actual malfeasance, just "too good to check" + it being extremely hard to actually get accurate data.
Beyond that--if this is such a great program, the pharmaceutical companies can make a really easy PR win by voluntarily continuing it. It's not like USAID actually was doing the actual production or administration of the drugs--they just provided money and facilitation, while siphoning off overhead.
If a hospital were considering whether to lay off an expensive surgeon, and someone pointed out that the surgeon was scheduled to perform a life-saving operation on a child tomorrow, it would be ridiculous and evil of the hospital board to say "well, it's just one afternoon of work, if saving the kid's life is so essential and the operation is such a good bet then if the surgeon has a heart he'll do it for free even after we fire him".
Your apparent notion that we have good data coming from large parts of Africa on overall mortality let alone cause of death is amusing but depressing. Are you concerned with the facts of the matter — ie in establishing what we can know that we know — or with propaganda and/or the suppression of your own intellectual curiosity in favor of some preexisting emotional attachment? I cite a pandemic-era NYT article as evidence of the poor state of affairs in regards to mortality data collection from Africa: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-deaths-underreporting.html
By the way, apart from the sheer problem of “counting the dead” throughout large and remote swathes of Africa, there are significant issues with determining causes of death, especially in connection to AIDS/HIV, which, might I remind you, does not itself cause death but can only be associated with death; that is, to put it another way, HIV/AIDS does not result in a universal set of mortality-causing symptoms that allows one to say unequivocally that it was the primary causeof death. See this paper for an overciew of the variety of causes of death associated with AIDS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7590652/#:~:text=In%20particular%2C%20malignancy%2Drelated%20death,2)
Given the considerable uncertainty surrounding these issues, and the immense technical difficulties involved with determining the facts of the matter in a way that would satisfy even a slightly conscientious observer, the mere hour of research you recommend hardly seems sufficient. Did you yourself spend more than an hour or were the George W. Bush speeches and newspaper articles you cited enough to slay all doubt?
"*Even* Republicans have never denied that the Republican Party saved millions of lives" is a statement that implies a very strange world-model. Did you mean "not even Democrats have ever tried to deny it"?
I don't know who you'd trust - I can find you statements confirming it by the New England Journal of Medicine, National Institute of Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, US Department of State, etc.
Also, it matches our evidence that AIDS deaths are going down in Africa (ie five million more Africans are alive than we would expect) which is really hard to fake (where do you hide five million Africans?)
I think if you spend about an hour researching this, you would find that there's basically universal consensus that what I say is true, and not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it. If you're not going to do an hour of research, why are you risking 5 million lives on your level of certainty that everyone else is wrong?
This was a program entirely done by George W Bush. For years, liberals were trying to figure out ways to say it was ineffective. But reality won out and the conservatives were right - this was a highly effective program.
It wasn't entirely Bush. 2006 was still under Bush when it switched to generic drugs, increasing efficiency 10x, and effectiveness much more. But if Bush wanted to be effective, he would have done so from the start, rather than waiting to be embarrassed by Clinton and WHO using them.
They could, but in practice I have yet to meet such a person IRL.
In general, it turns out that wanting to help people and wanting the democratic government that you elect and pay for to help people is hugely correlated.
I understand that many people have no qualms about spending other people's money on their preferred projects. I just don't think the government should be empowered to take their citizens' money to use on causes that don't explicitly benefit their respective nationals no matter how many vote to do it (except maybe if it's 100% of the voters)
First of all, why should that be a principle? We're in a democracy, the principle is 'the government does things that the citizens want it to do'. I can see a principled position for 'all taxation is theft, you can't take money from anyone for anything they don't want.' But 'you can't take money from people for things they do want if those things help foreigners only'? Why?
Second, what do you mean by 'explicitly benefits'? By a strict enough definitions, lots of domestic programs don't fit that description. By a nuanced definition, all foreign aid including PEPFAR meets that description.
Of course, any right wing policies that voters want is "populism" and "antidemocratic" and "against norms" etc etc etc and any left wing policies are just democracy
>for anything they don't want
You thought I wouldn't notice you sneaking that part in there?
Anyways, I'll copy paste something I wrote in another comment:
I'm not a libertarian, but one thing I agree with them on is that it should not just be assumed that we should be okay with governments taking our money. This is the root of why many libertarians believe that taxation is theft - they question why we should be okay with governments taking our money, and reject the validity of the justifications given. The last bit is where I part from libertarians, at least the tax=theft kind
I recognize there are some things beneficial to members of our society that requires us to be compelled to collectively pay for them. Given that this is how I and similarly thinking people justify taxes, it is hopefully clearer to you why we are far more skeptical of the spending of public funds on foreigners - the funds are compelled from us in the name of our own benefit, not in the name of benefitting others some place else - and why spending public money on things like AIDS treatments for Africans looks to us like our money is being stolen to pay for your preferred charities
Utilitarian logic just doesn't work. That's why SBF is in prison. It's wrong to take action to kill anyone foreigners or not, with only very unusual exceptions. It doesn't matter whether killing someone increases net utility. Similarly on taxes, they are involuntary. Arguments that can be applied to voluntary charities don't apply to taxes, because taxes are a violation of property rights. Any use of taxes should be decided based on democratic decision or an overriding emergency necessity. These programs are not democratic nor are they in response to an emergency.
I think this is a reasonable and consistent position, and it's not really the one I'm arguing against (it sounds like you think taxes to help foreigners and taxes to help countrymen are about equally bad).
"it's true that government charity is very inefficient, but government non-charity is also very inefficient"
There is good reason to think it's less efficient. It's Milton Friedman's distinction between buying your own lunch vs buying someone else's lunch vs buying someone else's lunch with someone else's money.
> These programs are not democratic nor are they in response to an emergency.
How is it not democratic? The people elected their congresspeople, collectively delegating decision-making authority to them, and those congresspeople then collectively agreed to fund PEPFAR in 2003, and then did so again in 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2024.
You don't delegate decision making power to congress by voting. If you don't vote, you don't suddenly gain decision making authority, you just sacrifice a powerful ability to influence politics. If it was delegation, non voters could go to congress and pass bills.
When I say democratically I mean whatever the current political process is. Thats for two reasons: (1) You can't clearly define democracy because it means too many different things in different countries, and even different things to different people in thr same country and (2) the only reason I care about democracy with regards to taxes that it makes revolt less likely, so the specific form doesnt matter. Sure, at the time congress passed these funding bills under the influence of the deep state, the deep state was democracy. Now democracy is algorithmic social media posting. Elon Musk is democratic because the algorithm says so. In the past democracy was robber barons telling people what to do in the newspaper. Then we had the agency media complex, where the agencies tell people through the media what to vote for. Now it's social media algorithms.
The FDR agency based post ww2 era of democracy is over. PEPFAR is a relic of a different time.
> You don't delegate decision making power to congress by voting. If you don't vote, you don't suddenly gain decision making authority, you just sacrifice a powerful ability to influence politics. If it was delegation, non voters could go to congress and pass bills.
No. You choose who your representative is; you have to delegate your votes to Congress for all the myriad reasons the founding fathers opposed direct democracy. They also opposed a tyrannical executive too, incidentally. Alas.
> Sure, at the time congress passed these funding bills under the influence of the deep state, the deep state was democracy.
The "deep state" is a horrifically bad mind-killing heuristic. Maybe Bush 2 actually thought, "Hey, things in Africa are really bad, I want to do something that can help Africans," spoke to Condeleezza Rice about the issue, who explained the biggest issue facing Africa was AIDS, and thus helped pass a bill which helped with AIDS, which became really successful? Like he wrote in his memoirs? If anything, a serious reading suggests that he was annoyed with "the deep state," since he repeatedly pushed for a better process over what was then being done, eventually giving highly specific orders about a focused, specific program with actionable goals and real measuring of the outcomes, rather than just bloating up the budget for bureaucrats.
Instead of, I don't know, the Deep State firing its mind control rays at him and Congress to convince them that saving babies from AIDS was good. There's an anecdote about the Nazis giving the Japanese a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Japanese going, "wow, these guys seem pretty badass, can we ally with them instead?" and that's me with all these imagined conspiracies. The world seems to be going pretty well, all in all - if the source of this isn't markets, rule of law, and democracy, but instead a shadowy cabal of ubermensch secretly pulling all the levers of power, then I'll have to reevaluate all my political opinions!
> Now democracy is algorithmic social media posting. Elon Musk is democratic because the algorithm says so.
So, you think that Congress would not pass a renewal of PEPFAR if it was put up to a vote in 2029? You think that they would vote for a bill to kill it if it were put to a vote now, in 2025? I can tell you that I have written to my Congresspeople to maintain PEPFAR, both now and in 2023 when there was a kerfuffle about the Mexico City policy. I actually even posted about it here and other places, to encourage others to do so as well. I certainly hope my Congresspeople would not vote for such a thing, and I would commit to permanently voting against them, and whoever they endorse, in both primaries and generals, if they did so.
But, to be clear, they haven't done so. All you guys constantly refer back to "oh, actually, this is just the will of the people." Okay. Then get Congress to vote to kill babies with AIDS, rather than having the President unilaterally do it.
You don't delegate your vote to congress. When you vote, you're voting for a representative. That representative gets the same amount of power no matter how many votes they got. 51%? 90%? Doesn't matter. If instead it was a delegation, then the amount of power the representative would have would depend on the share of votes.
I don't really care whether it's called a deep state. Personally Id prefer to call our previous system agentic democracy, because of the importance state agencies played.
Frankly I don't take memoirs seriously and you shouldn't either. The writer has a huge incentive to assign themselves more agency than the agencies gave them. And to make themselves look better.
What drugs are you smoking?!? Mind control rays? Zionist Aids babies? Japanese Nazis?!? Where did you get the idea I believe in those things? Reign in your imagination a bit please, the world is not that exciting. Conspiracies are rather dull.
Okay, so you just can't read. I guess I should have figured you were thinking at a significantly lower cognitive level when you first proposed that the Deep State passed PEPFAR. My mistake.
Let me put it in simple words for you:
PEPFAR is good.
Killing PEPFAR is bad. It would cause a bunch of people to die of AIDS.
Killing PEPFAR is extra bad if you break the law to do it, since following the law is a useful bright line to keep society working.
Killing PEPFAR quickly, rather than slowly, is extra bad because nobody can do anything to help the people PEPFAR helped. For example, babies don't get HIV meds to keep them from getting AIDS.
Therefore, Trump is an extremely evil person for this, specific, act. If the Christian God is real, he will burn in hell for this (Matthew 25:41-46). I don't care about your stupid ideas about democracy or the deep state.
No one is preventing you from using your own time and money towards the issues you care about. Taxes are taken by force, so not everyone who pays taxes is going to agree about how those funds should be used. Personally, I don't believe taxes should be used for anything except public security because the use of force can only be justified by preventing a worse use of force.
I understand you have deeply held Christian beliefs about Hell, but many people don't believe in Hell even many Christians. You can't use your belief in Hell to justify how tax funds are used.
Yes, they also elected a Republican Congress. It would be a bitter pill to swallow if the Republican Congress decided to kill PEPFAR, but that is not what is actually happening.
They elected a Republican congress with the expectation that they would serve Trump. If they could elect a clone of Trump to occupy every one of those seats, they would have.
...Everyone always underestimates the hold that he has on people. You don't get people calling you the second coming of Jesus without some level of unholy charisma.
Is it so hard to believe that this is what the people want? That doesn't necessarily justify their actions, of course. Maybe the majority is actually just evil from your point of view. But what the hell are you going to do about it?
The simplest answer of course is likely to be the correct one, and that is that some people have negative value for the lives of foreigners. A program that saves one such life is worse than any fraction of a broadband boondoggle.
That also explains the continued support of the rolling genocide in Palestine.
Admirable, but it seems clear to me that the operational plan is cutting programs wherever there won’t be too much resistance in order to “shrink the government” which in practice means tax cuts. That’s the only consideration.
If they cared about effectiveness, they’d talk about that instead of calling USAID an evil ball of worms.
I'm always shocked on these types of articles at how many of the top-level comments argue that giving even the tiniest amount to life-saving charities is bad. Is this really a majority view or do the few people who think this just feel really compelled to comment a lot?
The discussion is (mostly) not about whether giving money to charities is bad. It’s about whether forcibly taking people’s money from them and giving that money to charities is a legitimate thing for a government to do. As long as it’s just your *own* money you want to give to charity, and not other people’s without their consent, you’ll get very few complaints.
> It’s about whether forcibly taking people’s money from them and giving that money to charities is a legitimate thing for a government to do.
That may be your view, but it's a small fraction of the complaints in this comment section.
> As long as it’s just your *own* money you want to give to charity, and not other people’s without their consent, you’ll get very few complaints.
If you read the comments on any of the articles from this blog on giving to charity, you'll see that's not true. I don't think any of the other articles on charity involved government spending, but they garner just as many complaints. Even this article has a few people arguing that Africans shouldn't be protected from AIDS.
I'd applaud you if you donated your money to your preferred charity. I do not applaud people using the power of the state to spend other people's money on their preferred charity
Whatever extreme view is expressed in the comments is unlikely to be the majority one, because people with non-extreme views don't feel compelled to comment. The recent survey demonstrated that.
I do think there is a strong effect where the people with “extreme” opinions are more likely to comment. On the other hand, last November was a pretty comprehensive measurement of the revealed preference of the American people.
This is a regular occurrence in the comments section, yes. You can browse the comments section of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian to see like 50 people arguing it's good and right to care about British people, and close to zero disputing the ratio of effectiveness.
I personally donate to charities dedicating to the third world (specifically sub-Saharan Africa tends to be the focus). But I oppose any tax dollars being spent that way.
I am wearing of hearing the "moral" arguments I hear from many people. My legal-immigrant wife was cheated by USCIS. My congresswomen failed her, as did the rest of the "do-gooders" now coming out in opposition to deportations. When I raise the issue I have been called "selfish", "racist" (?), and many other things. My wife gets no sympathy (her "value" is "literally zero" to many even if not to you), and gets caught up in the inverse of Stalin's alleged "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." And if you never cared about the one person, why should I trust that you actually care about the many? If my wife has zero value to you, why should I care about the people you want to help?
If people didn't let these systems rot--if legal immigrants were cared for, and foreign aid programs regularly reviewed for their value--we would not get to the Trump stage. Don't expect your house to remain standing if you can't do needed repairs. I have seen how the State department functions; it is an embarrassment, as is the mentioned USCIS.
I have literally never met a person who thinks that illegal immigrants should get rights and be allowed to stay, who doesn't also think the legal immigration system should be reformed and expanded to be less punitive and awful.
It kinda sounds like you are setting these two things in opposition to each other in the way you frame the question, and I'm not surprised if people react negatively to that and tell you you're doing it wrong. I'm betting if you instead framed it as 'everything the US does about immigration is bad, even legal immigrants get screwed over and we need to fix the whole system' then you would not get pushback.
Has anyone estimated the number of HIV/AIDS cases outside of Africa that PEPFAR prevented by reducing the transmission of HIV in Africa? (Per year, or over the ~20 years of the program, or even projected to 2050).
Public health is/was concerned with ending transmission chains as well as saving individuals. The 26 million number is bound to be an undercount of the total lives saved.
My dad works on HIV/AIDS tracking and prevention in the US, and a big part of the reason it's impossible to eradicate it in the US population is because of people from countries with high rates coming here not knowing they are infected. It's definitely true that fighting diseases like this globally is an effective way to fight it at home.
We wouldn't be able to accomplish any other objectives of ours if we killed everyone on the planet. Whereas we can do plenty while not letting such people in.
People from countries with extremely high HIV rates have on average extremely low economic value (not to be confused with moral value, which we're assuming to be equal across all humanity, but broadly irrelevant to governments). The cost of not admitting them is, as such, roughly zero.
I'm sure that you will point out and find amusing that such a policy would probably have excluded Elon Musk, though I'm not sure how high the rate was at the time he fled.
Arguments can be made for providing aid without a commensurate allowance of admittance.
Does something about PEPFAR's work require that it be done by the government? This argument makes a lot more sense if the situation is "either the US government funds this or it can't get done" rather than "this could run with private donations, but it's a government project because individual donors are bad at decisions so their money needs to be taxed away for this."
Especially since this is basically just a giveaway to big pharma plus some coordination with existing groups actually administering the doses. If it's such an unambiguous win, the pharma companies could pick it back up for a massive PR win at very little overall cost.
Framing this as killing people seems misleading. It’s like analysing any tax reform through of the lens of who is “winning” and “losing”, rather than, what makes policy sense. The ultimate status quo is nothing, so it does seem reasonable to seek a policy justification for spending the money, rather than needing a justification to cut it.
Under US law, there is no actual authority for Trump to engage in the spending freeze. The money for PEPFAR was lawfully appropriated by Congress, and under the Impoundment Act of 1974, the only way he can rescind spending is by telling Congress why, on the same day he does so. Thus, his decision to cut the funding is itself illegal. Illegally preventing someone from receiving medical attention is ~killing - if you purposefully blocked an EMT from getting a patient into the hospital and receiving life-saving medical care, that would be prosecuted as murder here in Texas (as you knowingly and intentionally caused their death). In this case I think it would be closer to manslaughter, as Trump merely recklessly caused the death.
I was more making a philosophical comment, that a person is not positively obligated to spend any of their money to save people outside of their circle of concern, or you end up at infinite charity. Agree once you have extended care to someone, they are in that circle. But there seems a meaningful distinction between stopping money allocated to some spending program (where the death caused is remote) and say switching off someone’s life support (where it is direct). Do you disagree that continual spending should be subject to continual justification?
> Do you disagree that continual spending should be subject to continual justification?
Sure. And PEPFAR is good, that's why it has been passed by Congress five times, in 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2024. There are, I'm sure, lots of foreign aid programs that turned out not to be worth the money, and presumably Congress quietly stopped funding them.
Ok then. My objection is just framing. Seems like a rhetorical trick to benefit from most people’s assumption that the current status quo is correct, rather than justifying the position from first principles. Like when people say tax cuts disproportionately favor the wealthy, instead of thinking about whether the level of tax is optimal or sensible.
Do you have the specific citation, because my guess is that the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief” gives lots of implementation latitude to the President, such that he is not required to spend a single dime in any particular two-week period if he decides on a funding freeze to audit the program.
I agree that this is against the spirit of the law, but congress should stop giving the president so much authority over spending if they want the president to have less authority over spending.
>(A) withholding or delaying the obligation or expenditure of budget authority (whether by establishing reserves or otherwise) provided for projects or activities; or
>(B) any other type of Executive action or inaction which effectively precludes the obligation or expenditure of budget authority, including authority to obligate by contract in advance of appropriations as specifically authorized by law
>[...]
> Whenever the President, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the head of any department or agency of the United States, or any officer or employee of the United States proposes to defer any budget authority provided for a specific purpose or project, the President shall transmit to the House of Representatives and the Senate a special message specifying [a bunch of shit]
The 90 day pause is very clearly a "deferral of budgetary authority." One might imagine that in the normal day-to-day of governance, some days there's just no money spent on a particular program, but I don't think any reasonable person could think this isn't "withholding or delaying the obligation or expenditure of budget authority".
I know about the anti-deficiency act. That particular statute has been cited quite a bit recently. What I am interested in is the specific text of the appropriation made by congress for the PEPFAR program. I’m not an expert, but the citations I found cite back to 22 U.S.C. 2151b-2, which states in part:
“(1) In general
Consistent with section 2151b(c) of this title, the President is authorized to furnish assistance, on such terms and conditions as the President may determine, for HIV/AIDS”
If the terms and conditions the president determines are, “everyone needs to come back to the US now while we figure the budget out,” it’s not clear that any budgetary authority has been deferred, because the authority was given within the appropriation for the president to determine the terms and conditions under which to furnish assistance.
I am not a professional auditor, but it seems like stopping a program to audit it is pretty overkill and probably detrimental to being able to execute a thorough audit of all the moving parts. Also, Trump isn't bringing in auditors, he's letting Elon Musk and his DOGE team (that has no audit related qualifications) dig through payment histories and concoct lies saying that the spending was secret and funneled to partisan left wing orgs like... Politico for their political tracking subscription service. It's glaringly obvious this is illegal, breaks precedent, and is just Trump being corrupt by handing someone sensitive government access to lie on his behalf.
So imagine a world where you find a young deer next to its dead mother, take it into your house and hand feed it for 5 years, and then are considering whether or not to release it into the wild again.
If you had ignored it in the first place, maybe it would have died, or maybe it would have learned to fend for itself and been ok. But at this point it is dependent on you and doesn't know howto survive without you, and will definitely die if you cut off that support now.
If you created a framework that people need to live, and they accepted that framework instead of building their own alternatives based on assurances from you that it would stay in place and be stable to rely on in the future, then yeah it's reasonable to say you are killing them if you suddenly shut it down without warning.
Analogy is inapt. The deer can’t now learn to fend for itself. But a human - any human - can learn to obtain anything that money could have bought them. So many more things can intervene before withdrawing money directly causes death. Not so in the deer case, or for turning off life support.
I'm sure *normal* people don't hate African children enough to value their lives at 0.
But if anyone did value African lives at 0, the billionaire throwing Sieg Heils and rooting for the far right in Germany seems the most likely candidate, no?
I'm sure normal people don't explicitly value African children at zero, but if you examine the donations they give, you'll find that they by revealed preference value the lives of African children at zero.
Might actually be less than 0 for some people. The more of them there are, the more of them will eventually come here, and if they do they'll join the other side in the current culture war.
"Realistically I think it’s even worse than this, because in practice the government levies as many taxes as it feels like levying, spends as much money as it feels like spending, and turns the difference into deficit, so it’s not obvious that canceling PEPFAR gives any more money to American programs. I’m writing this assuming that we want to keep the deficit fixed, which is a laughably fake assumption for the real government."
This footnote is actually at the heart of the issue. Congress spends however much money it decides to spend, on whatever it decides to spend it on, and sets taxes wherever it wants to (paying the difference with debt). The only way to get more money back to people or to redirect it to other programs (well, in a normal world, where Congress actually does things, instead of sitting around letting the president trample all over the Constitution) is to convince them to vote to spend less or spend money on different things. Same thing with e.g. a small or narrow tax cut; any shortfall is made up with a different tax or with debt (which becomes tomorrow's taxes).
I think this is looking too deeply into the assumptions MAGA types are making – they simply don't care about children in Africa, and would rather save $6 billion in taxes. They don't want that money in the hands of the government at all.
My initial position was that we should find a way to transfer PEPFAR to private hands. This would be done in a way as to not "pause" the program(which obviously would cost lives). I still think this would be an ideal solution, since this would preserve the program while cutting government spending.
Now, I think PEPFAR is just to good and cheap of a program ,and so I don't really care where the money comes from. There are better places to cut money from, anyone serious about cutting government spending should not have cutting PEPFAR as a priority.
NOTE: When talking to right-wingers, don't forget to point that the number of children with HIV in Africa is decreasing. It is a worry among us Chuds that programs like PEPFAR are just subsidizing reckless behaviour by Africans, that is, we worry that the people will just start having more HIV babies knowing that they will survive thanks to meds. The data shows that there isn't any HIV baby boom, to the contrary, babies with HIV will be thing of the past soon.
> Valuing a foreigner at less than 1/100th of an American would put them somewhere between a cow and a chicken, which if nothing else seems like an awkward thing to have to bring up at UN meetings.
Most Americans aren't vegan, so a revealed preference argument for showing that they value foreigners less than 1/100th of an American would also show that they value animals much much less than 1/100th of an American.
There's an easy solution to that but the risk of raising the rate of kuru is too high a cost.
Also, clearly, the answer is clearly that the vast majority of Americans aren't vegan, and some portion of vegans cross over into being anti-human. Your enemies are not quite so evil as you like to believe. Scott is more obnoxious than we like to believe, though.
Every time I read a post like this, I get a little bit closer to preferring to save a random dog to saving a hundred people who make this sort of post. I have to pause and seriously think to remember that every human life has value, even those moral degenerates who not only sin and fall short of the glory of the Lord, but seem to delight in the stink that comes from rolling around in the moral garbage dump they've decided to live in.
I am reminded of a (probably apocryphal) story of a Native American who was burned alive by Conquistadors. When asked whether he wished to convert to Christianity before he died so that he may be saved, he said if Heaven is where the Spaniards went, he'd rather go to Hell.
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them?
He answers in the negative:
Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it.
I suppose flipping it to "would he sacrifice a finger if it would save the lives of a hundred million Chinamen?" makes it a slightly different question, but I do not share his optimism.
As we know from Wick (2014) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wick_(film)), it is considered at least within the Overton window to value the life of a dog that's close to you more than the life of a random American, so the dog thought experiment doesn't correspond to a general stance on the value of animals (which, again, Americans will literally eat).
Defaults matter; the organ donation rate is either 1% or 99% depending on if its a pain to sign up
in theory, musk and trump are changing the funding plan from "by default" to "prove yourself" over all, type 2 errors *are part of the plan* its nonsensable to criticize a specif case instead of the median case(and justifying you supposed median)
> Defaults matter; the organ donation rate is either 1% or 99% depending on if its a pain to sign up
This isn't actually true. Organ donation rates do not wildly change after switching from opt-in to opt-out; the change was just 10% in Wales (https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/01/12/opt-in-out-organ-donation-us-uk/), and I've seen studies that suggest the change is ~0% overall. The blockers are mostly elsewhere in the process, from what I've seen - family opposing it, doctors not having good access to relevant systems, etc - and sometimes the shift from opt-in to opt-out exacerbates these factors (family has an easier time opposing it if it's opt-out, for obvious reasons).
Successful transplants vs paperwork does confuse this for ea and practical consideration; but Im talking about shitty filters the paperwork being very high but having bad downstream effects( the legal system needing to be a 2nd filter with the opposite preference ) ill grant this is also elons plan; when mass firing twitter he also had to rehire.
---
Given a bad filter with a large grey zone, "do you report it as true or false", will just produce type 1 or type 2 errors predictably, which do you prefer? Its a value judgement about the nature of those errors.
Elon here is preferring false, clearly stating so, and single false negative isnt a meaningful criticism (if he's willing to admit he's a terrible filter remains to be seen, but maybe in the cards)
> Im pretty sure I got this example from less wrong, has their opinions changed?
It's a pretty common reference because it intuitively make sense, but when you actually look at it with studies, it's just not very effective. I don't know the opinion of Less Wrong since I rarely go there. This is one study looking at it in some detail and finding no statistically significant overall effect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0085253819301851
I'm not on the platform formerly known as Prince, but I laughed at your tweet today. I also laughed at your comment that you should have expected the result.
As someone previously calling for the destruction of government as we know it, I'm terrified of who is currently destroying that government in the U. S. Much like in 2017 after the inauguration, I'm considering the military requirements to defend the Canadian border.
It makes no sense to compare an action (e.g., cancelling programs) against an imagined alternative in which one does whatever one thinks is the optimal thing with each program. That imagined alternative is equivalent to "Scott is an omniscient and omnipotent benevolent dictator," and it exists in no proximate world.
The relevant alternative to the action is our present state, in which a large majority of the USAID programs range from useless to actively bad. In comparison with that, the action of cancelling programs with prejudice, including some of the ones you happen to like, is far and away a good thing.
Some of this is about object-level disagreement about which programs are good or bad. Some of it is more meta-level disagreement about whether the government should be in this business at all, taking into account second-order effects, etc.
Taking all of that into account, I think the approach being taken is highly defensible.
1. Seems like PEPFAR is off the table, so why focus on that? Feels like you're choosing the worst argument of the opposing side to debate.
2. Some of what USAID is doing seems objectively bad, aimed at keeping dictators in power, deepening the suffering of others. Shall we refuse to audit the rest of the system because one program passes muster? Seems like that would incentive politicians to add singular poison pills to programs like USAID, then use the rest of the money however they saw fit, secure in the knowledge they could point at the one useful program if anyone questions their actively harmful behavior.
3. You argue that the reason to keep PEPFAR is because its altruism is effective. Seems like we should value a review of the rest of USAID to determine what else is effective? Why fight against that? It's likely there are other good programs besides PEPFAR, but is that a 30/70 balance, or a 1/99 balance? Public pressure might tip the balance in favor of doing good ... effectively. "Musk/Trump are shutting the whole thing down!" And they're sensitive to public pressure (cf. PEPFAR), so point out the other good programs. Or, failing that, propose a better system. Or at least defend the status quo as is, not some idealized version of it where everything is PEPFAR.
4. It's all deficit spending, so it comes out in inflation in the wash, right? Since that hits anyone holding USD currency, and rich people tend to hold assets, inflation will hurt poor people in the US, as well as people in poor countries who hold USD/treasuries, the hardest. On the margin not a big deal, but in the aggregate it makes a world of difference. I saw a man treading water, but since he wasn't in immediate danger of drowning, I figured I should carry on as usual until the situation got worse. No need to help him out of the pit and end his suffering until it gets bad enough to worry. Poor people only complain about inflation because they don't know how much good the government does with their dollars. I'm sure those complaints won't lead them to do anything drastic, like a drowning man grasping at anything he can reach...
2. Sure? But then *make an actual audit* of the agency’s actions, instead of a blanket freeze which will target both the good and the bad (this is your answer to 1. – this is the easiest-to-identify program that they’ve decided would be effective for political messaging – doing unambiguous good, founded and lauded by impeccably conservative GW Bush).
3. Since Congress appropriated the money through both Democrats and Republican legislatures, it would seem the onus is on Trump/Musk to explain why the whole thing is so rotten it should be dismantled (also note how Trump has been railing against foreign aid for about a decade now), as opposed to keeping the status quo (or shave funding by 10%).
4. If what you’re worried is the deficit (and its effects on inflation, especially for the poor), that is legitimate. What do you think about tax cuts for the more affluent, which are also assessed to amount in lost revenue at over 10 times the USAID budget?
2. Sure, in a world where we could have a public audit of each program I'd be wholly on board with that. Nothing close to that has been openly discussed for decades, so that's not the world we live in. Instead, we get the choice of a.) status quo, or b.) dismantle USAID and all the anti-development work it does, and hopefully later get some actually effective foreign aid apparatus set up. We'll lose some good stuff, probably, in the shuffle, but the most effective programs could be spared (PEPFAR, so far). Per Scott's framework, we can assume that the randomly cancelled USAID program will be 1/100th as good as PEPFAR, but given that many are doing active harm to global poverty, it seems the downside isn't just near zero but fully negative. So if the median program is net negative, the equivalent to PEPFAR on the other side of the ledger needs to be dismantled yesterday. The status quo preserves all those negative programs. Given the opportunity to cancel all those and rebuild an effectively altruistic foreign aid program I'll take it. I have low confidence we'll get a "good" program, but high confidence we'll at least get something better than the active harm of USAID. I'll take the short-run pain from a few cancelled programs along with the MANY short-run benefits from cancelling all the bad programs (net good in the short-run), with the possibility of something actually decent coming out the back end. I can't see the argument for perpetuating a status quo that's net negative after removing PEPFAR (and arguably before). Unless you're under the impression that USAID is mostly doing good in the world. That was never my impression (before Musk figured out this was a problem), so I'm all for gutting the beast. Let's first do no harm.
3. This is a question of Constitutional authority, which seems tangential to what Scott is talking about. I'm not a conlaw scholar, but from what I've observed over the past 20 years, it seems SCOTUS has deferred to Executive discretion on logistical implementation of laws passed by Congress. There were lots of problems with implementation after ACA was passed, partly because a lot of stuff was written last-minute. So Obama had to make a lot of executive decisions about how to implement it or risk the whole thing collapsing under its own contradictions. Republicans challenged him every step of the way, saying he needed to execute the law exactly as written. The wanted the unworkable law to collapse, and they had the votes to prevent Congress from fixing it directly. The courts agreed with Obama that the president had broad executive authority to decide how and whether to enforce the specifics of any legislation.
Predictably, if you give any branch of government power, they'll use that power in ways you don't anticipate. Since ACA, Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again, have all pushed to expand Executive discretion to get around Congress. Trump is arguing he's implementing the will of Congress within the broad authority of the Constitution to make it workable. He's not spending new money (cf. Biden's failed attempt at forgiving student loans en masse), but he's choosing whether certain aspects of the law are implemented, and how (cf. Biden's targeted dismissal of certain student loans, or Obama's end-run around immigration reform through DACA). Personally, I'm not sure how to split the difference between stripping the Executive of all discretionary powers to the point government is unworkable, and giving the President so much authority he can do whatever he wants. Both parties (probably moreso Democrats) have tried implementing new programs through the Executive - outside Congressional authority - with some limited success. I'm mostly not in favor of that. Both parties (probably moreso Republicans) have tried straight-up rescinding Congressional mandates - also with some limited success. I'm somewhat opposed to that, though I think there's a line that's clearly being crossed. I fully expect Republicans to overreach over the next 4 years, and I'm hoping lawyers on the Democratic side can help restore some balance. I think that's unlikely, though. They're more likely to follow the pattern of tepid objections to expansion of Executive power, then full-throated endorsement of those expansions once they get in office.
4. For all the harm they do, USAID is clearly not at the top of the pile of spending excesses. We're straining at a gnat, while swallowing a camel. This is scalpel work on a sledgehammer job. But we're also not a fortnight into this thing, so I'm still reservedly hopeful that we'll see *some* progress. The big one - Defense - is probably not going to get a good overhaul under Republicans. Even though a truly 'strong' defense department would mean trimming down what's become mostly fat with very little atrophied muscle left over. Maybe if Republicans set precedents of 'Executive power to ignore', Democrats can follow after with some real cuts to defense spending. Probability of this is low, because Defense is in every district like Hydra - moreso the more useless the program. Also because Democrats under Harris embraced the Bush and Cheney legacies for some strange reason? I'm mostly hoping that the fading Harris legacy will allow them to sweep that under the rug. The Clinton faction likes it, but maybe the Obama faction will be able to shove them aside. The argument right now seems to be between "we lost because of Woke" and "we lost because we had no vision". If the Obama side wins we may see cuts to Defense post-Trump, but I'm not holding my breath.
As to whether tax cuts have much impact ... meh. Annual revenue doesn't seem significantly impacted by these things long-term, nor does the percent that's raised from different income quintiles. If he brings back SALT that will likely shift the burden back from more wealthy states toward the poor ones, which would be objectively a regressive tax move. I'll object to that when it happens. Though to be fair those richer states are already subsidizing poor ones with massive redistribution programs. I happen to know that, for example, much of the 'poverty reduction' programs in KY are a racket to the point where it's largely waste. Should we tax California to send money to Kentucky? Do we really even "tax" to raise revenue anymore, though, or is it all just pruning incentives? It's not like taxation influences spending. Reagan destroyed that important connection long ago.
The drowning analogy is pretty bad in general (which is why it's normally a shallow pond you can stand in) because every year drowning prevention week tells us, "reach, throw or row, don't go" or some sort of similar catchy phrase. Jumping in often just results in two victims instead of one. You're supposed to stay on land or in the boat and throw them a rope, a life preserver, or reach for them with a pole... even if you're a strong swimmer, it's extremely difficult to rescue someone without a flotation device. Even a child can drown you easily, unless you have specific training. Like, Navy Seal training is ideal, but at the very least lifeguard training. Most people do not have that.
If you think you would ever jump in after a child or an adult I encourage you to take a lifeguard training course so you can experience for yourself how difficult it really is. (And that's in a pool, not difficult water conditions like floodwaters!) Then you can make an informed decision.
>So in a discussion of the ethics of canceling PEPFAR, I don’t think it’s enough to say that you care about Americans more than foreigners. You would have to care about Americans more than 100x more than foreigners.
By this reasoning all forms of foreign aid are a one way ratchet which you could never cancel because cancelling them is always going to harm someone but the money goes into the general pool. This is an absurd enough conclusion that it should clue you in that something is wrong with your reasoning.
You are also assuming that action and inaction are the same. Nobody does this except weird Internet guys. Cancelling the program means not giving people any more money, which is a form of inaction.
And the whole thing is is just another variation of the same reasoning which implies that you have to donate everything you own to EA that is not useful in making more money. By your reasoning, limiting EA donations to 10%, or to any amount, is profoundly immoral since by not giving them the rest of the money you are killing prople. Just like you need to let individuals keep most of their money--even though that money could save *real lives* instead--countries should keep most of their money even though giving it away saves lives.
>We currently spend 0.7% of the total budget and ~3% of the discretionary budget on foreign aid.
The "total budget of the government" is comparable to your gross income, not your net income, so applying the EA 10% to it makes no sense.
> The "total budget of the government" is comparable to your gross income, not your net income, so applying the EA 10% to it makes no sense.
That’s not what he’s doing or implying in the article, though? The point is that it’s still an objectively fairly small fraction.
(In your example, the discretionary funding corresponds to your net income minus your taxes, your mortgage/rent and possibly your health insurance, depending on how detailed your model is. No one’s compared that to the gross income.)
Even the "discretionary" budget of the US includes such things as the military, health, and transportation. It isn't comparable to the discretionary budget of an individual, and claiming that 3% of the "discretionary" budget of the US is like 3% of an individual's discretionary budget is misleading.
(Your taxes fund the police, who hopefully will defend you. The government doesn't pay taxes to someone else, but it still has to pay to be defended.)
Scott's also using a misleading rhetorical technique when he says that "We currently spend 0.7% of the total budget and ~3% of the discretionary budget on foreign aid." If he thinks that comparing the total budget isn't valid, he shouldn't mention it at all. If he thinks that it is valid, he deserves to be criticized for it whether he mentions something better in the next clause or not.
The more I think about it, the more I'm reminded of Scott's (paraphrased) "you can't do anything about homelessness unless your plan is absolutely perfect and has no negative externalities whatsoever. The negative consequences of the status quo are conveniently ignored" post.
>This is an absurd enough conclusion that it should clue you in that something is wrong with your reasoning.
He refuses to accept that, as the absurd conclusion is strongly desired.
I agree that government and household budgets are very different in often counterintuitive ways; but I’ll also note that the GWWC pledge is for 10% of gross income, if the donations are subject to a tax deduction.
@Scott: now that you've seen him gleefully torch PEPFAR and other USAID programmes to the roaring applause of... certain people, have you become more open to the notion that Musk is a sociopath/ narcissist?
The problem is the scarcity mindset, the idea that the US's problems are due to a lack of money or resources. The US has arguably more money and resources than any civilization in history! The marginal gains of adding a tiny amount of those resources are trivial. The big losses are in inefficiencies, and that is not solved by throwing in more dollars into the furnace, but by understanding how to reliably create functional organizations that do things, which seems to be one of the deepest mysteries of the natural world.
Companies seem to have managed this not too badly, though. Of course, they do this because those who didn’t got under, and their value system is not the one we ascribe to a government…
Have you ever worked in a company? Companies are horribly dysfunctional all the time. And yes, they also have a selection effect. The point is exactly that: you don't fix this problem by just destroying everything and rebuilding from scratch but This Time We Do It Right. You fix it by building with a certain diversity of approach, seeing what works best, weeding the bad out while keeping the good, and building new stuff taking a page from the good, rinse and repeat. Evolutionary algorithm.
Burning down the ONE program that unquestionably achieves its goal with stellar performance ain't it.
Corporate dysfunction exists. There would be less of it if we made it easier to do hostile takeovers https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/enable-raidershtml and set up Robin Hanson's "fire the CEO markets". But that still leaves them far more selected for efficiency than governments. Compare the ages of for-profit corporations to governments. The age of universities is also a clue to that sector.
The plan, from the very beginning, was to have the FCC create a maps of broadband service across the country, spend 2024 and 2025 on grant disbursement and funding, and actually start the physical part of making connections in 2026 and 2027. As of right now, every state has a complete plan, well more than half has finished the challenge process (which allows people to disagree with the map), and 22 are in the process of choosing ISPs. Delaware, Louisiana, and Nevada have finished that whole process and have their final proposals up for public comment!
Unless you just straight-up disagree with the idea of helping rural americans get broadband, there is no honest way this can be called a boondoggle, and I hope Scott doesn't continue to spread disinformation like this.
I know of a person who probably "straight-up disagrees with the idea of helping rural americans get broadband" unless it is through the satellite-based services of a company he conveniently owns.
Goodbye broadband program, it was fun while it lasted :-/
Because there's been several rural broadband initiatives before which failed. One has to be quite optimistic that to think all this money poured into planning will achieve results that the last several tens of billions did not.
>What they found was a 55% serviceability rate — that is, little more than half of the sampled addresses certified as served by the selected ISPs were now being served by them. They also found a 33% compliance rate, meaning that only about a third of the sampled locations that were certified met the requirements for upload/download speeds.
One of the more frustrating things about utilitarian moral calculus is our very willingness to consider the implications of math leaves us vulnerable to weaponizing math by generating obtuse edge-case scenarios.
Meanwhile in the real world, the policy questions which demand ethical answers don't seem to be edge cases. They are things like "should we give every American free healthcare or insure that our nuclear arsenal can destroy the world 3000 times over instead of 1500". There is doubtless room to discuss trade-offs and the term "guns or butter" exists for a reason, but we have a LOT of gunss.
The argument here is a version of the one responsible for Brexit: Let's take the money we send the EU each week and give it to the National Health Service. I think of this as the drunk driver's fallacy - Why aren't you catching burglars and rapists instead of breathalysing me?
Separately the point about the child in a pond argument is proximity, and I am surprised something so thunderingly obvious is not picked up on., Consider the sentence: I am very close to my brother, but we only talk by Skype since he moved to New Zealand. Consider further that the good Samaritan parable is explicitly an answer to the question Who is my neighbour, in Greek ho pleesios mou, the person physically close to me? Which the Samaritan obviously is to the victim. So drowning child analogy has nothing to say about the geographically distant and unrelated.
I am pro pepfar and a regular donor to children-in-Africa charity, but a fallacy is a fallacy.
Drunk driving interdiction is often funded by NHTSA grants that provide for dedicated shifts by officers doing nothing but that all night. Presumably you could instead allocate that funding to hiring additional detectives in rural counties, where the lack of competent investigators is a bottleneck, and thereby catch some additional amount of thieves.
Rape is different of course because nearly all rape is acquaintance-rape. "Date rapes" and child molestations, where the identity of the perpetrator is rarely in doubt, the problem is more one of evidence and circumstance.
I agree with all in the post. I miss a sentence mentioning the US has some famously rich philantrophs (and a bunch of super-rich foundations) who are surely able and willing to take over the funding for this big but manageable and decent program. - Did not Bill Gates say in recent interviews, he talked with Trump at length about those important programs - and that he got his phone number? - Actually, my little theory is, Bill did call Trump. ;) - That specific program might need some government backing to assure the pharma-companies agree to sell their medicine cheap to those places, but the money for the program can be found outside the budget. I do not say it should, but if I had to decide: "End all USAID today and close that agency" vs. "Keep all USAID" .... and I had to decide blindly, just having my intuitions (aka experiences) about gov. aid .... I would, indeed, fire USAID. And let better people/orgs take care about those issues.
That is NOT the situation Trump/Musk are in. That is not what they should do in the situation they are in. Today. But, yes, cut USAID by 90% till 2027. Find new donors for the very best programs. (addendum: how many people in Africa or worldwide knew a month ago about this AIDS program and the good it does and that it is US funded? Less than 1%, I guess. But then, even Gates gets flak more often than praise.)
The elephant in the room here is how much American money is spent on killing and not saving people. It’s not great to ignore a drowning child, it’s a lot worse to drown one.
Zimbabwe's GDP per capita is 1/40 th that of the US so assuming the 100× ratio of caring they should be 2.5× tines more willing to spend money on domestic PEPFAR than the US government.
I am not sure where that calculation leaves you, but the amount of obligation on domestic governments especially poor but not desperately poor ones shouldn't be zero.
I consider myself "libertarian-ish". I wasn't always. I do see a kinda moral obligation to help the less fortunate. At least those whose misfortune is not their own fault.
And, if we are going to have a government, it would prolly be in the business of enforcing moral obligations amongst each other: don't kill each other, don't steal, don't let your kid starve to death, etc. "If you have way more money than you need, give just a Lil bit of your money to help save Africans dying of AIDS (ffs!)" Seems to fall into that basket of moral obligations that a minarchist state should enforce.
But if you're gonna go full ancap, the government is no longer in the business of enforcing moral obligations. There is no government.
But let's just say: foreign aid is one of the last lights I would shut off when shutting down government on the way to AnCapistan.
For so many, it's one of the first. I mean I get it with Trump. He's an extreme nationalist and he dgaf about foreigners. Like you said, Scott, they are worth zero in his mind. I don't agree with such a mentality but I get how cancelling a program like PEPFAR seems to be a much easier decision in his mind than canceling that stupid rural broadband program.
I don't get JD Vance's "brotherhood" mentality. I don't consider my countrymen like my brothers. I suppose I value my immediate family (child, spouse, actual blood brothers and parents) more than strangers. But I don't value a stranger who is a country-man more than I value a stranger who is a foreigner. But maybe I am particularly weird.
But surely, the average American (even the average Trump voter) doesn't value a slight chance at reducing a random rural American's internet bill over saving the life of an African with AIDS?
I say: we put it to the test! Run some fake contest where it's rigged so that most people win and offer them as a prize: $1 for themselves and $1 donated to one of two charities:
It wouldn't be a fair test if they weren't also allowed to just keep the dollar for themselves. There's nothing stopping the administration from shutting down the broadband program as well, after all.
> But surely, the average American (even the average Trump voter) doesn't value a slight chance at reducing a random rural American's internet bill over saving the life of an African with AIDS?
The average American does not engage with the actual content of politics like this (and in their defense, has little reason to expect it would matter if they did). It's sentiment and status games all the way down, and right now the winning platform is apparently sticking it to the libs.
In terms of looking at the order on the way to ancapistan, I think it helps to look at the actual history of the US government and how it got to where it is now. Social Security was added in the 20th century, so that can be eliminated prior to the military.
It is a bit weird to discuss discretionary spending from US federal budget as if it was a charity. Federal budget is not a charity is many respects, and, in particular, it is not filled via voluntary contributions.
We are forcing our brothers under gunpoint to contribute to measures that save them from other mortal dangers. And the real question, which you are completely avoiding, is whether we should be forcing our brothers under gunpoint to also save foreigners. The alternative is not to finance another stupid program. The stated aim of DOGE is to reduce federal spending, so the real alternative is to do a bit less forcing under gunpoint and a bit more of leaving money to our brothers and children to use how they see fit. I do not think this is the same moral question as the most efficient charity allocation.
I think the morality of taking money at gun point in order to distribute it abroad is fundamentally a massive problem - its bad enough when the money may be distributed to somewhat help you, but when its effectively forcing foreign charity on people, I'm not sure where the reasonable justification for it lies.
6 billion for 250k lives would put it at 24000k per life, which is better than some charities but is well off the top charities at efficiency which are 5k a life or so. Perhaps this would be more efficient if funded privately - but is there any reason it couldnt be?
At the end of the day, the ideal would be for the government to spend less, not the same amount redistributed. This is a clear example of the government being less efficient than the private sector. I'm not sure why we should be encoraging it.
I do think I do think there’s a selfish case for keeping PEPFAR that American nationalists can be more confident about (https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/every-argument-against-pepfar-debunked?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios): even if Americans have no reason to care about African lives, African states care about African lives, and PEPFAR - in virtue of being so effective - is of great value to the countries it operates in. If one thinks it’s in America’s interest to resist China’s Belt and Road initiative in Africa, PEPFAR is a great tool for twisting the arms of African leaders to serve American interests, not China’s
A fascinating comments section – I genuinely had no idea that the arguments people made against PEPFAR might include "AIDS drugs don't save lives", "Saving African lives is actually bad because of overpopulation", and "For me an African life really is worth less than a thousandth of an American life."
Money saved by cancelling my credit cards doesn't automatically flow to the best possible alternative. Sure, I spend huge sums of money on wasteful nonsense, and our household is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, but these shoes I bought as a present for my sister were pretty good value. And if I hadn't bought those shoes, what else what we have spent the money on? If you make me return the shoes, it means you hate my sister.
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If PEPDAR is such a great program, it should have no problem finding funding on a voluntary basis. And there's no particular reason it needs to be run by the US govt - it doesn't use special powers or operate at some vast scale. So if no-one is willing to run it or fund it if Trump won't, what does that really say about how much people value the program?
The purpose of government is to provide for the common welfare of its citizens. We can legitimately debate exactly what that looks like, and how broadly or narrowly to view that welfare, but foreign aid isn't plausibly intended to benefit the citizenry. As such, it's wholly illegitimate. And, unsurprisingly, it's overwhelmingly unpopular; there are overwhelming bipartisan majorities in just about every Western country to cut foreign aid. It is **the** classic example of the PMC hijacking the political process to fund their own private interests at the expense of the common good.
Zeroing out the foreign aid budget is a moral and symbolic imperative. If the government can't manage something as painless, popular, and righteous as this, they are good for nothing.
Well, I am a citizen and I want some of my taxes to be spent on people in need, some of them (gasp) foreigners. So yeah, programs like PEPFAR do benefit me, as my desire is to be part of a country that does good in the world.
Foreign aid is also intended to buy goodwill from governments and prop them up against alternatives that are less desirable, which is in my jnterest as well.
I happen to have limited sympathy for USAID as a whole, as I believe that 80%+ of foreign aid is a waste of money, at least with regard to helping people in need.
But to pretend that money which ends up in the hands of foreigners who need help goes against a national citizen’s interest in principle is silly.
The claim that there is an overwhelming bipartisan majority to cut foreign aid in about every western country is false. Even after a massive drop in support for foreign aid in Germany over the last two years, about half the population still wants to keep or increase current spending. And this is in a recession. In 2022, not exactly a success year either, support to keep or increase current spending was at 68%. An overwhelming majority, if you will.
>"Well, I am a citizen and I want some of my taxes to be spent on people in need, some of them (gasp) foreigners."
Tax cuts plus you voluntarily donating would have the same effect, but what I think you actually mean is you want some of other people's taxes to be spent that way, which is just theft with extra steps.
Well, if we have reached the taxation is theft level of discourse, we are probably too far apart to reach some kind of agreement.
Besides, I wasn’t even introducing the premise that taxes should exist. I was assuming that that premise was held by the person I responded to when they said that a government should provide for the welfare of its citizens.
My point was that foreign aid is not in principle a worse way of spending government money, which is what OP implied.
Again, if your assumption is that taxation is theft anyway, then I don’t know why foreign aid specifically is worse than other forms of spending tax dollars.
Yeah, again, i think our basic assumptions about how society ought to be run are too far apart to have a good discussion in this forum.
I do think that taking money from me (who is fortunate enough to make a decent living) to pay someone else (who isn’t) is, in principle, a fine thing to do.
But what’s actually important in the context of this discussion is the citizen / non-citizen distinction.
As far as I understand your logic, transferring (tax) money to people in need is wrong, period.
The question this discussion revolves around, however, is whether transferring money to citizens in need is fine whereas transferring money to non-citizens is not fine.
>"As far as I understand your logic, transferring (tax) money to people in need is wrong, period."
That is correct. No amount of need makes robbery acceptable, and having a third party (government) do it on one's behalf does not change the fundamental character of the act. Calling it "taxes" is merely masking the distinction between necessary funding mechanism for public goods and robbery-by-proxy.
>"The question this discussion revolves around, however, is whether transferring money to citizens in need is fine whereas transferring money to non-citizens is not fine."
I did not read it that way, but I can see how one might.
Okay, I want you to imagine a leftist. Rather than focusing on trying to argue for the places where their statist policies are arguably good - health care, welfarism, whatever - they instead spend an enormous amount of energy arguing for agricultural collectivization, a horrifically bad policy that just kills a bunch of people for ~no benefit. That's you right now with your "taxation is theft, so make sure those babies get HIV."
You don't seem to understand (pretend not to?) the difference between your personal interests, and the *common welfare* of the citizenry.
You also don't seem to understand (pretend not to?) that "X is true in just about every Y" implies that there are indeed one or two Ys for which ~X.
You are right that foreign aid could *in theory* benefit domestic citizens, but this isn't the actual justification, this isn't the basis on which aid programs are selected, this isn't the reason you want them, and this isn't true in practice. It's just a silly smokescreen.
In summary, I am not surprised with the level of good faith you display, given what you are arguing in favour of.
I understand all of these things, at least I believe so. If it comes across as if I don't (or pretend to not), then I apologize.
However, I wish that we could communicate in a way that resembles the politeness we would probably show to each other in person.
I don't claim that my personal interests are the same as the common welfare of the citizenry.
I am saying that the way that public money is spent should at least vaguely reflect the interests of the people this money was taken from in the first place. I assume we generally agree on this principle.
As I am a tax-paying citizen (not a US citizen, but of a country spending money foreign aid), my interest should have some weight. And that interest is to be part of a nation that spends some of its wealth on people in need.
Again, in my view, the foreign aid sector is massively ineffective, with most activities not achieving much of anything, so I am not shedding tears for most of the programmes affected here.
What I am disagreeing with is the blanket pronouncement that a national government should not spend money on foreign aid because it is inherently in. conflict with the welfare of its own population. Unless, of course, you define "welfare" narrowly enough as to definitionally exclude a representation of my interests that doesn't materially benefit me.
The algorithm currently theoretically being followed by DOGE seems to be on the order of "pause everything while we audit. Restart programs only when successfully audited and confirmed to be useful. Cancel everything else".
It seems to me an absolute improvement to add "look to the best programs being defended honestly from the other side of the aisle and prioritize those for auditing and restarting quickly".
Is this not close to what happened here? Trump puts everything on pause for 90 days, Musk and DOGE team start looking into everything >Lots of people cry out, but some of those people are using good arguments to defend PEPFAR > PEPFAR looks to be restarted hopefully.
If this is the case, it would seem that the role of altruistic defenders of effective foreign aid programs should be to identify the programs currently on pause that were actually saving lives, cry for their reinstatement form the rooftops, or more likely on X, since that seems to be from where Musk will have the quickest response time and thus help DOGE reduce the quantity of babies thrown out with the bath water to the minimum.
Well, their process doesn't seem to be very broken then? They paused programs with a bias on casting a wide net, then they unblock those that have a consensus of being very valuable (in which case people making noise about the good ones is good information and probably expected by design), then start permanently defunding and cancelling programs waiting for reactions and consequences.
It's not a process you'd pick if you trusted the bureaucracy, but it's one of the few that work if you don't. When asked, everybody will say their project is critical (to them and possibly their livelihood). You need a metaphorical gun to the head to have people actually pick the projects that really need to survive.
The problem is that if you only look for noise, then you're not evaluating the arguments, and if you say you'll look at noise + arguments, then noise is the worse signal, because what people make noise about doesn't tell you whether they're right or wrong.
The noise approach would make sense if we had no idea what a program and so we wanted to learn where dollars were going, but you don't need to shut off programs to do that sort of thing when there is documentation and people to ask for clarification, *even if you don't fully trust them*.
Put another way, it would be valuable if you wanted to check if Social Security was a third rail in politics, not if you wanted to evaluate if Social Security *was a good program*.
>"… it would be valuable if you wanted to check if Social Security was a third rail in politics …"
This is plausibly the sort of thing they're actually doing at this phase.
If pausing a given program doesn't result in an intolerable amount of noise, you can expect to be able to comparatively easily cancel altogether, saving your energy for the fights over programs that *do* generate a lot of noise.
> This is plausibly the sort of thing they're actually doing at this phase.
Then they're lying, or all the people defending the idea here and elsewhere are misleading the rest of us. The rhetoric around these cuts has always been "we're going to cut waste in government", not "we're conducting a study on what issues are third rails in government".
I may not have expressed my hypothesis clearly; it's not necessarily an either-or.
Assume arguendo that they do think it's all waste that they want to cut. They could be deliberative with each cut, except they're capacity constrained and wouldn't be able to get to all their targets. So they just start cutting everything, and only reverse when there's blowback. Then almost all of intended targets are hit before they have to start prioritizing their very limited capacity for deliberation.
> They could be deliberative with each cut, except they're capacity constrained and wouldn't be able to get to all their targets.
They had anywhere from 1 to 4 years to plan this, and there is more than enough intellectual capacity left from the anti-government types in the Republican Party. There is little excuse for not knowing what to cut.
Or they could just look at the actual analysis and make a decision after being able to explain why they're cutting *that particular program*.
Moreover, posts like mine mean absolutely nothing. If they knew I said these things, they'd probably also know I've never supported them and will never support them. They don't gain a damn thing by listening to me.
That's a general counterargument against doing anything. We don't know what their metric is for "this program has proven to be load-bearing, so we'll restore it", but it's a fair assumption that they have one. Assuming a priori that such metric is impossible or that they're not good enough to come up with one is... a bit much. Let's see how they do first.
No, it's not a general counter-argument. I'm not demanding they achieve 100% support for cutting a program. I'm saying they and their defenders shouldn't conflate how much will people scream with how wasteful/inefficient/bad a program is. That's remarkable easy to do, and if you applied an iota of thought to the problem, you wouldn't ever do this "see what makes people scream" nonsense.
There are many (very different) reasons for providing development assistance through governments. And there are counter-arguments for not providing development assistance through governments to most/all of these. Plus counter-counter arguments to these again, and so on.
…So the real decision-making problem is much more complex than an effective altruism, Singer-type cost-benefit calculation of where the money does most “good” in some health/social welfare sense.
..Mind you, it is certainly relevant to wrote blog posts like this one by Scott. But do not focus the whole development aid-discussion around “effective altruism”! That is fatally narrowing of the objectives of development aid (or development cooperation, as we say these days).
Some other arguments than effective altruism (not an exclusive list):
a) Avoid negative externalities. Boosting the capacity of a country to fight infections diseases is useful for one’s own country, since virus and bacteria know no borders. This is particularly important if the country in question has even more immediate problems to spend its own limited tax money on, than fighting infectious diseases within its borders.
b) Related: Prevent collapsed/failed states. Failed states are safe havens for terrorists (who also know no borders), and also implies that the health care system will go to hell (=not be a priority of in-fighting warlords), leading back to problem a).
c) Secure friendly allies, or keeping existing allies happy. This was particularly important during the cold war, and has become important again with the rise of China.
…none of these objectives necessarily implies that development aid is to go where it saves most lives. If it sometimes does, it is a nice side-effect, but that is not necessarily the chief objective. Or among the important objectives at all.
For example, governments in frail states often have to buy the loyalty of strong regional elites to keep them loyal (typical patron-client logic, which is a way to keep the peace in many countries). To a Western eye, this looks like “corruption”. But it might be a very important, and very rational, way to spend the money (including your development aid money), if the alternative is the risk of civil war & a failed state. Incidentally, this is why the (often very repressive) leaders of frail states have a good bargaining chip when they talk to Western donor governments: “If you cut out aid to me, you may well bring me down, since my own taxation capacity is very limited – but what do you prefer, me or a high risk of chaos?”
…these are examples of the type of policy goals government-owned development aid agencies can take (and do take) into consideration, that a NGO-owned “effective altruist” organization does not take into consideration & probably should not take into consideration.
I feel like there is a game theory component to this, with the big caveat that I do not know much about game theory.
Let's say you are politically selfish. You care about yourself, your family, and then your friends to an extent. You only care about this circle. Therefore, when making voting decisions, you prioritize the interest of yourself, your circle, and nobody else.
A big failure mode for this strategy are friends or family members socially shunning you for it. If liberals start advocating for socially disowning people who vote selfishly, and your kid is a liberal or one of your friends is a liberal, then you start to run into big problems.
I am not saying that most conservatives think this way. However, a good amount do, and as a result you see a lot of insecurity and culture war messaging from the right trying to socially ostracize anybody who prioritizes ideological morality over direct peer relationships. This doesn't refute the point of this article, which makes a good point, but it does try to explain why figures like Vance constantly go out of their way to emphasize this 'ordo amoris' type messaging.
I'm not American, I have no skin in the game, but...
US budget deficit is around 2 trillions dollar per years nowadays. Money saved in USAID may not be used in another way more efficiently, but if it isn't borrowed, then it's a net gain anyway. If I see a child starving and my family is already knee-deep in debt, then yes, maybe there is a net good to be gained in buying him food, but it's still irresponsible towards my first responsability to deepen this debt for the sake of someone else.
The US is not in the situation of having taken a small loan, it's in a situation of being systematically funded through debt, year in year out for the past two decades.
PEPFAR’s record-keeping on individual patient progress is sufficiently meticulous that if its numbers are way off, there would have to be an active conspiracy to lie about the data, not just a case of “the number of lives saved could be anywhere from 16 million to 26 million, so we’re just going to pick 26 million because it’s the number that makes us look best”.
“is there any examination of pepfar by someone adversarial ?
if not then SA wasn’t arguing for it in good faith”
Well, that wouldn’t follow. (It might be that all the serious examinations of PEPFAR come from researchers who happen to be sympathetic to the program since (a) it’s hard not to be sympathetic to PEPFAR because it’s obviously great, and (b) critics of PEPFAR tend to be deeply unserious (Cf. https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/every-argument-against-pepfar-debunked?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios). The most serious critical ‘deep-dive’ I’m aware of is this report from the Heritage Foundation which, despite reaching for every criticism of PEPFAR under the sun (including ones for which the report cites no evidence — e.g., that Biden’s PEPFAR is [was] secretly promoting abortion overseas, in defiance of US law), didn’t dispute PEPFAR’s “25 million” estimated. (Given that the Heritage will have had the time, resources, and ideological motivation to find fault with that number — since it’s the best pro-PEPFAR argument— if there were fault to be found, you’d expect him to have raised it [especially since the report is willing to make other criticisms with little or no evidential backing.]) https://www.heritage.org/budgetand-spending/report/reassessing-americas-30-billion-global-aids-relief-program
I didn't read the whole report, but I did a quick CTRL+F to find all the places where the 25 million number comes up. The two mentions of it seem suspiciously ambiguous:
>The program **is credited with** saving an estimated 25 million lives and is a tribute to the American people’s unparalleled charitable spirit in helping others who are in need.
>[...]
>Although PEPFAR **claims to have** saved 25 million lives, could those resources have saved even more lives if they had been distributed proportionally based on disease severity?
The authors acknowledge that others have claimed PEPFAR saves 25 million lives, but they never claim to have verified the numbers themselves nor do they even make any claim as to how likely this number is to be correct. They seem to just be granting it as a premise for the sake of argument.
“If you ascribe literally zero value to foreigners, you probably don’t want PEPFAR. But most Americans are not in this category, and I think your love for your countrymen should move you to let this majority of people use 1% of the federal budget for something they care a lot about.”
This was interesting. Obviously, the view that Americans have no reason to care about foreigners is nuts, but if you do think you have no reason to care about foreigners, it’s not clear to me why the love of your fellow countrymen should move you to want to keep PEPFAR.
First, most Americans are (or would be, if they knew about it) pro-PEPFAR; but most Americans aren’t *that* fussed about it, so most won’t feel aggrieved by it’s abolition. (You might think that even if most Americans don’t feel aggrieved, their actual or latent desire to save foreign lives will be frustrated if Trump cuts it, and, on desire-satisfaction theories of wellbeing, that will mean cutting PEPFAR is a harm to those Americans. But nearly all desire-satisfaction theorists will stipulate that the desires whose satisfaction or frustration affect your wellbeing have to be “about your life” in the relevant way, precisely to avoid the upshot that total strangers dying of AIDS is something makes your life go worse (Cf. Parfit’s Stranger)).
Second, if you think your fellow countrymen are just substantively wrong about foreigners mattering, and think that even a small cash injection into the least effective domestic program is better than money spent on the most effective foreign aid program, it’s not clear why - given the first point - PEPFAR-critics have any reason to want the government to actively spend money on these misguided concerns. (This seems importantly different from, say, pro-choicers supporting the Helms Amendment, which stops PEPFAR funds from supporting overseas abortions. Intuitively, one might have reason to *omit* to fund abortion out of fealty to the beliefs of pro-life American taxpayers, even if one thinks they’re substantively wrong; but if a majority of Americans had a vague, fairly weak, and misguided desire that <1% of the budget should pay for the digging and refilling of holes, premised on the belief that the Earth likes to be tickled by spades, I don’t think you’d have reason to support *actively funding* the program.)
That said, I do think there’s a selfish case for keeping PEPFAR (https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/every-argument-against-pepfar-debunked?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios): even if Americans have no reason to care about African lives, African states care about African lives, and PEPFAR - in virtue of being so effective - is of great value to the countries it operates in. If one thinks it’s in America’s interest to resist China’s Belt and Road initiative in Africa, PEPFAR is a great tool for twisting the arms of African leaders to serve American interests, not China’s
Scott's been blind to the public choice theory realities on overregulation and institutional reform for a while. There is a desperate need for institutional reform, but I would say the chance to do any of it quickly via 'move fast and break things' came and went around 2012-2020 at the most generous. Now you have mongol invaders, sadists, psychopaths and criminals who want to smash things because its fun and gets them twitter likes vs all the slowed stagnant institutional problems we had before. It shouldn't be so but it is.
"$42 billion effort to give rural Americans Internet which, after endless delays, has failed to connect a single rural American."
The $42 billion hasn't been spent yet. It passed 3 years ago, not an especially long time for US infrastructure projects. The US is a very wealthy country so it's always going to be more efficient to spend money helping Africans. But the evidence given that this is an especially bad program is really weak. Is the idea that you have to agree a lot of current government spending is total waste in order to gain credibility with the people in power you are trying to persuade?
I obviously agree with the thrust of the argument, but if PEPFAR costs 6 billions per year, and the budget is 1500 billions, it represents 6/1500=0,4% of the budget, so to cut foreign aid to 0.1% you would have to cut PEPFAR, right?
If you ascribe literally zero value to foreigners, don't you still want Africa to become more developed for the selfish reason that it's good for the American economy in the long term to have better countries to trade with?
...Why? We're already getting our manufacturing needs met. And developing these countries isn't going to magically improve the... quality of the population. All it's going to do is make it more expensive to exploit their natural resources.
"9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ 11 But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God) — 12 then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”
Ordo amoris is *expanding*, not *contracting*, the circle of love. It's natural to care about and for those nearest to us:
Matthew 7:9-11
"9 Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!"
But what we are then told is "very well then: who is my brother? who is my neighbour?" and that gives us the parable of the Good Samaritan. *Everyone* is now your neighbour. *Everyone* is now your concern, if you are to be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.
But that does not mean we get to skip out of our obligations by deeming some things corban: 'oh I'm terribly sorry, elderly neighbour unable to afford your heating and so freezing to death, I've devoted all my giving to Good Deeds Out Foreign, so I can't spare anything for you. Why, that would not be maximally efficient giving! Comparing the QALYs, saving one old Western woman from dying of hypothermia is nothing compared to giving drugs to a long-distance truck driver in Lesotho who likes frequenting prostitutes all along his route but doesn't like condoms because they don't feel as good during sex!'
(If you can be sarky about real estate agents in Des Moines, I can be sarky about guys who are not practicing safer sex and so need to be saved from their own folly. Just because they're Out Foreign doesn't absolve them of responsibility for their own health; Des Moines is Out Foreign if you're a native of Lesotho, after all).
Those in need close to us also have a claim on our help:
Epistle of James:
"14 What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?i
15 If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day,
16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it?"
PEPFAR is a great programme, I'm not arguing about that. But there's a false correlation here: things like BEAD which are a boondoggle should be scrapped and the money taken back. But PEPFAR and similar programmes are being used as a shield - "you want to scap the budget? but look at the good things it does!" (There's an Irish saying "hit me now with the child in my arms" and PEPFAR is the child here).
Maybe, if it takes threatening to cancel things like PEPFAR to get the outcry and attention enough to be able to scrap things like BEAD and demand accounting for it, then that's the price that has to be paid in order to clear out the waste and bloating that's there.
Three hundred comments already, so maybe this has already been said, but your numbers also assume literally zero value of PEPFAR to Americans, which is implausible: saving foreign lives makes America more popular elsewhere in the world, and extends American "soft power"; I have no idea how to quantify this effect, but I'd wonder how PEPFAR compares in cost and effectiveness-as-propaganda to actual soft power initiatives
> US aid similarly decreases support for China while increasing support for the US—a more straightforward substitution effect. These results suggest that Chinese aid is actually diminishing Chinese soft power in Africa, while US aid is bolstering American soft power, both in absolute terms and relative to China. American aid also increases support for the liberal democratic values that are more often associated with the US than with China and other authoritarian regimes, including a belief in the importance of multi-party elections.
We *don't* actually know that it makes America more popular in the rest of the world, the people that voted for Trump don't necessarily want America to be more popular, and they have been inundated for years with "AMERICA BAD" progressive messaging- to the extent soft power exists at all, they're going to assume it's mostly been damaging us.
The government does so few things effectively, we should keep functional programs around even if they only represent the interests of a few hundred Americans.
If there was a group of people out there who cared about something, like the habitat of some weed that has no economic or ecosystem-wide value, and we came up with a government program that protected the weed at little economic cost to great effect, I think it’s worth leaving around just to keep those few people satisfied.
Government for literally everyone involves getting taxed for things you think are stupid, if not for any other reason that there are people who value and prioritize other things than you (inevitable with hundreds of millions of people). I think it’s fine if you shut down stupid-looking programs that do their job incredibly ineffectively (EPA environmental reviews…), but if they’re low cost high benefit to causes you just don’t agree with, we should just leave them untouched for our other American’s satisfaction.
Otherwise come next election when the [opposing party] is in power, they will make trouble for you with the programs you want to keep going.
I’m optimistic that after the foreign aid freeze, Trump will quietly reactivate some of the more valuable foreign aid projects. I would be surprised if he keeps the freeze going across the board for the whole 4 years.
I disagree. Taxes don't exist just because some minority of people like a thing. That's "concentrated benefit, dispersed cost" as public choice economists warned about. Taxes exist because the government has to be funded, and the government has to exist to fill the power vacuum and prevent some other government from taking its place (and taxing the people how it chooses). If a minority of people care about some habitat, they should fund it with their own charitable donations rather than forcing everyone who doesn't want to fund it to do so via taxes.
What do you think of federal spending that doesn't benefit all citizens equally? Farm subsidies, infrastructure spending, telecom expansion, etc. (basically everything? Even the military) never serves the interests of the nation as a whole equally.
I oppose all farm subsidies and want to privatize infrastructure as much as possible, along with shrinking the military to only what's necessary to defend the US (being surrounded by oceans and relatively non-hostile neighbors helps).
That’s a fine position to have, but it’s not shared among the vast majority of people. If you disagree generally with anything more than a minarchist state, then it’s not really a disagreement specifically with my assessment.
But if you’d like, you can preface my comment with “Given that the government spends money on things that don’t serve the interests of all equally, then…”
I do have a larger disagreement with a lot more than this program. I'm not even in favor of government post offices, although those are at least specified under the Constitution. And due to that larger disagreement I'm also going to disagree specifically with your assessment.
While PEPFAR operates as a program specifically focused on HIV/AIDS, it is managed and administered by several U.S. government agencies, including USAID which plays a key role in the implementation of PEPFAR's activities.
Looks like California Man 10^100 Bubble Rationalist here is again too brainwashed to figure out that its purpose isn't to help your brothers, foreigners, or Americans, but to give the CIA and Shady Bunch a leg up in controlling the local populations in the interest of power not humanitarianism.
If it saves lives, then it saves lives. All the pro-market people keep saying that markets lead to economic growth which improves people's lives, even though market participants are encouraged to act selfishly. If PEPFAR is actually just a way to exercise soft power, it still has saved millions of lives.
PEPFAR doesn't save lives, it *costs* lives, it is funded by extorting resources from decent people and transferring them to the corrupt Shady Bunch. It's not a way to 'exercise soft power', it's a way for people like you to support brutal authoritarianism by proxy and rejecting all responsibility for the abuse.
Actually, PEPFAR does save lives. You believe it costs lives because you have fallen into an epistemic black hole from which no light can escape. Trump's pick for NIH head, Jay Bhattacharya, is a co-author on a paper calculating that PEPFAR saved ~740,000 lives from 2004-2008. I eagerly await whatever nonsense you have to dismiss this evidence.
No, I believe that you don't understand that resources are limited, and that opportunity costs and quantitative fallacies don't exist.
Trump's pick for NIH head can compute all the 'lives saved' and compare body counts like it's 'Nam 1968 all he wants, it's no argument for sound policy.
1. Measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes.
2. Disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
3. Presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness.
4. Say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
Claiming mystifying magic unmeasurable stuff is just a way to admit you've lost the argument: if that money really could be put to good use saving American lives, or whatever other opportunity cost you imagine, you ABSOLUTELY could point to evidence of that.
One imagines, say, a $6B domestic program that saves millions of lives would leave quite a visible footprint; that if a mere $6B total increase in consumer spending led to a significant uptick in life expectancy, you could point to evidence of that by some study that would have found such a massive effect by accident and then been confirmed by ten followups.
But the reality is that PEPFAR is good, and all you can do is make up "oh, well, maybe somehow it's bad." That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
We're not arguing, I'm explaining why you're wrong.
'Saving lives' is a shit metric, there's a qualitative difference between the lives of "a 92-year-old demented bachelor in a nursing home" and a "22-year-old pregnant wife in a maternity ward".
If there weren't, you wouldn't exist because men would have slaughtered every one of your female ancestors.
You can imagine $6B programs that are magically funded by mana falling from the heavens, and say, sterilize everyone and put them in chemical comas for an uptick in life expectancy, "uptick in life expectancy" just isn't an argument when qualitative factors dominate.
The reality is that you can't actually have arguments because you don't know how to think, and the "PEPFAR good" opinion simply has been assigned to you, in same way and to the same extent as all your other opinions.
First, a quibble: some people are getting rural broadband from that program. I know two personally, one of which had a bundle of fibers buried up to her house, which is 8/10 of a mile from the highway. There is no way that could be done profitably without government largess. (This doesn't make it a good program. Giving out Starlink subscriptions would have been cheaper, I suspect. And who says people in rural areas are entitled to the same conveniences of the cities?)
The general rule of thumb to be biased against foreign aid has less to do with worthiness and more to do with ability. It is easier to know what is truly going on in our own country, and our government has authority. Trying to use that authority in other countries frequently backfires. Notice our attempt to create an Islamic democracy in Iraq or our attempt to give women some rights in Afghanistan.
I think we should also be strongly biased against small federal government programs. The superpower of the federal government is that it is BIG. There are some projects that it is really hard to raise charitable money for due to the daunting scale of the problem. This is where the IRS is rather handy.
But piling up wealth on one place doesn't increase the amount of wealth. It just makes it an impressive pile which then needs to be distributed. If it is distributed via thousands of small budget items, bureaucratic overhead and/or corruption cancels out the efficiency of the fundraising.
What evidence are you going to need to acknowledge that foreign financial interventions do more harm than good?
Tyrants and lack of rule of law impede the innate human desire for improvement. What charities and NGO’s have been responsible for elevating billions of people out of abject poverty? Markets and rule of law consistently delivers those outcomes.
Development economics has an extensive track record of creating & supporting tyrants - by gifting them resources - and undermining rule of law - by supporting progressive coded policies over local democratic empowerment.
The US has >40 trillion in debt, another ~50-100 trillion in deferred liabilities. PEPFAR got cancelled for a week. This is a good opportunity for EA’s to self-reflect on why they’re now suddenly defensive of ineffective government spending.
I think there are a couple pieces of context missing from the discussion: first, the "ER" in PEPFAR stands for "emergency response", and the program was already trying to move away from providing health services and be more of a partner to increase sustainability. You cannot have a 15-20+yr "emergency" program. Eventually, the work would need to be taken over by local actors. Second, PEPFAR is highly inefficient as a single disease focused effort. It often had the effect of distorting local health systems by focusing on HIV, paying high salaries for contract staff and consultants, and neglecting other things. That is why it slowly morphed into other "wrap around" areas like nutrition and education. It was too unwieldy and difficult to manage. Third, it is basically impossible to reform a program like PEPFAR. Congress barely reauthorized it last time and there are too many interested parties to update it. It was not nimble enough. In order to even spend funds you needed approval from like multiple different coordinators, you needed to develop yearly country operational plans, there were multiple earmarks you needed to hit, then managing a contract/grant, reporting, etc. It was a mess. Lastly, countries will adapt. It is not all bad news. Look at the case with Zimbabwe (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/globalhealth-july-dec12-zimbabwe_07-17).
During Bush’s second term I worked for a USAID-funded nonprofit that got totally upended by the way PEPFAR was implemented. The new rules stated that the lion’s share of aid had to go to PEPFAR, leaving only nominal sums for any other kind of program, so everything pivoted to AIDS prevention. We had to re-apply for everything, so our existing AIDS-prevention work was briefly suspended or severely limited. We were also forced to promote things like the “A-B-C’s of AIDS Prevention”: A is for Abstinence, B for “Be Faithful” and C is Condoms. Needle exchanges were suspended or limited, at least temporarily. And religious groups could compete for funds, which in reality meant they could spend more of their own budgets proselytizing and were not obligated to spend any on condoms. I left and found a new job before things really hit the fan, but about half the organization got laid off. I hadn’t really been following PEPFAR in the years since- I’m sure it underwent a lot of changes between Obama, Trump and Biden, and I’m glad it seems to be having some success. But there were a painful, chaotic couple of years for all the people who surely contributed to that success. And a lot of people abroad fell through the cracks as the programs that might have helped them had to scramble to completely rearrange themselves, compete for funds under new processes, lost established resources and connections, and had to reassemble teams that had been fired from assorted jobs during the budget gap.
1. Some of us believe that Americans should be allowed to decide which foreign charities to support individually, rather than collectively. I don't like being required to donate a portion of my tax dollars to domestic charities either, but there is a stronger argument for that.
2. If PEPFAR is so wonderful and cost-effective, surely organizations such as the Gates Foundation and possibly even African governments will step in and replace the U.S. funding. Perhaps they might even be able to afford this by eliminating ineffective programs.
PEPFAR has been around for more than two decades. I have no doubt that it's saved many lives, and suddenly canceling it sounds like a bad idea. However, I do think it's a good thing to question its effectiveness and not just turn it into an equation of lives saved / cost. It was set up as an "emergency" response to AIDS/HIV, and now twenty years later I would have hoped it could be winding down its operation by creating sustainable improvements. Maybe it has, although based on the fact that its funding has tripled, and canceling it will cause many deaths, I kind of doubt it.
This is a mistake-theory perspective. All true, but it misses one important thing -- the cruelty is the point. Cancelling a program that actually doesn't do anything useful (like that broadband program) just wouldn't be so popular among the target audience, which is why they didn't choose that program to cancel. Which is why I wouldn't expect that broadband program to get cancelled.
Hurting someone is the point; preferably in a plausibly deniable way; preferably for a very low level of "plausibly" -- so that you know, and they know that you know, and you know that they know that you know.
Each political tribe has its "Voldemorts". We had the ones who enjoyed drinking white or male tears, now we have the ones who enjoy drinking black or female or trans tears. Each political tribe does certain things designed specifically to appease its dark-triad members. In return, it gets their vocal support on the internet.
You need to think like a Trump voter. Let me explain...
When they cancelled the program, it was awesome, because they *owned the libs*.
And when they restarted the program, they showed everyone that the libs were *lying* about them wanting to stop the program.
From a Trump voter perspective, those are two consecutive wins. A huuuge victory!
(It may not make much sense now, but trust me that one month later, some of them will remember that Trump was awesome because he cancelled the program, and some of them will remember that Trump was awesome because he *didn't* cancel the program despite the lying liberals accusing him of doing it.)
Your analogy doesn't seem accurate. In that fact pattern it's save a child or do nothing. The choice would be to save a random child vs. your child if both were drowning and you could only save one. Also, the random drowning child is one that has parents that have a history of letting their unsupervised children wander around dangerous bodies of water knowing, and not caring, that they can't swim. Not the first and won't be the last.
While I think PEPFAR is absolutely worthwhile and should continue, the process of a full accounting and examination of foreign aid is also necessary considering the lack of accountability and waste in that area. That's what he was hired to do.
Philosophically it makes plenty of sense to me that we reprioritize our care to family, friends, neighborhood, city, state, country, and then the rest of the world. There are way too many people with their lives and families in shambles that fret too much over national or international issues.
Trump has no humanity, he does not act ethically and he has no empathy for his fellow human beings. He is amoral, he does any business as long as it is financially profitable and cutting off supplies to the poor african people is very profitable.
This article is just like what happens whenever someone gets elected to city council and cuts the budget.
- the unions strike
- the parks get shut down; the gates get chained shut.
Why the parks? It's not that they were expensive, it's that they are publicly visible and shutting them down is cheap. It's a tactic to make city council unpopular.
The agencies are being forced to justify their spending. The usual method of an audit that doesn't disturb their functionality (i.e. their spending) has never worked - because it does not disrupt their spending.
And what we're finding out is that for every PEPFAR there's ten grants to Politico to run hit pieces, and a hundred grants to shell organizations where the money eventually ends up in a Congressman's net worth.
"In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are suffering? Shouldn’t we value American lives more than foreign ones? Can’t we spend that money on some program that helps people closer to home?"
I think these are the wrong questions. PEPFAR has been around since 2003. After *22 years*, is it too much to ask for African governments to take responsibility for the prevention/treatment of AIDS among their own citizens? I don't want anyone to die, but I also don't want people half a world away dependent on American largesse for f#$%ing ever while we're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt about every 100 days. I take your point about ineffective government spending, but to me you could kinda defend any government program with "they'd only waste it on something else instead."
This, yes. It has been made affordable. It should now be seen as something basic the governments themselves do, just like making sure people are fed, or building the dictator a palace or buying him a new Gulfstream. The dictator buys his people the HIV medication that they need and will need forever. This transfer of responsibility should happen while we have some influence in Africa.
Discouraging this expectation, that it should be off the table for discussion because utterly impossible, does not seem to me to be an attitude toward Africa that will bear fruit.
Is it so unreasonable to think they might need our help for a little longer, especially when, as the numbers cited by Scott elsewhere in the comments show, they really are getting better? How long did it take the US to get its shit together?
In 1799, the US Government was in arrears of $140,000 to Algiers and some $150,000 to Tripoli. 1/5 the congressional budget went to tribute payments, and we weren't able to fix the situation until 1815--which, depending on how you count it, was somewhere between 39 and 27 years after the country was founded. We started off in a much better position in terms of demographics and resources.
You talk about trillions, but again, the numbers for this specific program are less than a rounding error in the scheme of things. It's not fixing debt, or lowering taxes; it's just taking a lot of good out of the world in a way which is very damaging for Americans (both the ones who thought the program was good and the ones who benefited from the additional overseas clout) with no upside.
Was the US some big recipient of foreign aid back in 1799? I'm not sure I see the relevance, otherwise. Also, weren't these debts you're talking about a result of North African piracy, and not...ya know, typical commerce? Either way, I don't think it's relevant.
As for your first question, yes, that is my point. It's pretty unreasonable in 2025 to not be able to handle AIDS, which has been around for almost fifty years now and which has had effective treatments available for thirty years now. I'm not saying the program should be ended today, but yes, after two decades we should be looking to pass the funding off to someone else. I understand the scale issue; in the grand scheme of things, it's not that much, but the old saying "how do you go bankrupt? $1 at a time" still applies.
I agree with this but feel like it is in tension with some of your other views.
If the marginal government dollar does no good, then canceling this program 'to free up money to help americans' will do no good.
But if the marginal government dollar does no good, an increase in taxes takes away money from people to do no good with it, and a tax cut gives people more money without losing us anything good.
I don't know enough about the structure of government to say exactly where the marginal dollar goes or how valuable it is. But if you think the answer is 'not valuable at all', I would like to revisit your past posts about how tax cuts are bad.
This post makes a great argument for why PEPFAR shouldn't be cut *conditional on this being the only program being cut*. But since it's not the only thing being cut, we have to assess the bigger picture: what's driving the DOGE cuts and what would happen without them? And if we believe Musk the answers are:
- The driving force is the growth of deficit, which has been getting worse and worse ever since the 1990s.
- If we don't do the cuts, eventually the US will declare bankruptcy or enter a Weimar-Republic like hyper-inflation cycle, causing far more cataclysmic side effects than cancelling PEPFAR ever could.
From that perspective cutting PEPFAR might actually be a good thing: it gets "cuts" on the small list of policy questions people can keep in their heads and increases the chance of Musk succeeding and triggering a massive wave of cuts that will avoid the incoming bankruptcy. Even if the chance is just 10%, the disaster of going bankrupt is so huge that I'd say its more than justified -- or at least disproving it requires a far more complicated formula than the 1-to-100 ratio presented here.
Except that we could cut every discretionary program in the country and not balance the budget. Essentially every single one of your tax dollars goes towards: Medicare, Social Security, Defense Spending. If someone says they're working to balance the budget but they do not cut Medicare, Social Security, or Defense Spending, to the point where those are essentially different programs, then they are grifting you. And frankly there's big limits to what they could do by just cutting defense spending.
Your options, since the 1990s have been to be for: 1) higher taxes, 2) cutting programs that are broadly popular, or 3) budget deficits. Americans have decided to delusionally embrace none of those options, so we end up cutting good programs that save lives and keep America secure, and laying off half the government workforce to save 6% of the budget.
I know, I know. Every little bit helps. Let's completely eliminate every useful program other than those three and pretend we did something about the deficit.
Let’s say we did start from those 3 programs. What do you imagine would be the criticisms of the naysayers? My prediction:
- “You guys want to cut my pensions but you won’t cut a study of tribal languages in Djibouti?”
- “You want to shut down the army base in Syria? But you won’t stop funding this one rebel group which allegedly planned to attack the U.S. at some point?”
- “You’re cutting Medicare? How come we’re still paying $2B to help healthcare in Burma?”
If you tried to do it all at once you’d have lobbyists from both sides unifying in a crying rally saying the wrong things are being cut and you’ll never get anything done. So what’s left? You do it the “salami method” way where you start with the least popular programs, cut those away while promising great riches to the welfare state. Then once that’s done you go after the military. And finally you declare that everyone must remain in solidarity and that as the very last resort we must rescue pensions and healthcare.
Is this going to happen? I would bet not but if it did happen, I don’t see how it could be done in any other way. My bet is on Musk having this plan in mind as evidenced by how well prepared Trumps executive orders were - and if any human could play 5D chess, it’s him.
So...eliminate the entire discretionary budget to get rid of one of several arguments against making actually meaningful changes. Ok. I think Imma just stop trying to talk about politics on the internet.
If you make giants cuts to discretionary spending, it will take deficit from critical levels to merely bad. Also it means less cuts to those mandatory programs which will be wildly unpopular.
I see a giant misalignment with what you think the purpose of foreign aid is vs. what the actual purpose of foreign aid is.
Politicians love to sell foreign aid as charity. The purpose of foreign aid is not charity, if that ever became its only purpose it would be terminated, killed, and buried in one day. The purpose is to propagate American influence around the globe. Have a stick by which we can threaten revoking foreign aid if Panama or Egypt or Saudi Arabia doesn't comply with our demands.
This should explain why the Democrats have started throwing a major temper tantrum over USAID after finding, and why Republicans finally found it within themselves to yank: Because DOGE found out that 90% of it is money-laundered back to Democrat NGOs and domestic political causes.
Even if foreign aid was normatively supposed to be charity, I still think there's a time-place concern. If there's a child drowning in the river, you'd be stupid to think "well I paid my taxes, that will pull the child out". Charity is not homogeneous like that. You are the only person on the face of the planet capable of pulling that child out of the river at that moment, SO YOU DO IT. That's the major point of the Good Samaritan parable: You alone are that child's neighbor, nobody else is, so YOU do it. Not a foreign nation thousands of miles away.
The point of the Federal government budget is to support the American nation. This is justified. It's doubtful Africa shares our values. I seriously doubt the life saved numbers are that high. Only ~40% of AIDS medications distributed are taken as directed. There was a good video about the One Laptop project along these lines too. Western values misalignment is rampant like this. We just assume people value life and education and our values the same way we do, and frequently they just don't.
In the other post he explains Trump. :D Merci! USAID he mentions thus:
(...) keep in mind the main point is not to eliminate Black History Month, though I do not doubt that is a favored policy. The main point is to get people talking about how you are eliminating Black History Month. Just as I am covering the topic right now.
How is that war against US AID going? Will it be abolished? Cut off from the Treasury payments system? Simply rolled up into the State Department? Presidential “impoundment” invoked? I do not know. Perhaps nobody knows, not yet. The point however is to delegitimatize what US AID stands for, which the Trumpers perceive as “other countries first” and a certain kind of altruism, and a certain kind of NGO left-leaning mindset and lifestyle.
The core message is simply “we do not consider this legitimate.” Have that be the topic of discussion for months, and do not worry about converting each and every debate into an immediate tangible victory. -
Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …
All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —
I suspect we’re all talking past each other a bit because of the term “value.” After all, my stance isn’t rooted in a belief that human worth differs across borders. Rather, it’s because I value human life pretty consistently across borders that I arrive at the position I do. I believe it is a practical response to two constraints: (1) the accountability gap inherent in global aid systems, and (2) the asymmetric risk of unintended harm when operating in contexts where local knowledge and feedback loops are absent.
You’re right that certain interventions (e.g., PEPFAR) show measurable success (I do not inherently trust the measurement, though that's an argument for another time given my current ignorance of PEPFAR), but this doesn’t resolve the structural problem. Let's assume PEPFAR is as effective as you say it is. For every PEPFAR, there are countless programs where overhead costs, cultural misalignment, or outright graft don't just negate, but reverse intended benefits. And the issue isn’t just variance in effectiveness—it’s that the variance itself is often invisible to donors. When we lack reliable mechanisms to audit impact (or worse, when aid infrastructure becomes a self-perpetuating industry), the null hypothesis should shift toward harm reduction, not maximalist utilitarianism.
This isn’t a rejection of global empathy—it’s a recognition of practical subsidiarity. Proximity allows for iterative correction: I can observe whether my neighbor’s food bank incentivizes dependency or empowers recipients, adjust accordingly, and build trust through repeated interaction. By contrast, foreign aid often operates in a moral hazard loop: the donor’s moral satisfaction is disconnected from outcomes with varying polarities of good/evil, while recipients (and intermediaries) face perverse incentives to game abstract metrics (ultimately making them almost entirely unreliable).
Your charity-effectiveness distribution example is telling ("of two randomly chosen charities, one will be (on average) 100x more effective than the other"). If we model interventions not as “neutral vs. good” but as “harmful vs. weakly beneficial,” the expected value flips. Consider the replication crisis in development economics: many celebrated studies (e.g., deworming RCTs) now face methodological scrutiny. When even experts struggle to evaluate impact, why should we assume lay donors—or governments—can reliably distinguish 100x-effective charities from those exporting harms, intended or unintended?
And a fake/poor charity isn't just 100x less effective while remaining neutral; it can be almost immeasurably harmful. Look at Dr. Cyril Wang's impact on Alzheimer's research as an example in the medical world. Would you merely call GLP-1 research "100x more effective than Wang's amyloid beta research"? I'd probably state that a completely different way, and with a great deal more venom.
I posit that it's way more likely for the harm/good distribution to be weighted towards harm due to, again, (1) the accountability gap, and (2) the asymmetric risk of unintended harm.
And as a lived example, it's incredibly difficult to do something good and productive that's additive rather than subtractive. I don't know where I read a version of this quote, but I think about it often in my work (and it has proven true every single time: "If you want to make something 1% better, improve your processes. If you want to make something 90% better, stop doing something stupid." I think government-driven foreign aid is the "something stupid" in this metaphor.
I’ll concede this creates a tragic tension. We should care about suffering everywhere. But when our capacity to act effectively diminishes with distance, the ethical imperative shifts toward building robust local systems rather than outsourcing virtue via untraceable (and non-consensual) donations. To paraphrase Ostrom: complex problems are best solved by nested, polycentric institutions—not abstracted global markets in moral credit.
I think we also shouldn't forget the fact that foreign aid programs boost how people see America around the world, so there is a self-interested reason to do it too.
It's a common conservative fantasy that by cutting the programs they want to cut they can balance the budget. It's not actually possible to do it that way.
In that light, it's dumb to fight over PEPFAR, there are excellent reasons to keep it going and axing it won't fix anything or even move you closer to fixing anything. It's likely going to piss off a lot of people just like the woke did, MAGA is absolutely capable of generating an overwhelming amount of backlash like what is happening with wokism, don't become the reverse-woke.
The post makes the good point that if we cancel the Africa AIDS program, we need to think how the money will be used instead (of course, we haven't cancelled it yet, just paused to do exactly that thinking, but the point is still good).
But we also need to think about whether if the US doesnt pay for PEPFAR, it will disappear. If it's such a good program, why wouldn't these African countries do it on their own? They are poor--sure-- but they do have governments that spend money on lots of things, and if PEPFAR is so good, they can divert money to that. Then, the question we must ask is what other African government programs will go unfunded if the US stops funding PEPFAR. And so it is the average-quality African government program we must look at as well as the average-quality American government program.
I'm a guy that lives in India. I think completely altruistic stuff like PEPFAR that "helps foreigners" in third world countries is, in fact, one of the most valuable, self-interested things the US government and other developed countries can actually do. It's the same principle as when the US military invested sizable amounts of money just to make chocolate and ice cream widely available for troops during World War II. That's the sort of thing that sticks in people's minds for decades. Because it's the sort of thing only a true "land of abundance" in it's golden age would actually be capable of pulling off.
Sure, PEPFAR and other foreign aid programs do help impoverished Africans (or whoever). But simultaneously, they are proof of "national capacity". A whole bunch of different capabilities in disparate domains (leadership, administrative capability, technical capability, affluence, the rule of law, governmental integrity etc.) have to exist and successfully come together to create something like PEPFAR. If that kind of national capacity exists, increasing it is only marginally difficult. If that national capacity is lost, it's usually lost forever. Merely demonstrating that the US has *surplus* national capacity gives the American economy tremendous advantage.
Imagine you're a US citizen that wants a high-paying job. Or a businessperson of some kind that wants to make lots of money. Or maybe you're a local non-profit that could benefit from donations. Or you're a local government official that could benefit from tax revenue. Or you're a local University that does research and hopes to win the Nobel Prize and maybe some royalties from patents. In all of these situations, you would maximize your benefit if you had around you, people that could and personally WANTED to succeed alongside you.
For example, right now, there are 5.2 million Indian-Americans in the US. A further one million Indians have applied for permanent residency, to be eligible for US citizenship. A further 331,000 Indians are paying full price (over $7.6 Billion) just to study in the US and be eligible to work between one to three years in the US economy, and then maybe an H1-B. And that's just from India.
What I'm trying to say is, Indians, and other non-Americans, have seen and heard of the national capacity of the US and this has had the effect of millions of non-Americans actively rooting for you and simply showing up to your doorstep, legally, and wanting to contribute to your specific success. Their only condition being to succeed alongside you and become a fellow American like you. This is a GREAT deal for anybody in the US and is the reason the US is the richest society in recorded history. All that was necessary for millions of non-US citizens to be rooting for American success was the US simply demonstrating national capacity it already had.
As a real world example, in 1914 an American inventor called Jesse Dubbs and his son Carbon Petroleum Dubbs (that was his legal, real name) founded Universal Oil Products. The family of the Armour meatpacking company invested in UOP and funded its lawsuits defending its patents. At the same time, a Russian chemist named Vladimir Ipatieff got sick and tired of Lenin's bullshit and defected straight to the US, and landed at UOP. The Big Oil of that era finally got tired of UOP's lawsuits and decided to acquire it, and in the process gave a share of the resulting company to the American Chemical Society as an endowment. Ipatieff, UOP and the ACS kicked ass and took names in the field of innovative fuel mixtures and lubricants.
UOP, ACS' and Ipatieff's success resulted in the US having the edge in fossil fuel extraction and refining, and that contributed to success in WWII and the Cold War. Today, UOP is headed by a guy named Rajesh Gattupalli. The US succeeding in WWII and the Cold War in turn motivated Sergey Brin's parents to flee the Soviet Union and come straight to the US. Brin and Larry Page co-founded Google and combined with Eric Schmidt to, like, reshape the evolutionary trajectory of humankind, I guess, and make trillions of dollars of wealth for American investors and pension/retirement funds. Google/Alphabet is now headed by Sundar Pichai.
All of this sounds like serendipity, or something, but it's a fact that it happened in the US and benefited millions of Americans financially, because of the simple fact of the US not shying away from expanding and demonstrating its national capacity in the past.
I think the US cancelling foreign aid and taking an isolationist stance will have the opposite effect- of atrophying US national capacity and consequently losing out on a bunch of stuff. This effect won't be felt for a decade or so, but after that, the US will probably not be top dog anymore.
Troops in WW2 were employees (some involuntary, via the draft) of the US government. Not at all like charity recipients. If the US cut off all charity, it could continue. If it didn't pay its troops, they would likely mutiny.
There are governments which haven't tried to be world policeman, like Switzerland & Sweden. My impression is that they're doing fairly well, although Sweden is having some problems with its immigrants.
> Not only you but lots of folks here seem to be thinking pretty tactically instead of strategically.
"Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics". I discount such talk of strategy from people who would experience no negative consequences for their strategic ideas being wrong.
> I think it's ignorant to assume that non-policeman states like Switzerland and Sweden don't benefit directly and perhaps even exist as-is only as a consequence of a forceful US-led world.
If they are getting the benefit without such spending, such spending seems less necessary on the part of the US. But also, they existed before the US led the world.
> It's to offer a reminder of an alternative to European, Chinese, and Middle Eastern development with a goal of reducing their spheres of influence and ensuring US hegemony.
I don't see a problem with "European development" in Africa, whatever that means. Nor do I think the US needs hegemony as far away as Africa.
> they don't get so tied in that then they pursue Chinese surveillance architecture
We're worried that African countries are going to spy on us?
> many countries that could find their ideology shaped by such an arrangement into hating the US and going to war with us fifty years down the road
I just don't see African countries going to war with us. Any US involvement with them would be a war of choice.
> Or if land war is incomprehensible, can you imagine where this leads re the primacy of the dollar?
I think the Swiss do just fine without the Swiss Franc having "primacy".
> In a continent of people for whom the clearest regional memory of the US is "oh those people used to buy and sell us,"
The US banned the international slave trade not too long after it came into existence (the Constitution included a period of delay before it could do that).
> Foreign aid is actually an answer to the question of how you get US people in countries around the world without guns in their hands
I think trade can do that.
> I see soft power as the major alternative to global policeman.
"Soft power" would not be an effective alternative if Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs. "Soft power" doesn't stop the Houthis from interfering with shipping.
> One way or another, the US, the West, or some contingent of "progressive" (including US conservatives here) state needs to involve itself if we don't want to live in a world that is increasingly in a Chinese sphere of influence or a radical Islamic sphere of influence or whatever.
We don't "need" to insert ourselves into the third world. We tried doing so in Afghanistan, but radical Islamists took it back anyway.
> Isolationism is an approach, and maybe if we get a sweet iron dome and dominate our continent, we can amass enough resources and trade to let the rest of the world figure itself out.
Israel has an "iron dome" because it's neighbors are hostile. The US is not, it is already dominant on its continent.
> If you don't like to talk about the future with strategists
Is every commenter on the internet a "strategist"?
> We could ask the question, "how did the US get into its global policeman role back when?"
The most obvious preceding factor would be the relative decline of the UK.
> Soft power is the advanced guard.
You haven't established it does any guarding at all.
> The relevant aspect of the Houthis attack on shipping in the context of soft power is "if the US ran Middle-East diplomacy in a way that warmed the hearts of Houthis (the unbearable two-state solution, for instance), there would be no shipping attacks."
The Houthis attack ships that have nothing to do with Israel. They aren't trying to make any deal with the US over them either.
> That there is just demonstrates a failure in approach.
What would be an example of a success?
> Policy in Afghanistan is not about who controls Afghanistan but about Iran and the broader Middle East.
The Taliban killed a number of Iranian officials and nearly went to war with Iran prior to 9/11. We didn't overthrow the Taliban for that reason, we did it because of 9/11. Iran was empowered by us overthrowing hostile neighboring regimes.
> Frankly US policy wonks might feel our investment in Afghanistan was perfectly worthwhile.
They can believe the moon is made of green cheese, that doesn't make it true.
> Re African troops and the iron dome--have you heard of boats and ICBMs? An ocean ain't as big as it used to be. Africa is just an example here. It's every continent and every country.
The US hasn't been attacked by boats since Pearl Harbor (really, that was planes launched from boats), and there isn't a navy that can compete with ours. African countries don't have ICBMs, and the countries that do have them don't need to launch them from Africa to reach us. There is thus no apparent gain to the US from political wrangling there.
>If the US cut off all charity, it could continue. If it didn't pay its troops, they would likely mutiny.
You're missing the point, TGGP. I was talking explicitly about *National Capacity* That is, what a country is *able* to do. You're talking about the minimum a country can get away with doing. My point was that in practice, national capacity either expands or contracts. Everybody wants some kind of magical dial where they can set what they think is the *correct* amount of national capacity at any given time according to their beliefs, but that sort of thing usually ends poorly for the citizens and the economy. Either the US is vibrant enough to export governmental competence to Africa for free, on a whim, via PEPFAR or it is shrinking into a despotic state. There is no in between. There's only a time lag.
Why, a guy named Leon Trotsky contemplated the problem of impoverished and poorly supplied troops mutinying and came up with the idea of 'Barrier Troops' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrier_troops Trotsky realized that no, a country didn't have to figure out how to get chocolate and ice cream to the frontlines, instead it could just position soldiers to catch and execute fellow soldiers trying to retreat, for any reason.
Like I said, I'm from India. India was a Soviet client state from the late 1960s, and the Soviet-approved dictator Indira Gandhi amended the constitution about a hundred times and nationalized a bunch of industries to implement Soviet-style Commanding heights of the economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commanding_heights_of_the_economy
doctrine.
What nobody realized at the time was that Soviet national capacity was continuously shrinking because of their bullshit statist policies and every Soviet client state that copied the Soviet Union and followed stupid Soviet advice on who to trade with (Soviets) and who not to trade with ("Evil Capitalists") also destroyed their own national capacity just like the Soviets. The result is that all of the former Soviet states and all former Soviet client states are dysfunctional countries. Every single former Soviet or Soviet client state has a corrupt government that "protects" its citizens through heavy statism, taxes and societal control, and every citizen is impoverished and has to succeed in spite of the government, not because of it.
>There are governments which haven't tried to be world policeman, like Switzerland & Sweden. My impression is that they're doing fairly well, although Sweden is having some problems with its immigrants.
The US simply happens to be the richest and most militarily powerful member of the UNSC. For now, that is. Power is a zero sum game and other countries are also jockeying for the position of "world policeman", so if US national capacity declines and someone else's increases, the US will lose influence and clout, that's all.
The US maintains its diplomatic "soft power" and it's military and economic "hard power" for it's own self interest. It just happens to have its fingers in many pies, economically speaking: protecting the petrodollar in the middle east, "protecting" its favorable trading partners in Scandinavia, Western Europe and the Far East and browbeating them into deals favorable to the US (for example, every single Japanese airline has exclusively bought Boeing airplanes for several decades), "protecting" the <link> Sea Lines of Communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_lines_of_communication</link> to favor US interests and disfavor US enemy interests (eg. North Korea and Iran)
Overall the US is doing a pretty good job. Extra "humanitarian" work is simply a low-marginal-cost extension of existing US national capacity, and the US is not alone in doing humanitarian and free stuff, even developing countries like India and South Africa also do similar things. The US just happens to be capable at a planetary level, relative to other countries.
> Either the US is vibrant enough to export governmental competence to Africa for free, on a whim, via PEPFAR or it is shrinking into a despotic state. There is no in between. There's only a time lag.
Nonsense. Switzerland doesn't try to manage other countries, and that hasn't caused it to shrink into despotism. There's no actual connection. Nor, of course, is PEPFAR free. That's what the parent post has been arguing about!
> Trotsky realized that no, a country didn't have to figure out how to get chocolate and ice cream to the frontlines, instead it could just position soldiers to catch and execute fellow soldiers trying to retreat, for any reason.
You have to ensure the barrier troops don't mutiny either.
> Yeah, practically speaking, the "World Policeman" is the UN Security Council
Maybe during the Korean War, but afterward the US acted repeatedly without UN backing (the Soviets boycotted the UN's decision there and would have vetoed subsequent actions).
> "protecting" its favorable trading partners in Scandinavia
Yeah, I was talking about *national capacity*, similar to what Caplan calls "social capacity". I agree with Caplan that Statism is an awful worldview.
>Nonsense. Switzerland doesn't try to manage other countries, and that hasn't caused it to shrink into despotism. There's no actual connection. Nor, of course, is PEPFAR free. That's what the parent post has been arguing about!
Are you kidding? Switzerland is basically a confederation of Alpine villages with a couple of cities thrown in. And even Switzerland has an annual $4.5 billion foreign aid budget, including food aid in 38 countries.
I don't know what you mean by "doesn't try to manage other countries". If you meant to say that the US sticks its nose in other countries' affairs and Switzerland doesn't, you're quite mistaken.
Being a neutral country, Switzerland is diplomatically involved in almost every conflict in the world today. Swiss diplomats have negotiated with Boko Haram, South Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Kosovo, Lebanon, and even Catalan separatists in Spain. In addition to that, Switzerland also mediates between the US and Cuba, Saudi/Iran, US/Venezuela, Russia/Georgia and apparently also between Iran and Egypt.
I'm aware that PEPFAR costs money to the US. I am agreeing with Scott's point of view that the US spending the money on PEPFAR is better than the US squandering the money elsewhere. I'm just going a bit further and saying that programs like PEPFAR are proof that the US is capable of doing great things.
The moon landing and so on. These are all *evidence* of national capacity.
>You have to ensure the barrier troops don't mutiny either.
Yeah, the Soviet strategy for that was to have the barrier troops overseen by the Cheka/NKVD secret police, and the NKVD technically overseen by the Politbureau, but in practice having an incestuous relationship with each other, to the point that Joseph Stalin was terrified of his daughter getting raped by the NKVD chief Stalin himself appointed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria
Anyway, my point was that "abundance" is a much better situation than "no more than necessary".
>Maybe during the Korean War, but afterward the US acted repeatedly without UN backing (the Soviets boycotted the UN's decision there and would have vetoed subsequent actions).
My point was that the "World Policeman" role is played by a group of countries and not the US individually. Of course, the US also unilaterally declares war on any country it wants, but that is a right that every sovereign country has and exercises. For example, India unilaterally fought Pakistan in 1971 to stop a genocide and because of that, "East Pakistan" became Bangladesh.
I also kinda get where you're coming from on the 'no link between foreign aid and despotism', but I'm still sticking to my position. Like I said, *in practice* national capacity either expands or contracts. *In practice* your elected representatives have some empathy for citizens and foreigners alike, or they don't have any empathy for either. Its only a matter of time before you find out.
You want the government to *only* perform basic common services and leave the rest to the individual decisions of individual citizens. And yet, can you name a single country that actually does so, *in practice*?
You've perfectly explained the weakness of doing anything via government or central planning. There's no natural inclination for government capital to flow towards efficient uses.
At the very least, private doners *could* evaluate and selectively choose what charities they donate to.
It is absolutely *wild* that you can look at the spending priorities of the US and conclude "enemy action" is the cause of debt and missalocation of funding.
Unless your political philosophy is specifically "I like war and corporate tax cuts", I have no idea who you think the enemy is.
> like the Broadband Equity And Deployment Program, a $42 billion effort to give rural Americans Internet which, after endless delays, has failed to connect a single rural American.
Hello. I work at an organization that is advising several state and local governments on the BEAD program. I have noticed that the BEAD program has been catching a lot of flack recently, so I thought I would take this chance to explain what is actually behind those delays.
tl;dr: BEAD has definitely taken longer than it should have, but the delays have been due less to government incompetence than to the decision to pick one side of the tradeoff between "move fast even if it means a lot of the money will end up going to the wrong places" and "move slow and make sure the money doesn't get wasted". When the BEAD program kicked off, we didn't have good data on which households had broadband access and which didn't. There is a timeline where we just decided to push forward quickly with the data we had, but in that world a lot of the money would have been at risk of getting deployed to areas that already had broadband, and a lot of households would have been skipped over because the ISPs had fudged their coverage claims. I also think the program would have had a harder time reaching its goal of 100% broadband coverage.
Instead the government spent around two years creating a new set of broadband maps for the country, then going through a back and forth process to clean those maps and get grant programs set up in each state. Reasonable people can differ over whether all of this this was worth a ~2ish year delay (I definitely have my own gripes), but I don't think BEAD has been quite as big of a failure as people in these parts seem to think. And for the record: I judge DEI to have played a negligible part of this, and, as much as I like them, I don't think "give all the money to Starlink" was ever a feasible solution.
Interesting read! I’m guessing the gap in the calendar between Match 2020 and July 2021 was mainly covid, or was writing the FCC’s request this complex?
Thanks! And that's a good question. Looking at some of the FCC reports from that period, it seems that part of the problem is that Congress directed the FCC to start creating the maps in March, but didn't actually give them the funding to start working on it until the end of the year. The rest of the time seems to have been spent reformulating the data submission standards in preparation for the contract.
Thanks for your reply, this looks like a very silly failure mode from Congress (nine months…).
I also had another question: Do you have thoughts about the amount of expenses? The US is a large country and infrastructure is expensive, but how does it add up to over 40 billion? (Isn’t this much more expensive than what the ISP could have got by fudging their claims?)
A good reason to not direct 100% funds to one super effective program is risk. Humans are dumb and prediction is hard. If you mess up and send all the funds to program A that is merely 10x less effective than program B, you are doing a lot worse than a 50/50 between A and B. You can imagine how the same dynamics apply. It's like diversifying in the stock market, even though you could probably go through most of sp500 1 by 1 and "prove" why each individual stock is a bad pick compared to MAG7.
This post has all the ingredients for an argument for libertarian extremism, but somehow fails to put them together.
```Is it unfair to focus on BEAD and other especially bad programs? Shouldn’t we expect the average newfound dollar to be redirected to an average program? I think we should expect somewhere between average and worst. We should expect it to equal the worst program if government spending rationally picked the lowest-hanging fruit first (ie invested their first X dollars in the best program, the next Y dollars in the second-best program, and so on, always investing the marginal dollar in the best available program). We should expect it to equal the average program if the government has no idea what it’s doing and just funds random things based on what cable news show a Senator watched last night. In truth, it’s somewhere in between, so we should expect a newfound dollar to go to something in between an average program and the worst program.```
Here you admit that, in expectation, new government spending makes the average value per tax dollar go down, for reasons I wholeheartedly accept.
Why wouldn’t that same logic work in reverse? Randomly axing government spending would, in expectation, get you more value per tax dollar.
And if you accidentally axe something that provides really good value for the dollar (say PEPFAR), well the money didn’t disappear. It’s just not being taxed anymore. So the people who would no longer have to pay the taxes could fund it directly, for a lower overhead cost.
Your counter-argument, the most important sentence in the whole post, you put in a footnote:
```It could also go to tax cuts and deficit reduction, but don’t get too excited - the biggest ever drop in the size of the federal budget was something like 10% and very temporary, so we should still expect the vast majority to go to other programs.```
You take it as read that this entity that sometimes does good things like PEPFAR, but on average does things like BEAD, cannot be reduced in scope or scale.
Maybe you’re right. I can think of many reasons why you would be. But I think it’s worth making sure, rather than taking it as a premise.
hey my PhD topic doesn't come up very often! I used standard econ modelling with a "parameter" that reflects that relative value of your own/brother's life to that of a foreigner (in this case it is welfare in a welfare maximisation setting). It is not a clean illustration of just what happens if you choose 10x or 100x or whatever, because the model also includes absorption constraints which mean that if you try to give a country too much aid is gets wasted, but we chose 10x for that parameter, just for illustrative purposes, and it implied levels of foreign aid far above actual aid levels. Here is that paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022199614001263
I am struggling to find a citation or source that supports the claim in this article that Toby Ord says, of two charities chosen at random, one is typically 100x as effective as the other.
The closest claim I can find from Toby Ord is "There are many ways of helping to improve our world, but they are not created equal. Even just within global health, some approaches are thousands of times more effective than others. If you choose two at random, then on average one is a hundred times better than the other." (from https://www.tobyord.com/research)
But there is no reason to think this is true of charities in general, and I would expect to have a hard time even measuring this across charities in general. Health is relatively easy to measure effectiveness of, but I wouldn't even have a guess for how to measure downstream outcomes of e.g. charitable organizations in the arts. I suppose you could measure the economic effects (perhaps a grant to a small theater company allows it to pay the equivalent of 5 additional full time salaries) but a lot of the benefit of funding the arts is... having art.
Relatedly, one of the many reasons for the US to save lives overseas - besides the moral benefit of saving lives - is that international human development writ large is beneficial. Not all spending needs to be evaluated in terms of immediate good. (Never mind the downstream economic effects of creating goodwill among potential trade partners, which I suspect may pay for PEPFAR on its own.)
I can easily see how "If you choose two at random, then on average one is a hundred times better than the other." could be paraphrased as Scott did, especially since "approaches" isn't in that part of the quote so inferring it to be about "charities" is a reasonable mistake.
The carping about BEAD (the rural-broadband program) is pretty disingenuous. That program was never for the feds to just hire contractors and start laying new fiber; if that had been proposed it would have been laughed out of Congress for good reasons.
In the first place in most rural parts of the country no plans or engineering for such a network yet existed. Also the program as authorized is for the _states_ to do the implementing (that was a key part of how it passed muster politically), and no state yet had any such capacity in place. So the federal agency was directed to first give all the states time to write their own plans, then review those for consistency so it will work as a national network, etc.
There never was any sensible idea, nor any claim by the previous administration, that a new nationwide piece of rural infrastructure could be getting physically _installed_, by the 50 individual state governments just three years after the program was authorized to design such a thing from scratch. Across a literally continental-scale nation? Come on now....real design engineering takes time, at waaay smaller scales than that, for good reasons.
About two dozen of the state plans have now been approved by the feds, the rest have been completed and submitted for approval, and the first RFPs were being published for contracting during 2025. That was an entirely sensible timeline given the actual task that the federal and state governments were given.
(Of course it's all moot now since Trump is trying to cancel the program.)
I’m not an expert on this stuff but would the improvement in satellite internet remove the need for rural fiber networks? Sort of how in many developing countries you don’t see telephone poles because people just leapfrogged to using cell towers and cell phones. Personally I’m not a fan of satellite internet because I’ve read that these things are leaving paint chips and debris all over the place but I guess this could be one upside to them by connecting rural areas quickly
No. The program is authorized to end up costing 42B in _total_, most of that for the construction phase still to come. Only a small portion of the authorized funding has yet been spent.
The question that remains is how altruistic are rhe Charities? Are 90% of every dollar donated paying a miltimillion dollar CEO? In that case we adding to the problem and ethically defrauding those who with their hearts donated the funds believing they are actually effectuating change. Instead, 90% of their donation goes to excessive salaries to fund personal jets and holiday homes. Or, in your example goes toward funding Internet for all which has not produced a single connection. So philosophically, of course, writing huge checks and combining them with propaganda to sway public opinion exploits the altruistic wishes of the donor while intentionally robbing their intention. The system of donations requires complete transparency so expectations can be achieved, whitnesed and questioned if necessary. The current corporate/Congressonal system of shifting vast sums throughout the ledger is an ethical disaster, and primarily results unintended, often unknown, payments and reimbursement for expenses never disclosed to the donors. Large scale charity in many cases has the appearance of being a business of deceit. It's time to request altruism throughout the entire charitable process.
Errrrr, remember that A.C.X. is an ultra-W.E.I.R.D. space where moral universalism is taken as an axiom. In most of space and time, people outside of the local community, or even one's family, weren't due any moral consideration at all. (IUUC in the traditional Netsilik Eskimo culture, if a hunting band came upon a single hunter, if he couldn't establish that he was related to anyone in the band, he would be killed as a matter of course.) And remember that though the US is really W.E.I.R.D., it's less W.E.I.R.D. than *we* are. Yeah, money saved by cancelling PEPFAR may not be redirected to a really good cause, but at least it will not-increase the national debt, so in the future we will pay incrementally smaller taxes, which is much more important than the lives of foreigners.
I'm missing something more foundational. U.S. government and its citizenry are bound by a compact in the form of a constitution. At its conception, I don't see it as ever having considered spending such amounts on foreign humanitarian efforts. Obviously, it's evolved, but coming back to first principles - is there effectively no limit to what the U.S. government can spend on any noble effort and correspondingly tax (i.e. use the monopoly of force to command its citizens to pay) to fund? Clearly, a lot of spending vastly exceed the initial compact, but can't we call out foreign humanitarian aid as amongst the most egregious and start by cutting there?
Relatedly, a lot of the logic here seems to be simply utilitarian: $X/life-saved is cheap, therefore spend. I'm curious if any of the advocates for the spending here would use the same logic when appointed to act as CFOs/controllers/treasurers/admins of all the organizations in their lives. It doesn't matter that I serve in a state government and instituted to serve the interests of my state, the neighbor's state is poor and I can save their lives at $X/life; it doesn't matter that my daughter's girl scout troop sold cookies to fund a camping trip, I can save lives at $X/life to help a challenge in another continent. At some point - even if spending is effective, isn't it legitimate to say that organizations exist with finite charters and spending outside such a charter is immoral on its face?
Yes, when the left has the majority, the left can contend its been given the authority to do all these things. In this case, when the right has the majority, isn't it legitimate to say: "This is out of scope. Our contract didn't include this, shouldn't include this, and (we contend), never has included it. Time to re-establish some limits. If that work is to be done - great, let's talk about other means of addressing, but heaven knows an out-of-control federal oversight can't be trusted to do so."
Even if you ascribe zero value to foreigners, you should still support foreign aid, which improves our standing and influence in the world. We can support foreign aid for selfish reasons!
This assertion should be empirically verifiable yet there has been literally nothing from people making the claim along the lines of, say, "these X Y Z countries were recipients of $1093589 worth of foreign aid, and they made these specific A B C decisions that resulted benefit to Americans plausibly due to the good will from the foreign aid". Yet for how many times I've heard this line of reasoning in support of foreign aid, I've not seen a single instance of anyone identifying an actual specific outcome that benefitted Americans, only general rationalizations about trade or soft power or whatever
Also PEPFAR started in 2003, and AIDS declined in the US long before PEPFAR. That's a strong indication that such international disease prevention programs are negligible when it comes to protecting Americans
I'm not sure it would be verifiable, and I'm not sure it matters. $1mil (the amount in your example) is such a minuscule amount in the federal budget (0.00001%, or $0.002 per US citizen), that we should be willing to throw it at things that have even a small chance of helping.
Also, WRT PEPFAR, saving babies from HIV is valuable in its own right, even if it doesn't help Americans.
You can't justify it by saying it's just a small portion of the budget. You could create that entire budget by a multitude of smaller portions added up together.
Saving babies is valuable even if it doesn't help Americans, which is a justification for charitable donations, not taxing Americans.
You're being deliberately obtuse. That number was obviously just an example, but I'm glad to know you don't actually give a shit whether public funding of international causes benefit nationals of the governments doing the funding as is often argued
>Also, WRT PEPFAR, saving babies from HIV is valuable in its own right, even if it doesn't help Americans.
My comment was obviously aimed at the argument that "ackshually foreign aid helps Americans because soft power and stuff". What I got back from you: "it doesn't matter if we can verify if that's true, spend spend spend your money on Africans anyways"
I'm not the one being obtuse. It's not that I "don't give a shit" about the benefits, it's that the level of success necessary to justify the cost is so small that it's not worth measuring; it would probably cost more to measure it than to just provide the help on the strong likelihood that it will have a positive impact.
WRT PEPFAR, I addressed that in the first comment (saving babies makes countries feel good about America). There are plenty of other diseases that could make their way to America which are more effectively treated at the source.
No for the first two, possibly in the third case (like with COVID) but HIV was never actually at risk of breaking out into the broader population and was instead already endemic in a subpopulation of the US.
You really don't think it helps Americans if foreigners, who we want to trade with and who we want to support us in international discussions/conflict, are informed about world events, especially in a way that supports American views?
Ordo amoris, as it's invoked in this debate, reminds me of the 'Murder is actually really frowned in Japan. It goes against the traditional concept of 生きる, which means "to live"' tweet. Which makes (a certain class of) adult convert catholics the equivalent of weebs, which check out.
The issue is not that there are bad (or good) humanitarian programs in USAID.
The issue is that there are all manner of color revolution, domestic societal manipulation, and no doubt other fuckery going on there. And it is by no means obvious that any program fits into any one of the good or bad buckets.
> Then there's the millions going to the BBC, the NY Times and what not. Bought and paid for.
There was a similar Skeptics.SE question recently about Politico. It turns out it’s a professional subscription (one per staffer?), since it’s apparently easier than tracking directly what happens in Congress.
Also on the topic of 'interesting to argue about and therefore wrong/irrelevant':
I'm no expert, but everyone I hear from who is an expert on this topic seems to tell me that foreign aid is not primarily a humanitarian endeavor, and is almost entirely used as leverage to force poor foreign governments to negotiate favorable treaties and trade deals and diplomatic concessions and etc. Basically that it is an investment in soft power that pays extremely real dividends both economically and geopolitically, not a deadloss charitable expense that just disappears out the door.
So the framing of 'what percent of our budget should we spend on foreign charity' is, as I understand it, also incorrect. We spend noting on pure foreign charity and probably never will; everything is an investment will real returns, and the question is where and how much to invest.
The collective West - the source of by far the majority of aid donated - couldn't even get a strong majority of the aid recipient countries to support symbolic UN motions against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. If foreign charity can't even be leveraged to do that, imagine how little it accomplishes when it comes to anything of importance
I'm not sure why you think we would preferentially spend our political/diplomatic/financial leverage on unimportant things instead of important things.
Like, assuming any competence at all, you'd expect the important things to be the first ones that get accomplished using limited resources, and the unimportant ones to be last.
"Would"? Did the collective West *not* in fact try to diplomatically isolate Russia by, among other things, getting "the Global South" - the aid recipients - on side?
Okay, fine. We don't have to count that then. List those important things that have been accomplished and benefitted donor countries plausibly as a result of foreign charity from those donor countries
Legit realization. Elon Musk's philosophy is basically the same as Thanos' in Infinity War. He thinks there's a resource problem and rather than fix it in any sane way his solution is to grab as much power as possible and randomly destroy half of everything on the assumption suddenly things will work. And if you thought that was a stupid plan, this is a stupid plan for exactly the same reasons and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
EDIT: I obviously didn't explain the metaphor well (because it was intuitive to me but obviously no one else based on replies). The thing being destroyed in this case isn't half of the population, its half the federal government.
As we are seeing in this comment section, although I'm relieved by the number of people who seem to be pushing back on the claim that you can burn something down and just magically erect a more efficient structure in its place.
Surely Elon Musk's solution is to develop space travel so we're no longer limited to the resources on earth? Which may or may not count as a sane solution, but it's rather different to killing half the universe's population.
I obviously didn't explain the metaphor well (because it was intuitive to me but obviously no one else based on replies). The thing being destroyed in this case isn't half of the population, its half the federal government.
Ah. I want to destroy the entire federal government, regarding city states as preferable to nation states and 50 independent states as at least an improvement. So in that case I'd be more extreme than Thanos.
It might take a lot more than 50 city states to cover the current territory of the United States. I guess it depends on how borders are established. And they'd be constantly shifting because city states tend to be in perpetual low-level warfare with each other.
But you can advocate for whatever extreme reorganization of existing power that you want and hope it catches on either through some kind of succession movement or division process or whatever. What the Trump administration is doing however, is more like if you got elected on the basis on one mandate, took it as permission to implement your city-state policy, and then began to do so by randomly restricting payments that acknowledged the existence of the federal system in the hopes that people would just adapt and recognize we weren't doing that anymore and would just magically fall into your city-state system (and of course you would continue to punish them by whatever arbitrary levers you have available if they didn't figure out the specific city state system that you wanted).
I snort-laughed at "most Americans are not in this category", and again more loudly at "your love for your fellow countryman". I was a mistake theorist about Trumpists for years, the same way I still am about most fiscal conservatives, and I just kept on being surprised that none of them seemed to be seeing the mistake as it got more and more obvious over 2015-2020. At some point, I just had to accept that these people have different terminal values to me - they know exactly what Trump is, they know what he's doing, and they vote for him and support him because he is what they want.
Ever since, it's been years of watching mistake theorists being surprised over and over and over again, exactly the same way I used to be. My theory of "the average Trumpist's goal is to tear down everything any decent person holds dear" consistently predicts their actions, while their theory of "the average Trumpist is a decent person who has simply been misled about their rational self-interest" consistently fails to. Hell, Kamala's entire campaign was built around the idea that maybe 5-10% of Trumpists were fundamentally decent people who could be lured into voting for a sufficiently bipartisan alternative, and look how that turned out.
The median Trumpist takes one look at the fact that cancelling PEPFAR kills foreigners and makes the liberal half of the country feel sad and hopeless and is immediately and thoroughly in favour. They don't care about efficiency, or what else the money will be spent on, or even from a purely nationalist perspective whether or not completely destroying America's soft power is a good power. They just want it gone, because the cruelty is the point.
Scott, I understand that you write posts like this in an attempt to do some good in the world and pull some people back from the abyss. But they're already gone. You're better off using that energy to mitigate what they've brought into the world, if that's even possible at this point.
You don't know much about the UK, do you? Two of our four main political parties are run by open Trump supporters (Badenoch and Farage) and two of our last four prime ministers have been open Trump supporters (Johnson and Truss). Also, Brexit. I assure you I am all too familiar with the strain, and I don't think we're in any way immune.
I mean, the conseratives on Reddit do seem to be upset about the plans in Gaza. Not because 2 million people would probably die as a result, mind you, but because it would be a waste of tax money. So part of it is also that they want lower taxes.
I mean, I'm not going to go to the wall over things like "ketchup on well-done steak is bad". I know perfectly decent people who disagree with me on that, even though they shouldn't. Ditto real issues like state interventionism versus laissez-faire, or the merits of immigration or a welfare state. These are issues where taking the wrong approach can do and has done incredible harm, but they're complex issues and it's very easy to be wrong about them while still having only the best intentions. I'm almost certainly wrong about some of them myself, and I don't agree with "the left" (insofar as that's a single belief system rather than twenty angry cats in a fairly flimsy bag) on all of them either.
But when those values are things like "human suffering is bad and we shouldn't cause more of it for the lols", "acquiring and spreading knowledge is generally good", "the rule of law is important enough for it to be worth changing bad laws rather than burning the entire system down", or "existential threats to civilisation are a thing we should care about"? When we're disagreeing on things like whether dictatorships are better than democracy, and whether it's a reasonable thing for every second word out of your leader's mouth to be a lie, and whether rape is excusable if it's by someone on the right team, and whether my trans friends should be allowed to live free? Not just one of those things, but all of them, with several dozen more I could add to the list?
Yeah. Yeah, on the whole, I'm going to call my values clearly and obviously correct. I'm not going to call someone who doesn't share at least most of them "decent". And I no longer believe that the median Trump supporter shares any of them.
I'm sure *some* of governmental aid spending goes to good causes. Just as I am sure some of the charity donations from Madoff or SBF were going to really good causes that helped a lot of people. That's not a good argument though against prosecuting them for bad things they did - which yes, if successful, would necessarily deprive them of the ability to spend money on the good causes. And that would lead to children starving, etc. Still not a good argument. There's a very good evidence now USAID spending in part and government aid spending in general is completely out of control and corrupt. And thus, needs to be reigned in, even if... etc. etc.
> We should expect it to equal the worst program if government spending rationally picked the lowest-hanging fruit first (ie invested their first X dollars in the best program, the next Y dollars in the second-best program, and so on, always investing the marginal dollar in the best available program). We should expect it to equal the average program if the government has no idea what it’s doing and just funds random things based on what cable news show a Senator watched last night.
The latter sounds more plausible to me regarding the marginal dollar. There is some minimal amount of funding necessary for the government to continue existing, and thus governments which don't spend that cease to, but with an affluent government like ours there's little constraint at all.
> So in a discussion of the ethics of canceling PEPFAR, I don’t think it’s enough to say that you care about Americans more than foreigners. You would have to care about Americans more than 100x more than foreigners.
I exclusively direct my charitable donations to the third world, where a dollar can go farther. But I don't think the government should be taxing Americans to give to non-Americans at all, altruistic charity is simply not what the government is for (voluntary donations fill that role).
> Valuing a foreigner at less than 1/100th of an American would put them somewhere between a cow and a chicken, which if nothing else seems like an awkward thing to have to bring up at UN meetings.
It's a good thing the UN has no power to tax some nations in order to redistribute to other nations then.
> we discharge whatever claim foreigners have to our charity
Charity is not determined by the recipient having a "claim" but instead the donor deciding to give. PEPFAR is funded by taxation, and thus not really charity in the usual sense.
> I have no principled method for deciding how much of the US budget should go to foreign aid, but the current amount of ~1% doesn’t seem excessive
We should have some reasoning, or else we can't determine what amount WOULD be excessive.
> I think people should donate 1-10% of their income to effective charities, then not feel obligated to worry about altruism beyond this leve
Ok, but this isn't a dispute about charitable donations, but instead a taxpayer funded program.
> If you ascribe literally zero value to foreigners, you probably don’t want PEPFAR. But most Americans are not in this category, and I think your love for your countrymen should move you to let this majority of people use 1% of the federal budget for something they care a lot about
I have stated that I direct my charitable donations abroad, so I don't place a value of zero on foreigners and thus you would place me in the "majority". But I also don't agree to taxing any American for that purpose, and am thus opposed to a "majority" you merely imagine by conflating two things!
Way back in 2004, I remember arguing with a conservative coworker about aid to Indonesia after the tsunami. He said it was a waste of tax dollars; I said Indonesia was the most populous Muslim country on Earth and it was a good thing for the US to be conspicuously helping a bunch of people in Aceh at a time when we were fighting a GWOT across the globe and desperately needed the cooperation of the Muslim world.
We didn’t convince each other but I think my argument holds up pretty well.
Yes. It explained it improved the public support in of US improved and public support for Bin Laden has worsened. That does not necessarily lead to material gains in the US, especially considering Bin Laden was killed anyways.
True, but that’s not the counterfactual – the GWOT was already ongoing in 2004 and the US had already shown to the world that they didn’t think they needed proof to invade a country of Muslim people (which made them quite unpopular). Showing a little goodwill (a rounding error compared to military expenses in Afghanistan or Iraq) was probably better than not to.
'But I don't think the government should be taxing Americans to give to non-Americans at all, altruistic charity is simply not what the government is for (voluntary donations fill that role).'
Exactly right. Scott's last few articles have not been up to the usual standard for clarity of thought unfortunately
I think most people are fine with money going to poor/starving people, what they absolutely do not support are the thousands of DC locusts that are taking home 6-figure salaries at NGOs and non-profits who do absolutely nothing of value, they’re essentially just keyboard warriors and zealots making amazing wages while so many working people can barely get by.
Will canceling their sinecures put a dent in the budget deficit or alleviate working class woes? Absolutely not but I still think 70-90% of this stuff needs to be axed (that’s the proportion of usaid money that is being reported as not going to actual foreign aid).
Many hardcore Trump fans are watching Russia Today, so maybe the purpose of this is to destroy all programs that might possibly provide aid for Ukraine, and the African kids are just collateral damage (because a more precisely aimed attack would expose what it is actually trying to achieve).
Hmm, interesting. I was wondering whether the seeming antagonism between Trump and Putin was real or just kayfabe... I guess a US-Russia alliance isn't off the table yet. Maybe they can assemble a new Axis powers.
(1) I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned the idea of (for want of a better term) remit. The remit of a government is to rule its own country well, not to help other countries. Of course, that doesn't mean a government should *harm* other countries -- even if, hypothetically, the US would hugely benefit from invading and genociding Canada, such a course would still be ruled out by moral considerations -- but I don't think a government is obliged to actively help other foreigners. By analogy, consider a charity whose remit is to promote literacy in the third world, and which decides to start spending some of its money on mosquito nets instead. Is spending money on mosquito nets inherently bad? Of course not. But it's not part of the literacy charity's remit, so I think it would be quite reasonable for its donors to object that their money is being spent on non-literacy-related causes.
(2) Some people on this thread are talking about the soft power gains of international aid, but TBH it doesn't really seem like the US, or any western country for that matter, gets much goodwill from its aid budget. In fact, I rather think it's the opposite. The (implicit, and often explicit) premise of international aid is that it's unfair that some countries are richer than others. But once you've accepted that premise, spending a few billion on condoms in Africa isn't really going to cut it: you need to keep giving, and/or keep accepting third-world citizens into your country, as long as your country is in any way better off than the third-world places you're trying to help. Anything less would be unfair, after all. And of course, the recipients of your largesse aren't going to thank you for being marginally less unfair than you might be, they're going to resent you for not doing away with the unfairness altogether, and view any aid you give as a pathetically inadequate attempt to buy them off. Saying that the US has a moral obligation to help poorer countries is a way to make the US hated, not loved.
It’s folded into State Dept, so basically like everything with Trump there is no way to know whether the sound and fury will signify anything. Looks to me like Rubio just basically said “yes please I would be happy to add their budget to mine.” It would not be at all surprising if Rubio calculates that PEPFAR (which buys us favors from African nations whose support he will want on occasion) is one of the programs he’d like to keep. To Scott’s point, if this is more bureaucratic reorganization than erasure, then the funds will just be redirected to a foreign aid initiative that Rubio decides is in line with Trump’s foreign policy goals - which (obviously, I hope) is a decision that could have made just as loyally and effectively by a Trump-appointed administrator of USAID. But that would destroy the illusion of Big Things happening …
Apparently funding has not resumed to the point that PEPFAR can resume operation, and Rubio is seemingly using the fact that they're not working as an excuse to purge the organization.
> On Jan. 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for lifesaving medicines and medical services, ostensibly allowing for the distribution of H.I.V. medicines. But the waiver did not name PEPFAR, leaving recipient organizations awaiting clarity.
On Sunday, another State Department waiver said more explicitly that it would cover H.I.V. testing and treatment as well as prevention and treatment of opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times. The memo did not include H.I.V. prevention — except for pregnant and breastfeeding women — or support for orphaned and vulnerable children.
Although PEPFAR is funded by the State Department, roughly two-thirds of its grants are implemented through U.S.A.I.D. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neither organization has released funds to grantees since the freeze was initiated.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Rubio appeared to blame the recipient organizations for not acting on the waiver, saying he had “real questions about the competence” of the groups. “I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” he said.
Yeah I’m following that too but I think it’s essentially “not yet,” not “not ever”. I don’t mean to minimize the immediate impact (people really won’t get paid temporarily until the machinery restarts), but until the announced 90 day review is complete we have no clue how it will finally resolve. Given the way things went in the first Trump administration though, my very strong suspicion is that after the drama it will be pretty much the same as it was before: foreign aid will be used, at pretty much the same funding levels and in mainly the same ways as it always has been: to buy political support of foreign governments. I don’t doubt the programs might be shuffled around a little and 10% or so of the staff may turn over. But in the end, it’s going to be just like it was before: a self-interested nation-state using ostensible altruism as another tool in the foreign policy toolbox. If the reorg into State is one of the elements that is still there when this thing takes its final form, then the only real difference will be that one Trump appointee (Rubio) is calling the shots instead of a different Trump appointee (the USAID administrator if he’d named one).
Also, since Americans are among those humans who enjoy having sex with other humans, and since some of the other humans would otherwise be foreign nationals who are HIV positive, it saves American lives too. I mean, if we value the lives of American sex-with-foreigner havers roughly as much as we value the compatriot fuckers.
I am extremely confused about how the relevant people have the authority to do all of this. I'm not American, but I was always sold the idea that the American governmental system is so great because of all of the checks and balances , and that seemed broadly plausible to me.
That story doesn't seem at all compatible with what we're seeing now. Putting aside any discussion of the object level, how does Musk or even Trump have the unilateral authority to do all of these things? Was the checks and balances thing just a fig leaf all along?
Yeah, in retrospect, it was a pretty stupid system. The only reason it lasted so long was because nobody even tried to break it. But unfortunately, democracy now has to end because the price of eggs went up. How unfortunate.
This arguably *is* one of the checks (depending on how SCOTUS rules in the inevitable impoundment case).
The Executive branch (specifically the Treasury Department) is the entity that actually writes checks on behalf of the Federal government, but is prohibited by an explicit clause of the Constitution from spending money unless Congress has appropriated it for that purpose.
There's some ambiguity about whether Congress can require money be spent as appropriated (except for payments on Federal debt) or whether there's inherent Presidential power – analogous to prosecutorial discretion in criminal law – to simply not.
Of course, this wasn't the question of the post. But your completely theoretical philosophical question assumes that the efficacy of both programs under discussion was known with 100% accuracy.
It seems like you could push a slightly different argument. If PEPFAR is one of the most effective programs at saving lives, should we eliminate other programs and use their funding to bolster PEPFAR spending? Are we obligated to have a minimal government that mostly funds programs that are good at saving lives?
For instance, can we justify the Department of Agriculture spending $68 billion when we could be using that to prevent AIDS deaths? $43 billion by the Department of Education?
Taking the x100 effectiveness difference at face value, it should be trivial to find programs to cut. You could do it randomly and come out way ahead on average.
To think about PEPFAR, I have to first mention something very general that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread (though perhaps it was - see Vesa Hautala's reference to Aquinas).
One of the most obvious reasons that occurred to me for ordo amoris is a general recognition that there is a lot of suffering in the world, but also a lot of people capable of rendering care, and so a logical emergent strategy is to *care for the suffering in your immediate vicinity and trust other people to do the same*. If most suffering is close enough to someone who can care, most suffering will get covered; any suffering in some remote area is tragic, but not easily addressed, and no one is to blame. This is so intuitive to me that I assume it was a commonplace belief, so I'm surprised to not see it covered here, so... here it is.
This gets around the family argument. I don't have to agonize over how many strangers equals one family member. If a stranger is dying right in front of me, I can render care, and hope that if my mom fell down the stairs in some building a thousand miles away, some stranger near her is rendering care in turn. That stranger doesn't have to care a whit for mine, and I don't have to immediately book a plane to my mom, and if we tried, we'd lose both my dying stranger and my mom. (Again, to me: intuitive.) I don't have to agonize about why I was a thousand miles away from my own mother; there are reasons for close family to still be geographically far; presumably this was discussed beforehand, and the risks were acceptable.
Large scale suffering can require large scale coordination to address; this is well enough; even individualists can see this. In our timeline, that coordination is often done by governments. But also in our timeline, suffering exists at home as well as abroad. So, ordo amoris: each entity focuses care on whomever's closest, *on the premise* that other entities are doing the same. The US prioritizes one American over 1000 Ugandans while expecting Uganda to value one Ugandan over 1000 Americans; we are each other's fargroups, after all.
Long term care is different mostly because there's time to coordinate further. One entity can now organize long term care for a fargroup in exchange for something. One ought to ask what the US is getting for PEPFAR. (And this is not a rhetorical question. There exist Americans in Africa, who can expect care for international goodwill reasons stemming in part from PEPFAR.)
At the same time, there are Americans suffering in America. Surely $6B per year would help them. Possibly more! OTOH, America does actually spend much more than that on Americans. I think the priority is already established, and this would be a good thing to consider as well.
Ultimately, conservatives argue for local care because it's much more direct, and much more efficient (esp. considering how easy it would be for a grifter to infiltrate an intercontinental chain of charity where the taxpayers aren't able to know the people in the chain). This is independent of the argument about relative worth of life, and doesn't require US conservatives to utterly disregard African lives. Indeed, given the amount of resources they spend on missionary movements, as well as willingness to fund PEPFAR anyway, it's clear to me that that care is still abundant.
This makes a LOT of assumptions, such as that all regions are suffering equally at all times, and that regions are never in particularly bad situations that make it impossible for themselves or surrounding regions to help. Do you think no other countries should help the US if they had a massive earthquake that turned half the country to rubble, simply because "ordo amoris"?
If you don't care about African lives, that's fine. You don't have to do all these mental gymnastics to justify it to us, you're not a politician.
Is there a reason you've been unusually rude and insulting these past few days? This is just about the opposite of my actual position regarding African lives.
...What? I was not trying to offend. Again, I genuinely do not care about how much you value lives, but there's no need for you to come up with such an arbitrary rule to justify it.
Look at this way: your mother is suffering from a horrible illness in another country. You know you could help her by caring for her. You do fly over to help her, right? Right?
If a close family member were suffering a long term anything, I'd naturally want to help, and since it's long term, help would actually be possible. But the example posits a drowning child, not a child suffering from a chronic illness, and since the thought experiment necessarily plays off the audience's emotional intuition, the immediacy necessarily affects the response. It's not arbitrary.
...What does any of that have to do with PEPFAR? We're not talking about drowning children, we're talking about long term international aid that will kill people if discontinued suddenly. You care about saving lives, right?
You just seem to ignore that by saving "Americans are suffering too", but Americans are already being cared for to the point where they are not afraid of starving or dying of easily preventable diseases. Our resources would be much better spent saving lives that take less resources to save, "ordo amoris" be damned. That's basically the whole point of EA! You can't just say it's "not efficient" when neurotic organizations like GiveWell have been funding AND verifying these charities that actually save lives, despite being overseas.
Anyways, I don't even know why I'm arguing with you about this. Here's a Scott post from over a decade ago about what he thinks about your ethics, and he is ten times more rude about it than I am because he actually cares about human lives.
I think your argument would have gotten much farther if you hadn't imagined a completely different version of me, argued with that, and then claimed you were arguing with me.
Re. Broadband stuff: This is all downstream of the US post regan deciding that is actually bad for the government to even be able to do things, let alone actually do them.
I shouldn't complain because I made a decent chunk of my money pre covide college degree working jobs that 1000% should have been state run from start to finish at average final cost 75$ an hour per manhour (such waste! the government has no incentive to efficiently allocate funds!)
and were instead private contracted out for an effective cost of 700$+ an hour per manhour (the efficiency of the private sector! The invisible hand of the market!), not that I saw more than 30 of that 700, on account of my boss was working very hard from wherever he was getting high and cheating on his wife.
The broadband thing is a particular pisser, that shit should be a publicly owned utility. Pure rent seeking bullshit; every time I leave the US and end up in the middle a fucking jungle and still have better network access than if I were to take the massive journey from close to a major urban hub to slightly further from said hub I get closer to jihad against Cox et al.
Yah it really pisses me off that it seems impossible for people to see it as just a systems engineering problem.
Yes, the free market is very efficient when there is competition but a private monopoly or monopsony is strictly worse than a government one -- the individual people running the system aren't magically better but now they also need to try to return profits.
Hard agree. High Speed broadband is strictly a luxury good; especially now that starlink exists. You can do anything you need to do at 5 mbps; if you need 4k video that bad simply download it overnight.
Unfortunately, Rural America has most of the voting power per person in the US, so they get as much pork as they want.
I don’t care about Americans 100 times more than foreigners but the government of the American people absolutely should. Putting Americans first is its entire purpose.
“Putting America first” is not actionable, unless you specify the distance between first (America) and whatever is being put second. And if nothing is in second place, how meaningful is it to be first, anyway?
Even if the US government doubled its foreign aid spending, it would still be putting Americans first, by a wide margin.
You are elected president of the union in your industry. You are negotiating its wages.
“Before we begin, I feel the need to specify that I value union members at a rate of 15.34 times that of those in in the industry not in the union. I value my union compared to the teachers union at 5.8621. I value my union compared to the steelworkers union at 4.4492. I value…”
Well, the union I used to be a member of, back when I had a job where being in the union made sense, spends some of the dues it collects in ways that benefit non-union members (for instance, by organizing community activites that supported poor families). I approved of this, some other members probably less so.
However, most of the money was spent to benefit union members in one way or another.
So, the union put union members first. Just as a government that spends money on foreign aid puts America first, by a much wider margin.
Saying that the US government is obliged to prioritize its own citizens over foreigners is entirely compatible with that government also spending money on foreign aid.
Ah, I guess we misunderstood each other: I don’t mean to say that a government needs to justify prioritizing its own citizens.
What I mean to say is: Saying that “a government needs to put its own people first” doesn’t tell me much about what it should spend on foreign aid. Putting your own people first could mean spending anything between 0 and 49% of your budget on foreigners.
If we agree that the government should prioritize citizens then doesn’t mean when cuts need to be made, benefits to citizens should be prioritized over non citizens?
But it is? Foreign aid is 1% of the federal budget, and since there are about 20 times more people outside the US than inside – in fact, let’s say 10 to remove China, India and the European Union who can take care of themselves – that means it values one American as much as 1000 foreigners.
So what, America lucks out in getting a government that prioritizes its interests because it has a large population? Does that mean small countries should always value foreigners more than its citizens?
Yes but as much as I don't like how Elon is doing things I do think there is some potential upside to just restarting a department/agency -- and let's be honest that's what is going to happen with most things Elon kills, some later administration is going to rebuild them (live by EO die by EO).
And yes, you do lose institutional knowledge but there is also the issue of code rot (well administrative procedure rot). Except when it comes to gov programs we are even more reluctant to tear things down and start again lest someone accuse us of not appreciating those goals.
Having said that, we could have just achieved the upsides without the downsides by taking a little more care and building the new version before tearing down the old. Basically, I think every government agency should be rebuilt from the ground up at least every 25 years or so. But you do it by phasing over and building the new system while you keep the old one working and move people and processes into the new version.
I generally agree with this article, and, in fact, I recently signed Leah Libresco Sargeant's "Pro-Lifers Who Support PEPFAR" letter, which I hope saves PEPFAR permamently. BUT.
Vice President Vance's comments about the ordo amoris weren't made in the context of the foreign aid controversy, but rather in a discussion about why the Left feels so much compassion for illegal immigrants and so little compassion for the victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants.
Not sure why I feel the need to defend Vance here. Vance *has* defended the foreign aid cuts in general. Also, Vance's comments were still very controversial in the illegal immigration context, for good reason! Nevertheless, it just didn't sit right with me. Scott *did* totally destroy the argument Scott presented here, but that isn't the argument J.D. Vance actually made. That's un-Scott-like, which rankles.
Well, it is an interesting and important philosophical question. Given that we owe more consideration to people we feel closely related to, however defined (not necessarily just biological relationship), this doesn't mean that we owe distantly related people *nothing*. We certainly are not justified in delivering bad treatment, at least not for this reason. The last time we did this, we separated families and orphaned innocent children.
Worrying that something similar might happen now just seems prudent, and not an example of "having more compassion for illegal immigrants than for fellow citizens."
What is the point is not to optimize how gov money is spent, but to create the perception that vast sums of money are now being saved (billions!) and therefore a big tax cut can be enacted?
'But most Americans are not in this category, and I think your love for your countrymen should move you to let this majority of people use 1% of the federal budget for something they care a lot about.'
This is a terrible way to apportion tax money. The reason to have constitutional republics is so that people don't just get to spend tax money on 'things they care about', because a majority of people could then decide they care about their own pockets and spend tax money filling them. Unfortunately, too much of this already happens, but there's no reason to encourage it!
I think you're thinking about this too rationally. (Haha!) I'm not sure about that old saw of "evil can't understand good" or its inverse "good can't understand evil", but it can be harder to understand people who think very differently from you.
They see the government as the instrument of a hostile institution. It brings over people from other countries with different languages and looks, takes their money in taxes, supports people who tell their kids to use drugs and surgery for any gender confusion, sends their kids to war, and a couple other things I'm probably forgetting. The more it gets decreased in size, the better.
Agree here. I think conservative voters are tired of worrying about other people's problems (this doesn't just include foreigners, but many groups of American as well). They would rather risk their economic interests and civil rights in exchange for more local independence. Whether the MAGA movement leadership is telling the truth to these voters is another issue.
I agree with you. After all, we had rich liberals voting for Democrats who were going to raise their taxes because they were worried about the environment, minority rights, abortion rights (even if male or rich enough to fly to a state where it was legal), or countless other things. Why wouldn't lower and middle-class conservatives do the same?
While I think I see your underlying point, I'm not sure your example is symmetric. Having a difference of political opinion on policy is one thing, it's another to tolerate (or even celebrate) the weakening of our democratic institutions in favor of a strongman because policy doesn't go your way.
I don't think that MAGA voters are voting on policy (which *would* be the symmetric situation). I think they are voting against social change, the world becoming more complex, and having to compromise with communities they have no emotional stake in (like urban dwellers). They want a strong man to suppress those other people, not compromise with them.
The US produces more carbon than ever before, but liberals still support separation of powers. They took away Roe vs. Wade, but feminists still support leaders who obey the law. We still do not have single payer health insurance, yet democrats didn't try to rig an election (unless you think they did, in which case I guess we need to have *that* discussion).
At this point I am expecting two things to come out of this mess: 1. the realization that current antiwoke rationalists were to Elon/Trump what ye olde social democrats were to Stalin - useful idiots 2. In short time, the great woke restoration - from the insight that woke might have been right about the evils of the right wing (dark web etc included), proceeding rapidly towards raising the prestige of everything else the woke stood for.
1) I don't think that social democrats were that useful to Stalin, and that's an important insight, with clear contemporary implications, if true.
2) Still not sure what "Woke" is, unless it's just the extreme Left. But anyway, it wasn't just a small minority of extremists who were concerned about the evils of the right (not just the dark web, but esp "Dark Money").
3) The clearest thing I get out of this mess: We badly need to get money out of politics.
Scott, I think you're getting lost in the "arguments as soldiers" object level, when there's a much more important meta level going on.
Trump/Musk are doing what in the business world is known as Zero-Based Transformation/Redesign (search that up and you will find loads of consulting companies that you will recognize offering to help you do this; it is a well-known thing). Basically you start from nothing and add things back in as they justify themselves.
Trump didn't cut PEPFAR to be evil; he cut everything and then will add things back in as they justify themselves.
Now why did he take this approach? Your comments sections will answer that question readily: softer approaches have failed; the bureaucracy in general has proven very able to stonewall, and USAID in particular has resisted democratic oversight.
There are a few levels at which this can be analyzed. There's the basic good governance level: How can we run government agencies such that they can be reformed with less blunt instruments? Why didn't Obama or Biden do so?
There's the tribal politics level: when you don't keep your extremists in check, you put the things important to you in danger. They use you as human shields, and you cannot rely on the other side to hold their fire in that circumstance. People outside a tribe cannot reform it with precision. As it stands now, I think we all know DOGE is going to keep digging up incriminating programs to hang around the necks of whomever they feel like cutting. When you hold power next time, you can probably do some utilitarian calculation where every time a government agent throws up some culture war chum, that's a 0.001% hit against PEPFAR's longevity (and then multiply it out).
There's the practical politics level about how the nearly-total Democratic capture of these institutions has in a way made them more vulnerable. Republicans have no investment in them at all; it is completely enemy territory that they can shell at will without risking anyone on their team. Even simple self-preservation would advise other institutions (looking at you, higher ed) to get themselves some slightly-above token conservative representation. People only take care of things they feel some ownership of.
Now, this next part is tricky, because part of the ZBT process is seeing which programs drum up enough support to justify keeping/reinstating them, and having people loudly complain is the main signal for that. This may well be the most effective place to spend your internet points right now!
But ultimately you're still down in the trenches using arguments as soldiers, and what a lot of people are going to hear isn't "I care a lot about PEPFAR specifically" it's "I am focused on this because Trump Bad and this is the best way to show people he is bad." And they're thinking "this is a tiny piece of a vital reform of a government that had turned hostile to me and mine and you're trying to block it" so now they're deploying their own soldiers. I guess the question is: How sure are you that Trump Bad really isn't your major motivator?
"Trump Bad" is *my* major motivator, for exactly the reasons you describe. I have no investment in the Republican party, the Trump administration, movement conservatism, Big Tech, or the "Billionaire Club" at all, so attacking same does no damage to me or the side I feel loyal to.
Unless you are also suggesting that government reform should have some slightly above token liberal representation?
Token is fine, let’s talk terms. Polling indicates that the Federal civil service is 90% Democrat in affiliation. So my proposal is that by the end of this process, the civil service will be 90% MAGA Republican and 10% Democrat. Do you consider this reasonable token representation? If not, why not? Do you have prior recorded objections to the status quo you could show me?
Can you show me the polling? Political discrimination is illegal, so if that's been happening I am 100% behind stopping that. But I need proof first.
But that's not what my comment was about, nor your's, I thought. Reform is being undertaken by small groups of specially selected people. DOGE for example. I was referring to more than token liberal representation on *That*.
Are you just arguing for affirmative action for conservatives? Federal government jobs disproportionately require advance degrees and advanced degree holders strongly lean Democratic.
Relatedly, about half of federal government employees are military personnel and they strongly lean Republican. I’m a Democrat and don’t think that’s a problem. I have never heard any Democratic politician raise it as an issue. Some jobs just disproportionately attract certain kinds of people.
This is the kind of issue that is very hard to be rational about. My perception is that most human beings balance a felt emotional need to be charitable to strangers against a felt emotional need to promote one's nationality (ie, tribe). This is obviously going to be more dependent upon shared emotional states than any quantitative ratio. The way I see communities of people promote a set of values is via symbolic dramatic action--so canceling the best foreign aid program probably carries more symbolic value re defending the nation than canceling a less effective one. It may be more insidious than that--Republican political messaging seems to associate being nice to foreigners with Democrats and Liberals, so to the extent that the "national tribe" is equated to one's political party, canceling the foreign aid program that educated liberal democrats like the best is even better. There may even be a kind of race to the bottom in the sense that the person who can vocalize some version of "Screw the foreigners" in the most colorful way signals their loyalty to the tribe.
Of course, liberal democrats have their own version of this.
Here's a ratio, albeit one that probably cannot actually be calculated: the countryman to foreigner ratio is sensitively dependent upon how defensive people feel about the strength of their country's institutions. The in-group bias takes over from there.
The way to solve this (if you see this as a problem) isn't to bandy facts about--it's to craft messaging that overcomes political polarization and helps people trust each other more. unifying messages directed at average middle income people might do more to help the poor than any amount of analysis. "A rising tide helps all boats"
The less insecure we feel, the more generous we become.
The value of anything is subjective. Gold isn't valuable to someone dying of thirst in the desert, who would trade gold for water.
The value of life is especially subjective. As you said, your brother is a more valuable life to you than a stranger's. A cow's life is less valuable than your brother, but you're basically saying a local cow's life is more valuable than a distant cow's life, since you can harvest the local cow for meat products. And cows produce more food products than chickens.
When it comes to non-human life, where does it end? You assume the value of a stranger's life is more than zero, but is the value of a worm's life more than zero? A bacterium's life? A nanobe's life?
We only have so many resources, and so much caring, to spread around. The value of other lives to the human brain not only varies by individual, but when it gets to be marginally low enough it can indeed round down to zero, and thus effectively BE zero. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
In my opinion, the government shouldn't be in the business of charity to other nations unless it somehow furthers national interests. The government's job is to govern THIS country. If giving to other countries is judged to improve relations with other countries then we should do that. Leave giving to foreign countries in the hands of individuals, who can decide if their money is better spent on such, or helping a local stranger, or their brother.
I think Jesus assumes a hierarchy of loves, and uses that to help us see where we're lacking at the moment: "love your neighbor as yourself" is there because we usually don't have any trouble putting ourselves first. I think of it more like taking the limit of y as x approaches infinity: many different functions will also have a limit of infinity, but they will get there at different speeds. e^x will get there pretty fast, and log(x) will be very slow, but it will still get to infinity. So if our souls are infinite, then eventually our love for others will be too.
If you change 1% of budget to y% of surplus you have my vehement agreement.
I’m with the straight line people to paraphrase you on other topics. Our convex line problem has to take precedence here because of geometric divergence (debt increase).
Painful and true. Not saying we are doing this perfectly, but we have the order right.
I think you disagree that we will pay down the debt with the unspent funds. If you are right about that you are right and in the next decade (handwavey) we won’t have any ability to deliver foreign aid anyway bringing us back to where we are today.
1. Because the government is huge, the best I could expect it to do is to make decisions initially on broad categories, and then refine the categories later. That is consistent with what has happened to date. All international aid was stopped (possibly deemed net negative by administration priorities), and then later life saving treatment programs (deemed net positive) were re-instated. Soon, maybe different life saving treatment programs will be considered on an individual basis. In my most hopeful prognostication, the individual parts of PEPFAR will be considered and PEPFAR will become even better.
2. Even if the broad category is net positive (so that any break in the broad category program is a cost), it could still be a net benefit to pause funding until the agency makes an affirmative case of its benefits, making the case and having to live by it could be a self-improvement process which outweighs the cost of the pause.
If we want to compare value, then we need a simple function with a handful of parameters. We constantly want to compare things of different classes and lack any reasonable tool for calculating. Instead we always revert to standardizing in money, I’m not convinced this is good.
I don't know anything about PEPFAR, but if it's so effective and gets cut, can't other funders step in and continue to fund it so it continues to exist?
The rational-actor anarchist take here looks something like this:
Trying to resize a government involves dismantling the web of incentives and memes that spurs the growth process.
While e.g. foreign aid programs cost ~0 from a bird's eye view they are great for optics (memes) and great for untraceable spending (incentives).
They also don't affect many people in your country, so dismantling one is about as low-risk as you can go in terms of creating negative memetic energy.
On top of that "likes government foreign aid" and "would vote a trump government" or "thinks DODGE is not literal Satan come to destroy America" crossover is about 0.
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So dismantling foreign aid programs is about as good of a practice run as you can get.
You get to understand, in practice, what it's like to dismantle government programs fast (a novel action, sociologically at the cutting edge, this might be impossible).
You get to observer and fight against the memes and the incentives.
It's not a perfect practice run, but, if DODGE was to stop medicare/medicaid, the probability of failure is ~100%. So what is an action they can take to bring that to, say, ~90% ? This seems like a reasonable first step, it at least provides a plan of attack, even if bad.
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As an analogy, whenever I'd have to refactor a codebase, I don't start with "refactor the broken core".
I start with "refactor a bit around the edges that seems as confused as the core" -- and that gives me a lot of valuable information even if overall it has no long term benefits, and the simplicity I get by refactoring is counterweighted by bugs I've accidentally introduced in the way it interfaces with the rest of the code.
Same applied when I tried to reverse engineer and simplify mechanical/electronic systems.
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To be clear, I don't think that the few people wishing to fix the US government will succeeded, and most people claiming this likely just want more power/influence/money.
But your argument is not a good faith argument against a steel man of DODGEs perspective. It is a political argument to an absent political audience (i.e. one that is sensible to reason, and if such existed, the US wouldn't be where it is in the first place)
Some Americans are obese and/or addicts, and you might think they'd spend their money badly. Others are not (and those others tend to have much higher incomes and thus pay more taxes).
> Others are not (and those others tend to have much higher incomes and thus pay more taxes).
Overall, only something like the top 20% are even net contributors, and the crossover point is somewhere between $80-$100k annually.
Is there any way to take money from bad programs and redirecting them to less bad programs that does not involve cancelling programs?
And is there any way to cancel bad programs, in the current situation, that does not involve taking a flamethrower to a lot of things, and then reinstating the ones we shouldn't have burnt to the ground?
Because I think "you can't cancel any programs until you figure out a way to only cancel ones that should be cancelled and only redirect the funds to the best optimal use" is another way of saying, "you can't cancel any programs", which is another way of saying, "you can't fix this, give up, stop trying".
Even when you say it.
If a program is net-negative, assuming you’re prioritizing the most harmful programs first, canceling it will lead to the money being better spent.
The point is, if you want to improve government efficiency, focus on the actual bad programs, not the ones that save millions of lives.
Or, burn the entire field, then replant with only good programs.
What makes you think that replanting will result in “good” programs? Why cut good programs? Seems arbitrary, especially when establishing a good government program is non-trivial.
The same reasons you think "tell Congress and the people Congress and the executive branch appoints to sort out what the good programs are ahead of time" will result in the good programs being kept.
If one is feasible, the other is feasible, because you'd be using the same sets of people to make the distinction. If neither is feasible...
I guess I am confused by your comment.
Removing programs one by one just requires that the government can slowly change. Burn and replant requires the government can quickly change.
If one thinks the government cannot effectively quickly change (that is that ~600 decision makers their 300 million stakeholders will struggle with alignment the more complex the ask per moment) then it should bias one towards more incremental approaches.
I think it's plausibly easier to quickly change than slowly change the government, due to new bureaucracies being less ossified than old ones, although the transition costs are also higher.
Will the fire that burns the field also take all the terrible straw men with it? If so, it does sound a little tempting.
It's a safe assumption that the government of a country of 330 million people is going to be very complicated, have a lot of moving parts, and it's going to have quite a lot of parts that look bad to any given person. This is because 330 million is a LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE. They have different perspectives, different interests, different valuations of what's good and bad and every single one of them is working from a substantially different set of information.
A government full of programs that grew up organically, bit by bit, is certainly going to be messy and confusing and unpretty. But a government that results from burning everything to the ground and replanting[1] is going to represent exactly one small set of interests, perspectives and valuations. You'd better have really, REALLY high confidence that those interests are extremely well in-line with yours, and that the perspectives and valuations result from accurate information and sound judgement. Because if they don't, if they're hostile to you and yours or out of touch with reality, you literally just torched your safety net.
[1] Taking it on faith that the replanting happens.
A government opening to replanting promises to hear the concerns of people wanting programs reopened and to let them make their case. This would also weed out many programs with very weak cases.
"the nature of the Constitution is simply such that there is a better case for the president being able to spend less money than appropriated than more"
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/trumps-executive-branch-revolution
Both are "feasible".
All around us are examples of success being achieved by pruning net negative options, redirecting, and slowly honing in on the optimal outcome – business, horticulture, evolution, science, navigation, health, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, that is not to say that there's never a place for catastrophic change – revolutions, forest fires, demolition, creative destruction. But the cost of that is enormous, total, and it takes a painfully long time to build back, and even longer to get to something like "thriving".
Like everything else, it's a tradeoff, and if you care about the outcome, you have to understand both sides of the ledger. It's not enough to be displeased with the status quo, and with the unbearable patience and work required to improve slowly. You have to understand the costs – not least in terms of patience and work – of burning it all down, building it back, and going without it in the meantime. If you want to get to success faster, you also need a crystal clear vision for what you're trying to achieve, that you can share with people and get buy-in for. Otherwise it'll just be more burning.
I don't know how you, personally, make that calculation. What worries me, however, is that I don't see a lot of evidence of people in charge making the calculation at all, nor sharing a vision or direction other than "not this".
The PEPFAR issue is a good example, as it looks very much like someone taking a torch to something they don't understand, with no clear goal other than to burn things down. Feels a lot like the summer of 2020, TBH, just with different players and methods. Just dumb iconoclasm.
>Feels a lot like the summer of 2020, TBH, just with different players and methods. Just dumb iconoclasm.
Same methods, really, just dumber and less surgical. Defund EVERYTHING! Cancel culture but it's the FCC doing it!
I don't think it is feasible to expect our government to prioritize good programs. The best we can do is probably indeed to torch programs on the assumption that they tend to be bad and thus nothing is better than something.
PEPFAR was not established during the Continental Congress, as an inviolable part of the foundation of the nation, it was established in 2003 by George Bush during his first term. So if it is possible to create a good programme in the 00s it should also be possible to create good programmes in the 20s.
What sense I can make out of it is that there are complaints about creep, that it has expanded from "treating AIDS" to other areas and gone beyond its original remit. I can't speak as to how accurate that is.
But if I go by Wikipedia, PEPFAR itself was a replacement for previous efforts considered less effective. I'm sure the people involved in those programmes also complained hat they were doing good and closing them down would be a terrible idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief
"[Condoleeza Rice] also told [Bush] that HIV/AIDS was a central problem in Africa but that the United States was spending only $500 million per year on global AIDS, with the money spread across six federal agencies, without a clear strategy for curbing the epidemic."
So it seems possible at least theoretically to shut down one or more programmes and replace them with something better suited to the situation as it now is. PEPFAR itself has undergone that change, with a reorganisation in 2008 and expansion into new countries:
"When PEPFAR was signed into law 15 resource-limited countries with high HIV/AIDS prevalence rates were designated to receive the majority of the funding. The 15 "focus countries" were Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zambia. Most of the $15 billion for the program was to be spent on these focus countries, $4 billion was allocated for programs elsewhere, and for HIV/AIDS research (the other $1 billion was contributed to the Global Fund).
With the reauthorization of PEPFAR in 2008 there was a shift away from the "focus country" approach by authorizing the development of a Partnership Framework model for regions and countries, with the aim of ensuring long-term sustainability and country leadership. Through bilaterally-funded programs, PEPFAR works in partnership with host nations to support treatment, prevention and care for millions of people in more than 85 countries. Partnership Frameworks provide a 5-year joint strategic framework for cooperation between the U.S. Government, the partner government, and other partners to combat HIV/AIDS in the host country through service delivery, policy reform, and coordinated financial commitments."
Maybe a shakeup *is* needed, who knows?
I mean it is possible, but as Scott points out, is it a priority? What are the odds and the marginal gains of picking a program in the top 1% of success and improving it *further* rather than picking some completely disastrous bottom 1% shitshow that you literally couldn't make worse if you try?
Realistically, this is not a "we can make this better" thing, it's a "we don't care shit about some Africans dying of AIDS, we'd rather save the money even if it means then wasting on something completely inefficient".
Why can't the Gates or Novo Nordisk Foundation take over PEPFAR?
What if we crispie crittered all the rage-thinkers instead?
If you wanted to do that, your party should have taken full control of the country before the opposition did. Too late for that now, obviously.
1) replanting comes with massive overhead - most likely, most of the institutional knowledge is lost, and the knowledgeable and dedicated people no longer available, when you decide to "replant". Especially since the stated goal of Project 2025 is to replace employees dedicated to their respective institution (the so-called "deep state") with ones dedicated to the current president, so the best people wouldn't even be eligible.
2) who do you expect to do that? The current administration obviously doesn't bother to find out in advance what's worth saving, so why would they bother ro find out retrospectively?
>why would they bother ro find out retrospectively?
Presumably because people would notice that shit is hitting the fan, as they did in this instance, and because they want to not look like/be cartoon villains.
"because they want to not look like/be cartoon villains" - forgive me if I don't have a lot of confidence in that motivation, after Trump has threatened to invade a NATO ally and suggested to occupy Gaza (after expelling the Palestinians).
To build casinos, no less. That honestly IS cartoonish villainy.
Eh, if expulsion were realistic, it would probably be preferable to slow strangulation by Israel, which is the inevitable default.
Expelling the Palestinians would be the humanitarian option compared to keeping them under Israel's control.
Do you...not suppose there might be some *downsides* to burning the entire field? Should you perhaps weigh those in the calculus?
If anyone knew how to reliably create good organizations that infallibly and efficiently pursue their goal from scratch the world would be a very different place. "See how they go, weed out the bad and keep the good" is pretty much the state of the art.
That is an open goal for bias...our programmes are good because we are good, their programmes are bad because they are bad.
The problems with trying to do a massive overhaul of an airplane mid-flight are pretty easy to understand. If you cancelled Medicaid tomorrow and it took you even a few months to stand up the new Good Medicaid, incredible amounts of suffering would happen in the interim. As we're seeing right now, the same goes for research spending, overseas deployments, etc. etc. etc.
This plane you can’t land, or at least you really really shouldn’t. And not even trying to fix things (i.e. “don’t do that while in mid-air”) is going to result in uncontrolled involuntary landing.
It’s a horrible set of choices, but sometimes you get those.
It would be nice to have a gang of maintenance people who could carefully and quickly swap out only the parts that need it, and a long term expert crew who could be trusted to advise and assist in good faith. Unfortunately the only maintenance gang the passengers are in the mood to give access, tools and materiel are ones that have never been anywhere near most of the crew, because the crew seem to have made a living out of getting the plane into this state and have no intention of stopping unless forced.
That particular maintenance gang are good at angle grinders and plasma cutters, and figure you can just wed back bits after determining they were necessary after all. But they don’t know what the long term expert crew know and they listen to the latter with skepticism and a jaundiced look at the written logs.
But the alternative isn’t some hypothetical better nicer maintenance gang from the Land of Counterfactuals, it’s no maintenance until the crash. Just look at the trend graphs.
Everyone is going to argue "But my program is a good program, not one of the bad ones!"
PEPFAR seems to be one of the good ones, and I think there is an obligation to help others. But I'm a Christian and I get that from divine guidance, something which has been sneered at as a source of moral authority and instruction. So if we're now asking the questions "Why am I obligated to help people who are complete strangers?" that's not a bad thing; when was the last debate about public morality? Just saying "Because we should" is not good enough: what are your reasons?
It would be wild if Trump, of all people, was responsible for kicking off a public debate about "why should we do good?" and getting agreement on a system of ethics for the state.
Well then you get into the question of “why try to be a good person if not because of the fear of divine punishment”? Which is a problem if you don’t believe in some sort of objective morality to ground everything.
The answer I’ve arrived that is that (most) people have a conscience either pre-installed through selection for prosocial behavior or socially conditioned into them, and said conscience must be appeased to remain psychologically stable. To do this, you can either do good (as defined in your own particular worldview but hopefully having something to do with reducing suffering) or you can do non-good and try to convince yourself it is good via a series of “copes” ie. faulty arguments that are intentionally under-scrutinized because they serve to appease the conscience. Copes are an inferior strategy for appeasing your conscience because deep down you probably are aware it’s cope. So the best way to live is to genuinely try to be a good person, and to do so in a logically consistent fashion, while avoiding “copes”.
Pretty much any argument one could deploy against PEPFAR strongly seems like cope.
I admit that the problem with this is there’s no known solution for convincing the general population to behave this way, but that applies to pretty much every framework.
Why be a good person without fear of divine punishment? Because cooperation beats defection as a long term survival strategy, as groups are stronger than individuals. That's your objective morality, if you need one. It isn't complicated, it predates religion, and it's almost certainly why we evolved to have the prosocial behaviors you mention in the first place. Apes together strong.
And then we hit the disparity between what is good for the survival of the species, and what is good for the survival of the individual, and bad actors arise and punishment has to come into play to ensure people keep playing nice.
The real problem is scarcity, as usual. Specifically scarcity of information. In a tribal society it's easy to watch for bad actors defecting and punish them accordingly, and unfortunately all our social mechanisms for dealing with bad actors revolve around that small scale paradigm. In a country of hundreds of millions and systems of endlessly increasing complexity, those social mechanisms collapse and bad actors run rampant without consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
> what are your reasons?
I would say with AIDS, like with many other diseases, there is also a general selfish reason: because we want diseases to generally have as little a chance to spread and mutate as possible.
But the altruistic reason can very well be "because human life and prosperity is a terminal goal in and of itself". You don't really need any particular justification or rationalization for it. I like being healthy, I imagine everyone else in the world is also a sentient being like me since we're all built the same, I imagine everyone else also wants to be healthy internally. If I am in a position to make someone else healthy at tiny expense to me, why not do it?
It would be wild. It's also not going to happen.
If your aim is to cut all foreign aid programs, because their effect is net-negative, you gotta prioritize the most obviously net-positive programs first.
It's about divide and conquer. All programs involve the corrupt running net-negative/harmful/detrimental programs and the virtuous running their beneficial/net-positive programs. The corrupt will only care about their net-negative programs and not help the virtuous. Once all the net-positives are gone, you can then move on to remove all of them. The corrupt will not get any protection from those annoying, virtuous, altruistic saints, as they're no longer invested in protecting the rest of the foreign aid.
Then maybe once they're are all gone, their political power entirely broken, you could try rehiring the best of the saints and your entire foreign aid department might actually become a net-positive, trustworthy institution. Which at the moment it obviously is not, since it funds net-negative programs and everyone knows it. Obviously someone should go to hell for this, but since this is a democracy, sending them there before their natural death is not an option.
Imagine, you tried going after the net-negatives first. You're falsely assuming that those don't do anything and that you've got infinite political power to do whatever you like, in whatever order you like. But those programs convert money into clout and connections. Instead of saints, now you're fucking with a bunch of sociopath pull peddlers now. The first thing they do, is instrumentalise the saints for their PR.
And, no, you're not allowed to assume Hypothetical Optimised Congress where a majority, or even a plurality, of both houses is Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Or rather, feel free to assume whatever you want and do whatever you want with that, but it won't move me, or get me or the millions like me to listen, or believe you're trying anything but feel good about... feel good about what, exactly? Noting that someone will have to put PEPFAR back? Claiming that hypotheticals in moral reasoning don't matter because "it's all fake"?
This has been disappointing.
Too bad, I was kind of hoping to discuss the pluses and minuses of the CATGIRL Act.
Seriously, I think the red team-blue team culture war is so ingrained at this point it's just going to swing back and forth until the Chinese eat our lunch.
I don't know, I have a feeling this will be the last swing in a while, one way or another...
Why do you think the White House will stop changing hands to the other party every 4-12 years? It's not Trump won in a true landslide. It was still a close election, just less close than is typical these days.
There are more or less stupid ways to cut government. The last time anything even halfway reasonable was attempted was in the 90s. It involved government audits and was headed by Congress and supported by the President. After that, we had a President who waged two massive wars that blew up the deficit (Bush), and then we had a half-hearted attempt by Obama in his second term to do the same thing that was done in the 90s. (the Republicans didn’t bite and Obama didn’t try particularly hard.) Neither Trump 1.0 nor Biden had any interest in taking on the deficit. What makes you think that haphazard cuts to government are the only, much less “best” way to cut government, when we have an approach from the 90s that worked well and has mostly just been left untried since then?
Who was it you thought would be trying it now? The minority party, who are too busy rabidly attacking everything they can reach in the majority party? Or the majority party, who haven't managed to even try this since the 90s? (And are also, with less urgency, busy attacking anything they can reach in the minority party.)
"Yes, we have this method, but it's impossible for any of the people who would have to try it to try it, any more than the second through ninth-best, so we shouldn't try this tenth-best method that does have a constituency and support and should give up instead."
Why does it have to happen this second? I’m not an arsonist; ensure the conditions are right (austerity Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader, austerity President) and one of the better methods will be viable. There’s already a reasonable constituency for this in Congress, we just don’t have a good President. I don’t want to torch the government right this second just because we don’t have the right conditions. Since these conditions have been achieved in the past (and probably will be again when Trump is out of office), I think it’s perfectly reasonable to achieve these conditions rather than flamethrower the government. You should try to explain why this needs to be done now in such a slapdash way, rather than being done later in the way I’ve described.
In the past, when those conditions were achieved, did the government shrink, and stay shrunk? And how often do the stars align for that?
And, if you had to put names to the people who are the constituency in *the current* Congress for this, who would the top... eh... twenty be? ("You don't know 20" isn't a disqualifier, by the way. But one Rand Paul and a half dozen fellow travellers doesn't qualify the careful-scalpel method as viable.)
Last time you made your bed, did it stay made?
Some things require constant attention - hot stoves and government deficits in a democratic society, for example. Neither one requires a flamethrower.
Freedom Caucus + New Democrat Coalition + Blue Dogs are a reasonable start, since these caucuses have a history of working for cuts to the deficit. These are about a quarter to a third of Congress depending on the year; non-caucus members have also joined these efforts when the conditions are right (that is to say, when they’re badgered by a Speaker of the House or a President of their party to vote for an austerity bill). Since many Republican and Democratic speakers have come out of these caucuses and tried pushing for austerity bills, I would say that the major missing piece is a President who can push for this and enlist his counterparts in the opposite party. Trump can’t do this because he’s polarizing, and Biden didn’t have any interest in deficit reduction, but it’s likely that if we elect a President who isn’t a warmonger, we have a reasonable chance of getting someone who’ll cut the deficit like Clinton and Gingrich did in the 90s. Not as fun as watching the world blow up, but green shade budget balancing rarely is.
One wonders if there a reason the feuding parties can not produce a candidate like Clinton.
Nothing is ever going to "stay shrunk". That's just not how it works. You have to keep doing laundry. You have to keep doing dishes. You have to keep brushing your teeth. And the government has to rebalance its budget.
Burning and replanting, as people suggest, certainly is a method, but even then you're not creating a new system that's going to be infallible forever - at best you're paving the way to have to burn and replant again later on.
I'm not going to claim to know that it's better or worse, but the argument that it doesn't "permanently fix" anything is invalid for every possible change.
I'm not an arsonist in the literal sense that I don't burn down buildings (after all, most buildings are privately owned rather than government buildings). But the government is not like a civilian owner of a building, it is based on taxation of the governed and only exists with out support, and is thus subject to the results of elections. The analogy would thus not be to torching someone else's property, but demolishing some of your own, which is an entirely standard thing to do over time.
Why is it impossible to figure out which programs are bad, then take a flamethrower to them? Even people who disagree about whether a program to bring broadband to the rural US is a worthwhile program can agree on whether it is an is an effective program.
The plan for progra would include a budget and a timeline .. You could use simple criteria for torching: torch programs that are both over budget and more than 40% behind where timeline said they would be. Those guidelines are imperfect, but certainly better than torching everything.
Maybe you're just somebody who thinks great big fires are really cool and thrilling?
Happily, they're not torching everything, and never have been. Pausing a lot of stuff. Pausing implies the strong possibility of unpausing, which is the difference.
Now tell me about how your method has less collateral damage, i.e. less PEPFARs cut (and then reinstated after enough screaming and/or lobbying for it before Congress) than the one they're using.
You are suffering a lapse of logic here. My proposal is not an alternative to what is being done now. It is also not a method I think is great. It is an alternative to your proposal of taking a flamethrower to everything. I made my counter-proposal because you said eliminating programs by identifying the bad ones was impossible in practice so we'd have to just resort to torching everything. Coming up with something better than torching everything's a pretty low bar to clear.
The core problem is that data may inform politics, but can't supplant it. The attempt otherwise can just create workarounds.
They said “pause” but then have started firing all the people whose job it would be to restart it.
The pause has not been unpaused. Their lawyers have said all these programs have been cut.
It'd take too long, and you might lose the House in two years.
If you don't burn the whole thing down, the agencies will simply stonewall you on every level, and can easily drag the process out long enough. A rough sketch of a strategy an agency could employ: first, the head of the agency simply refuses to follow orders to cut the programs. And when fired, will file suit against you saying you don't have the right to fire him. Some Liberal court, say, the Ninth Circuit, will rule in his favor, and reinstate him, and then he'll stay in place until the Supreme Court weighs in. If you have appointed an Acting head in the interim, he'd be hamstrung by someone filing suit declaring that he has no authority to issue any orders. The Democrats then drag out the confirmation process for your replacement nominee. Maybe get him "credibly accused" of gang rape or something, and have a long show trial. If you manage to get your guy confirmed, then the lower-level members of the agency don't implement his directives. Maybe someone leaks a damaging story about him to the press, and get him to resign (and then you have to go through the whole confirmation thing again). If they DO start cutting a program or two, they do it in gradual and easily reversed way that will take years to fully wind down. And you have to do something like this at every single agency you want to implement changes in. And when the administration changes, every last one of them moves quickly to undo all your changes in less than a month.
The deep state is better thought of as a leaderless resistance with many independent cells, rather than a strictly hierarchical organization that can be decapitated. It takes … cruder methods to fight such a foe.
That makes sense. But if we start by torching everything wouldn’t there be the same massive bullshit phenomena at work in setting up sparser and better programs, so that nothing much gets set up? Also it seems like a lot of the cleared ground and freed up money could end going to new “programs” that are really just little oligarchies run by Trump favorites. Jared K. could be put in charge of the Florida Seaside Improvement Program, in which he takes ownership of all properties they don’t meet some bullshit code, and flips them for a lovely fat profit.
> so that nothing much gets set up
Oh no. How terrible.
If some individual program is really that good, Congress can legislate for it directly instead of setting up "independent" administrative agencies that inexorably go rogue to manage a whole bunch of them at once, the majority of which are bad.
Okay, yeah, that kind of thing could happen, but when the other guys take office, they're not going to pretend the Florida Seaside Improvement Program is a nonpartisan independent agency run by career civil servants the President cannot fire at will. They'll promptly remove him, and put their own guys in charge. That regular churn will keep it from becoming too much of a nuisance. They would be bad, certainly, but the alternative looks like permanent oligarchies telling you you can't build on your land because the puddles on it are "navigable waterways" or something (see Sackett v. EPA). The "fat profit" they make is negligible; if you like, you can think of the election as a bet that you profit from when your guy wins. In expectation, it basically evens out.
> same massive bullshit phenomena at work in setting up sparser and better programs,
trump apparently took the assassination attempt to heart and named protental successors
fdr needed 12 years to make this era of american government, its been weeks
Im still not optimistic about the future but drastic, cruel, action raises my estimation we can delay and weaken the coming darkage by allot
Or make it come a lot faster!
A stable america will slow the collapse drastically.
Nation states are decaying, but if the middle east drops the charade, then russia then china but it takes 100 years for europe and america to balkanize it will be allot less violence and maybe segments of international trade still work and we get to have chips to store all the ebooks.
"Jared K. could be put in charge of the Florida Seaside Improvement Program, in which he takes ownership of all properties they don’t meet some bullshit code, and flips them for a lovely fat profit."
While horribly corrupt, that (ironically) would be better than the infamous eminent domain cases where property was seized in the name of civic development, then nothing happened (save that some people made a tidy profit). At least flipping derelict properties means that those properties are now either repaired and improved, or demolished so building on the site can go forward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
"Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 5–4, that the use of eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner to further economic development does not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
...After the Court's decision, the city allowed a private developer to proceed with its plans; however, the developer was unable to obtain financing and abandoned the project, and the contested land remained an undeveloped empty lot.
...In spite of repeated efforts, the redeveloper (who stood to get a 91-acre (370,000 m2) waterfront tract of land for $1 per year) was unable to obtain financing, and the redevelopment project was abandoned. As of the beginning of 2010, the original Kelo property was a vacant lot, generating no tax revenue for the city. In the aftermath of 2011's Hurricane Irene, the now-closed New London redevelopment area was turned into a dump for storm debris such as tree branches and other vegetation. However, as of May 2022, a private developer was building 100 apartments, a 100-unit hotel, and a community center on the property.
Pfizer, whose employees were supposed to be the clientele of the Fort Trumbull redevelopment project, completed its merger with Wyeth, resulting in a consolidation of research facilities of the two companies. Pfizer chose to retain the Groton campus on the east side of the Thames River, closing its New London facility in late 2010 with a loss of over 1,000 jobs. That coincided with the expiration of tax breaks on the New London site that would have increased Pfizer's property tax bill by almost 400 percent.
After the Pfizer announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle, in November 2009, in its lead editorial called the Kelo decision infamous:
The well-laid plans of redevelopers, however, did not pan out. The land where Susette Kelo's little pink house once stood remains undeveloped. The proposed hotel-retail-condo "urban village" has not been built. And earlier this month, Pfizer Inc. announced that it is closing the $350 million research center in New London that was the anchor for the New London redevelopment plan, and will be relocating some 1,500 jobs."
Again ironically, the dissent on the Supreme Court decision included some of the infamous horrible conservative judges:
"The principal dissent was issued on June 25, 2005, by Justice O'Connor, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas. The dissenting opinion suggested that the use of this taking power in a reverse Robin Hood fashion — take from the poor, give to the rich — would become the norm, not the exception"
Shortly thereafter (after Kelo), a little town in Texas boldly tried to take the farm/home, its acreage fronting the highway, of an elderly mother and daughter we knew* (which homestead was incidentally protected by a conservation easement) - because here was some undeveloped land and the town "decided" it needed a ...
Target.
Why? Why would any town "need" a particular store?
Because, you see, the town five or ten miles down the road had gotten a Target. And so this town wanted to grab that tax revenue from its own Target.
(This is how America comes to look so depressingly the same at every highway exit ...)
In a *very* rare sound move, the state Lege passed a law that takings of private property couldn't be solely for private benefit.
*Ironically, they had moved there after their original homestead was taken some decades earlier, to build a lake in Dallas.
>and you might lose the House in two years.
Yup! I was thinking that that was probably a large chunk of the motivation for doing all of these very fast and crude cuts. Many Thanks for the detailed scenarios.
Grr, the amount of collateral damage being done is astounding. Even setting aside all the damages to NSF, NIH, and CDC, one of the actions was to offer a buyout to everyone in the CIA. Umm - do they _want_ to lose the people who interpret spy satellite photos???
Yeah, there _are_ time constraints :-( but I'm really leery of how they are swinging the chainsaw. "Move fast and break things" is only sane for a _very_ specific kind of company, and even there, the idea is normally to _build_ a replacement service/product _first_, and let the competition break the legacy product.
EDIT: One other thing: I find it very ironic that the Trump administration is more-or-less following a "tear-it-all-down (maybe we'll build back later)" policy - which is typically one of the marks of left wing campus radicals. And not to their credit either.
> do they _want_ to lose the people who interpret spy satellite photos???
I'm sure they'll rehire the people who are loyal to the administration and its ambitions.
Many Thanks! Hmm... Might work, might not. Depends partially on whether they can manage to filter and rehire before people find other jobs or move on in some other way.
By "administration" you mean Trump? By "ambition" you mean "occupying Greenland"? Sure, hire those people exclusively, what could possibly go wrong!
Historical side note: in Germany, public officials and soldiers swear an oath to the constitution. They explicitly do not swear an oath to the current administration, or the current chancellor, or the current president, because the last time that was required, ...let's just say "bad stuff happened".
So does everyone in the US government. Turns out oaths aren't worth a damn.
Trump is not the first president who was interested in acquiring Greenland.
We've occupied Greenland so long that there's been time for the DEI-ers to meditate the change of name of our operation there. Ironically, to something much less cool. (More ridiculous goes without saying.)
What actually is the goal here? Are you trying to set up an effective government that does good things but *doesnt* have institutional memory, a core of workers with experience and the ability to fight back when someone tries to cut it down? If so, I think you’re imagining something that doesn’t actually make any sense.
No, I recognize that a government "effective" enough to be able to do good things is going to do mostly bad things. The goal is Norquist's bathtub.
Ok. I think that is an unusual view, and a massively misguided one, but it is not logically incoherent.
Is there a reason you live in the United States rather than Somalia or Syria if you prefer ineffective governments?
It's way richer, allowing for a much better standard of living. I do not attribute that to the competence of the government.
And among the countries that have a standard of living anywhere comparable, the US government might be the least intrusive by a long shot.
None of my criticisms should be taken to imply that there is anywhere on the face of the earth that is better. The comparison is only between America as it is, and America as it could be (and occasionally America as it once was).
I mean...yes? Very easily? Congress creates and cancels programs all the time?
And what would you give as a Fermi estimate for the ratio of programs created to programs cancelled?
Either in raw numbers of programs or total dollars spent, although I'm interested in both.
I would say this is the optimal time for Republicans to cut programs, controlling all three branches of government. Surely if they think USAID has a lot of waste they must have specific programs in mind already? If they don't it's just shouting.
This is going to depend heavily on definitions. Is an authority without appropriations a program? Is letting appropriations lapse and not providing more funds a cancelation? Where does imposing new requirements become a new program?
Now congress definitely prefers to be seen as doing stuff not not doing stuff. If you want a specific (unsure on how representative example), the 2024 WRDA (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4367/text) has specific authorizations and deauthorizations as well as a bunch of modifications you could look at.
That's kinda besides the point isn't it? During the budget cycle the executive requests funding for specific programs and Congress provides them some amount of deference. Probably even more deference if they explicitly calling out 'we don't want funding for program X because it is wasteful for reasons A, B and C'
"'Because I think "you can't cancel any programs until you figure out a way to only cancel ones that should be cancelled and only redirect the funds to the best optimal use'"
That would be an excellent argument if anyone were actually saying that. You'd be well advised to take it and put it on the shelf until you find somebody who is.
There is QUITE a gap between saying "don't ever do anything that runs the risk of cancelling good programs" and "don't cancel the programs that offer breathtakingly high cost-effectiveness at saving lives." This isn't a "oops, we thought this was somewhat net-negative and it was actually slightly net-positive" situation. This was a "literally ANY amount of effort would have determined this particular program was a winner" situation.
To say it a little pithier, you're claiming the argument is "don't ever shoot unless you can hit a bullseye" when in fact the argument is "if one of your first shots hits a child in the face, maybe we should take your gun away."
Now, there's an open question about whether cancelling a program like this was a result of incompetence (i.e. not doing the bare minimum research to understand how useful it was) or malice (i.e. seeing these particular foreigners dying as a good thing). I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which is more plausible. Any, y'know, which is scarier.
>There is QUITE a gap between saying "don't ever do anything that runs the risk of cancelling good programs" and "don't cancel the programs that offer breathtakingly high cost-effectiveness at saving lives."
Not according to Scott's reasoning. His example is a program of high effectiveness, but his reasoning is that since the money from the program goes back to the general pool, you need to compare the program to that, which would imply that we keep even programs of low effectiveness since they are still more effective than the general pool. He just doesn't spell this out.
Well, yes, if your goal is to raise the median effectiveness of the programs you start with the bottom 50-th percentile and replace THOSE, hoping the new ones will do better. That way median go up.
If you start with the very best odds are you won't be able to do better and median go down.
This analysis you could apply to any kind of utilitarian reasoning: "You say we should use criterion X to decide if we should do Y, but edge cases are hard to adjudicate, so you're basically saying we can't ever do Y; or you're saying we should grind through the data until all Knightian uncertainty is resolved and we can find the true utilitarian result."
Two issues with this:
1. Edge cases and acceptable risks are a pretty general feature of utilitarian reasoning, there are various ways of addressing them, there's no particular reason for Scott to spend time on them, and utilitarian reasoning doesn't commit you to a particular strategy for dealing with real-world uncertainty.
2. The examples Scott focused on are not edge cases, and he repeatedly made this point.
>This analysis you could apply to any kind of utilitarian reasoning:
Sure.
If you don't distinguish between action and inaction, then plain EA-style utilitarianism implies that if you don't immediately spend all the money you have (except that necessary for survival, staying employed, etc.) on helping poor people around the world, you are a horrible person for being complicit in their suffering.
There are ways in which EA tries to get around this. I don't find them convincing, but convincing or not, Scott isn't using them here--his argument is basically taking seriously the EA reductio ad absurdum that says you have to give everything away. Of course this argument applies to any sort of utilitarian reasoning about helping people. And that's what's wrong with it.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Basically, there are two ways to cut waste/abuse
1. Pause/stop everything and then restart those programs that can be justified
2. Audit all activities and stop those that are wasteful
Note that both methods are used by private companies: the second as part of the normal functioning of a company and the first in times of crisis. Both methods are legitimate and depend on the scale of the abuse, available time and available resources. I don't really have an opinion which way is more appropriate for the US at the moment.
It's not a time of crisis. Trump thinks it's a crisis, because he really likes saying "I will declare an emergency" and "the worst X in history," but our fiscal situation is not so dire that you can't wait a couple months to take the obviously good programs out of the firing line first.
If nothing else, the current budget funds the government through March. No matter what insanity you force through with executive orders, you still have to wait until March for the money to actually get redirected to the hypothetical better programs. May as well use that time to check if you're accidentally going to kill thousands of people.
If Turmp treats this as normal and doesn't rush it, the people involved in these programs have more time to make it even more difficult to cut things.
But isn't Scott's counter argument just: foreign aid is ~1% of the budget, so if you want to cut a lot of waste you can do so without touching foreign aid, which we now contains one of the best programs the government has (PEPFAR)? Now, obviously I see why it is politically toxic to say "we're going to cut a bunch of government programs but not foreign aid" but cutting foreign aid can still be bad even if it is politically convenient.
The answer to your first question is No, but your second is yes. Plenty of presidents have created commissions with the goal to investigate which programs were bad, then based on their recommendations, canceled those. This is the only time I can remember a president canceling more, than reinstating the funding later. And that’s assuming he actually plans on reinstating any of the.
? The point is, all we should be doing is taking away money from *bad* programs! Not taking away monry from unusually-good programs for reason, like PEPFAR!
The people canceling the programs literally have the philosophy that the government sucks at allocating money, so they don't believe at all that the money would end up in the actual best program.
There is this pattern I've seen a lot in business and marriages and the like where one person will say "we need to do both X and Y. I'm going to do X, and leave Y to you." Where X is the fun and easy thing and Y is the boring difficult thing.
It's not leadership.
https://www.econlib.org/when-to-defund/
Even dividing the programs into "good" and "bad" is generally wrong. Some are more effective than others, but they're also generally working on different problems.
Inspired by his post on homelessness, by any chance?
that does not involve taking a flamethrower to a lot of things, and then reinstating the ones we shouldn't have burnt to the ground
Is not an option.
As a rule, after you fire people, and blow up their programs, some you need don't come back, and it takes significant amounts of time for them to get back to work, (potentially years), and to rehire people.
In short, cancelling a program and reinstating it is a great way of turning good programs into bad ones.
In the meantime, the problem they were facing goes uncontrolled and gets worse, and now if it was a real problem you need to dig out.
In short, cancelling programs that you actually need really is prohibitably expensive, and cancelling ones that you do not still might cost money now to save money later.
Obligatory reminder that you can, yourself, from the comfort of home, redirect money from wasteful government programs to effectively altruistic ones. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AskPyNg6hHP6SrmEy/redirecting-one-s-own-taxes-as-an-effective-altruism-method
This is the kind of thing that makes tax book super complicated, and I'm all for it.
I expect many readers will make very incorrect guesses about this article based on that summary, so I feel I should clarify that it's not discussing some sort of legal earmarking process, it's talking about illegally refusing to pay your taxes.
I consider this clearly unethical (except ~in situations where it would be ethical to violently overthrow your government) and I think a large majority of people would broadly agree with me.
I read through this. I wouldnt say the "you" in this sentence actually applies to most people who read it.
There is one weird trick to not pay taxes if you dont work for an employer, have no us based interest bearing accounts, brokerage accounts or property.
Must be nice.
This is extremely illegal, extremely unethical, and can land you in jail.
That guy appears to have managed it for 20 years. Which is itself an indicator of the government being dysfunctional.
> extremely illegal, extremely unethical, and can land you in jail.
2/3.
> I doubt anyone has a specific finite foreigner-to-American ratio which is more than 1000x
I genuinely think that if you polled Americans, most people would value an American life at more than 1000 Africans. Hell, there's people who would say that number is infinite, seeing as they see those lives as having less than zero value. There's people saying that in this very blog's comments section, you can't just pretend they don't exist.
I think we're agreeing. You're saying many people would say the number is infinite, I'm saying few people would say it's finite but greater than 1000x.
...I still think you're really underestimating how little the average person values the lives of random Africans.
Blockade of Africa cost 2K Brits, freeing 150K slaves back in the early to mid-1800s so he might not be. Then again there are far more Africans as a percentage of world population than ever before, and people are far less Christian.
Where are you getting that 150k from? Is that just slaves directly freed. Becuase the blockade probably prevented the enslavement of countless more.
Yeah, and u are right. It’s a stupid datapoint to use without context.
What Scott wrote above is compatible with average person putting zero value on the lives of random Africans.
I think the big problem here is conflating "how valuable is this?" with "how much should the US government spend on it?"
As a human, I believe that Coca-Cola shareholders and Pepsi shareholders are equally valuable and worthy of respect. However, as a shareholder in Coca-Cola, I believe that the Coca-Cola company should spend one hundred percent of its money trying to benefit Coca-Cola shareholders, and zero percent of its money trying to benefit Pepsi shareholders. I have nothing against Pepsi shareholders as people (and I might even be one myself) but doing nice things for them is just not the job of the Coca-Cola company.
It's the job of a country's government to serve the interests of the citizens of that country, nothing else.
...What if the citizens don't want five million Africans to die for no reason?
Then they should donate to some kind of charity. They absolutely should do this! It would be good!
But they should do this on their own and not try to repurpose another organisation like the US Government.
This just questions the legitimacy of taxation. The enterprise of taxation presupposes the legitimacy of the collective imposing their will on the country and redistributing their assets as they see fit, rather than just independently paying for things, individually.
It's perfectly fine to question the legitimacy of the enterprise from first principles and adopt an alternative more libertarian perspective in which taxation is inherently evil and should be minimized to the greatest extent possible, but that's mostly orthogonal to the matter at hand.
If collective imposed redistribution to foreigners is illegitimate due to the mechanism, then using that mechanism to direct funds towards domestic causes is similarly illegitimate.
Yes, taxation inherently has legitimacy problems that voluntary donations lack. That's why it is commonly justified with the claim that individuals can't purchase national defense, being a public good. Charitable donations are not a public good however, and the existence of them shows it's possible without a government taxing to provide it.
No, that's not all there is to that position. One can concede the legitimacy of taxation but still question the legitimacy of things that the taxes go to pay for. I for example question where in the Constitution charity of any kind is authorized, let alone charity to foreigners.
I think there's a good argument for saying that the government needs to stop being an organisation that just does whatever random thing people want it to do and focuses on things only a government can do. The point* is that if you've got an all-singing all-dancing flailing omnistate, it may as well flap a tentacle in a direction that saves 250,000 Africans instead of flapping it in a direction that does nothing.
*rephrased in limited-government terms
But when you try and make it no longer an all singing and all dancing flailing omnistate, every tentacle cries foul.
But if PEPFAR is a good program, then clearly saving a quarter million Africans from AIDS _is_ something a government can do!
So why not let it do it?!
In fact, some of the money Coca-Cola spends does also benefit Pepsi. For instance, Coke and Pepsi both pay various trade groups and lobbying organizations to make the market and regulatory environments more favorable for soda generally. That this benefits their competitors is not a disincentive, since it makes the pie for both of them bigger than it otherwise would be.
The analogy to PEPFAR is that the United States buys several things that are in the interests of its citizens, such as "soft power," a better global reputation, a more stable world, and national pride, for what amounts to a very small amount of money. The fact that Africans also benefit doesn't make those things not in the national interest.
Yes, that's a legitimate argument in favour of governments handing out foreign aid.
"It helps foreigners" is not, though.
Well, it is if the citizenry wants to help foreigners. If it didn't help foreigners it wouldn't have any of those benefits I mentioned.
If they want to help foreigners, they can voluntarily do so via charity. That's what I do!
I feel like there's two discussions that might be going on.
Person A: the government shouldn't spend money on P regardless of whether the voters want it to or not
Person B: the government should spend money on P if the voters want it to
Person C: I, as a voter, don't want the government to spend money on P
Person D: I, as a voter, do want the government to spend money on P
I'm not even sure whether we're having the A vs B discussion or the C vs D discussion right now. I hope we're not having the A vs D or B vs C though.
Is a State not supposed to ever do anything based on ethical principles of any kind? A State that valued foreign lives at zero is not neutral. You could say it only values those as proxies for reputation and stability and pride but that's just the same argument you can make for individuals doing good. "Uhh I didn't do it for you, I did it because it makes ME look better!"
The Tsundere Approach to international politics.
> A State that valued foreign lives at zero is not neutral
Again we're getting confused between values and responsibilities.
The fact that a particular institution doesn't do a particular thing does not mean that any of the people in that institution think it's a worthless thing to do, just that it is outside the scope of that institution. Fixing potholes in Buenos Aires is a fine idea, but not something that the Moose Jaw Macrame Society should be spending its money on.
A state doesn't exist because of ethics. A state exists because some entity will claim a geographic monopoly on violence. In the US, that entity is subject to elections.
Is there a large coalition of Africans who are super-thankful of America and willing to go to bat for us in a crisis?
The US has historically dumped all sorts of resources into helping other people who then have zero gratitude for it, sometimes negative gratitude.
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." - Mark Twain
There are also many places where we put in lots of money and gained gratitude, like Germany and Japan. But in any case, the recipients of the aid are not the only people we build up goodwill with.
Yes, those countries are great allies (maybe until three weeks ago). Rebuilding a first-world country is more likely to result in people seeing and understanding your contributions.
Bush said the Iraqis would welcome us with sweets and flowers. I don't think that worked out. How do Iraq and Afghanistan feel about all the blood and treasure we spent on them? "Oh, no, those are bad foreign intervention programs, not good ones." Sorry, like Scott said, you can't make the money flow to just the good interventions. Everyone thinks the foreigners will be grateful, but that has more to do with their ability to be like us in the first place.
Let's ignore Africans' ability to help us out if we needed it. Do they even have the desire to? How many countries have America Day celebrations for all the lives we've saved?
I think it's good to spend the money to save the lives out of the basic Christian duty like Deiseach said. But I see no evidence besides hopium that we're actually buying good will among them. More likely they see us as a bunch of foreign moral busybodies nagging them about their sex lives.
The US occupied Germany and Japan for years and essentially rebuilt their societies along pro-American lines, which TBH I think had a bigger impact on their subsequent attitudes.
There is a myth of the Marshall Plan that Tyler Cowen has written about, that our assistance to the defeated is why they recovered. In fact, we gave much more money to the UK (and forgave most of their war loans), while Germany was still required to pay reparations. The Ordoliberals of West Germany just did a much better job of running their country in the postwar era than Labour did in the UK.
A cursory search doesn't reveal any surveys of PEPFAR recipients, but they are presumably at least somewhat grateful the US provides the aid. Note that women and children are the primary recipients, and the latter are not generally grateful *to anyone*, even those who help them.
More broadly, this survey (https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/african-perception-united-states-evolving-geopolitical-landscape) of the African population says the following:
> When asked which country they perceived to be the best model for their future development, 33% of respondents chose the United States, while 22% chose China. Out of 34 countries surveyed, the United States surpassed China in 23 countries. Only 4 African countries (Tanzania, Senegal, Tunisia, Eswatini, Malawi, and Mozambique) ranked both countries equally. Compared to the results of the same question in the previous survey period (2014/2015), preferences for China and the United States as development models remained unchanged. However, the U.S. advantage increased marginally from 6 to 9 percentage points.
> Younger Africans (36% of people aged 18- 25) were more likely than older Africans (26% of people above 55) to prefer the United States as a model for development. While men (25%) and women (19%) expressed equal preference for the United States as a development model, men preferred China more than women.
Note that Africans don't see US-China influence as zero-sum. They welcome both.
I don't know if they'd go to *bat* for the US, but distance matters a lot - Mexico can send people to help us when a hurricane hits while that's a longer distance for any African nation.
I'm willing to leave the *ability* for Africans to go to bat for us off the table. Who knows what future thing might happen where we suddenly wish they have a bunch of goodwill for us? One reason to invest in goodwill is that you don't know how it will be needed. (And if they become merely "slightly below average economically," at 1.5 billion people that's an awesome trading partner.)
Thanks for citing the survey data.
Slo, charity.isn't charity, charity is trade.
I'm not sure what you're saying, so I'll say where I am.
1. "We do it because it's the right thing to do" is an excellent argument, and one I would make for PEPFAR.
2. If someone is going to argue we're going it for self-interest through soft power, I'd want evidence we're getting soft power.
I don't buy that citizens are actually getting anything in their interest.
PEPFAR is very much the motte justifying some completely absurd, and much less useful/stability-increasing/"soft power" providing NGOs dancing around in the bailey.
Interestingly, I think the Coca-Cola corporation might spend a higher percent of its intake on foreign aid than the US government (see https://www.coca-colacompany.com/social/coca-cola-foundation , I must be getting something wrong but it really does seem to be 2% vs. 1%). But see also anomie's reply.
That's their business.
This seems misguided. Coca cola is essentially payed by investors to increase their value, and accordingly, that's what they should do. Not due to some inherent rule about valuing one group over another group, but simply because it was on that condition that they were granted the money.
Using a strict parallel, taxation shouldn't be used for anything tax payers don't want. That doesn't necessarily preclude programs to benefit outsiders, since unlike the case of investors, it's hardly self-evident that taxpayers don't support that.
Of course, the parallel isn't strict, since individual taxpayers don't get to decide whether to pay taxes or on what condition they'll pay.
But that only makes the analogy even less appropriate.
>"Using a strict parallel, taxation shouldn't be used for anything tax payers don't want."
A wrinkle is that the distribution of influence over *how* taxes are spent is wildly different to the distribution of who pays how much.
Too easy to convince voters to spend somebody else's tax dollars on one's pet cause.
If Coca-Cola shareholders voted a resolution at a general meeting to pay a dividend to Pepsi shareholders then such a dividend should be paid. The interests of the shareholders are whatever the shareholders say they are.
The American people's elected representatives voted for PEPFAR. That means that it is in the interests of the American people.
The American people also voted for Donald Trump to be President, therefore whatever he does as President is also in the interests of the American people.
There's a Separation of Powers question to be argued in terms of who exactly has the authority to do what, but that's not what we're talking about today.
This is one question that bothers me a lot in the arguments against Trump's actions. Almost everything he is trying to do is something the Executive was directly or indirectly empowered to do.
I don't see any reasonable argument why a previous president (including the ones who set up the organizations Trump wants to change) had the power to do so, but Trump doesn't have the power to change or even remove those organizations?
I totally get why they don't want him to do that, but as Obama once said and conservatives have since run into the ground "Elections have consequences." Obama wasn't wrong, but just very shortsighted.
> I don't see any reasonable argument why a previous president (including the ones who set up the organizations Trump wants to change) had the power to do so, but Trump doesn't have the power to change or even remove those organizations?
The reasonable argument is that it is illegal for the President to do so. PEPFAR was not setup by a previous President, it was authorized by the US congress. It is still authorized by the US congress and the executive branch, according to the laws of the United States, is obligated to spend the money appropriated by congress.
If the Trump administration believes this program is bad, then they need to work with Republicans in congress to not reauthorize it in March when its current authorization expires.
Agreed.
The issue with PEPFAR is:
1. Does Trump have the power to shut down a program that was authorised by Congress (ie the Separation of Powers question you have).
2. Do the American people think that PEPFAR meets the goals that they have for government spending? I think that's what Scott is trying to answer here.
I don't think there is - or can be - some external absolute measure of "the interests of the American people" beyond "what the American people want". But then, I also think that shareholder lawsuits to impose some external legal standard on what management does are bullshit. Pass a resolution at a general meeting and if they don't comply, then fire them, or sue them. But the purpose of a corporation is to do what the shareholders desire. The purpose of a government is to do what the citizens desire. There can be limitations on how easily they can achieve certain things, on how big a majority may be required to do certain things. But if enough people want to do something, then the government or the management should be compelled to do it.
Foreign aid does serve national interests - it's a cheap way to buy influence with other countries. Being known as "those nice guys who helped cure our AIDS epidemic" is useful when we need to ask a favor from another country.
I find this style of argument in favor of foreign aid much more convincing than the utilitarian arguments where we give foreigners’ lives inherent value. Still, I find it hard to believe that we get much value out of impoverished African nations. If they understood how much of a favor we are doing them by providing incredibly-good-value life-saving drugs, they would simply buy the drugs themselves.
Arguably, a publicly funded GiveDirectly-type program would be even more effective. But it would also be much more politically controversial.
PEPFAR benefits at around $4400 per life saved, which is right in line with standard GiveWell estimates of cost per life saved.
China understands this very well
Consistently acting like you consider lives to have inherent value, as opposed to making visible cynical Machiavellian calculations about who's more likely to be a worthwhile ally in the future, can be a useful strategy for building trust and gratitude.
Alice and Bob are going on a date at a restaurant. Bob is attentive to Alice's needs, but rude to Charlie the waiter. What can Alice infer about how Bob will act when Alice is in a less favorable negotiating position?
> I find it hard to believe that we get much value out of impoverished African nations.
Given that the land exists and is populated, would there be greater marginal benefit to American interests if the people there were slightly more prosperous, thus able to participate in international trade more than they currently do? Or worse off, and functionally unable to export much of anything but plague-stricken refugees or desperate violence?
What favors have we ever gotten from that?
Probably stuff like "okay, we will drop the charges against the senator's nephew" or "we will release the Marine from police custody, but he better stay on the base from now on."
I think this is what people are thinking when they assign an infinite foreigner/domestic value ratio. They think that those African citizens should rely on their own government to create programs to benefit those citizens. They form the meta-level belief about relative value from this object-level belief about accountability.
If someone in Africa was concealing a biological weapon which had previously killed roughly three-quarters of a million Americans, a virus that clearly poses ongoing strategic danger since there's still no reliable cure or vaccine, would you say mitigating that threat is sufficiently relevant to shared interests of American citizens for government action? Assuming a proven, cost-effective way to do so, which doesn't incidentally create any "negotiating with terrorists" type messes.
But Coca Cola funds all sorts of non-directly profit maximizing pursuits (scholarships, sport games, physical renovations, art galleries, etc). Part of it is that shareholders believe that such pursuit have uncertain but positive ROI at some future date, or some indirect contribution to current ROI (through marketing, consumer franchise, "goodwill", etc.). But also because they think it's a good in itself.
Same for USAID. There might be indirect benefits (creating a bit of goodwill goes a long way and might be cheaper than sending in the marines/directly bribing some generalissimo to pursue geopolitical objectives, stimying the creation of new viral variants might be cheaper than curing US citizens when they get infected, the data generated are a public good benefiting US citizens, etc), but also is a good in itself, just like the Coca Cola program for disadvantaged youth or whatever.
There is also an element of "isolated demand for rigor" (or as commonly known online, hypocrisy): no, after spending so much blood and treasure to save the poor minorities oppresed by the Axis of Evil, make sure Israelis sleep safe and sound, indirectly funding missionary trips so that the souls of heathen foreigners might be saved, etc, you don't get to act all principled about how it's treason to cheapily saving Africans from preventable death. Clean your own house first if this is really what you believe and not just some convenient debate pose.
You can't handwave away the people who think the amount is infinite. And in terms of taxation, I think zero dollars should be spent on charity, since that is a matter of voluntary donations.
There's also a non-zero number of commenters who see all lives having less than zero value. Pretty sure there's a few antinatalists around; there used to be.
Also the foreigner-to-American phrasing is better. If white Australians didn't speak English, Americans wouldn't care about them, either.
> There's also a non-zero number of commenters who see all lives having less than zero value.
Well yes, I'm one of them. I'm not an antinatalist, mind you. A few people having less children isn't going to make the death of humanity come any sooner.
I agree with the literal thesis, and that PEPFAR is very good and shouldn’t be cancelled, but I’m not sure “flowing to other programs” is the best way to think of spending cuts
I think a better model of cancelling PEPFAR would be that it relaxes *real resource constraints* a little bit by taking a bunch of labor and everything involved in the medicine supply chain and such that was formerly involved in administering the program.
Financially, this looks like people getting fired, the price of labor going down a tiny bit, and former PEPFAR administrators etc selling their labor to the next highest bidder. Likewise for other resources: demand for gas and everything else in the supply chain drops a bit, price goes down, and some marginal uses of gas etc become profitable or just barely cheap enough for an arbitrary consumer somewhere to purchase.
(I wrote about understanding fiscal policy through the lens of real world resources here: https://www.aaronbergman.net/p/deficits-dont-matter-spending-does )
Also, to reiterate, none of this changes the conclusion for me. I think it’s good for the government to basically take up a PEPFAR-sized batch of real resources to use for PEPFAR
Scott's approach has the merit that it's making an apples-to-apples comparison. Even if you favor the programs being cancelled and the unspent money being returned to taxpayers, you could still achieve those cuts by ranking government programs on usefulness, and cutting programs starting at the bottom of the list.
How would you operationalize your model? It seems like it requires us to imagine what the typical private sector company would have done with medically experienced labor being fractionally cheaper. I'm sure that provides some benefits, but I'm not sure how you would calculate it.
I think it would be better if the Trump administration did that rather than acting chaotically. But since I favor ending most government programs, I'm not going to object when the chaotic process results in an end to some random program.
There's an old saying in state economics, 'Whatever we can do, we can afford'.
Money and budgets are abstractions, what exists in the real world is labor and resources and how they are directed. If there is idle labor that could be used to some good purpose, printing money to pay for that labor to stop being idle and start producing something is not lost money, it's money creating new value. And the money itself will flow back into the economy, activating more labor as it increases demand.
If there are people who want to run PEPFAR and are qualified to run PEPFAR and are otherwise going to be doing much less useful things, then paying them to run PEPFAR isn't a deadweight loss. It's creating value where none would otherwise exist.
All this would hold if the government didn’t increase spending to compensate. But also, each unit of gas etc. getting cheaper comes because a different American isn’t getting to use it. You’d have to argue the program employees were using the gas worse than the average American. Maybe so, if the program employees are richer than average, but I’m not convinced it’s a big effect.
If another program gets funded as a result, then the govt will commandeer those real resources instead. So it still matters where the money goes in the counterfactual.
Your framing is most useful in the general case where the legislature debates and proposes a specific level of spending which may be higher or lower to some previous amount.
This haphazard freeze with no changes in budget is a different thing
I am very skeptical of altruism, and very skeptical of charities. Don't charity workers and NGOs work for their self interest, much like politicians and everyone else? What if their best bussines model to maximize their self-interested profit is basically moral entrepreneurship, lying and even aiding authoritarian governments to get donations while pretending they "help" people?
Self interest is not reducible to economic profit. A person can have any reasons to prioritize their self interest in ways that have nothing to do with, or may even even require sacrificing, their access to economic resources.
"Don't charity workers and NGOs work for their self interest, much like politicians and everyone else?"
...not trivially, no? Just to give an example, I know lots of people who could easily get eg $500K working for Big Tech, who instead make $100 - 200K working at a charity because they really believe in the cause. I think I've heard the standard is that charities pay 30% less than for-profits for the same quality of labor, so if that's true then everyone working at a nonprofit is by that fact alone not working in their self-interest.
I agree with Eric that they will still prioritize something like "internal benefits they're getting", but those internal benefits might be the warm feeling of doing good.
See also https://meteuphoric.com/2013/12/22/pretend-to-really-really-try/
I worked at NPOs/NGOs that were mostly state-funded and supposed to do "good things". I am so grateful to all German taxpayers! Best salaries I ever got. Often tax-free. Easiest work and most fun work, too. And I was just a small cog, the people up made more and had even more fun. (One of them greatly enjoyed to tell the local staff: "You are fired". In contexts, where you could never fire someone under German law.) - It was "culture", but conversations with fellow aid-workers: just the same.
If your social circle consists of people who have the luxury of getting to choose between a $500K job and a more rewarding/inspiring/enjoyable $200K job, consider that you might not have a very good handle on what life looks like for the modal taxpayer. Plenty of people are legitimately financially struggling, as are their brothers -- not everybody's brother is a successful real estate agent in Des Moines, even if all the brothers of all the people you know are.
Because of diminishing marginal utility of money, somebody deciding to sacrifice an additional $300K on top of the $200K they're getting either way, is arguably less impressive than somebody putting $50 in a collection box when that $50 is basically their entire discretionary spending for this month, after rent and food and basic necessities. Which is great if they're choosing to put that money in that collection box of their own free will, but it makes it a morally dubious act to argue that the government should take that $50 from them and spend it on a charity not of their choice.
Sure, that's perfectly valid and a great reason to not take $50 from poor people.
But not as an argument against those charity workers being generally less interested in maximizing profit for themselves which is what this comment thread is about, no?
They aren't as pure as heart as an impoverished person who gives away the shirt off his back, but nobody's saying they're Jesus... just that they are likely satisfied with the life quality they have and not grasping for more. In a world where many well-off people are decidedly not that, I think it's reasonable to believe they are genuinely trying to help people and not secretly get richer. Just because they don't have to give up their house and car to help people doesn't mean they can't be helping people at all. Yes, it's easier to be content with what you've got when you've got a decent life, but so many people who have decent lives are grasping and envious and not content at all.
Agree, it's tangential to the main point of the top comment of this thread.
But Scott's dismissing of the "don't we have a responsibility to help those close to us first" point by saying basically "nah, nobody close to you is actually in need of help, that's just fiction" rubbed me the wrong way a bit. So I wanted to respond to that, and a comment where he casually mentions his many friends who are either making $500k or voluntarily choosing to prefer their dream job at $200K instead, seemed like a good place to put that response.
So your aim was to talk directly to Scott, and you felt like responding to a comment of his was more effective than posting a comment on the essay, so you picked the comment to which it could be least tangential and tried to connect it?
“Self interest” includes more than salary—self righteous moral preening has a value as well…
Especially for a social circle where people’s Hobson’s Choice is between making $500k as an evil Meta PM or $200k + the Warm Glow of Self Satisfaction(tm) for maintaining some charity’s IT stack.
Do you have an actual set of reasoned or empirical arguments as to your position, or are you just trying to make yourself feel better about not helping others by casting people who do as just as selfish but dishonest?
Genuine question.
Secondary, does it matter? If we agree that helping others is, to a first approximation, good, then we're 90% of the way to agreement and we're just discussing strategy. If we don't, we're operating from such radically different moral precepts that I don't think meaningful discussion can occur.
Well, there's public choice theory. We have to assume everyone works for their self-interest and therefore organizations work more for their own continued existence and socioeconomic gains of its members than any causes, therefore if there any perverse incentives, like bussiness model I mentioned, they act accordingly. See the Rescue Industry, for example, and plenty of goverment programs that have long outlived their purpose.
Why do we have to assume that? Because there's a lot of obvious examples of people doing the opposite. For example, I'm arguing with you rather than doing the work I should be. That's obviously against my socioeconomic interest, and yet, here I am. Otherwise smart people buy lottery tickets. People buy games on Steam they never play and they know this.
So you can twist the evidence to suit your theory, or you can update your theory to fit the evidence.
Either way, I'm concluding you have no actual basis and are just trying to make yourself feel better.
"Self-interest" is not limited to "socioeconomic interest".
"People buy games on Steam they never play and they know this."
Ow! Foul!
Who is self-interestedly benefitting from PEPFAR? Are they doing so in a way that ultimately hurts the people PEPFAR is meant to help?
The people PEPFAR is supposed to help are the American people. Any US government program that is not supposed to help the American people is by definition waste. Maybe the mechanism by which PEPFAR helps the American people is by helping foreign people, but this is only a means to an end, not an end in itself.
“Any US government program that is not supposed to help the American people is by definition waste.”
That may be true according to your philosophy of government, but it certainly doesn’t say that anywhere in the US constitution. You can debate whether “promote the general welfare” in the preamble of the constitution actually means “promote our own welfare”, but nothing in the actually effective parts of the constitution is designed to prevent the government from engaging in foreign projects with the goal of helping non-Americans.
Article I Section 8 Clause 1:
“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and GENERAL WELFARE OF THE UNITED STATES; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States”
Emphasis mine of course. I did check this before making my original comment.
"For ourselves and our posterity" is in the preamble.
Anecdotal data point: my wife spent a year in Tanzania to get a village school going. Salary: 1000€/ month. Does that sound like "self-interested profit" was at the top of her list of priorities?
I would *pay* well over 1000€/ month to spend a season or two in Tanzania, and if that involved volunteering to get a school going, all the better.
I think you should just move to Tanzania? I mean, I don't know you or your life. But immigration to Tanzania seems pretty easy, and the pound goes really far there. Probably it would cost much less than 1000 pounds a month!
I suppose my comment was too oblique? It was heartfelt - I've been planning to go to Tanzania for about a decade (as you might guess from my user name), and given the likely duration of my trip, it will probably cost > 1000€/ month.
But beyond that, my comment answered the rhetorical question "Does [getting paid 1000€/ month to work in Tanzania] sound like 'self-interested profit' was at the top of her list of priorities?" No shade on FluffyBuffalo's wife, but my answer is a resounding "uh, yes", at least to me.
You’ve got one hypothetical but I’ve got another. What if the best business model to maximize self-interested profit is to honestly identify suffering people and propose effective means to help them? Did you ever think about that possibility?
I don't think such business model exists. Because charities want donations, they don't necessarily have to help people to get them, they could just pretend they do and get more publicity and power.
I didn't think about that possibility because the subjective probability I assign to it is so low.
You should go read some Adam Smith.
What specifically?
I believe The Wealth of Nations is where he gives the famous “invisible hand” argument that the profit motive can in many circumstances direct many people to do the thing that is most sociallly beneficial.
The profit motive can direct people in such a way, but not by first identifying "suffering people". The price system doesn't require that a producer know about suffering, but instead what people will pay.
There's a problem of filtered evidence here.
Charities that only wish to serve their own interests do so best by spending tons of money on publicity, so that everyone knows their name and thinks of them when a charitable topic comes up, and goes to them first when they want to make donations or find a partner to work with.
Thus, the charities that everyone has heard about, are definitionally the worst ones who spend the most on publicity and influence instead of charitable work.
It's easy to get that filtered evidence and think that all charities are bad.
But there are lots of great ones that don't spend their money on publicity, so you don't know anything about them.
The money saved would not "go into the federal discretionary fund budget... from there, it would be go to the same kinds of programs the rest of the budget goes to". Mechanically that is just not a correct explanation of what would happen to the money. If Trump and Musk simply withheld all PEPFAR payments, the money would simply sit in a federal account doing nothing at all*. Economically, its value would flow through to Americans broadly in the form of reduced inflation (and consequently reduced interest rates).
At the next budget, Congress would be able to retroactively rescind the funds and they would, under the budget scoring rules, become available to "pay for" some other spending increase or tax cut Congress wanted to do without increasing the deficit. (The same thing would happen if, instead of an improper cancellation by Trump, Congress simply repealed the program.)
You might quite reasonably believe that Congress will not choose to allocate this money to the best possible use, but the next use of the money *would* be deliberated, and it would *not* be some kind of automatic flow through to other discretionary spending. At the present time, the most likely use would be to offset a small part of the extension of the 2017 tax bill (TCJA), parts of which are due to expire this year. Congress would therefore need to find fewer other spending cuts or fewer other tax hikes in order to meet whatever deficit target they set during the tax negotiations.
* I realized this might be insufficiently forceful. The money would sit in an account *and would not be legally available for any other spending*. Trump (unless he broke the law) would not be able to simply move the funds to some other part of the "discretionary" budget. The discretionary budget is not called that because the president has discretion to assign the funds willy-nilly, it's just called that by contrast with Social Security and Medicare, where the spending amounts are determined by the program formula and not by a statutory authorization of a specific total $ amount.
I can’t see a like button. But if there was…. ‘Like’
I grant that you're right about the Trump/Musk situation, but "At the next budget, Congress would be able to retroactively rescind the funds and they would, under the budget scoring rules, become available to "pay for" some other spending increase or tax cut Congress wanted to do without increasing the deficit." sounds to me like they would in every meaningful go into the discretionary budget. Am I misunderstanding something?
Yes. They could also go to tax cuts or deficit reduction. And not only could, but it's extremely likely that they *would* go to a mix of those two things.
They could also be used to pay for program changes to entitlement spending, although that is considerably less likely.
Under ~no circumstances would they flow to a program like BEAD which has already been allocated a specific pool of money that is unlikely to be increased.
I've changed the wording from "discretionary budget" to "pot of spending", which hopefully makes it clearer that the pot could also be used for tax cuts.
But I want to make sure this is just a semantic distinction - would you agree that if the government spent $1.5T this year and $1.4T next year, then you should think of 93% of PEPFAR as being used in spending rather than the tax cuts/deficit reduction, and the other two things are only important if the size of the federal budget changes in an unprecedented way?
The reason the distinction is important is that the merits of tax cuts, and separately the merits of deficit reduction, are unlikely to be similar to the merits of the average discretionary spending program. (Different individuals will likely disagree as to whether tax cuts are better or worse than the spending.)
Doesn’t this just come back to the point that out of all the things to cut, PEPFAR should probably be pretty low on the list? Not to mention I think you’re vastly overstating the “inflation benefits” you get from this money not being spent. Not only is a lot of this money going to foreign countries, but the Fed is doing monetary offset anyways. I’m thinking like a 1 basis point effect on interest rates at the most lol.
Depends no? If they cancelled $100B of spending and then didn't touch anything else I'd say 100% of PEPFAR went to tax cuts. If they cut $500B of spending then only 20% of PEPFAR went to tax cuts.
Foreign aid is one of the less inflationary forms of spending, given that it's spent overseas by/helping foreigners and it's a small percentage of total spending.
Money "not spent" in Africa, reduces inflation in Africa and slightly affects exchange rates. It does not (for the most part) reduce inflation in America.
The AIDS drug for Africa seems extremely cheap per life saved.
As a citizenist, I put a higher priority on my fellow American citizens' lives and well-being, but I'm not an ideologue about it. We can save a whole lot of foreign lives for not much money, so that's a good thing to do.
It would be nice if the unpleasant and unhealthy Southeast African male penchant for "dry sex" was also somehow deterred, but letting their poor wives die from AIDS is too high of a price and doesn't seem to have been very effective of a deterrent.
Presumably, Musk and Trump are canceling stuff willy-nilly and then seeing which policies are most vociferously defended and which ones aren't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex
Oh! I think I'd better revise a couple of my replies.
I strongly agree with your presumption here, particularly given that Musk has had about two weeks to look over things from the inside, which is a laughably short period of time to consider an agency with tems of billions in funding (i.e, equivalent to a Fortune 500 company).
It’s weird to be cutting this much when you’ve only had two weeks to consider anything!
DOGE has not cut anything and has no authority to do so.
Well, *someone* tried to cut all federal grants at once, and did cut the entire foreign aid program, including medications for hundreds of thousands of people.
Weird how PEPFAR remains cut and Elon Musk keeps taking credit for it.
Is this your actual commenting account? @SteveSailer
I don't want to sound bad, what exactly do we earn by spending billions saving poor 60 IQ people on another continent from their own terrible practices? People have a point when they say money could be used to improve the lives of millions of americans which are more productive, if only government was way more efficient at least.
"I don't want to sound bad, but saving the lives of people who are poor or stupid is clearly a waste of time."
If you find yourself saying that, maybe it's a clue to think a bit more.
From personal experience, thinking has only made me care less about people, so your mileage may vary.
I am not saying nobody should help them, I am just thinking if we assume that if the purpose of government programs is to improve the lives of Americans, either directly or indirectly, spending billions on saving Africans from themselves doesn't make that much sense to me
You're arguing that people should only work to their specific self interest, which brings me to the question I raised above. For convenience:
> Secondary, does it matter? If we agree that helping others is, to a first approximation, good, then we're 90% of the way to agreement and we're just discussing strategy. If we don't, we're operating from such radically different moral precepts that I don't think meaningful discussion can occur.
Or alternatively, let us posit this scenario: let us assume that A Country could increase the general wealth of its citizenry by 1% by, say, burning the Kuwait oil fields and thus improving the price of oil that the US exports at the cost of devastating the local environment and Kuwaiti economy.
Or, if you like, the Kuwaiti oilfields have already been set alight, should A Country intervene to mitigate the damage if the outcome is the same as the above scenario?
Have you never heard of reputational effects? The U.S. takes a great many actions in the world that are unpopular but (in its judgement) advance its self interest. Other countries often have choices about whether to help, stay neutral or oppose such actions. Insofar as people other than you DO care about human lives (and I assure you that some of us do), spending a small amount of money to save a large amount of lives seems like the kind of thing likely to pay for itself many times over, in terms of reduced costs derived from general goodwill.
I've seen this argument advanced a lot recently, but I've not seen any examples given of this goodwill having manifested in the real world. Granted there may be a few here and there, but I'm highly skeptical that the returns add up to much
And also, we already burned practically every bridge in we had by reelecting Trump, so there really isn't anything more to be lost at this point.
Honest question, have you been looking? Perhaps read up on your history and learn a bit about how international politics went from about 5000 BC up through the 1940s or so. The U.S. position in the international order is really, REALLY exceptional, and it's not just because of having the biggest economy or the biggest military:
https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/
"I'm highly skeptical that the returns add up to much"
How much do various U.S. military operations cost? How much are its trade agreements worth? How about its intelligence services? Diplomatic corps? The collective budget (and value in the case of trade) of all of that is HUGE. Even slightly more friction in a few places--worse trade agreements, less efficient military ops, bad intelligence causing poor decisions--could add up to billions easily. Counterfactuals--bad things that DON'T happen because of goodwill--harder to account for, but given how many capital-T Trillions the U.S. spent because of ONE terrorist attack when a handful of militants in the Middle East got mad enough to actually do something, even small likelihood reductions for things like terrorism and war come out to pretty good deals.
I dunno, how about: it makes me as an American feel proud that America is saving lots of lives in Africa?
(And we're doing it for a reasonable cost.)
I'm the guy who came up with "citizenism" a couple of decades ago, but I've never been a fanatic about _only_ doing good things for fellow citizens.
You can do that by voluntarily donating to charities saving lives in Africa. That's what I do.
You could value being part of a nation that makes the *collective* decision to donate X% altruistically. Voluntary donations wouldn't get you that.
"if we assume that the purpose of government programs is to improve the lives of Americans" there is the assumption though!
I think when your country is the richest country on the planet, you can think about whether to help other, poorer countries rather than just your own citizens. A company should be interested in its own growth and profitability all the way until it becomes extremely successful, but that at that point, it should consider giving some of its money to charity, and many do. I think of the US government the same way. Our foreign aid budget is like 1% of what we spend money on. When you're the richest country in the world, you should start thinking about helping other, less fortunate countries. Your primary concern should still be your own citizens, but you can afford to spare some thought and money for others.
It's not just his assumption:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-programs/comment/91527279
I agree with Milton Friedman on corporations: they should disburse their money to their shareholders, and then let those shareholders donate to charity if they want to.
'General Welfare' can mean a lot of things. I don't know that this is so obvious a point.
If a large percentage of Americans want us to help other countries, and I think they do, would it not be to their "General Welfare" to have the government do that? And, can you not say it promotes positive relationships with other countries to provide them AID, which promotes the general welfare of the united states?
A quick google shows we provided foreign aid to Venezuela in 1812 to recover from an earthquake. Surely if this was some constitutional issue the founders would have cared about it at that time, since many of them were still alive.
Forty years ago I used to be strongly in favor of stockholders over stakeholders (e.g., workers, the community that grew up around the factory, etc.), but then I saw what first Michael Milken and then the outsourcers to China could do when unrestrained by anything other than the letter of the law (and sometimes not that in Milken's case). So, now I have more mixed views on the topic.
Is just perpetuating something more valuable than other possible uses, like say - within Africa - actually curing river blindness or something?
Or if HIV is a permanent part of human experience, is it good for a program to have no possibility of ever ending, no way that responsibility can be transferred so that it will not be reliant on the fortunes of one country?
I don't have any opinion about this program, and am quite prepared to believe it is an effective use of the US treasury. And perhaps it is useful more broadly, globally, because it keeps the viral load down so that HIV doesn't spread as much as it used to via international travelers (a flight attendant, I believe, did more than his part, at the start; and perhaps the West owes reparations for that)?
But the "forever" nature of it is concerning, perhaps, to an effective altruist. When the Yankee do-gooder population is no longer big enough to persuade others of the value of such forever programs, what will their sudden cessation look like?
I noticed in the local municipal budget the other day, a fixed item: housing for people living with HIV/AIDS. I actually hadn't heard much about AIDS in a long time - it used to so dominate the obituaries of young or "young middle-aged" men, whether stated or not. (That was back when newspapers and paid obits still existed.)
So I was surprised to see that all this time later, when we are assured that living with HIV and passing it on to others is no big deal, or at least without stigma - that this relic of the 90s hangs on. Presumably forever. But will it? There's a lot of talk about what Americans (Yankees, in truth) should do with their dollars. But where I live, it would make far more sense to ask, what is it that Mexicans value and will want to fund?uses, like say actually curing river blindness or something?
I don't have any opinion about this program, and am quite prepared to believe it is a great use of dollars since everyone says so. And perhaps it is useful more broadly, globally, because it keeps the viral load down so that HIV doesn't spread as much as it used to via international travelers (a flight attendant, I believe, did more than his part, at the start; and perhaps the West owes reparations for that)?
But the "forever" nature of it perhaps ought to concern the altruist. When the Yankee do-gooder population is no longer big enough to persuade others of the value of such forever programs, what will their sudden cessation look like?
I noticed in the local municipal budget the other day, a fixed item: housing for people living with HIV/AIDS. I actually hadn't heard much about AIDS in a long time - it used to so dominate the obituaries of young or "young middle-aged" men, whether stated or not. (That was back when newspapers and paid obits still existed.)
So I was surprised to see that all this time later, when we are assured that living with HIV and passing it on to others is no big deal, or at least without stigma - that this relic of the 90s hangs on. Presumably forever. But will it? There's a lot of talk about what Americans (Yankees, in truth) should do with their dollars. But where I live, it would make far more sense to ask, what is it that Mexicans value and will want to fund?
This is only a partial response, but, part of PEPFAR is preventing new HIV infections in newborns, so it does reduce the future burden.
We haven't gotten far enough to actually be reducing the total number of people with HIV over time, but we could.
That does sound very crucial. Putting little ones on HIV drugs doesn't sound good.
Perhaps the question is less how much foreigners value foreigners, and how to convince people to value their own.
I don't think the reason people in Africa rely on the US for AIDS medicine is that they don't care about each other enough, I think it's more about how the US is insanely prosperous compared to Africa (and uniquely so for a country of its size).
PEPFAR costs something like $21 per year per US citizen, which is pretty trivial for a country with a per capital GDP of $80k but less so in, say, Zimbabwe, which has a particularly high HIV rate (22%) and a particularly low GDP ($2.5k).
Also the entire world population with HIV is around 39 million, which is only like 12% of the population of the US. So it's about 58 times easier for the US to pay for HIV treatment for the entire world than it is for Zimbabwe to pay for it for their citizens.
Firstly, it looks really nice. Even if everyone is ultra-cynical, no one seems to want to stop being a hypocrite. They all dress themselves up as democracies or supporters of world peace and welfare. Saying you saved millions of lives from a disease in a foreign nation is status-raising.
Secondly, it buys influence and networks with local leaders. If the US had an Africa strategy to bring the nations into alignment with it, this would absolutely be a part of such a thing. I don't think it does, but it does generate positive feelings and counteracts China's influence. If you are an American citizen, you benefit from Pax Americana for every country that subscribes to it, even if you see dollars going out each year.
Gives us a bunch of clout.
From https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/
"... the average respondent thinks that the United States is a meddlesome busy-body that only occasionally considers the needs of other countries…and that the United States is thus a force for good and peace and they like it very much, thank you."
The above article discusses the fact that, historically, superpowers tend to wind up opposed by large chunks of the world in a logical balancing response, but the US is military allies with a huge chunk of the world, trades with a huge chunk of the world, and can throw its weight around powerfully against e.g. the Russian economy.
This has tremendous benefits for US citizens, and I would argue that purely out of self-interest it's definitely worth 1% of federal expenditures
The Copenhagem Consensus has developed a easily understood cost benefit analysis and made specific recommendations for enhancing human flourishing at least dollar cost. It might pay to explore the website.
Bjorn Lomborg developed that to argue against climate change mitigation, does anyone use it in other contexts?
He developed it to argue for ways " enhancing human flourishing at least dollar cost". Sorry, if you favorite project did not make it to the top. As you are not the only one who believes it should so very obviously be on top, Lomborg wrote some books explaining how to address climate change - and how not to. You may also read this blog and Scott`s writing in other places to see why not everyone here believes in "I want you to panic".
Anything Scott has written on climate change/crisis/deniers/... you can point to?
Here on ACX I remember a Straussian one:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids?utm_source=publication-search
My answer got out a bit too early. Anyways: Scott is “Rationalist”, to a large part, ie part of a community that worries about AI becoming an existential risk. Climate change is seen as real (by me too, also by Lomborg, also by Matt Ridley) and as a serious issue to consider (by those 3 guys, too), but NOT as an existential risk to humanity or even modern human civilisation (same here +BL +MR). Scott rarely touches the issue directly, as lots of other cover it competently (eg: BL +MR). And he is wise enough not to claim warmer winters are on average better than colder winters. His posts about why more people die in winter did touch the topic a little, but he came up with seasonality of flu as the most plausible reason. Nor did he ever wrote - Greta forbid - “more CO2 has lead to a greener planet earth”. He DID write recently he does not really care deeply whether there are 97 kinds of squirrel in the Americas or 79. Matt Ridley would loudly disagree!
I’m pretty sure that in the case of Limburg, he started by thinking about climate change and only moved to this broader question after that.
Or maybe he first drank tea. What matters: are his conclusions broadly correct. Epistemic helpless, but they make much more sense to me than what I got to hear from the other side. Which is: what we got on TV, what we heard at school, what was and is written in text-books for teenagers I had to work with - and Greta/Last Generation/ Klimakleber on and over the top.
When you are several trillion in the hole with blowout deficits each year, doesn’t all money saved (unless it cuts directly into revenues) automatically go into the worthy cause of pointing the ship in a smarter direction than furiously digging yourself into a bigger hole? Mix them metaphors!
You’re talking about spending money you don’t have - it’s all money you can’t afford that you’re borrowing.
Do you really think that however much stuff Musk cancels, the deficit will be smaller by that amount next year?
I’m highly pessimistic about politicians and spending also - but I would have had the same assumption about Javier Milei before I saw what he did. That shocked me enough to realise that my previous assumption that political systems were so broken they had no chance for course correction wasn’t always going to hold.
It’s pretty grim when clear thinkers like yourself can’t even conceive of the possibility that the most indebted nation on earth could possible stop spending and start cutting without catastrophe forcing it on them. It’s like it’s not even on your table of possibilities.
Its like an alcoholic open to any solution to his problem that doesn’t involve changing his exponential intake trajectory.
In this specific case, house Republicans have said that they intend to pass a budget extending Trump's existing tax cut (TCJA), cutting other taxes, and adding new spending (e.g. on border security). Extending the TCJA costs ~500 billion per year by itself; the other stuff is expected to be expensive but the details aren't negotiated yet. Conceivably they will find enough pay-fors to offset all of this but it isn't expected.
Further discussion: https://www.novoco.com/notes-from-novogradac/outlook-for-2025-tax-reconciliation-legislation-and-its-potential-impact-on-community-development-affordable-housing-historic-preservation-and-clean-energy-tax-incentives
The US isn't Argentina. It's biggest budget slices are for Social Security and the military. Not surprisingly, these also have very large and powerful constituencies who will electorally punish anyone who tries to reign them in. It's not impossible to fight them, but you need a lot of political capital to try. Republicans do not seem particularly interested in cutting spending on either, and I suspect Trump isn't going to break on that.
Foreign non-military aid is a very small amount of the overall US budget. You could double it to account for military aid or whatever and that would still be true (and not for nothing, but most people would not consider sending aging weapons overseas to count, so it's less than any nominal dollar amount you'd see).
The only way any of this makes sense is for DOGE to say to Congress in 8 months "look, we cut a trillion a year of spending and the world blamed Elon for it and thinks it's already done. Now all you have to do is ratify it by passing a reduced budget"
This way, Congress avoids most of the incentives that normally make it politically dangerous to cut programs, because Elon already did it.
The programs being cut currently are irrelevant on the scale of the US federal budget. There is absolutely no way that Musk can cut $1T dollars from the budget without major cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and/or defense. And if any of those are cut you better believe Congress will not "ratify" it because a LOT of voters depend on those programs and will be very upset if they are cut.
What do you mean when you say we can't afford it? What's the negative consequence the ship is pointed towards?
Should I link to the US debt clock? If your conclusion is “this is fine and will continue to work well indefinitely” when you look at it, then our perceptions are too far apart to reconcile.
Or maybe you think “it’s a lil high, I’m sure we’ll ease up before disaster strikes”? Either way we’re poles apart.
I know the debt is big but that doesn't answer my question.
The U.S. is 237 years old. To the best of my recollection, the national debt has been a number than most people would consider large for every single one of those years. Even among the earliest policy thinkers of the U.S. there were those that argued that it *should* be large.
So if you think the U.S. is headed towards immanent disaster because of its debt, could you please provide more specifics than "hey, look, big number?" What size of number will cause the disaster? What form will the disaster take? Will it be sudden or gradual?
gradual, then sudden
Probably hyperinflation?
At some point if the debt continues to grow then the interest payments on the debt exceed the tax collection capacity of the US Government.
Now the US Government can just keep printing dollars if it likes, but at some point you destroy the illusion that these dollars are worth anything.
If huge debt weren't dangerous then why would any government bother to collect taxes at all? It's much more politically popular not to.
Darn it, I wrote a whole little essay just now trying to explain this, and you did a 10x better job in 5 sentences.
Yep. Republicans are going to do their best to collect as little tax as possible without actually touching big ticket items. Unless you think DOGE are about to be getting into any military systems any time soon?
Not every single one of those years. Jefferson paid off the debt when he was President.
I don't have specific answers to those questions and I doubt anyone truly does since the exact context of the current world economy has never occurred in history.
But when Moody's and other rating agencies start downgrading our rating I'd say it's a problem we shouldn't ignore. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/moodys-changes-outlook-united-states-ratings-negative-2023-11-10/
Basic theory of MMT: government debt for any large Fiat currency is not the same as your credit card debt. Modern governments don't collect taxes and then then spend what they collect. They create as much money as they think should be spent, them they delete some of the currently circulating money by taxing circulation.
There has literally never been a government who could print currency and who didn't have debt, because without debt there is no money. Government debt bt is literally just all the money ever created, plus interest, minus all taxes ever collected. Unless you want a straight up contraction of total currency, the number will keep growing.
“Basic theory of MMT” this is like barging into a medical argument and saying “basic argument of homeopathy”. There is not a single serious person who should be convinced by arguments from MMT… particularly after 2020-2022.
-It answers the question of why national debt can be dangerous, but not the way people think.
-Why do you think the pandemic era challenges MMT? A huge amount of money was printed, it wasn't used to build productive capacity, taxes remained low, and then we got inflation.
-Are you confusing MMT with the policy preferences of MMT advocates? To use your tortured medical analogy, it's like arguing against medication because you dislike pharma lobbyists.
Most economists consider MMT to be completely bogus. There's no reason to think it gives us any insight that basic econ without MMT lacks.
Jefferson paid off the US government's debt. This did not eliminate currency, although of course we weren't on a fiat system then. If the current government decided to pay off all its debt, it would probably take a long while, but that wouldn't eliminate currency either.
inflation is a tax on those who cant afford a whole house at a time
No.
Inflation is a tax on people who lend money at fixed interest rates to those who can’t afford a whole house at a time.
If you have a fixed 30 year mortgage, the best thing in the world for you is steady, persistent inflation well above your interest rate.
Of course the HUGE caveat here is that your INCOME must also inflate at the same rate as everything else.
What has killed the US middle class since the 70s is that wages haven’t inflated at the same rate as general inflation.
Inflation.
It took me a while to figure out the answer to this question! People don't talk about it much, they usually leave it as a sort of vague disaster.
(TLDR: if debt climbs out of control, governments have to choose between a "debt crisis" and "hyperinflation", both of which are serious disasters for citizens.)
The first problem is that the more debt an entity already has, the riskier it is to lend them more money. So the higher US debt-to-GDP rises, the higher interest rates investors demand to convince them to buy US bonds. Those bonds backstop other investments (since nobody will give you a 2.5% 30-year mortgage when they could get a 4.75% 30-year T-bill), which is a direct cost paid by citizens. Homeowners literally pay more to the bank each month, the higher debt-to-GDP goes.
The specific disaster that happens when debt-to-GDP rises too high is that the country has to spend most of its incoming tax money on servicing the debt (paying interest to the folks who hold treasury bonds). Which means they have to issue even more bonds to get the money to actually pay for stuff. This cycle compounds. It's paying off one credit card with another credit card, basically. Eventually, there is no longer anybody who wants to buy US treasury bonds, no matter how high the interest rate. The market "bottoms out".
At this point the US must simply stop paying some bills. Maybe they stop repaying T bills, in which case their rating tanks and they can no longer raise money that way. Maybe they stop paying the military, or social security. This is one possible disaster. (Right now, the US spends as much to service the debt as we do on the whole military, if you want a sense of how far along this process we are.)
There's a way to get out of this bad cycle, though! The Federal Reserve can buy the T bills. And they don't care what the interest rate is on them, since they print money for free. (They don't actually print the money for this; they increment one bank account without decrementing another one, which they're allowed to do because they're the Federal Reserve. Anybody else who did it, jail.)
But this makes all the other dollars in existence less valuable. Which also helps the interest rate / bond problem, since all the US debt is denominated in dollars. You can "inflate it away". But this kind of inflation is essentially a tax, since you're debasing all the dollars your citizens hold.
So, basically, if the debt gets big enough, policymakers have to choose between two disasters. Either "the government can't pay its bills" (ie debt crisis) or "everybody's money is worthless" (ie hyperinflation).
The debt is mostly held by the US citizens and companies and the debt/gdp ratio has been pretty stable post-covid. It's still a good idea to reduce deficits somewhat but it's not a catastrophic situation.
At what point does it become a catastrophic situation, and how many decades away is that?
If debt of 125% of GDP is not too bad, what about 250? 500? 1000? There must a limit somewhere beyond which you run out of people willing to lend you money cheaply.
I don't think it's a helpful framing of the problem. It's just not the right KPI to track. Japan's ratio is over 200% and it's still not a failed state. It's not exactly a success either but so are many countries with 50-100% ratio.
The inflation on the other hand is a real constraint, and it's caused by extensive spending as we saw in the last few years.
I'm not that worried about 200%, I'm worried about 300%, 400%, 500% and so on.
At current rates it's adding about another 100% every ten years, and that will accelerate as the interest term starts to dominate all the others.
If you want it to stop at a mere 200% you need a plan starting now, you can't just say "Oh I'm sure someone will figure it out in a decade".
Step 1. Allow the TCJA tax cuts to expire this year, like the Republicans who passed them intended.
Bam, $500 billion off the deficit in one shot, starting this year. All the Republicans have to do is keep a promise from Trump's previous term - that these tax cuts were just a temporary stimulus and not a permanent loss to the government's revenue.
If the budget is in such a crisis, why are Republicans still trying to cut taxes further? What reasoning puts "cut PEPFAR" or "give Elon Musk root access to the Treasury computers" higher on the list of things we should try than this?
So rather than reducing the deficit by cutting spending, the plan is to just keep increasing taxes forever? And then one day the income tax rate will be 100%, and the government will deign to give some tiny fraction of that money back in the form of inefficient government programs that exist mainly as sinecures for the friends and family of government bureaucrats?
If spending cuts are impossible and spending increases are inevitable, then spending will increase until it consumes all available resources. Since living under the boot of a parasitic bureaucracy that sucks you dry for all eternity would be very bad, it stands to reason that any policy that cuts spending in any way is worth doing.
The blob has had decades to do this responsibly and they've made negative progress. Clearly the only path forward is to do it irresponsibly.
Step 1: cap Social Security at $1500/month for everyone
Step 2: raise retirement age to 68
Step 3: restrict Medicare and Medicaid to only cover procedures and drugs covered by at least 5 EU members in their public health systems.
Step 4: transition all city, state and federal pension plans to Social Security, with the same $1500/month cap
That's what, like 30% of the budget cut right there and then?
"If your household is over budget, you can address that problem either by spending less or by earning more income. It is tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that by analogy, the government can address its budget problems either by spending less or by raising taxes. But the analogy fails because raising taxes is not like earning more income; it’s more like visiting the ATM.
The government is an agent of the taxpayers. Raising taxes to pay for government spending depletes our assets just as visiting the ATM to pay for household spending depletes our assets. That’s not at all like earning income, which adds to our assets. "
https://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/11/15/econ-101-for-the-supercommittee/
This form of argument feels like an all-purpose argument against ever doing anything at all. Someone tries to raise taxes and you can say "Why raise taxes instead of cutting spending?" Someone tries to cut spending and you can say "Why cut spending when you could raise taxes?"
The proposition on the table right now is cutting spending, and that's a great idea. Raising taxes may also be necessary at some point, but that's a different discussion.
One thing I do think is that the goal should be to cut down the Government to a size where it's doing its actual job efficiently, and then figure out how much tax needs to be raised in order to fund that government, rather than to see how much money can possibly be squeezed out of the people and then try to think of ways to spend that money.
This economist has a plan: https://x.com/JessicaBRiedl/status/1806391665260638270
A few days ago, the online Right was in favor of the government hiring more Air Traffic Controllers. Eventually, somebody on the Right will realize that instead of canceling programs, we can put our guys in charge of them!
It's not enough to put "our guys" in charge of them, you also have to purge them of any potential dissenters. When most of the people working at these agencies have liberal/establishment sympathies, it makes more sense to just shut down the entire agency and rebuild it from the ground up.
That makes sense, the problem is with stuff like the FAA planes can fall out of the sky in the meantime, making your administration much less popular.
Not that that's what happened with the recent crash--those were all Biden appointees. I think the thing is you just don't have enough conservatives who really want to work for the FAA or HHS to actually staff those agencies. Frankly working in government has been so left-coded within living memory that I doubt you could find enough conservatives to staff those agencies--smart, competent people with right-leaning sympathies tend to go into the private sector where the incomes are much higher and the ideology's more friendly.
I definitely think the indigo blob is a thing, but why would I care if the traffic controllers are conservative or liberal?
And yes I am aware of Trace's FAA post.
Maybe we can use the money from cancelling all foreign aid to pay these people more.
The FAA can be privatized. Canada already did it.
https://www.econlib.org/privatize-the-skies/
I don't think government work is actually "left-coded". It's just that constantly attacking government tends to make government employees not like you, regardless of their politics. A lot of the people Trump is purging are Republicans, just not full-Trumpist Republicans.
It hardly ever makes sense to destroy an.institution with institutional knowledge. You are reinventing Lysenkoism.
I agree with all that except for "rebuild it from the ground up". The same process of capture will happen again.
Political appointees are a small part of the federal workforce. Most of the permanent bureaucracy is staffed by careerists who are hostile to the right. Left-wing employees are attracted to work in governments & non-profit organizations, right-wingers are drawn to other fields. In our electoral system the parties tend to trade off power, so any temporary Republican appointee will eventually be replaced.
If this had anything to do with deficit reduction, maybe I’d agree with you, but the deficit is not going to decrease. Republicans are in power currently, and they have been ideologically opposed to deficit reduction for forty years (because that money could instead be used for tax cuts). Congress plans to greatly increase the deficit this year.
And when it crashes and burns - the analysis will still favor the “we can’t do anything and should never try to retrench” crowd. Because those expressing the view that you just did, were “the naive” ones.
Yes, all cancellation of spending goes into deficit reduction, and deficit reduction is not the worst possible goal. But is $6 billion of deficit reduction actually as valuable as several hundred thousand lives? You might think that most congresspeople and most voters have drastically undervalued deficit reduction, but that’s still a very different question from whether PEPFAR itself is less valuable than deficit reduction.
It's more valuable to the US government. If saving lives in other countries is valuable, we should do so via charitable donations.
This would be a much more convincing argument if the current administration were working towards some sort of fiscal tightening more generally. But in reality almost everything else they are planning is making the the US fiscal position much worse (by orders of magnitude more than what we are spending in foreign aid).
Congressional Republicans (with the administration's fervent support) are working on extending the TCJA, adding a projected $4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years
If this aid is really effective, maybe people who share your view and private charities will step in to fill the funding gap in the absence of sending tax dollars.
...thereby redirecting their charitable giving from other slightly less worthy causes, which now suffer.
Yes, but this makes the counterfactual of the US Government cutting the program less bad, because it effectively sucks money from causes that are significantly less good (as Scott himself noted, charities have extreme disparities in effectiveness).
You can use that argument anytime anyone stops doing some good. If I stop feeding my children, you could respond it's not as bad as it seems, because someone else might step up to feed them.
Scott insists on the actual counterfactual of where the money would go. I think it's reasonable to symmetrically insist on the actual counterfactual of where the money would be taken from, because in this specific instance there is common knowledge that there's an issue here and AIUI sufficient interested charity throughput to actually replace this 100% (in many cases there's not, which is the key difference between this and your generalised form).
Is the actual counterfactual of where the money would go still worse than the actual counterfactual of where the money would be taken from? Entirely possible! To use Scott's numbers, one charity is typically 100x as efficient as another, so if this is 1000x the marginal government spend, and it's one of the most efficient charities, the marginal charity getting pulled to pay for this is probably still 10x the marginal government spend! But I like being fair, hence insistence on applying the same scrutiny to "where it'd be taken from" as to "where it'd be going".
If your children were currently receiving charitable money, then perhaps your reasoning would be correct.
It's less bad to the extent that private charitable giving is efficient, always going to the charity that is most worthwhile and most badly in need of money. Since we know it's actually very inefficient, we should expect private giving to only make up a small fraction of the difference.
Shutdown all funding that goes towards the arts, for example, and send it to PEPFAR? Plenty of stuff to cut that doesn't involve saving lives.
Most charities don't have billions of dollars to spend.
They would if people donated billions of dollars.
"Hey, give money to PEPFAR, we save one life per $50."
I don't know the number, since Scott's post oddly never mentioned it or I missed it, but it's apparently a super awesome number.
It would quickly get all the money it needs if it just said it needed money.
Presumably the life-saved/dollar ratio isn't as good for AIDS charities as it is for malaria charities, since the EA recommendations are usually about malaria.
And the claim for the vaunted malaria net program is that you get to $5500 per life.
Wikipedia says PEPFAR has saved around 25 million lives for around $110 billion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief), which is $4.4k per life, right in line with GiveWell averages of $3-5.5K per life.
Malaria charities in terms of the literal bednets are probably much less regulation-intensive than medicine that may need to be taken on a particular schedule, so that could be one component of the difference.
Excellent argument. So excellent that it can prove quite a bit more than you appear to have intended. Let's apply it elsewhere:
Some people say the U.S. military budget is absolutely vital for national security. I say, if that's true, then well-meaning private citizens will certainly step in to fill the gap. Why not slash it to zero? I'm sure you can fill in the blanks for every other item in every other budget (federal or otherwise) and draw the correct conclusion.
None of this is necessarily incoherent, BTW. If you want to be an anarcho-capitalist, that is certainly a thing you can be. But if that's what you want, you ought to do so with courage, consistency and forthrightness.
>I say, if that's true, then well-meaning private citizens will certainly step in to fill the gap. Why not slash it to zero?
Because then you have to legalise private citizens having thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, which won't end well.
Military and police are actually much more of a problem to substitute with private entities than anything else on the table. There is a reason that people who want to take chainsaws to the government usually don't want to take chainsaws to *that*.
Not so. You could cut the (tax allocation for its) budget to zero, leave it legally under the government control, but solicit charitable contributions to pay for the program. Which isn't quite full ancap, but it still matches the original argument well enough.
There is a fairly-significant difference between "cut a government program, let private actors do it independently" and "keep a government program, but make taxation for it voluntary". Among other things, willingness to pay for stuff tends to correlate with control over that stuff.
There's more of a risk of some military taking over and then setting taxation to whatever it wants. If we cut the governments charity budget to zero, there isn't an equivalent risk that the government will be taken over and the charitable budget reset.
Military example is trying to prove too much, I think. Here's a different one - The federal government provides funding/subsidies for:
- Fossil Fuel - Maybe $20B
- Farming - $30B
- Faith-based organization grants - unknown amount
- Roads & highways - $50B+
- Veterans spending - $300B
- Gun manufacturers - $100M in inducements (this might be state-level)
Many of these are things that some folks on the political spectrum might disagree with their tax dollars being spent on. Their arguments for disagreeing may be very similar to the arguments against foreign aid ("it's not the job of the federal government to distort the free market system through subsidies"). And they could also argue that if these are so valuable, charity would step in.
So - imagine a Democratic president deputizing a businessman (say, Mark Cuban) to go in and, without congressional approval, halt distribution of these funds because we need to stop the spending and we might as well start somewhere. Would you consider that lawful?
Sources for above data:
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs
https://www.cato.org/briefing-paper/cutting-federal-farm-subsidies
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/08/text/unlevelfield2.html
https://www.hud.gov/states/shared/working/r5/fbci
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59667
https://goodjobsfirst.org/top-three-gun-manufacturers-have-received-more-105-million-subsidies/
I wasn't making an argument for or against any use of government funds. I was suggesting to Scott that the people he is worried about due to the lack of government-funded aid might still get help from another source.
Yes, you were. Again, your argument Proved to Much. Anyone could say the same about any government program at any time for any reason, and it would be every bit as valid as what you said. You like it, you fund it.
But then again, the opposite is equally untrue. We obviously wouldn't want the government to intrude on every possible cause. Therefore there is some category of "things that are reasonable to be handled by the government" and there is some category of "things that are reasonable to be handed by individual citizens". You are not arguing principles, you are arguing which category this particular thing should belong to.
My bet is that people would actually pay for it willingly because the alternative is to be taken over by China and Russia. I'm ~99% sure it would be fully covered by voluntary "donations" by citizens who's tax bill is now $0.
Yeah, I agree, but instead of PEPFAR, it's specifically about funding the police wherever you live. If we just cut all the funding to them, then surely private citizens will step in to fund it.
My comment is about something that is happening already - PEPFAR funding is paused.
I’m not advocating for or against funding it, or for or against libertarianism. I’m not advocating anything.
I’m speculating that if this is really a great cause then maybe other charities or even the people who currently work for PEPFAR might find a way to keep it going without federal funds.
Wouldn’t great causes that need funds attract more donations than others?
No, that's not how the real world works, just as in the real world, even though the police are a worthy and important way to spend government money - that provide a value sufficiently high it might even beat out PEPFAR! - if we cut it then it just gets cut and not replaced.
I have no idea how you would even go about transferring all PEPFAR employees and medical supplies from the government to a private charity, and even if people figured it out, it would take a bunch of time, during which those babies would still get AIDS.
Charities funded by voluntary donations rather than taxes really do exist. You don't have to imagine them, you can look them up on GiveWell.
Transaction costs are a thing! It takes time to spin up a website saying "we need X money to meet a surprise shortfall," it takes time to find interested donors, it takes time to re-hire the staff who got fired, and that may not even happen because some people are going to say "fuck this I'm going to work a job where my paycheck isn't at risk when a billionaire throws a tantrum."
And Elon Musk can hack off bits of budget much faster than you can spin up replacement private organizations. Are you going to propose an emergency fundraising drive for every single good government program to get cut? What if it's something that's still good but not as attention-getting as lifesaving AIDS drugs?
Yes, they would in fact do so, as proven by hundreds of years of precedent in places without organized police forces. Just look at how early American settlers defended themselves against various bandits.
Settlers versus bandits isn't the same as urban crime. A city is an insanely dense region full of strangers; a bandit is one of the handful of strangers you'll see in the nearest few kilometers. There's a reason we transitioned away from mob justice to police departments alongside the spike in urbanization, and it's that police departments are much, much better at handling "find the guy who did this" and "stop the guy from doing this" when there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people within a few kilometers of you.
If we wanted to replace urban police we'd want something more formal than posses of settlers. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml
If Jeff Bezos woke up tomorrow and said "fuck Amazon, I'm firing everyone and deleting all the code off our servers and leaving everyone's packages stranded in random warehouses," you wouldn't go "this is fine, Amazon is very profitable, so someone will step in to build a new online everything store."
(And, uh, also in this hypothetical Walmart.com doesn't exist.)
Probably someone would eventually build a new everything store! But that would take years, and it would probably be more expensive and less good than Amazon for a very long time. You definitely couldn't just pick back up where Amazon left off: key people would have already gotten a different job; the servers would have been rented to someone else; neither the vendors nor the customers trust your new Nile.com.
PEPFAR is really good not because helping with HIV/AIDS is a particularly good thing to do; actually, it's kind of mid, and a lot of economists complained back in 2004 that it was a waste of money. PEPFAR is really good because it's an unusually well-run program, because it was George W. Bush's pet project and he really, really, really wanted to make it work. "End PEPFAR, private charity will do it" is like saying "end Amazon, someone will eventually make Nile.com"-- except that capitalism is beautifully efficient and someone will make Nile.com, but rich charity donors keep going "save millions from a horrible death? Nah, I'd rather buy my alma mater a really ugly new dorm."
Also, the U.S. government actually does have an advantage at working with other governments, as PEPFAR does. It is called "diplomacy" and the State Department, which houses PEPFAR, specializes in it. Some large funders, like the Gates Foundation, are basically countries, but the vast majority of private charity doesn't have the level of soft power the U.S. does.
Bezos/Amazon is WAY above replacement. He/it is unusually successful for a reason. This isn't true for all tech CEOs though, Ballmer was below replacement and once he stopped running Microsoft they started doing better.
But the question isn't whether we should replace the head of PEPFAR. The question is whether, if you completely destroy an organization, it doesn't matter because someone else can start a new organization to do the same thing.
Depends on the organization. For many, creative destruction is indeed optimal.
> It’s a little unfair to focus on BEAD or other especially bad programs, because money gained by canceling a good program will on average be redirected to a merely average program.
I disagree. The government isn't great at keeping their priorities in order. In fact, I'd say they're pretty terrible at it. But I still think they do better than chance. With the money they have now, they're trying to fund the most important things. They're failing horribly at it, but the things they're funding are still better than the things they're not funding. The fruit they've taken is, on average, lower hanging, so if you give them extra money, the fruit they use it to pick probably be higher than the average one they picked so far.
In short, the money will be redirected to a somewhat worse than average program.
Thank you, I've added a paragraph about this to the post.
Look. The requirement to be a conservative voter, nowadays, is to be entirely immune to when liberals say that if you don't obey them millions will die. That's a card you have played too many times. If we didn't vote for Obama/Biden/Kamala Trump/McCain was going to nuke the earth. We've heard it. If we didn't pass the Green New Day / Diversity Enhancement the Nazis were going to resurrect and invade Poland. We heard you. Any minute now.
But we no longer believe. That's the crux of it. We no longer believe you mean the things you say, when you tell us that, conveniently enough, the world is arranged in such a way that after we finally win the right to run stuff we have to do the things you want us to do or we are monsters. We are over it.
The problem of lying to us is not that we stop believing 'that specific lie'. It isn't even that we stop believing some percentage of a lie, such that the next lie can become 10x bigger and have the same effect. It is deeper than that.
Y'all said Trump had a piss tape and you were going to show it to us. You said he was in the KGB, and conveniently fell silent when Putin waited till losing control of one of the two countries he was ruling to attack the Ukraine. You said he was (somehow) also a Nazi (one of those communist nazis I guess) and would attack China. You said he watched 7 hours of tv every day, and had lost the ability to tell if it was real or not. Just an absolute firehose of lies.
Your team says a lot of stuff. I'm not gonna make the abortion comparison, but obviously you see where that goes, as far as us believing your motivations.
So we get a turn to be in charge, right? The bullet is blocked by a miracle and our guy gets to be the leader. He immediately is like 'lets not give billions to democratic grifters, shut it all down'. And what we expect from the guys who have proven, over and over, that they lie in order to become more powerful, is that a lie will happen such that he won't be allowed to use the power he got elected to have.
So, sure. He can't cut the gov or millions of babies will die. He can't not do green stuff or Mumbai will flood and millions of babies will die. He can't stop paying the Ukraine army or Russia will win and millions will die. Nothing stops you from saying that. Kamala didn't get to win but Trump has to do everything she would have done.
But, if you mean it. If you've always meant it. Then show us the piss tape. Show us his Russian spy badge. Roll up his sleeve and show the Dark Mark. Like, you endorsed the bad guys from your IRB nightmare post, I credit you with believing what they say. So in your world there is a piss tape, yeah?
Or, if your position is more nuanced, then say that. Say that you guys lie for power, and that this particular statement isn't one such lie. It is different from how we have to pay for the people to who hate us and think they are better than us in a billion other ways. This one is real. It goes to something that matters.
Like, you've always struck me as sincere. You have, I dunno, capital, here? Like, if you mean it. If you mean it this time, and you'll admit that the rest is tactical, but you genuinely think that if we don't obey you this time there will be seven figures of death, then say so do the betting market thing, and I'll buy it.
Because, like, take a sec and become us for a sec, and this is bullshit, yeah? The gov is doing something with millions of dollars that saves millions of lives? Pull the other one, right? The gov can't make a train station with a hundred times that money. There are liberals with that money from hell to breakfast, and they are somehow stopped form doing it privately (Cuz, like, if this was real, the whole maleria net thing doesn't make any sense)? Like, EAs would have been all over this.
I don't think you are insincere. You've always been a straight shooter. But I think you are being fooled. Can you genuinely look into it? Like, you get that, from someone outside of your POV, this is exactly what your team WOULD say, just to keep our money flowing to your pockets for a few months longer? "Yup yup, working folks gotta keep on paying the rich guys or they'll stop saving poor babies."
I don't believe them. They are always lying in order to hurt people and enrich themselves. But I might believe you.
From some kind of abstract perspective where all liberals are a perfectly coordinated team, you're not wrong. I've said basically this same thing in some of my posts.
Still, I will say, with 100% sincerity, and am happy to bet you via any mechanism you want if you can come up with this, that I think 100,000s of people will die if they actually cancel this one. (if you don't believe me, believe Trump/Musk, who apparently figured out that they made a mistake and restarted).
I think these two facts (liberals often like, PEPFAR is genuinely good) are both true. So what do you do about it?
I think there are two ways you could interpret your concern.
First, conservatives literally have no way to sort through the film of lies. They're in a state of total epistemic uncertainty and they should just assume everything is a lie. I think this is false. There are plenty of smart conservative doctors and epidemiologists - some of Trump's recent appointees are in that category. Or they could notice that PEPFAR was started by GW Bush - hardly a bleeding heart liberal. All of these things would have taken a few days to check.
Second, you could interpret it as karma coming home to roost for liberals. I think the people who suffer when you cancel a program that saves millions of Africans mostly isn't liberals, it's Africans. I think because of the everyone-is-trapped-in-a-trauma-based-political-psychodrama issue I've written about elsewhere, people can think things like "Ha! Killing these five million people really showed those liberals who's boss!" without noticing that this is kind of insane, and also all of those liberals have nice jobs and are still sipping champagne regardless.
Thanks for responding OP. I have read your stuff since the livejournal days. I used to give money when the NYT doxxed you. I stopped as we got more different, but I remember you fondly. That's why I answered instead of just rolling my eyes.
If you are saying this, and Trump and Musk came around, then I guess it's true. I can't claim that that's why Trump/Musk changed their minds, but I think the bigger version of this (the truth saying liberals said they really meant it) is probably what got through to them. It is important to have voices like you on the other side who aren't liars. If you'd destroyed your reputation doing piss tape stuff I wouldn't be here. I don't matter, but I mean I as in guys like me.
About your two ways, it's the first one. I've worked ten hour shifts in a gas station. I don't have the time to sort out what liberal is lying about what. I know you guys, as a team, will lie for power, and the ones that don't do it go along with those who do. I'm not judging, that's how we work too.
So what I do is I trust our leaders to work it out. It sounds like in this case they did. I hope you will keep on trying to make sure they don't get stuff wrong, and I hope they will stop all the waste that's going on but keep doing good stuff like this thing.
Anyway, thanks again for reading and answering.
I appreciate you - I hate preaching to the choir because it's useless, but everyone speaks such a different language these days that I don't know how to get people with really different starting assumptions from me to listen. I guess keeping in touch with some of them are still around from when people were closer to being on the same page is the best I can hope for. Thanks again for commenting.
> I trust our leaders to work it out.
You shouldn't. They didn't reassess because they were convinced by sound argument, they got scared by the bad press and cucked on the ruthless dismantling of the administrative state they initially embarked on.
They dropped Matt Gaetz based on the same kind of bullshit, and the woman they replaced him with will be nowhere near as effective as he would have been.
...Wait what? Are you seriously mad that they're not burning down the government enough? It hasn't even been 3 weeks, give it some time.
No, I agree they're doing far more than I expected, but I'm not going to pretend that when they're forced to walk back a move, that it was part of an unseen grand strategy, or that they changed their minds after Liberals convincing argued for their side: they retreated because their enemy successfully repelled their attack. That's fine, they're fighting powerful opponents, well-entrenched over decades, and it's unreasonable to expect flawless victories.
But I agree it's a retreat, not a rout, so "cucked" might be too harsh.
I think you shouldn't discount this being part of the plan.
> On Jan. 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for lifesaving medicines and medical services, ostensibly allowing for the distribution of H.I.V. medicines. But the waiver did not name PEPFAR, leaving recipient organizations awaiting clarity.
On Sunday, another State Department waiver said more explicitly that it would cover H.I.V. testing and treatment as well as prevention and treatment of opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times. The memo did not include H.I.V. prevention — except for pregnant and breastfeeding women — or support for orphaned and vulnerable children.
Although PEPFAR is funded by the State Department, roughly two-thirds of its grants are implemented through U.S.A.I.D. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neither organization has released funds to grantees since the freeze was initiated.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Rubio appeared to blame the recipient organizations for not acting on the waiver, saying he had “real questions about the competence” of the groups. “I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” he said.
I don't think Trump is worthy of any trust. He has shown himself repeatedly to be a liar so shameless that even the professional lying class (politicians) was outcompeted by him.
I'm pretty sure the pisstapes thing was always just liberal shit posting. Who took it seriously?
PEPFAR played into GW Bush's "Compassionate Conversative™" Evangelical persona. His was economically liberal in his spending (e.g. Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, Healthy Marriage Initiative).
Spending money on saving innocent third world victims of AIDS plays into the White American Evangelical worldview similar to how Abortion is about how women and babies (fetuses) are the innocent victims of the abortionists or society who should be saved.
It's just one of many Conservatisms (e.g. fiscal conservatism, moral conservatism).
>I think because of the everyone-is-trapped-in-a-trauma-based-political-psychodrama issue I've written about elsewhere, people can think things like "Ha! Killing these five million people really showed those liberals who's boss!" without noticing that this is kind of insane
I think they *do* recognize it as insane, but that cuts from both sides. Either they get held hostage by infinite debts and people without skin in the game (they'll have their cozy jobs and champagne regardless), or they call the bluff and let the people they *can* hurt be hurt. If there was a more direct mechanism that didn't look like an endless, grinding civil war, they'd take it. If there was a direct system of compromises and tradeoffs- "we'll approve funding to save X African lives if you send Y DEI admins to work in the salt mines and gulags," they'd take it.
The African lives are as much pawns to the champagne liberal as they are to the heartless conservative.
I agree that liberals cry wolf way too much. The reason that crying wolf is bad, though, is that occasionally a real wolf shows up, and if you don't have credibility no one will believe your warnings until it is too late. In the case of PEPFAR, there is indeed a wolf at the door. There's a lot of good evidence that it is an effective program that has saved a lot of lives.
PEPFAR is also a bipartisan program, it was started by Bush, and Obama, Trump (the first term), and Biden each saw no reason to mess with it. So this isn't a case of Democrats demanding Trump implement a Democratic agenda, it's a case of them asking him to leave a Republican program in place.
If you want me to establish that I have a nuanced and credible position on this, I am happy to denounce other times that liberal/leftist/Democrats have used histrionic language about stuff. For example, the Green New Deal was a terrible idea, there are many ways to ameliorate climate change that are friendlier to the economy. Reopening schools after the vaccine became widely available was a no-brainer and it's ridiculous how much resistance it received in the name of "saving lives." "Defund the police" was just stupid.
Do conservatives not cry wolf at all? Anyone remember "gay marriage destroy society", etc?
Their slippery slope argument turned out to be at least somewhat true, but I admit the trans nonsense is more of a culture war distraction than a real problem in society. And it seems to be losing influence. It was just so insane that it's gone on for so long, and part of the reason is that post-vibe shift, gay marriage culture warriors were a movement without a cause.
Well, the climate got worse even if it didn't kill everybody.
I think if you look at the predictions made by Scalia's dissents, they were quite accurate.
"The requirement to be a conservative voter, nowadays, is to be entirely immune to when liberals say that if you don't obey them millions will die. "
Well, yes, clearly. I suspect you have not quite thought this all the way through though. Because the result of this reasoning isn't "we're awesome and perfect and nothing ever goes wrong." The result of this reasoning is "we *consistently*, *predictably* do dumb things that kill millions of people, because we've decided that ignoring anyone outside the group who warns us about ANYTHING is the One Absolutely Indispensable Badge of Group Membership." See, some fraction of people on the liberal side DO listen when sober and sensible analysis says "hey, this is a big danger that will kill a lot of people." And you know what they do once they've listened. They REPEAT IT. And then you hear "wow, the liberals are saying something will kill millions of people again" and not only do you ignore it, you assume anyone who doesn't ignore it, and assume they're one of the liberals.
I mean, not to point too fine a point on it, but we literally saw this play out EXACTLY five years ago. A dangerous virus, spreading quickly was reported on by a lot of very different, very politically heterogeneous experts from all across the world. Liberals (and basically anyone not locked into the conservative infosphere) largely listened, took it seriously and tried to do the unity-in-a-crisis thing to save as many lives as possible. Conservatives saw the liberals saying stuff, screamed "FUCK YOU, YOU CAN'T TELL US WHAT TO DO!" and did pretty much the opposite of everything that was expected to have helped. A million Americans died. A million AMERICANS. The people you loudly claim to care most about. Some of them would have died anyway, of course: other countries with more unity and better leadership still lost people. But the U.S. got hit disproportionately hard. *Especially* the red areas.
I didn't want those people do die. Nobody I know wanted those people to die. But when you decide that it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for anyone outside your circle to communicate important things with you (which is what you have basically said), then any important knowledge that doesn't *start* in your circle can never, ever get in. Including new things that we learn about the world, even important, urgent things like "hey, this plane is going to crash."
I'm scared, Walter. I'm scared because it feels like tens of millions of people are living in an entirely different reality than me, and because when I try to talk to them about basic, simple, bedrock pieces of reality to try to establish some common ground, they repeat utter nonsense, or call me names, or stick their fingers in their ears or whatever. Sometimes they crow and revel about the utterly stupid things they've done. Sometimes they gloat and smirk about how they're going to harm my friends and family. I don't know what happened to this people, but I sure wish I could reach them. Probably you feel the same way (if about different people), but insisting "I will never, ever so much as consider what anyone even slightly aligned with them tells me under any circumstances" certainly isn't going to fix it.
Reality always has the last word. You can't win an argument with reality. No matter how aggrieved, how hurt, how righteously angry you FEEL, no matter how stridently you argue against reality, it will not budge. The BEST possible outcome is that you get nowhere and look foolish. The worst possible outcomes get entire chapters in history books, with somber memorials and days of remembrance.
>A dangerous virus, spreading quickly was reported on by a lot of very different, very politically heterogeneous experts from all across the world. Liberals (and basically anyone not locked into the conservative infosphere) largely listened, took it seriously and tried to do the unity-in-a-crisis thing to save as many lives as possible.
No. Neither side came out looking great, but the progressive blob has a greater counterfactual death toll to answer for.
Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit. Progressives balked at that and called the people proposing it Sinophobic and paranoid. *That* would have saved a lot more people than any lockdown after accounting for the whole "yes, welding everyone into their homes would stop transmission, but it would also lead to everyone dying of starvation" issue. And the misery of losing international transit would have been far less than the misery of lockdowns; ditto the economic costs.
I remember. When it mattered most, the conservatives were the ones taking things seriously and the progressives were the ones ignoring reality. Their blob gets a better grade than yours.
Given that the conservative blob decided to react against vaccines and refuse to wear masks, I'm not sure that last statement is the case.
We're probably similarly cynical about both blobs so I won't bother arguing that here.
The masks I was considering and are still strictly less of an issue than the quarantine. Quarantine would have saved everyone; masks and other NPIs saved some, by spreading the infections out to unburden hospitals and to move some infections after the vaccine, but not all (I don't think bringing R under 1 was ever feasible, in hindsight - not without the shit the PRC got up to, at least, and even they eventually fell short), and at greater cost (including in deaths, because of the drug overdoses).
Vaccine hesitancy is the one thing that compares, although while most of the refusers were Red Tribe that seems contingent on the vaccine being deliberately delayed in order to prevent it being Trumpeted (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-3-12-new-cdc-guidelines-available?utm_source=publication-search#%C2%A7and-yet-no-technically-we-are-incorrect-eric-topol-is-actually-the-worst - NB: linking Zvi because he's a Rat who hates Trump). That's not the whole blob, but it complicates things.
The correct immediate reaction would have been to call President Xi and say in suitably diplomatic language, “In an autocracy, bad news can travel slowly up the chain of command, but this virus is a serious threat and it is in both our interests to get it quickly contained. We will happily send our best virologists to assist you.” Just because that’s what Obama would have done if he were still President doesn’t make it a bad idea.
I don’t know which progressives called shutting down international transit Sinophobic and paranoid. A web search suggests that any who did did not use the word “Sinophobic.” In any case, I would think that the person to answer for the death toll would be Trump, not unnamed progressives. After all, progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opposed Trump’s corporate tax cuts, but that didn’t stop Trump.
I remember Pelosi visiting SF's Chinatown in early (Feb?) 2020 because the Republicans were saying anyone traveling from China is more likely to have been carrying the new virus. I think they said "racist" in general though, and not specifically "Sinophobic."
She visited Chinatown on Feb. 24, saying that people shouldn’t stay away from Chinatown due to the virus. She seems to have stuck to a positive message, not criticizing Republicans at all, and saying nothing about Trump’s travel restrictions.
Sample quote: “We want to be vigilant about what might be on the horizon -- what is out there in other places. We want to be careful how we deal with it (coronavirus). But we do want to say to people, come to Chinatown. Here we are, again, careful, safe, and come join us.”
For context, here is what Trump tweeted the same day: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
> Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit.
And who was President in early 2020 with the power to do this? How exactly is it the fault of progressives that Trump didn't do the thing you think was called for at the time.
"serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit. Progressives balked at that and called the people proposing it Sinophobic and paranoid."
Hmm.
I was living and working deep in the heart of "blue" America throughout 2020, and was/am well networked in progressive circles due to the work that I do as well as my family background. Literally no one I knew was opposing shutting down international travel at that time. Also they were all canceling all international travel personally/professionally -- I knew multiple people who took significant $ losses backing out of previously-booked international trips during that year.
So I'm puzzled...progressives during 2020 "balked at" shutting down international travel? Which progressives?
Also -- wasn't Donald Trump the president throughout 2020? With Republican majorities in the Senate and on the Supreme Court? And a slight Dem majority in the House having zero self-identifying progressives in its leadership?
If formally shutting down international travel was the serious and correct reaction...which party during 2020 had the capacity and hence responsibility to make it happen?
> Specifically, the serious and correct reaction was immediately shutting down all international transit, to China and to anywhere that didn't also immediately shut down all international transit.
Possibly, but I think the devil’s in the details here.
What date are you talking about? Would such a shutdown include Canada and Mexico if they didn’t follow suit? How long would you give them to adjust?
Covid started adding up in early March 2020 – if you had timed this too early (reports from China started late December, I think), you would have a lot of angry people and little to show for it for a pretty long time…
January/yes/basically none.
Let people be angry; they'd eat their words later.
Late or early January? Late January would already be stretching it, but early January seems frankly unsustainable given the mood at the time.
Businesses would have been yelling their heads off (remember how North America is very integrated economically), and no one would have bought the cost-benefit analysis.
I doubt that it would have been politically feasible to contain an outcry that big for even a month without clear rationale, let alone more.
Hug a chinaman, y'all!
I agree, disagreements about what seems like pieces of bedrock reality can be unsettling. There's a much more unsettling thing however: when tens of millions of people seem to forget what opinion they had and vehemently argued for about said pieces of bedrock reality just months ago. It's one thing to realize that some piece of reality is not as bedrock as you thought and change your mind about it, but what were your expressed and recorded beliefs about it should really not be debatable, and yet...
Since you brought up Covid, here are two time capsules that you might find surprising (and deeply unsettling). First, that time when Nancy Pelosi went to literally hug people in SF Chinatown to demonstrate that Covid was not a big deal: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-san-franciscos-chinatown/2240247/
In that case the liberal opinion did a 180 degree reversal (complemented by complete retrograde amnesia) in literally less than a week, Pelosi hugged Chinamen on Feb 24, on Feb 28 everyone got upset about Trump calling Corona a hoax (fake news btw, he did not) and suddenly it was a big deal.
Another is this post: https://old.reddit.com/r/worstof/comments/i1x87n/in_which_ramitheasshole_scolds_and_mocks_a_mother/ wherein redditors are confused and surprised when confronted by their own opinions on the efficacy of masks from four months ago.
Again, it's one thing to believe that the fact that masks don't work against Covid is a piece of bedrock reality. It is even understandable to get morally outraged at people who insist on wearing masks in the time of shortage and kill someone's grandma by doing so. Maybe even do a little harassment for the greater good. And, separately, it's understandable to change your mind and come to believe that you're killing a grandma by *not* wearing a mask outside and that's bedrock reality, bud.
But the amnesia accompanying this shift in progressive opinions is genuinely scary. How can you have a real discussion about what is true or not and what is likely true versus bedrock-reality true with people who genuinely don't remember their own beliefs from a week ago? Who believe that certain things are true because it's a moral thing to do, and since they have always been morally correct, their memories of their past beliefs change as necessary?
From Europe here, but it's the same: the amount of political, media and public amnesia around all things COVID disturb me a lot, at least as much as how quickly and deeply democratic governments went authoritarian without any noticeable institutional resistance (make you wonder what distinguish liberal democracy from authoritarian regimes deep down....).
I sorted the 3 in term of more and more surprising: politicians doing 180° is no surprise, kind of part of the job. Traditional Media not that surprising, not after their full support of government message during the first peak. Public, that's more surprising, I guess I was naive about the percentage of people still exerting a modicum of self-honesty and critical thinking. I knew it was likely small, but that small? I don't think they do not exists, but it's clear they do not exist enough to be visible even on non-traditional media.
I think at least part of the explanation (for the almost complete media support, and initial public support) is not only fear, it's the World savior mentality, especially the variant "we can save the world from apocalypse if we accept suffering a little now" mentality that is a hallmark of western thinking since the beginning of Christianity, at least. Media jumped on this nice story, maybe because encouraged by power in place, but also because it's just the kind of feel-good story they just love (we will win against an inhuman enemy with the strength of our altruism, resilience and unity - basically the plot of any apocalypse-porn blockbuster)
Still, I think Public amnesia is largely unwillingness to explicitely discuss what happened, rather than true amnesia, and that the COVID episode significantly hit the "suffer now to save the world" western meme. Because global warming and ecology is largely using this meme, and it's popularity is in free fall...
Funny you should mention this, because a week or so ago I happened to reread this old post:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/16/five-case-studies-on-politicization/
Watching the two sides both 180 in regards to quarantine was disheartening, because it feels like everyone just wants to make whatever political argument is most convenient for them in the moment. About the only consistent thing was the left crying racism as per usual...
Numerous cost-benefit analyses have been done since showing that "do nothing at all" was in fact the right approach. You would've been right if the pandemic was at least 3-5x more deadly, but COVID simply wasn't deadly enough to warrant doing anything about it.
This is a great comment and anyone from the left wing who is still going “but how could ANYONE vote for TRUMP” (most of my family lol) would do well to read it.
I do think though that we as the conservative team should try and sort out truth from lies. Just because the mainstream media etc bullshits constantly and distorts in order to mislead, doesn’t mean that literally everything they say is false. This is a trap that conservatives can fall into. For example, I am a doctor and I can tell you with some confidence that Covid vaccines work to prevent severe Covid infection. I am also confident that climate change is real, although exaggerated.
With the PEPFAR thing, it’s early days but it seems like it’s the one decent program in all these billions of dollars of waste, fraud and corruption that the government has been up to - so obviously the media are harping on it constantly. Fine, OK, if it’s a good use of taxpayer money hopefully Trump/Musk will reinstate it. But talking about it is a distraction from USAID funding Internet censorship or gain of function research in the Wuhan lab or torture training for repressive Latin American regimes backed by the CIA or Islamist terrorist groups.
Tucker Carlson tried that with the Daily Caller early on, believe it or not. He couldn't make any money and it wound up doing the usual report-lots-of-crap-and-the-occasional-actual-liberal-malfeasance conservative-media thing.
This is kind of what Richard Hanania was getting at with the Elite Human Capital thing (though his exact definition of it sounds suspiciously similar to himself). Liberals read, conservatives watch TV. There just aren't enough people on the conservative team who care enough or want to work for it to make a right-wing New York Times with strong journalistic standards (outside of their usual ideological blindspots, of course) a viable entity.
Some of it's ideological capture and assortment over the years, but I honestly think too many bright conservatives are busy raising kids. Which, I mean, obviously is necessary for there to be a next generation, but it gives the left an asymmetric ideological advantage.
Conservatives also have the largely unacknowledged problem that their intellectual tradition no longer has a strong basis underneath. God has been dead for more than a century now, nobody seriously thinks that there's a coherent universal ontology with religious dogma at its center, and separate magisteria/god-of-the-gaps replacements are clearly inadequate. Until this is acknowledged and dealt with, conservatives have nothing to entice secular intellectuals with.
That is a good point. I think some are trying to do it with various forms of nationalism or fascism under another name, even if it was kind of a flop in 1945.
They were/are rightist utopians, not conservatives. Claims about restoring mythical centuries-old "golden age" don't count.
I think pre-2020 Jordan Peterson had a potential to create a new foundation for modern conservatism... but then he went to Russia and got his brain replaced, and he just isn't the same person anymore. :(
What other conservative intellectuals are there? Theodore Dalrymple comes to my mind; any other examples? My rule of thumb is "a person who could write a guest post on ACX without dramatically lowering its quality level".
Hanania, kind of? But all of them have been reluctant to explicitly come to terms with the problem I pointed at. Of course, doing so isn't easy - replacing the basis of your ideology is about the most anti-conservative thing imaginable! But still necessary, I claim, if conservatism has any intention to provide serious challenge to progressivism/utopianism.
God is surprisingly alive in the US.
I don't think the problem is a lack of human capital for conservatives. The problem is that a conservative who doesn't support Trump 100% in every way is called a "Democrat" nowadays.
Republicans *had* a lot of human capital pre-2016, but they were all excommunicated or silenced.
“Y'all said Trump had a piss tape...”
Who is y'all? I never made that claim, or any of the other claims you list in that paragraph. To the best of my recollection, neither did Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
On the other hand, it was Trump himself who claimed on November 21, 2015: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering. So something’s going on. We’ve got to find out what it is.”
He later claimed explicitly (on ABC’s This Week) that he saw this on television. If this were true, the footage would have been saved on video. I’m still waiting for the video tape.
For that matter, I’m still waiting for the Weapons of Mass Destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
I know there are a bunch of nuts on the political left; mostly I ignore them. You should, too, rather than dismissing an entire half of the political spectrum.
On the other hand, honest conservatives like Daniel Larison during the Bush years or Liz Cheney more recently, are the fringe conservatives.
> there are a bunch of nuts on the political left; mostly I ignore them. You should, too,
The analogous version of this is "Sure, Donald Trump is a bit of nut; you should mostly ignore him."
And of course I would if he weren’t President.
You've missed my point. Why does him being president make a difference?
If it's because he's powerful and can do a lot of damage, that's true of the "nuts on the political left" you suggest we ignore as well.
I think it's worth noting that the average liberal (I don't know if I am the average liberal, but I'm close) would say the same thing in reverse. You said that Iraq had WMDs; you said that deregulation would be a good thing and then we got the 2008 bank crisis; you said Mexico was going to pay for the wall; you said covid was going to kill a negligible number of people; etc, etc. (Those last two "you"s were specifically Trump.) Hell, I could go farther back: Ronald Reagan's first big debut in politics was arguing that medicare would lead to a communist-style tyranny and destroy freedom in the U.S.
I appreciate Scott's efforts (and willingness, and ability) to talk sense across these lines. But I think that part of that is recognizing that the amount of lying on BOTH sides has been crazy. Obviously we have different views about the balance: I think there's been more lying on the conservative side, you'd probably say the reverse, so let's just say it's both and remind ourselves of the fundamental attribution error (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
That said, I don think that there is a distinction worth making: namely, distinguishing mainstream voices from fringe ones. On my side, neither major politicians (Biden/Pelosi/Obama/etc) nor journalist voices (your pick of NYT columnists) said anything about a piss tape. But it was Reagan who said medicare would end American freedom, Bush who said Iraq had WMDs and Trump who said Mexico would pay for his wall. I am not saying that all liberal lies are from fringe voices (the covid messaging was pretty deceptive at times, although not always), and am certainly not saying you couldn't find lunacy on the fringe right far beyond what even Trump says. But it's an important distinction to make, I'd argue.
But fundamentally, we live in a polarized society in which each side sees the other as fundamentally unconcerned with the truth. The response to this should not be to dismiss everything the other side says, but to read/listen to both sides, and decide each individual issue on the merits as best as we can (with, of course, a recognition that there are also both genuine mistakes and reasonable beliefs which change with new data as well as lies at play.)
>I think it's worth noting that the average liberal (I don't know if I am the average liberal, but I'm close) would say the same thing in reverse. You said that Iraq had WMDs; you said that deregulation would be a good thing and then we got the 2008 bank crisis;
I think this strengthens their point: The cons had a string of failures that discredited them back then, the libs became ascendant, and had their own string of failures and now we're here
>Ronald Reagan's first big debut in politics was arguing that medicare would lead to a communist-style tyranny and destroy freedom in the U.S.
I mean, if you add Social Security to that, I'd say you shouldn't count it out yet.
"A private email server is an unimaginably awful security breach" hasn't aged too well.
The sad thing is that the Clinton emails fiasco really was a disqualification; but our standards have dropped so much since. Never thought I’d find myself wishing we could go back to Bush.
The correct conclusion is that lying is endemic in politics. Which is why we should use futarchy instead.
PEPFAR's not our team! It's your team! George W. Bush is not a liberal!
Until Trump noticed PEPFAR, PEPFAR was a bipartisan program because it was extremely popular among conservative evangelicals, because it was created by a conservative evangelical president in response to conservative evangelical concerns about the global poor. The liberals haven't done anything a tenth as good. I don't know why evangelicals have gone insane, but the liberals are just stewarding the program until the evangelicals return to their senses and start gloating about how the conservative concern for government efficiency saved millions of babies while the libs were fussing around with DEI for shrimp.
The Republican base has become increasingly isolationist since the 2010s at the least. RINO is not a new insult.
My point is, if you squint your eyes to see things how the populists would, you can understand why they regard PEPFAR as liberals spending money to help foreigners instead of Americans.
If you say "PEPFAR is not a populist program," then I'm not going to write a long screed complaining about that. But it's insane to have a definition of "liberal" in which George W. Bush is a liberal. Especially if you're also (correctly!) criticizing liberal fearmongering about McCain and Romney. There is no world where Mitt Romney is a true conservative non-RINO and Bush is basically a Democrat.
What? Romney is a RINO too. You have to realize that Trump (and by extension, the new Republican party) aren't conservative, they're revolutionaries. Anyone seeking to protect the old order is an enemy.
I don't think they've gone insane, they just realized that they hate Africans more than they like pretending to care about human lives.
I think the balance of the evidence about 2000s-era evangelicals suggests that they did, in fact, genuinely care about Africans and human lives.
>Until Trump noticed PEPFAR,
To be fair I don't think Trump noticed PEPFAR at all. He was aiming at taking out left wing NGOs and PEPFAR happened to be in the blast radius.
First, I will just point out that "people make overstated and hyperbolic claims about the policies of their political opposition" is not some unique pathology of the left. Everyone does it, all the time, throughput human history.
But to respond to one specific point
> he won't be allowed to use the power he got elected to have.
He was not elected to have this power. He was elected President of the United States, which under our constitutional system does not have the power of the purse. PEPFAR is a program authorized by the US Congress and the President does not have the legal power in our system to just decide he doesn't like the program and refuse to spend the money. It's current authorization expires in March, if he believes its a bad program then fine, he can use his influence to get congress to not reauthorize it. But what he is doing now is very clearly illegal.
But people elected him in the hopes that he would upend the system. In that sense, he was elected to have power that supersedes the old order.
No, he was elected President in the normal way that people are elected President. People had all sorts of reasons for voting for him, but the question on the ballot was definitely not “Should we give Donald Trump dictatorial power not beholden to any law” If that WAS the question on the ballot and a majority said yes then that would something different.
It doesn't matter if it was on the ballot or not. Democracy is a system of compromise, not justice. It prevents conflict by making sure the minority does not needlessly waste their lives fighting fights they cannot win. Thus, the majority always has the final say.
> Thus, the majority always has the final say.
Just to be pedantic, a majority of Americans actually voted for someone other than Trump for President.
> It doesn't matter if it was on the ballot or not.
Of course it matters. People were voting for a President, a job which is supposed to be defined by our laws and have limited powers. If he is doing things that are explicitly not within legal power of a President then that is not what people voted for. Imagine you voted for someone to be the treasurer of your town. If they then proceeded to steal all the town's money to build themselves a mansion, would you just shrug and say "well the people voted for him"?
Wait what? He won the polular vote this time. Are you saying that the vote was rigged?
Edit: Huh, apparently he was a minority majority. Well, third party votes are equivalent to not voting, so I don't see it as particularly relevant. If they wanted a voice, they could've had it.
> If they then proceeded to steal all the town's money to build themselves a mansion, would you just shrug and say "well the people voted for him"?
If doing that was part of his political campaign, yes, yes I would.
The US and.most democracies is constitutionally constrained with limitations on powers, not a raw.majority-can-do-what-they-like system.
You mean he was elected to.do things a president is not allowed to? Or to be more radical.in the same framework?
This is a helluva comment which has way more salience than I (as a firm Never Trumper) would like. Any objection if I share it to my Notes feed and -- maybe, if I have the nerve -- with a few close relatives?
No, I don't mind if you share to whoever. Thanks for the compliment.
Why not use the saved money to reduce the national debt?
Or give it back to the people it was taken from? Maybe some of them have brothers in need.
I think the best way to think about that is that reducing the debt is a federal program that we could spend money on. It’s not the least valuable program to spend money on, but I don’t think there’s any clear indication that it’s *so* valuable that it’s more worthy of funds than the *average* federal program.
>but I don’t think there’s any clear indication that it’s *so* valuable that it’s more worthy of funds than the *average* federal program.
I think there's plenty of indication:
* Debt to GDP ratio is the highest it's been in a long time
* Interest on debt is becoming the largest item in the US Budget
* This, if unadressed, is likely to trigger a debt crisis which would, at best, greatly reduce Americans' purchasing power, through debasement of their currency.
Unless, by virtue of them being the biggest, you consider the average federal program to be Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense Spending, it does seem better than average (and even then, I definitely think you could do with some cuts to social security, but that's very unlikely to happen)
Given the benefits of reducing the debt, I agree it’s quite valuable. But again, you have to compare the cost. It’s not cheap to reduce the debt by a trillion dollars a year. And is it *so* beneficial that it’s worth cutting a trillion dollars of other programs? Some of those programs, yes. But again, this is one priority among many.
I think most of what the government spends money on is stuff that it shouldn't, thus reducing the debt is superior to most of that.
Convincing Rebublicans that they should do that would be a good first step. Right now their plans are to massively explode the deficit, and the only disagreement is "how high?"
I would argue that money not spent does not just sit there, there is no money to sit, as manifested by the huge amount of debt we are in.
It’s useful to think of cutting debt as just another program to fund. It’s a better program than some, but not the very best program to fund. I don’t think there’s any reason to think it’s better than the average government program, even though it’s surely better than some.
Does it bother you even a little bit that PEPFAR was yoked to a lot of idiocy so it could be used as a distractor to prevent the idiocy from being threatened?
Is it really the right response to such a thing to acquiesce to this trick in order to avoid a potential temporary slowdown in the good aid programs in order to separate them from the bad ones they have been yoked to?
Do the tricksters who do this bear the moral fault or do Elon and Trump bear the moral fault for not respecting the PEPFAR human shields? (And whose fault was it that those PEPFAR human shields had been corralled into such an extremely time-dependently sensitive relationship to USAID that their health was actually threatened by a few days of administrative confusion?)
In what sense was it yoked to idiocy?
If you mean that the same government that did PEPFAR also did lots of idiotic things, trust me, the government that's canceling PEPFAR is also going to do a lot of idiotic things.
If it were me, instead of canceling everything the first week, I would take two months to ask people which things were idiotic, then cancel the idiotic ones (doesn't have to be some kind of sinister hard-to-interpret experts - I could have told them this one myself). I'd even be fine if they erred on the side of canceling too much, as long as it's an error and not the intended outcome!
Not just “the same government”, but the same AGENCY (USAID), which was a slush fund for things like color revolutions and laundering money to politicians’ cronies, AND WHICH TRIED TO block access to information about its own disbursements to Trump’s incoming auditors (the only reason an immediate *suspension* of USAID activity was needed was that mutinous resistance was occurring, a thing Trump had vowed would be immediately nipped in the bud this time around).
Man, you parse this differently from me. To me, color revolutions seem like a CIA/DoD project meant to help the American people by screwing over its enemies. I think it's slightly dangerous to the charity arm to force it to also prop up our country's own selfish interests, but I hardly think it's treason or anything.
I strongly disagree with this statement about "color revolutions". The two I saw closest (in Ukraine) had not much CIA/DoD/xyz in it - esp. not direct and not directly relevant. Oh, one of my friends taught some of the students who started a demonstration on Maidan. Oh, his salary was mostly paid by a western NGO? So what? Your politology-students are angry about their gov. - you let them have a discussion, they ask for advice, you shrug and tell them: One option is to do a protest (fun fact: they knew anyways). - To twist that into "CIA staged 2014" is ... stinky BS. What I see from far - Belorus or Georgia - looks same.
Also, I doubt US-agencies are competent to do relevant stuff there - just far too slow moving. It has been some decades: how much CIA involvement in the protest in East-Germany 1954 (or 1989/90) ? How much DoD in Prague 1968? In Budapest? Even Solidarnosc? Even the Arab spring - oh sure, facebook and phones were invented by the CIA. (Edit: US-agencies was "USAID", slip of mind)
The CIA used to help overthrow socialist governments in Latin America all the time. The point was to win the Cold War. That ultimately did happen, though was it caused by the CIA? Eh, who knows?
Not an expert, but heard it often and sounds likely to me. Monroe-doctrine and all. "Indochina" is obviously also a clear and - not so subtle - example, though outside the Americas the US agencies famously blundered their "help" (similar: Africa). We can assume the US tried as hard as it could in Iraq before and after occupying/liberating it - no one seems to care to tell THAT story, as nothing had come out of it (similar: Iran). - In modern day Europe, they seem to have learned not to mess things up. Sending peace-corps volunteers to Ukraine did not "trigger" any revolution - it's what you do; my country sent me to Russia and Ukraine to help teaching German. Made me a spy or an agent for system-change? Wished it did. ;)
I think that people in Eastern Europe are quite capable of hating Russia even without CIA involvement. It may sound weird to edgy right-wing Americans who take their information about the world from Russia Today, but maybe reading about Holodomor on Wikipedia could be a good starting point.
+1 Well said. Will quote in future.
I don't think of the CIA as actually helping the American people. The DoD also devotes little of its efforts to "defense" of America either.
Some fraction of USAID money (on the order of ~$500 million? So a lot to a normal person; not a lot in the scale of the US government) was going to NGOs that promoted illegal immigration, teaching them the magic words, etc.
Also not everyone is a universalist like you.
Why not shut down *those* programs then?
This is about on par with saying "occasionally cops kill innocent people, so we should have no law enforcement whatsoever"
I wasn't arguing that the DOGE shut it all down and restart method was correct; my comment was aimed just at Scott's, that some fraction of the "charitable arm" is acting against American interests and in ways many Americans might call treasonous.
I think he's taking an overly-rosy view and it doesn't help his case.
USAIDs payments were and are public.
In left wing spaces right now all the news is "PEPFAR gone, millions will die!" In right wing spaces the news is "USAID paid $1.5 million to a Serbian NGO to promote DEI in Serbian workplaces, $70,000 to produce a DEI musical in Ireland, $2.5 million for electric vehicle subsidies in Vietnam, $47,000 for a 'transgender opera' in Columbia, $32,000 for a 'transgender comic book' in Peru, $2 million for transgender clinics and 'LGBT activisin' in Guatemala, etc". It's pretty obvious that the funding freeze is all about cutting off patronage funds to left wing NGOs and programs like PEPFAR were just caught in the crossfire. Definitely a point in favor of taking time to figure out the bad ones before shutting everything down, but the Trump admin seems to be going with a "move fast and break things" strategy.
> in favor of taking time to figure out the bad ones before shutting everything down
I don't see it. If you care about cutting off patronage funds to your enemies' allies, and don't care about PEPFAR one way or the other, what's the problem? Of course the other side will wail about PEPFAR, because they want both, and it's not politically advantageous to publicize the patronage.
The problem is that it allows your political opponents to accuse you of killing hundreds of thousands of Africans. Even if you don't care about PEPFAR including it in the blast radius give your opponent's ammunition to use against you. I can see the advantages of moving fast and broad, but one of the disadvantages is that it takes media focus away from the patronage funds and towards programs that are more popular and you weren't planning on cutting anyway.
It's also a problem that delays in funding might actually "kill someone" at which point your political opponents now have martyrs to try to beat you over the head with. (It would also be a moral problem to do something that results in people dying when you could have done it in a way where they don't die, but I wanted to focus on the political problems. Especially as we don't know if anyone is likely to die from doing it the fast and broad way.)
> The problem is that it allows your political opponents to accuse you of killing hundreds of thousands of Africans.
And again, why would Trump's base care about this? They already have majority power, they have no reason to care what the minority thinks of them. If they do resort to violence, well... Now you have an opportunity to purge the opposition.
Trumps base may not care, but many Americans will care and their votes count to. The Democrats want the average American to see Trump as causing chaos and disaster, and PEPFAR disruption is a decent weapon for that purpose. The Republican's have a small majority in the House and an alright majority in the Senate because the average American currently prefers Republicans. Giving your opponents ammunition to change the average American's mind about that is always a problem. It may be worth the cost, but it's still a problem.
Some of the chaos has been bad enough that even congressional Republicans criticized it. And I'm sure there's a lot more they're too afraid to say.
People who signed up for "boo trans people" or "boo inflation" aren't going to like it when the checks stop going out. It might be fashionable to hate on government in the abstract, but when confronted with the actual reality of destroying government, you're going to lose support VERY fast.
They were going to accuse you of something like that whatever you did. The details don't seem that relevant. I actually heard a lot more about his DOGE team accessing the Treasury's database than about PEPFAR, so they seem to have assessed (correctly, imo) that their target audience cares more about that than the deaths of "hundreds of thousands of Africans."
I don't think them getting martyrs to use as a weapon helps them all that much. They seem to have made a lot of hay out of the physical appearance of his DOGE team, and I think that's hard to top.
Yes, the enemy will always attack you. That doesn't mean that you should make it easier for them, or that making it easier for them to attack you isn't a problem.
> It's pretty obvious that the funding freeze is all about cutting off patronage funds to left wing NGOs and programs like PEPFAR were just caught in the crossfire
Why is that obvious? The most likely explanation is that they did what they want to do. If they cancelled PEPFAR it's because they wanted to cancel PEPFAR.
> In right wing spaces the news is
I'm willing to believe we spend money on dumb stuff but I have seen many cases of conservatives making lists like this and then when someone investigates it turns out to be a mischaracterization of something way more sensible. Like I remember awhile back someone saying they were spending money on, like, "the sex lives of worms" or something, and it was really a program to figure out how to sterilize some invasive species that was killing crops, or something like that.
Anyway DEI in Serbia seems good.
>The most likely explanation is that they did what they want to do. If they cancelled PEPFAR it's because they wanted to cancel PEPFAR.
I agree: the best explanation for why they are making sure PEPFAR isn't canceled with the rest of them is because they didn't want to cancel PEPFAR.
>I'm willing to believe we spend money on dumb stuff but I have seen many cases of conservatives making lists like this and then when someone investigates it turns out to be a mischaracterization of something way more sensible.
Everything listed could be a lie but the point would remain: the Republicans are not crowing about cancelling PEPFAR, they're crowing about cancelling "dumb stuff". Even if it's not true it tells us what the Republican focus is on the whole funding freeze.
My understanding is they un-cancelled PEPFAR because a bunch of evangelical Christian groups actually do care and raised a big stink and that's their constituents.
> the point would remain: the Republicans are not crowing about cancelling PEPFAR, they're crowing about cancelling "dumb stuff"
"The Republicans" could mean various things. If it means the rank-and-file ... perhaps it's what they're focusing on, but rank-and-file partisan types tend to, in the first instance, ignore negative news about their side. And given my point about evangelical groups at least some Republicans are pro-PEPFAR. But if "the Republicans" means *the people in charge* on the Republican side, apparently what they wanted is to cancel PEPFAR.
>But if "the Republicans" means *the people in charge* on the Republican side, apparently what they wanted is to cancel PEPFAR.
The Republican's in charge are the ones who are crowing about the "dumb stuff": that list I quoted earlier is from a White House press release, and Republican congress-critters have been repeating the same list of items in speeches for the last few days. What evidence do you have that what the Republicans really wanted to do was cancel PEPFAR? The only evidence you've presented is that PEPFAR funds were frozen along with all other funds in USAID. The fact that PEPFAR has been cleared to keep existing while all the "dumb stuff" is getting cancelled is strong evidence that the "dumb stuff" was their aim and PEPFAR wasn't.
Why not just shut down *those* programs then?
This is about on par with saying "occasionally cops kill innocent people, so we should completely defund all of law enforcement, and maybe hire some of them back in a few months"
>Why not just shut down *those* programs then?
That seems to be what the Trump admin is doing. They froze everything and are now vetting one by one. Programs like PEPFAR have passed and won't be shut down.
Like you said, they froze *everything*. Musk bragged about feeding USAID "into the woodchipper", and they've shut down many other things too, like most science funding, even completely non-objectionable stuff.
At some point, they might try to restart some of that, but shutting something down for weeks causes irreparable damage even if you *don't* lock everyone out and try to destroy the whole organization. When you stop paying people, they're forced to look for new jobs so they can eat and pay rent. When you stop paying for medicine, people die. Food aid rots in the ports (this is something a REPUBLICAN senator criticized Trump for) etc.
Something similar is playing out with the deportations (which I totally support, so I'm not even endorsing the should-be-criminals-only view).
A local reporter actually did some actual reporting - went down to Home Depot where the illegals stand at the edge of the parking lot under what little shade there is, and hope to get picked up for day labor. They all said there had not been much work the past few months; that was what they worry about. Asked if they were worried about being picked up by ICE, they said (in Spanish) no, that they believe ICE would focus on criminals, and since they weren't criminals, they didn't feel they would be in its sights.
Meanwhile, the high schools are letting the kids out to protest, probably permanently; and there's a protest at the Capitol, and much hand-wringing because deportations are such an existential threat to the entire Hispanic population lol.
I'd like them to be more specific: tell us the names of Tren de Aragua members, for instance, that they wish to remain here. Or which Chinese traffickers of indentured slaves.
Are you asking why Trump and Musk yoked PEPFAR to other programs in their cuts? Or why PEPFAR is run out of an agency that does foreign aid?
As for your last question about whose fault it is that PEOFAR recipients are in a time-sensitive relationship with medication, I think it’s the HIV virus’s fault. No human decided that you have to take the medication regularly - everyone would rather have a medication that works long term and allows big gaps between doses.
That’s a strange way to misrepresent what I am saying.
I am NOT SAYING that PEPFAR aid recipients don’t have to take their medication every day!
I am ONLY SAYING that it’s extremely unusual for patients who have to take a medication every day to be vulnerable to a few days of administrative confusion-normally they BOTH have a reserve of spare pills available, AND their doctor or clinic doesn’t suddenly lose access to all drug supplies from all suppliers if some faraway organization has a change in leadership.
This isn’t a few days - it’s supposed to be a 90 day pause, and the officials were told to stop sending supplies. The clinic probably has supplies for a week or two, but if the staff isn’t supposed to come into the clinic that’ll cause problems.
It was fully resolved within a few days. And the USAID is not the only supplier of those medications, they are available everywhere for people who can afford them, and doctors and pharmacies everywhere are used to dealing with insurance changes and administrative changes and other hiccups in such a way that it takes much more than a few days for any patients to “run out” of necessary meds.
Wired says it was not resolved:
https://www.wired.com/story/usaid-researchers-email-access/
Issuing a waiver for a program is a little irrelevant if you lock out and fire everybody running it.
The 'idiocy' as you call it is the entire point of foreign aid.
Foreign aid is not about deadloss charity, as Scott frames it here.
Foreign aid is about soft power projection across impoverished nations around the globe.
It always is and always has been a tool for statecraft, either by being used directly as leverage in negotiations to get favorable deals and considerations from poor nations, or as you say as a mask for more sinister operations that need to move a lot of money in foreign areas without a lot of scrutiny.
We can talk about whether the US should be projecting soft power in these ways, but if we want that discussion we should have it openly. Pretending that PEPFAR being associated with such things is a knock against the program is missing the point; that is what it was created to do in the first place.
Pause, review, validate, prioritize, resume the good stuff, kill the bad stuff
One day you're going to be diabetic, and your insurance company will say they're pausing your insulin for six months to "review, validate, and prioritize", and then six months later they'll send your corpse a nice letter saying "we decided insulin was necessary after all!"
I think probably what they actually did (pause it for one day, realize they made a huge mistake when everyone screamed really loud, restart it) was fine (though I'm not sure! Probably there were real disruptions to a program that 100,000s of lives depend on!). But this only worked because lots of people screamed really loud, and I am proud to be one of those people.
My point was that you do this once when you discover that, in among the wonderful things you’re doing, there is some serious amount of very dubious, wasteful, even damaging activity as well. Given the fungibility of all the resources that are going into this scheme if you don’t pause, etc., then you’ll never have the opportunity to fix anything. It rather looks like DOGE has revealed a specific trigger point with regard to USAID that deserves this kind of once-in-a-lifetime response.
The question remains: Why do you have to just pause everything while you review, when you can't even spend the money the pause presumably saves until the next budget decision? The disruption and uncertainty the pause causes cannot possibly be worth whatever its benefits are, especially if the reviewers are that uninformed about what the stuff they're reviewing is doing.
Because of enemy action, obviously. You can't review hostile bureaucracy in a timely manner while it runs as usual, as it will obfuscate and frustrate you at every turn.
How? Why does pausing the programs magically make the "hostile bureaucracy" unable to stymie your efforts? Are you just going to fire everyone while you review? If so, how do you plan to restart the good programs with nobody to run them. None of this makes sense
I don't think they fired anyone yet?
You put everyone on paid leave, lock them out of their paperwork and computer systems so they won't be able to interfere with the review, then fire those who deserve it, and everybody else resumes work. Also, people will scream with righteous indignation particularly loudly about actually valuable programs (as we witness here), which would also provide useful evidence.
Honestly, a lot of people, probably quite a few over here, will be able to just pay the fees and sort it out with the insurance company later.
I don’t think that pausing for one day and restarting is working yet, because they haven’t unpaused all the other funds that are needed to run this.
A reason why medication should be paid for directly by consumers rather than insurance.
That's a fully generalized counterargument to any institutional or policy change that can potentially cost lives in the short term. Including, say, a hypothetical scheme to replace insurance with whatever policy that ends up lowering the cost of and increasing the availability of insulin in the long run.
What value does pausing have, other than making sure a bunch of babies now have HIV that wouldn't otherwise have had it?
You can still send Musk around to get everybody's SSNs and the new bluechecks can misinterpret publicly available data without pausing everything.
Wow, how did no one ever think of that before?
They might have, but lacked the will to carry it out.
This matches very well with my intuition, which has long maintained when someone utters a sentence of the form of "we should stop funding X and give that money to Y instead," the only correct way to interpret that sentence is "we should stop funding X." They do not care about Y. If they cared about Y, they would just be advocating for Y. The only reason Y is in that sentence at all is to try to make X look worse by comparison.
Also I'm no expert but I don't think government processes (outside of *maybe* two items both in the discretionary budget of a single agency) actually allow you to just take money from one place and move it to another. You can argue for funding Y. You can argue for cutting funding to X. But they are separate arguments which stand or fall independently (which is as it should be).
The analysis about what would happen with this hypothetical unspent money is essentially incorrect.
If the US did not spend that $6 billion dollars, that would not result in the federal government spending that $6 billion elsewhere, because congress hasn't authorized more money for those other programs. The marginal effect would be to reduce the federal deficit by $6 billion dollars. This means that the treasury would borrow $6 billion less that year in order to have enough money to fund what it does spend money on.
This means that investors who buy treasury bonds in order to finance the US' deficit spending will instead invest their $6 billion elsewhere. Who are these investors buying treasury bonds? Some of them are:
- The Federal Reserve. If the Federal Reserve buys $6 billion less in treasury bonds in a year, that means that the money supply is effectively reduced by $6 billion, resulting in a tiny amount less inflation. This means that everyone who holds cash sees the value of their cash increase (or, decrease less) ever-so-slightly.
- Institutional investors like banks, mutual funds, pensions. If these investors buy $6 billion less in treasury bonds, that means they're investing their money elsewhere. Then the marginal change is to increase the amount of money invested in other similar low-risk investments in the US. Think more loans for (and thus lower interest rates for) mortgages, state and municipal bonds, corporate bonds, etc.
- Foreign investors. They will invest their money in something else, possibly not in America.
So, in summary, the actual marginal consequence of not spending that $6 billion dollars is that that $6 billion will be invested elsewhere, in similar low-risk investments such as mortgages, state and municipal bonds, corporate bonds, and foreign government bonds, by investors who would have otherwise invested purchased treasury bonds. There may also be a slight rise in consumption if interest rates on investments are lowered some. You may or may not think that those uses of the money are more valuable that PEPFAR.
I'm assuming that Congress has some idea how big the existing deficit is when they decide whether or not to pass new bills, and that eventually cutting old programs makes them think they have room to pass new ones.
I think they spend more money whenever they can, which is why the deficit has got to the place where it is.
I think this is the right way to think about all government spending. But unless you’re someone who thinks that this alternative is better than almost *any* government spending, it would be surprising if it turned out to be better than PEPFAR.
The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Niger is 5.79, its population has increased from 11m to 27m in 25 years and and the country imports 41% of its food.
Thus, while canceling PEPFAR and allowing people to die of AIDS now seems harsh, one could argue that the demographic landscape is already incredibly unsustainable, and all PEPFAR may be doing is kicking the demographic can down the road slightly until extreme civil strife and/or famine absolutely ravage the region, and enormous numbers of people die in various nasty and brutish ways.
It could be argued, that in the long run (generations), that if we feel we must interfere - lowering the fertility, raising the drought resistant food output, and letting AIDS run its course might be a more pragmatic approach.
If Niger has a food supply problem, why not address that, without touching PEPFAR spending? The idea that, because there's a risk of famine, one should hope for a plague to forestall it is pretty wild. There isn't a famine now, so it's like if Scrooge had said, "If they are not going to die, they had better do it."
You've glanced up against a controversial take here :
Implementing agricultural reforms, administering health care, fostering cultural change in family planning - it all sounds a lot like we're taking over Niger?
I didn’t say anything about fostering cultural change in family planning. And we’ve helped many countries, including with technical innovations, without “taking them over.” I don’t even know if Niger is at risk of famine as you say. What I’m saying is that “if a famine is coming let AIDS run its course” simply makes no sense, because the reason to prevent famine is to prevent people from dying horribly and needlessly, which is the same reason to prevent plague.
I tried to address this at my longer post at https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/1886505797502546326?mx=2:
(4) DOESN'T SAVING THE LIVES OF POOR PEOPLE JUST CAUSE THEM TO BREED AND CREATE MORE POOR PEOPLE? I think this is false for places like India and South America, which have below replacement fertility rates. It's more true in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are still above replacement, but getting less so - their TFR will be below breakeven in about a generation.
I think in the sub-Saharan African case, there are two opposite effects. First, giving an individual more money causes them to have more kids. Second, making a country richer causes the people there to have fewer kids (this is why Congo's TFR is 6 and Singapore's is 1.04). All charity is some combination of helping individuals and making a country richer. Even curing disease is like this, partly because its long term goal is to eliminate the disease (which would be great for the country) and partly because raising a potential worker to age 25 is a big investment, having that worker die at age 25 means you have to write the whole thing off as a loss, and that's as bad for GDP as losing any other big investment. I don't know for sure whether these two effects cancel out, or which one is more important.
If you told me the pro-fertility effect was stronger, I would count that as mark against global health programs, but not an infinitely large one. A lot of this is driven by what I said before about imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents just as much. If I can prevent that at the cost of pushing back the sub-Saharan African fertility breakeven point six months or five years or whatever, I still think that's a good trade. If you disagree, there are lots of non-sub-Saharan-African-global-health charities you can donate to.
>A lot of this is driven by what I said before about imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents just as much
That seems like a dubious assumption for numerous reasons. But a steelman version would be something like:
>Imagining how devastated I would be if my kids died, and then considering that every kid who dies of malaria devastates their parents at least a tenth as much.
You can make arguments about the extreme effectiveness in PEPFAR, even with significant adjustments for differences between populations.
>DOESN'T SAVING THE LIVES OF POOR PEOPLE JUST CAUSE THEM TO BREED AND CREATE MORE POOR PEOPLE?
That claim also sneaks in the assumption that life as a poor person is so bad as to be not worth living. Why exactly is more poor people a bad thing, if they live happy lives and only cost a trivial amount of resources? If the population of Africa was 4x what is is now, and PEPFAR cost 0.4% of the federal budget, it would be...still a pretty good deal?
Maybe the "vast swaths of poor people" argument would make sense if foreign aid was on the verge of crippling the American economy, and we just couldn't bear the cost, but come on. PEPFAR is like $10-20 per year per American! The demographic explosion that's going to bankrupt is, unfortunately, well-off geriatrics in Florida collecting social security checks and using Medicare.
A male and female are in a prison and given a set number of calories for only two adults to survive on.
They admit they will always feed themselves first. Should they have children?
Most of the starvation in Africa happens in conflict prone regions where it is difficult to import food. In relatively peaceful areas, people in general are not starving.
It will be very interesting to see how the demographic transition plays out in SSA considering the association in many SSA cultures between fecundity and social status. It would be wildly interesting if the TFR there ever went as low as South Korea's.
"Many studies (n = 48) found that having many children can bring social status and prestige to families and communities."
https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-023-01627-7
"Second, making a country richer causes the people there to have fewer kids (this is why Congo's TFR is 6 and Singapore's is 1.04)."
The non-3rd world did not have children in a negative resource environment for decades. It is immoral behavior toward their own children, stop enabling it. If you disagree, there are lots of sub-Saharan-African-global-health charities you can donate to.
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1888708803367170515
Interesting case where the fertility dropped before the nation became 'wealthy'
...and Niger's per-capita GDP is also up 4.4x from 25 years ago. It may be hard for you to believe, but most of Africa is on the same upward economic trajectory as much of Asia in the mid-20th century.
Plus, if you were truly humanitarian-minded and worried about population growth, you'd advocate for additional funding for family planning, not mass death and suffering. "Letting AIDS run its course" is ghoulish and sadistic when it can be treated for a trivial amount of money.
Malthusian arguments have just never been proven true in reality.
Every person who survives is another laborer with the potential to contribute to the economy.
If you randomly kill 10% of the population, you don't suddenly make everyone else 10% richer because now there is more to go around. You at teh very least shrink the economy by 10% because you killed 10% of the workers, and more likely you shrink it by 40% because critical people in a pipeline or supply chain being lost disrupts the entire chain, and people are displaced because their family lost a breadwinner or they are leaving work to go into mourning, or etc.
And this is only exacerbated if instead of killing them immediately, you give them a slow wasting disease that kills them over years during which their family has to care for them and provide for them.
So, no, letting people die to avoid famine does not work, and making people healthy and strong does not create famine. It is just straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly good to save people from death and disease.
Malthusianism was an accurate description of human existence prior to the life of Malthus.
My family is in danger from the national debt. So's yours. 60-80% is a safe debt-to-GDP ratio. The US is at 123%. This article reads like it comes from an alternate universe where governments never have debt crises. Where interest rates don't affect anybody's lives. Where no country has ever played chicken with macroeconomic forces and ditched just a smidge too late.
Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts. If I thought there was any hope of decreasing the debt, I'd . . . well, I'd hope it would go for the worst government programs first, but I'd understand if they wanted to give everything a haircut. Getting rid of the best ones first, not touching lots of the stupid ones, and we all know they'll increase the debt anyway just seems dumb.
Trump is dumb. Also, our families are both in danger from the national debt.
Trump would do the tax cuts whether or not PEPFAR or USAID or whatever is defunded. When/if the debt goes up it would go up by an amount less the amount of whatever is defunded
I should be less flippant. Your ethical calculus ought to account for the fact that government spending influences macroeconomic reality, and that macroeconomics poses real danger to real people. There is an actual, real, not-hyperbolic trade-off between spending money on foreign aid and reducing the danger of economic catastrophe for US citizens by paying down the national debt instead. In the case of PEPFAR, it seems like the trade-off is obviously worth it.
"Trump obviously doesn't care about the debt or he wouldn't be promising massive tax cuts." Many who are right of center believe that tax rate cuts can improve the debt, (in specific situations and in general; in short term and long term contexts). If you have some specific reason to believe that those crowds are wrong, or that Trump is not amongst them, do tell. Otherwise this seems to be a bit unfair, no?
The Laffer Curve is real, but I don't think even Art Laffer himself is claiming that we're on the right side of it (admittedly, the tax code is complicated so some tax/benefit combos might be).
The only time we balanced the budget in my lifetime happened after Clinton raised taxes in 1993. He got punished for that in the midterms and no president since has dared taken a similar risk.
Taxes are not the only reason it went down, but GOP appeals to the Laffer Curve always ignore this one spectacular exception.
Interest rates were much higher then too, as was interest as a share of GDP.
Trump indeed doesn't care about debts, but taxes are not a solution to it.
https://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/11/15/econ-101-for-the-supercommittee/
I disagree. I believe Trump cares about debts. I even believe that Scott believes Trump cares about debt. I believe it is a rhetorical excess to say otherwise. Of course, there's a long list of priorities, and caring about debt (or changing debt by a marginal dollar) may be differently prioritized for him than for others, but to say he doesn't care (at all) strikes me as disingenuous. I mention it because Scott seems to want to evangelize to "the other side" and rhetorical excess that impugns the motivations of other side strike me as counterproductively divisive. One way for me to have indirectly made that point would be the Laffer curve. There's a nice article written by a Trump senior policy advisor arguing we are on the inefficient side, suggesting that the concept may be resonant with at least parts of Trump's circle. But the Laffer curve is just a tool to have made the point, and a bit beside the point. Incidentally, to clarify - I do believe that for many prospective marginal proposed changes in tax policy that we are on the right side of the Laffer curve (particularly when adjusting for effects after including growth), and that is not a rhetorical excess on my side.
Trump has said "I am the king of debt. I do love debt. I love playing with it"
Which specific proposed marginal changes to tax policy do you think will increase tax revenue?
FWIW Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio is over 250% and they seem to be muddling along okay.
The thing about debt to GDP is the context in which it occurs. If there were a a large country out there with a huge surplus, I'd be more worried. But China, India and pretty much of all of Europe have ratios above 75%.
The only countries with low ratios are economic weaklings like Russia and Afghanistan.
Japan is an interesting case! They get away with it because people there save a ton of money, much of it in the form of government bonds, and international investors use them as a stability hedge. They've also got a ton of deflationary pressure, so interest rates stay really low despite super inflationary monetary policy.
But other countries can't get away with that kind of thing. Even developed nations like Greece, for example. When the 2008 crisis hit, they were running a 129% debt-to-gdp ratio and had a huge unaccountable public sector. They went into a recession, lost a quarter of their GDP over 4 years, unemployment went to 25% and they had to be bailed out 3 times in a row.
So the interesting question is, how much leeway does being the world's reserve currency actually get us? And will we continue to be able to maintain that advantage in the face of BRICS? When the next economic downturn comes, are we going to be like Japan or like Greece?
I just think the chance that we're the next Greece is non-zero, and so it's wrong and bad to treat government spending programs as though they only trade off against other government spending programs. By all accounts, macroeconomic trends are cyclical, which means another 2008 is coming at some point; and every dollar of government deficit spending, no matter which program it funds, trades off very concretely against my personal safety from that coming crisis.
Goldman Sachs predicts a 15% chance of recession in the US this year.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/goldman-sachs-lowers-odds-us-recession-15-after-better-than-expected-jobs-report-2024-10-07/
Polymarket has 23% right now https://polymarket.com/event/us-recession-in-2025
Your family is also in danger from HIV taking over the world, and also from climate change, and also from asteroids. It’s true that the government debt poses *some* danger, but it would be strange to think that *this* danger is more pressing than several hundred thousand lives per year, especially when you are only averting $6 billion a year of the debt.
No, we in the US are not in danger from HIV taking over. Decades ago health authorities scared Americans into believing it would crossover to the majority population who didn't engage in IV drug use or sex between men, but it never did outside of sub-Saharan Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fumento#Heterosexual_AIDS Infectious diseases have more externalities than other health issues, but HIV specifically has limitations which prevent it from becoming endemic in the larger US population.
First of all, people have been making that exact argument for my entire life and probably before that, close to a half century at this point. No one has ever done anything to address the 'problem, and no crisis has ever emerged. It's a bunk argument that doesn't understand how the finances of a sovereign nation with fiat currency works, especially not if that nation is the US with all its unique advantages and relationships.
Second, as Scott says in the article - if what you cared about is the national debt, you'd be arguing to cut huge amounts in military spending or etc., not chiming in when someone says foreign aid is good.
Indeed, we should be cutting huge amounts of military spending, along with our gerontocratic welfare state.
We should cut huge amounts of military spending. I'm chiming in because I think Scott's ethical calculus should account for the risk of the US not being uniquely invincible to macroeconomic forces, as you both seem to think it is. 2008 seemed to showcase a distinct lack of US macroeconomic invincibility, to my memory.
And Clinton worked really hard to address the problem of the national debt. It was one of the signature achievements of his presidency. Look it up. It's not something Rush Limbaugh invented to scare you.
"I am happy to “concede” that if you face a choice between saving a stranger and saving your brother, save your brother! Or your cousin, or your great-uncle, or your seven-times-great-nephew-twice-removed. I’ll “concede” all of this, immediately, because it’s all fake; none of your relatives were ever in any danger. The only point of this whole style of philosophical discussion is so that you can sound wise as you say “Ah, but is not saving your brother more important than saving a complete stranger?” then doom five million complete strangers to death for basically no benefit while your brother continues to be a successful real estate agent in Des Moines."
This a million times over. Most debates with the "intellectual" right could be entirely dismissed by some version of this paragraph.
Right. But most people are not effective altruists. Most people are selfish. They care about their brother in Des Moines (assuming he didn't beat them up growing up or marry a much hotter spouse) but caring about people halfway across the world or shrimp is really much more something you do when you've got enough to spread around.
What if your brother has a passport and a libido? What if viruses are contagious? PEPFAR tamps down a global pandemic, which benefits everyone on the globe. Also, since what has happened here is political smoke and mirrors and zero actual change to the foreign aid budget (since Rubio is taking over their budget and absorbing it into State Department) we have near zero information about what Rubio will decide to do with PEPFAR in 90 days. Since PEPFAR buys the political support of African nations, and since Rubio and the administration remain interested in the deployment of power and influence internationally, my guess is that after missing three months worth of doses, little if anything about PEPFAR will change. The USAID “closure” is bureaucratic reorganization not shrinkage.
I'm saying why few people care, not why I don't. Your argument is excellent on the actual merits. I just think most people are too stupid or self-absorbed to care. We just got a president elected who promised to control inflation with tariffs.
A million times not this. How can anyone possibly on the same page advance that Singer point about the drowning child, and condemn another hypothetical as "all fake"? Have you ever seen a child drowning in a river, and do you realistically ever expect to? Whereas this is really about spending money on PEPFAR vs spending money on something else, and I can easily see myself spending money on life saving medical treatment for my children. So it turns out not to be all fake at all.
I'm pro PEPFAR, I donate monthly to an African children facing charity, but good causes are not helped by bad logic
Scott is a doctor, and his other lifesaving credentials are well-established. I know I've personally physically intervened to save a few lives (and many other, more minor acts of goodness towards strangers).
None of them were literally drowning children, but I don't take that to be your point.
None of that detracts from my point that there's a proximity element to moral obligations whether that's genetic or physical or (in the medical case) physical plus professional. We can argue that there shouldn't be, and about whether this principle justifies ending pepfar (it doesn't). My objection is purely and simply to shouty moral philosophers like Singer inserting fallacious analogies into the argument and getting away with it.
He's a psychiatrist, not an ER surgeon.
Are there any people who would be buying life-saving medication for their children if it weren’t for the dastardly use of a tiny fraction of the federal budget to save lives in Africa?
I could imagine there are people who would be buying life saving medication if they didn’t have to pay for social security, or for the military, but the amount they are paying for PEOFAR isn’t realistically affecting this.
>and I can easily see myself spending money on life saving medical treatment for my children.
By 'can see' you mean 'hypothetically'.
That was the whole point. The things you might imagine spending the money on instead are hypothetical. The people dying in Africa are not.
Also, good luck paying for your kids lifesaving medical care with the $17 that would be your share of this program.
I am that winner of life's lottery, a rich Englishman, so my share of PEPFAR is £0.00. But anyway people's money is their money; your "not very much" claim sounds no different from saying shoplifting from the supermarket is ok because what difference can it make to Walmarts bottom line?
As to your "hypothetical" point my children might not be ill yet but there's no guarantee they won't be, so perhaps I am building a contingency fund. Secondly I and most people would if necessary sell my house to save a child. As you don't seem to buy the proximity argument, have you already done that for the sake of these African children?
You're literally making Scott's point for him in answer to the key paragraph. Americans have made the reasonable decision, through their reps, to spend something like 0.3% of the budget of the richest nation in history to save the lives of 100s and 100s of thousands of poor people, mostly children, in destitute countries. Your dumb philosophical intellectual games and feeling of superiority are just you masturbating to your small mind in the corner. And Trump doesn't get to undo that decision by himself. He's not king.
So how does that work? President George W Bush initiating the scheme was a reasonable decision made by the American people via their reps, but President Donald Trump putting it on hold is something completely different? Was Bush king to a greater extent than Trump?
Uh yeah USAID exists through legislation
>But anyway people's money is their money; your "not very much" claim sounds no different from saying shoplifting from the supermarket is ok
Moving goalposts generally means you've conceded that your first argument was wrong.
We were talking about saving a foreign life vs saving your child's life, and whether this argument falls to Matt's objection about hypothetical vs. real-life harm.
If you agree that your objection to Matt's point was invalid for the reasons I gave, and instead want to start arguing that all taxation is theft so all government programs are immoral, then we can do that but I'm literally just going to link you to Scott's Non-Libertarian FAQ.
Both rude,and illogical. I wasn't making a new point, I was responding to your claim that there is not very much money at stake.
Which raises another issue. I donate, completely outside the tax system, to charities which benefit African children. You can claim not to believe that, but then we can have a bet about it under which the loser makes a large donation to a charity which benefits African children. I suspect that you would find that bet unappealing. Being an arse on the internet is not a substitute for putting your hand in your own pocket.
I think "taxation for foreign aid is theft" is a much more defensible claim than "all taxation is theft". With taxation for something like national defence, there's a plausible reason why all citizens have a moral duty to pay -- namely, that all who choose to live in a territory are choosing to benefit from their defence. Whereas if a program is used exclusively by Africans, then there isn't a clear reason why the obligation to pay for it should fall on people living in the US.
I feel like this accounting relies on much more paternalism than we should be comfortable in a democracy, and certainly much more than the type of libertarian who thinks any taxation is theft should accept from their government.
My formation is that in a democracy, the government largely does things that the citizens want it to do. And we judge what the government does by how much it satisfies the citizen's preferences about what it should do, rather than by some set of proxy measures of who it helps and how. In that sense, a preference to help citizen and a preference to help non-citizen are not qualitatively different from each other, they're just preferences to trade off with everything else.
I think that your formation relies on a sense that how it actually works is government takes you money and then uses it to care for you. This is more paternalistic because it implies that you are not a party to deciding how the government operates or what you it to do - the government succeeds if it uses your money to benefit you materially, and fails if it uses your money in ways that don't benefit you. To me this removes the role of democracy and citizen's preferences.
TBH, I immediately start by questioning the estimates of "lives saved" by any of these programs, or foreign aid (occurring private efforts) generally. The sources of the data are exactly the same NGOs and foreign governments who are receiving the stream of spending and goods. In areas where corruption is a way of life and no one can really audit the books.
So it works out to
1. NGO with a stake in the whole system does a small study in one area, reports some number that may or may not generalize (spoiler: it never does) about lives saved per dollar spent.
2. More NGOs, aid organizations, etc multiply that estimate by the top line spending number, not counting the 90+% "overhead" (ie bribes, kickbacks, normal overhead, political donations (I repeat myself)) and come up with BIG-NUMBER of lives saved, which is why no one can ever think of doing anything about these funding streams, including looking into them too deeply, because "think of the children".
Forgive me for being cynical, but all the incentives and evidence I've seen points to this being another Washington Monument strategy.
Such numbers (“25 million lives saved!”) — which this author cites without an ounce of skepticism — are no doubt cooked up in the same manner a methhead concocts his drug of choice. How in the world would such an organization ascertain this figure in the first place? HIV doesn’t always lead to AIDS, and even AIDS does not exactly kill one instantly… Anti-virals, moreover, don’t cure anyone of HIV or AIDS last I checked. Is this organization simply administering anti-viral drugs to symptomless HIV-positive Africans and then patting themselves on the back for saving black lives? I wouldn’t be surprised. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if in reality this much vaunted program doesn’t take more African lives than it saves. A disturbing thought, certainly, but there’s no end to the disturbing realities one can find these days if one goes looking with open eyes.
I don't know who you'd trust - I can find you statements confirming it by the New England Journal of Medicine, National Institute of Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, US Department of State, etc.
In case you're conservative and don't trust the liberal media, here's George W Bush saying it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI0ymilJYb0
And here's FOX News saying it: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-renewing-bush-era-program-africa-help-fend-off-russia-china-boost-national-security
And the Washington Times: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/14/we-must-save-pepfar-to-protect-most-vulnerable-fro/
And the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/counting-the-lives-an-aids-foreign-policy-helps-save-849a3b87
Also, it matches our evidence that AIDS deaths are going down in Africa (ie five million more Africans are alive than we would expect) which is really hard to fake (where do you hide five million Africans?)
I think if you spend about an hour researching this, you would find that there's basically universal consensus that what I say is true, and not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it. If you're not going to do an hour of research, why are you risking 5 million lives on your level of certainty that everyone else is wrong?
A quick look at the ungated pieces (FOX and wapo, both opinion pieces) reveals that they make assertive statements without actually citing primary sources. Credibility: 0. Those sources that are cited are exactly the same groups that have large, even existential incentives to...round up...their numbers. I'm not accusing anyone of actual malfeasance, just "too good to check" + it being extremely hard to actually get accurate data.
Beyond that--if this is such a great program, the pharmaceutical companies can make a really easy PR win by voluntarily continuing it. It's not like USAID actually was doing the actual production or administration of the drugs--they just provided money and facilitation, while siphoning off overhead.
If a hospital were considering whether to lay off an expensive surgeon, and someone pointed out that the surgeon was scheduled to perform a life-saving operation on a child tomorrow, it would be ridiculous and evil of the hospital board to say "well, it's just one afternoon of work, if saving the kid's life is so essential and the operation is such a good bet then if the surgeon has a heart he'll do it for free even after we fire him".
Your apparent notion that we have good data coming from large parts of Africa on overall mortality let alone cause of death is amusing but depressing. Are you concerned with the facts of the matter — ie in establishing what we can know that we know — or with propaganda and/or the suppression of your own intellectual curiosity in favor of some preexisting emotional attachment? I cite a pandemic-era NYT article as evidence of the poor state of affairs in regards to mortality data collection from Africa: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-deaths-underreporting.html
By the way, apart from the sheer problem of “counting the dead” throughout large and remote swathes of Africa, there are significant issues with determining causes of death, especially in connection to AIDS/HIV, which, might I remind you, does not itself cause death but can only be associated with death; that is, to put it another way, HIV/AIDS does not result in a universal set of mortality-causing symptoms that allows one to say unequivocally that it was the primary causeof death. See this paper for an overciew of the variety of causes of death associated with AIDS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7590652/#:~:text=In%20particular%2C%20malignancy%2Drelated%20death,2)
Given the considerable uncertainty surrounding these issues, and the immense technical difficulties involved with determining the facts of the matter in a way that would satisfy even a slightly conscientious observer, the mere hour of research you recommend hardly seems sufficient. Did you yourself spend more than an hour or were the George W. Bush speeches and newspaper articles you cited enough to slay all doubt?
>not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it
"*Even* Republicans have never denied that the Republican Party saved millions of lives" is a statement that implies a very strange world-model. Did you mean "not even Democrats have ever tried to deny it"?
I don't know who you'd trust - I can find you statements confirming it by the New England Journal of Medicine, National Institute of Health, Journal of the American Medical Association, US Department of State, etc.
In case you're conservative and don't trust the liberal media, here's George W Bush saying it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI0ymilJYb0
And here's FOX News saying it: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-renewing-bush-era-program-africa-help-fend-off-russia-china-boost-national-security
And the Washington Times: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/14/we-must-save-pepfar-to-protect-most-vulnerable-fro/
And the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/counting-the-lives-an-aids-foreign-policy-helps-save-849a3b87
Also, it matches our evidence that AIDS deaths are going down in Africa (ie five million more Africans are alive than we would expect) which is really hard to fake (where do you hide five million Africans?)
I think if you spend about an hour researching this, you would find that there's basically universal consensus that what I say is true, and not even Republicans have ever tried to deny it. If you're not going to do an hour of research, why are you risking 5 million lives on your level of certainty that everyone else is wrong?
Trump's own NIH head nominee (Jay Bhattacharya) also co-wrote a study back in the day confirming it saved 740,000 from 2004-08: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/05/740000-lives-saved-study-documents-benefits-of-aids-relief-program.html
This was a program entirely done by George W Bush. For years, liberals were trying to figure out ways to say it was ineffective. But reality won out and the conservatives were right - this was a highly effective program.
It wasn't entirely Bush. 2006 was still under Bush when it switched to generic drugs, increasing efficiency 10x, and effectiveness much more. But if Bush wanted to be effective, he would have done so from the start, rather than waiting to be embarrassed by Clinton and WHO using them.
Someone who values foreigners' lives and donates to charity could believe that governments shouldn't be spending public funds on non-nationals
They could, but in practice I have yet to meet such a person IRL.
In general, it turns out that wanting to help people and wanting the democratic government that you elect and pay for to help people is hugely correlated.
I understand that many people have no qualms about spending other people's money on their preferred projects. I just don't think the government should be empowered to take their citizens' money to use on causes that don't explicitly benefit their respective nationals no matter how many vote to do it (except maybe if it's 100% of the voters)
First of all, why should that be a principle? We're in a democracy, the principle is 'the government does things that the citizens want it to do'. I can see a principled position for 'all taxation is theft, you can't take money from anyone for anything they don't want.' But 'you can't take money from people for things they do want if those things help foreigners only'? Why?
Second, what do you mean by 'explicitly benefits'? By a strict enough definitions, lots of domestic programs don't fit that description. By a nuanced definition, all foreign aid including PEPFAR meets that description.
Of course, any right wing policies that voters want is "populism" and "antidemocratic" and "against norms" etc etc etc and any left wing policies are just democracy
>for anything they don't want
You thought I wouldn't notice you sneaking that part in there?
Anyways, I'll copy paste something I wrote in another comment:
I'm not a libertarian, but one thing I agree with them on is that it should not just be assumed that we should be okay with governments taking our money. This is the root of why many libertarians believe that taxation is theft - they question why we should be okay with governments taking our money, and reject the validity of the justifications given. The last bit is where I part from libertarians, at least the tax=theft kind
I recognize there are some things beneficial to members of our society that requires us to be compelled to collectively pay for them. Given that this is how I and similarly thinking people justify taxes, it is hopefully clearer to you why we are far more skeptical of the spending of public funds on foreigners - the funds are compelled from us in the name of our own benefit, not in the name of benefitting others some place else - and why spending public money on things like AIDS treatments for Africans looks to us like our money is being stolen to pay for your preferred charities
I am such a person, but since this isn't IRL I guess your statement hasn't been refuted. Perhaps if we ever attend the same meetup it will be!
Utilitarian logic just doesn't work. That's why SBF is in prison. It's wrong to take action to kill anyone foreigners or not, with only very unusual exceptions. It doesn't matter whether killing someone increases net utility. Similarly on taxes, they are involuntary. Arguments that can be applied to voluntary charities don't apply to taxes, because taxes are a violation of property rights. Any use of taxes should be decided based on democratic decision or an overriding emergency necessity. These programs are not democratic nor are they in response to an emergency.
I think this is a reasonable and consistent position, and it's not really the one I'm arguing against (it sounds like you think taxes to help foreigners and taxes to help countrymen are about equally bad).
I discuss this in a little more detail, and probably disagree with you a bit more, in my Point 1 near the end of https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/1886505797502546326?mx=2
Im banned on X, sorry. For "inauthentic behavior".
congrats, I suggest shopping the fediverse via ban lists
Just add "cancel" to the URL, like this:
https://xcancel.com/slatestarcodex/status/1886505797502546326?mx=2
I think of taxes as only being justified to help the population being taxed. And then, only when taxation is the only means of providing that help.
Quoting from your tweet:
"it's true that government charity is very inefficient, but government non-charity is also very inefficient"
There is good reason to think it's less efficient. It's Milton Friedman's distinction between buying your own lunch vs buying someone else's lunch vs buying someone else's lunch with someone else's money.
This is a very good post. I think you should post it here on Substack for posterity/sharability.
> These programs are not democratic nor are they in response to an emergency.
How is it not democratic? The people elected their congresspeople, collectively delegating decision-making authority to them, and those congresspeople then collectively agreed to fund PEPFAR in 2003, and then did so again in 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2024.
You don't delegate decision making power to congress by voting. If you don't vote, you don't suddenly gain decision making authority, you just sacrifice a powerful ability to influence politics. If it was delegation, non voters could go to congress and pass bills.
When I say democratically I mean whatever the current political process is. Thats for two reasons: (1) You can't clearly define democracy because it means too many different things in different countries, and even different things to different people in thr same country and (2) the only reason I care about democracy with regards to taxes that it makes revolt less likely, so the specific form doesnt matter. Sure, at the time congress passed these funding bills under the influence of the deep state, the deep state was democracy. Now democracy is algorithmic social media posting. Elon Musk is democratic because the algorithm says so. In the past democracy was robber barons telling people what to do in the newspaper. Then we had the agency media complex, where the agencies tell people through the media what to vote for. Now it's social media algorithms.
The FDR agency based post ww2 era of democracy is over. PEPFAR is a relic of a different time.
> You don't delegate decision making power to congress by voting. If you don't vote, you don't suddenly gain decision making authority, you just sacrifice a powerful ability to influence politics. If it was delegation, non voters could go to congress and pass bills.
No. You choose who your representative is; you have to delegate your votes to Congress for all the myriad reasons the founding fathers opposed direct democracy. They also opposed a tyrannical executive too, incidentally. Alas.
> Sure, at the time congress passed these funding bills under the influence of the deep state, the deep state was democracy.
The "deep state" is a horrifically bad mind-killing heuristic. Maybe Bush 2 actually thought, "Hey, things in Africa are really bad, I want to do something that can help Africans," spoke to Condeleezza Rice about the issue, who explained the biggest issue facing Africa was AIDS, and thus helped pass a bill which helped with AIDS, which became really successful? Like he wrote in his memoirs? If anything, a serious reading suggests that he was annoyed with "the deep state," since he repeatedly pushed for a better process over what was then being done, eventually giving highly specific orders about a focused, specific program with actionable goals and real measuring of the outcomes, rather than just bloating up the budget for bureaucrats.
Instead of, I don't know, the Deep State firing its mind control rays at him and Congress to convince them that saving babies from AIDS was good. There's an anecdote about the Nazis giving the Japanese a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Japanese going, "wow, these guys seem pretty badass, can we ally with them instead?" and that's me with all these imagined conspiracies. The world seems to be going pretty well, all in all - if the source of this isn't markets, rule of law, and democracy, but instead a shadowy cabal of ubermensch secretly pulling all the levers of power, then I'll have to reevaluate all my political opinions!
> Now democracy is algorithmic social media posting. Elon Musk is democratic because the algorithm says so.
So, you think that Congress would not pass a renewal of PEPFAR if it was put up to a vote in 2029? You think that they would vote for a bill to kill it if it were put to a vote now, in 2025? I can tell you that I have written to my Congresspeople to maintain PEPFAR, both now and in 2023 when there was a kerfuffle about the Mexico City policy. I actually even posted about it here and other places, to encourage others to do so as well. I certainly hope my Congresspeople would not vote for such a thing, and I would commit to permanently voting against them, and whoever they endorse, in both primaries and generals, if they did so.
But, to be clear, they haven't done so. All you guys constantly refer back to "oh, actually, this is just the will of the people." Okay. Then get Congress to vote to kill babies with AIDS, rather than having the President unilaterally do it.
I'll try to explain this again more clearly.
You don't delegate your vote to congress. When you vote, you're voting for a representative. That representative gets the same amount of power no matter how many votes they got. 51%? 90%? Doesn't matter. If instead it was a delegation, then the amount of power the representative would have would depend on the share of votes.
I don't really care whether it's called a deep state. Personally Id prefer to call our previous system agentic democracy, because of the importance state agencies played.
Frankly I don't take memoirs seriously and you shouldn't either. The writer has a huge incentive to assign themselves more agency than the agencies gave them. And to make themselves look better.
What drugs are you smoking?!? Mind control rays? Zionist Aids babies? Japanese Nazis?!? Where did you get the idea I believe in those things? Reign in your imagination a bit please, the world is not that exciting. Conspiracies are rather dull.
Okay, so you just can't read. I guess I should have figured you were thinking at a significantly lower cognitive level when you first proposed that the Deep State passed PEPFAR. My mistake.
Let me put it in simple words for you:
PEPFAR is good.
Killing PEPFAR is bad. It would cause a bunch of people to die of AIDS.
Killing PEPFAR is extra bad if you break the law to do it, since following the law is a useful bright line to keep society working.
Killing PEPFAR quickly, rather than slowly, is extra bad because nobody can do anything to help the people PEPFAR helped. For example, babies don't get HIV meds to keep them from getting AIDS.
Therefore, Trump is an extremely evil person for this, specific, act. If the Christian God is real, he will burn in hell for this (Matthew 25:41-46). I don't care about your stupid ideas about democracy or the deep state.
That clear enough?
No one is preventing you from using your own time and money towards the issues you care about. Taxes are taken by force, so not everyone who pays taxes is going to agree about how those funds should be used. Personally, I don't believe taxes should be used for anything except public security because the use of force can only be justified by preventing a worse use of force.
I understand you have deeply held Christian beliefs about Hell, but many people don't believe in Hell even many Christians. You can't use your belief in Hell to justify how tax funds are used.
And then they elected Trump.
Yes, they also elected a Republican Congress. It would be a bitter pill to swallow if the Republican Congress decided to kill PEPFAR, but that is not what is actually happening.
They elected a Republican congress with the expectation that they would serve Trump. If they could elect a clone of Trump to occupy every one of those seats, they would have.
Maybe I'm a big old democracy cuck idiot, but I don't think this is actually true.
...Everyone always underestimates the hold that he has on people. You don't get people calling you the second coming of Jesus without some level of unholy charisma.
Is it so hard to believe that this is what the people want? That doesn't necessarily justify their actions, of course. Maybe the majority is actually just evil from your point of view. But what the hell are you going to do about it?
The simplest answer of course is likely to be the correct one, and that is that some people have negative value for the lives of foreigners. A program that saves one such life is worse than any fraction of a broadband boondoggle.
That also explains the continued support of the rolling genocide in Palestine.
It's not clear that PEPFAR aid has actually restarted. They're claiming it has, but reports are that clinics are still turning people away https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/health/trump-usaid-pepfar.html
Admirable, but it seems clear to me that the operational plan is cutting programs wherever there won’t be too much resistance in order to “shrink the government” which in practice means tax cuts. That’s the only consideration.
If they cared about effectiveness, they’d talk about that instead of calling USAID an evil ball of worms.
I'm always shocked on these types of articles at how many of the top-level comments argue that giving even the tiniest amount to life-saving charities is bad. Is this really a majority view or do the few people who think this just feel really compelled to comment a lot?
The discussion is (mostly) not about whether giving money to charities is bad. It’s about whether forcibly taking people’s money from them and giving that money to charities is a legitimate thing for a government to do. As long as it’s just your *own* money you want to give to charity, and not other people’s without their consent, you’ll get very few complaints.
> It’s about whether forcibly taking people’s money from them and giving that money to charities is a legitimate thing for a government to do.
That may be your view, but it's a small fraction of the complaints in this comment section.
> As long as it’s just your *own* money you want to give to charity, and not other people’s without their consent, you’ll get very few complaints.
If you read the comments on any of the articles from this blog on giving to charity, you'll see that's not true. I don't think any of the other articles on charity involved government spending, but they garner just as many complaints. Even this article has a few people arguing that Africans shouldn't be protected from AIDS.
It's also my complaint. And I'm in this comment section!
I'd applaud you if you donated your money to your preferred charity. I do not applaud people using the power of the state to spend other people's money on their preferred charity
Whatever extreme view is expressed in the comments is unlikely to be the majority one, because people with non-extreme views don't feel compelled to comment. The recent survey demonstrated that.
I do think there is a strong effect where the people with “extreme” opinions are more likely to comment. On the other hand, last November was a pretty comprehensive measurement of the revealed preference of the American people.
This is a regular occurrence in the comments section, yes. You can browse the comments section of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian to see like 50 people arguing it's good and right to care about British people, and close to zero disputing the ratio of effectiveness.
I personally donate to charities dedicating to the third world (specifically sub-Saharan Africa tends to be the focus). But I oppose any tax dollars being spent that way.
I am wearing of hearing the "moral" arguments I hear from many people. My legal-immigrant wife was cheated by USCIS. My congresswomen failed her, as did the rest of the "do-gooders" now coming out in opposition to deportations. When I raise the issue I have been called "selfish", "racist" (?), and many other things. My wife gets no sympathy (her "value" is "literally zero" to many even if not to you), and gets caught up in the inverse of Stalin's alleged "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." And if you never cared about the one person, why should I trust that you actually care about the many? If my wife has zero value to you, why should I care about the people you want to help?
If people didn't let these systems rot--if legal immigrants were cared for, and foreign aid programs regularly reviewed for their value--we would not get to the Trump stage. Don't expect your house to remain standing if you can't do needed repairs. I have seen how the State department functions; it is an embarrassment, as is the mentioned USCIS.
I am very angry about all of this.
I have literally never met a person who thinks that illegal immigrants should get rights and be allowed to stay, who doesn't also think the legal immigration system should be reformed and expanded to be less punitive and awful.
It kinda sounds like you are setting these two things in opposition to each other in the way you frame the question, and I'm not surprised if people react negatively to that and tell you you're doing it wrong. I'm betting if you instead framed it as 'everything the US does about immigration is bad, even legal immigrants get screwed over and we need to fix the whole system' then you would not get pushback.
Has anyone estimated the number of HIV/AIDS cases outside of Africa that PEPFAR prevented by reducing the transmission of HIV in Africa? (Per year, or over the ~20 years of the program, or even projected to 2050).
Public health is/was concerned with ending transmission chains as well as saving individuals. The 26 million number is bound to be an undercount of the total lives saved.
Should we also worry that the more people get infected with AIDS, the higher the probability of airborne super-AIDS or something?
(And if so do we want to be treating AIDS patients or letting them die quicker?)
My dad works on HIV/AIDS tracking and prevention in the US, and a big part of the reason it's impossible to eradicate it in the US population is because of people from countries with high rates coming here not knowing they are infected. It's definitely true that fighting diseases like this globally is an effective way to fight it at home.
It sounds like we could avoid it by not letting such people in.
We could end HIV entirely just by killing everyone on the planet.
Observations like this are not serious unless they include an argument that it would be worth the costs.
We wouldn't be able to accomplish any other objectives of ours if we killed everyone on the planet. Whereas we can do plenty while not letting such people in.
As charitable and fun as ever, aren't you?
People from countries with extremely high HIV rates have on average extremely low economic value (not to be confused with moral value, which we're assuming to be equal across all humanity, but broadly irrelevant to governments). The cost of not admitting them is, as such, roughly zero.
I'm sure that you will point out and find amusing that such a policy would probably have excluded Elon Musk, though I'm not sure how high the rate was at the time he fled.
Arguments can be made for providing aid without a commensurate allowance of admittance.
Does something about PEPFAR's work require that it be done by the government? This argument makes a lot more sense if the situation is "either the US government funds this or it can't get done" rather than "this could run with private donations, but it's a government project because individual donors are bad at decisions so their money needs to be taxed away for this."
Especially since this is basically just a giveaway to big pharma plus some coordination with existing groups actually administering the doses. If it's such an unambiguous win, the pharma companies could pick it back up for a massive PR win at very little overall cost.
I disagree and I wrote a post about it: https://bucktalk.substack.com/p/contra-scott-alexander-on-money-is
Framing this as killing people seems misleading. It’s like analysing any tax reform through of the lens of who is “winning” and “losing”, rather than, what makes policy sense. The ultimate status quo is nothing, so it does seem reasonable to seek a policy justification for spending the money, rather than needing a justification to cut it.
Under US law, there is no actual authority for Trump to engage in the spending freeze. The money for PEPFAR was lawfully appropriated by Congress, and under the Impoundment Act of 1974, the only way he can rescind spending is by telling Congress why, on the same day he does so. Thus, his decision to cut the funding is itself illegal. Illegally preventing someone from receiving medical attention is ~killing - if you purposefully blocked an EMT from getting a patient into the hospital and receiving life-saving medical care, that would be prosecuted as murder here in Texas (as you knowingly and intentionally caused their death). In this case I think it would be closer to manslaughter, as Trump merely recklessly caused the death.
I was more making a philosophical comment, that a person is not positively obligated to spend any of their money to save people outside of their circle of concern, or you end up at infinite charity. Agree once you have extended care to someone, they are in that circle. But there seems a meaningful distinction between stopping money allocated to some spending program (where the death caused is remote) and say switching off someone’s life support (where it is direct). Do you disagree that continual spending should be subject to continual justification?
> Do you disagree that continual spending should be subject to continual justification?
Sure. And PEPFAR is good, that's why it has been passed by Congress five times, in 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2024. There are, I'm sure, lots of foreign aid programs that turned out not to be worth the money, and presumably Congress quietly stopped funding them.
Ok then. My objection is just framing. Seems like a rhetorical trick to benefit from most people’s assumption that the current status quo is correct, rather than justifying the position from first principles. Like when people say tax cuts disproportionately favor the wealthy, instead of thinking about whether the level of tax is optimal or sensible.
Do you have the specific citation, because my guess is that the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief” gives lots of implementation latitude to the President, such that he is not required to spend a single dime in any particular two-week period if he decides on a funding freeze to audit the program.
I agree that this is against the spirit of the law, but congress should stop giving the president so much authority over spending if they want the president to have less authority over spending.
The Impoundment Act of 1974 specifies:
>"deferral of budget authority" includes—
>(A) withholding or delaying the obligation or expenditure of budget authority (whether by establishing reserves or otherwise) provided for projects or activities; or
>(B) any other type of Executive action or inaction which effectively precludes the obligation or expenditure of budget authority, including authority to obligate by contract in advance of appropriations as specifically authorized by law
>[...]
> Whenever the President, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the head of any department or agency of the United States, or any officer or employee of the United States proposes to defer any budget authority provided for a specific purpose or project, the President shall transmit to the House of Representatives and the Senate a special message specifying [a bunch of shit]
The 90 day pause is very clearly a "deferral of budgetary authority." One might imagine that in the normal day-to-day of governance, some days there's just no money spent on a particular program, but I don't think any reasonable person could think this isn't "withholding or delaying the obligation or expenditure of budget authority".
Here's the text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-bill/7130/text
I know about the anti-deficiency act. That particular statute has been cited quite a bit recently. What I am interested in is the specific text of the appropriation made by congress for the PEPFAR program. I’m not an expert, but the citations I found cite back to 22 U.S.C. 2151b-2, which states in part:
“(1) In general
Consistent with section 2151b(c) of this title, the President is authorized to furnish assistance, on such terms and conditions as the President may determine, for HIV/AIDS”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/2151b-2
If the terms and conditions the president determines are, “everyone needs to come back to the US now while we figure the budget out,” it’s not clear that any budgetary authority has been deferred, because the authority was given within the appropriation for the president to determine the terms and conditions under which to furnish assistance.
>funding freeze to audit the program
I am not a professional auditor, but it seems like stopping a program to audit it is pretty overkill and probably detrimental to being able to execute a thorough audit of all the moving parts. Also, Trump isn't bringing in auditors, he's letting Elon Musk and his DOGE team (that has no audit related qualifications) dig through payment histories and concoct lies saying that the spending was secret and funneled to partisan left wing orgs like... Politico for their political tracking subscription service. It's glaringly obvious this is illegal, breaks precedent, and is just Trump being corrupt by handing someone sensitive government access to lie on his behalf.
So imagine a world where you find a young deer next to its dead mother, take it into your house and hand feed it for 5 years, and then are considering whether or not to release it into the wild again.
If you had ignored it in the first place, maybe it would have died, or maybe it would have learned to fend for itself and been ok. But at this point it is dependent on you and doesn't know howto survive without you, and will definitely die if you cut off that support now.
If you created a framework that people need to live, and they accepted that framework instead of building their own alternatives based on assurances from you that it would stay in place and be stable to rely on in the future, then yeah it's reasonable to say you are killing them if you suddenly shut it down without warning.
Analogy is inapt. The deer can’t now learn to fend for itself. But a human - any human - can learn to obtain anything that money could have bought them. So many more things can intervene before withdrawing money directly causes death. Not so in the deer case, or for turning off life support.
I'm sure *normal* people don't hate African children enough to value their lives at 0.
But if anyone did value African lives at 0, the billionaire throwing Sieg Heils and rooting for the far right in Germany seems the most likely candidate, no?
I'm sure normal people don't explicitly value African children at zero, but if you examine the donations they give, you'll find that they by revealed preference value the lives of African children at zero.
Might actually be less than 0 for some people. The more of them there are, the more of them will eventually come here, and if they do they'll join the other side in the current culture war.
He was actually born in Africa.
...In apartheid South Africa.
"Realistically I think it’s even worse than this, because in practice the government levies as many taxes as it feels like levying, spends as much money as it feels like spending, and turns the difference into deficit, so it’s not obvious that canceling PEPFAR gives any more money to American programs. I’m writing this assuming that we want to keep the deficit fixed, which is a laughably fake assumption for the real government."
This footnote is actually at the heart of the issue. Congress spends however much money it decides to spend, on whatever it decides to spend it on, and sets taxes wherever it wants to (paying the difference with debt). The only way to get more money back to people or to redirect it to other programs (well, in a normal world, where Congress actually does things, instead of sitting around letting the president trample all over the Constitution) is to convince them to vote to spend less or spend money on different things. Same thing with e.g. a small or narrow tax cut; any shortfall is made up with a different tax or with debt (which becomes tomorrow's taxes).
I think this is looking too deeply into the assumptions MAGA types are making – they simply don't care about children in Africa, and would rather save $6 billion in taxes. They don't want that money in the hands of the government at all.
My initial position was that we should find a way to transfer PEPFAR to private hands. This would be done in a way as to not "pause" the program(which obviously would cost lives). I still think this would be an ideal solution, since this would preserve the program while cutting government spending.
Now, I think PEPFAR is just to good and cheap of a program ,and so I don't really care where the money comes from. There are better places to cut money from, anyone serious about cutting government spending should not have cutting PEPFAR as a priority.
NOTE: When talking to right-wingers, don't forget to point that the number of children with HIV in Africa is decreasing. It is a worry among us Chuds that programs like PEPFAR are just subsidizing reckless behaviour by Africans, that is, we worry that the people will just start having more HIV babies knowing that they will survive thanks to meds. The data shows that there isn't any HIV baby boom, to the contrary, babies with HIV will be thing of the past soon.
> Valuing a foreigner at less than 1/100th of an American would put them somewhere between a cow and a chicken, which if nothing else seems like an awkward thing to have to bring up at UN meetings.
Most Americans aren't vegan, so a revealed preference argument for showing that they value foreigners less than 1/100th of an American would also show that they value animals much much less than 1/100th of an American.
...That's assuming that they value Africans more than livestock.
There's an easy solution to that but the risk of raising the rate of kuru is too high a cost.
Also, clearly, the answer is clearly that the vast majority of Americans aren't vegan, and some portion of vegans cross over into being anti-human. Your enemies are not quite so evil as you like to believe. Scott is more obnoxious than we like to believe, though.
Would save your dog or a hundred random african men infected with AIDS due to dry sex?
Every time I read a post like this, I get a little bit closer to preferring to save a random dog to saving a hundred people who make this sort of post. I have to pause and seriously think to remember that every human life has value, even those moral degenerates who not only sin and fall short of the glory of the Lord, but seem to delight in the stink that comes from rolling around in the moral garbage dump they've decided to live in.
I am reminded of a (probably apocryphal) story of a Native American who was burned alive by Conquistadors. When asked whether he wished to convert to Christianity before he died so that he may be saved, he said if Heaven is where the Spaniards went, he'd rather go to Hell.
Adam Smith said it well:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them?
He answers in the negative:
Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it.
I suppose flipping it to "would he sacrifice a finger if it would save the lives of a hundred million Chinamen?" makes it a slightly different question, but I do not share his optimism.
That view of human nature is way more fantasy than reality, I'm afraid
As we know from Wick (2014) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wick_(film)), it is considered at least within the Overton window to value the life of a dog that's close to you more than the life of a random American, so the dog thought experiment doesn't correspond to a general stance on the value of animals (which, again, Americans will literally eat).
Defaults matter; the organ donation rate is either 1% or 99% depending on if its a pain to sign up
in theory, musk and trump are changing the funding plan from "by default" to "prove yourself" over all, type 2 errors *are part of the plan* its nonsensable to criticize a specif case instead of the median case(and justifying you supposed median)
> Defaults matter; the organ donation rate is either 1% or 99% depending on if its a pain to sign up
This isn't actually true. Organ donation rates do not wildly change after switching from opt-in to opt-out; the change was just 10% in Wales (https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/01/12/opt-in-out-organ-donation-us-uk/), and I've seen studies that suggest the change is ~0% overall. The blockers are mostly elsewhere in the process, from what I've seen - family opposing it, doctors not having good access to relevant systems, etc - and sometimes the shift from opt-in to opt-out exacerbates these factors (family has an easier time opposing it if it's opt-out, for obvious reasons).
Im pretty sure I got this example from less wrong, has their opinions changed?
> https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/01/12/opt-in-out-organ-donation-us-uk/
Successful transplants vs paperwork does confuse this for ea and practical consideration; but Im talking about shitty filters the paperwork being very high but having bad downstream effects( the legal system needing to be a 2nd filter with the opposite preference ) ill grant this is also elons plan; when mass firing twitter he also had to rehire.
---
Given a bad filter with a large grey zone, "do you report it as true or false", will just produce type 1 or type 2 errors predictably, which do you prefer? Its a value judgement about the nature of those errors.
Elon here is preferring false, clearly stating so, and single false negative isnt a meaningful criticism (if he's willing to admit he's a terrible filter remains to be seen, but maybe in the cards)
> Im pretty sure I got this example from less wrong, has their opinions changed?
It's a pretty common reference because it intuitively make sense, but when you actually look at it with studies, it's just not very effective. I don't know the opinion of Less Wrong since I rarely go there. This is one study looking at it in some detail and finding no statistically significant overall effect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0085253819301851
I'm not on the platform formerly known as Prince, but I laughed at your tweet today. I also laughed at your comment that you should have expected the result.
As someone previously calling for the destruction of government as we know it, I'm terrified of who is currently destroying that government in the U. S. Much like in 2017 after the inauguration, I'm considering the military requirements to defend the Canadian border.
It makes no sense to compare an action (e.g., cancelling programs) against an imagined alternative in which one does whatever one thinks is the optimal thing with each program. That imagined alternative is equivalent to "Scott is an omniscient and omnipotent benevolent dictator," and it exists in no proximate world.
The relevant alternative to the action is our present state, in which a large majority of the USAID programs range from useless to actively bad. In comparison with that, the action of cancelling programs with prejudice, including some of the ones you happen to like, is far and away a good thing.
Some of this is about object-level disagreement about which programs are good or bad. Some of it is more meta-level disagreement about whether the government should be in this business at all, taking into account second-order effects, etc.
Taking all of that into account, I think the approach being taken is highly defensible.
Is there a reason not to take a few weeks and pick out the programs that are obviously good, like PEPFAR?
1. Seems like PEPFAR is off the table, so why focus on that? Feels like you're choosing the worst argument of the opposing side to debate.
2. Some of what USAID is doing seems objectively bad, aimed at keeping dictators in power, deepening the suffering of others. Shall we refuse to audit the rest of the system because one program passes muster? Seems like that would incentive politicians to add singular poison pills to programs like USAID, then use the rest of the money however they saw fit, secure in the knowledge they could point at the one useful program if anyone questions their actively harmful behavior.
3. You argue that the reason to keep PEPFAR is because its altruism is effective. Seems like we should value a review of the rest of USAID to determine what else is effective? Why fight against that? It's likely there are other good programs besides PEPFAR, but is that a 30/70 balance, or a 1/99 balance? Public pressure might tip the balance in favor of doing good ... effectively. "Musk/Trump are shutting the whole thing down!" And they're sensitive to public pressure (cf. PEPFAR), so point out the other good programs. Or, failing that, propose a better system. Or at least defend the status quo as is, not some idealized version of it where everything is PEPFAR.
4. It's all deficit spending, so it comes out in inflation in the wash, right? Since that hits anyone holding USD currency, and rich people tend to hold assets, inflation will hurt poor people in the US, as well as people in poor countries who hold USD/treasuries, the hardest. On the margin not a big deal, but in the aggregate it makes a world of difference. I saw a man treading water, but since he wasn't in immediate danger of drowning, I figured I should carry on as usual until the situation got worse. No need to help him out of the pit and end his suffering until it gets bad enough to worry. Poor people only complain about inflation because they don't know how much good the government does with their dollars. I'm sure those complaints won't lead them to do anything drastic, like a drowning man grasping at anything he can reach...
2. Sure? But then *make an actual audit* of the agency’s actions, instead of a blanket freeze which will target both the good and the bad (this is your answer to 1. – this is the easiest-to-identify program that they’ve decided would be effective for political messaging – doing unambiguous good, founded and lauded by impeccably conservative GW Bush).
3. Since Congress appropriated the money through both Democrats and Republican legislatures, it would seem the onus is on Trump/Musk to explain why the whole thing is so rotten it should be dismantled (also note how Trump has been railing against foreign aid for about a decade now), as opposed to keeping the status quo (or shave funding by 10%).
4. If what you’re worried is the deficit (and its effects on inflation, especially for the poor), that is legitimate. What do you think about tax cuts for the more affluent, which are also assessed to amount in lost revenue at over 10 times the USAID budget?
2. Sure, in a world where we could have a public audit of each program I'd be wholly on board with that. Nothing close to that has been openly discussed for decades, so that's not the world we live in. Instead, we get the choice of a.) status quo, or b.) dismantle USAID and all the anti-development work it does, and hopefully later get some actually effective foreign aid apparatus set up. We'll lose some good stuff, probably, in the shuffle, but the most effective programs could be spared (PEPFAR, so far). Per Scott's framework, we can assume that the randomly cancelled USAID program will be 1/100th as good as PEPFAR, but given that many are doing active harm to global poverty, it seems the downside isn't just near zero but fully negative. So if the median program is net negative, the equivalent to PEPFAR on the other side of the ledger needs to be dismantled yesterday. The status quo preserves all those negative programs. Given the opportunity to cancel all those and rebuild an effectively altruistic foreign aid program I'll take it. I have low confidence we'll get a "good" program, but high confidence we'll at least get something better than the active harm of USAID. I'll take the short-run pain from a few cancelled programs along with the MANY short-run benefits from cancelling all the bad programs (net good in the short-run), with the possibility of something actually decent coming out the back end. I can't see the argument for perpetuating a status quo that's net negative after removing PEPFAR (and arguably before). Unless you're under the impression that USAID is mostly doing good in the world. That was never my impression (before Musk figured out this was a problem), so I'm all for gutting the beast. Let's first do no harm.
3. This is a question of Constitutional authority, which seems tangential to what Scott is talking about. I'm not a conlaw scholar, but from what I've observed over the past 20 years, it seems SCOTUS has deferred to Executive discretion on logistical implementation of laws passed by Congress. There were lots of problems with implementation after ACA was passed, partly because a lot of stuff was written last-minute. So Obama had to make a lot of executive decisions about how to implement it or risk the whole thing collapsing under its own contradictions. Republicans challenged him every step of the way, saying he needed to execute the law exactly as written. The wanted the unworkable law to collapse, and they had the votes to prevent Congress from fixing it directly. The courts agreed with Obama that the president had broad executive authority to decide how and whether to enforce the specifics of any legislation.
Predictably, if you give any branch of government power, they'll use that power in ways you don't anticipate. Since ACA, Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again, have all pushed to expand Executive discretion to get around Congress. Trump is arguing he's implementing the will of Congress within the broad authority of the Constitution to make it workable. He's not spending new money (cf. Biden's failed attempt at forgiving student loans en masse), but he's choosing whether certain aspects of the law are implemented, and how (cf. Biden's targeted dismissal of certain student loans, or Obama's end-run around immigration reform through DACA). Personally, I'm not sure how to split the difference between stripping the Executive of all discretionary powers to the point government is unworkable, and giving the President so much authority he can do whatever he wants. Both parties (probably moreso Democrats) have tried implementing new programs through the Executive - outside Congressional authority - with some limited success. I'm mostly not in favor of that. Both parties (probably moreso Republicans) have tried straight-up rescinding Congressional mandates - also with some limited success. I'm somewhat opposed to that, though I think there's a line that's clearly being crossed. I fully expect Republicans to overreach over the next 4 years, and I'm hoping lawyers on the Democratic side can help restore some balance. I think that's unlikely, though. They're more likely to follow the pattern of tepid objections to expansion of Executive power, then full-throated endorsement of those expansions once they get in office.
4. For all the harm they do, USAID is clearly not at the top of the pile of spending excesses. We're straining at a gnat, while swallowing a camel. This is scalpel work on a sledgehammer job. But we're also not a fortnight into this thing, so I'm still reservedly hopeful that we'll see *some* progress. The big one - Defense - is probably not going to get a good overhaul under Republicans. Even though a truly 'strong' defense department would mean trimming down what's become mostly fat with very little atrophied muscle left over. Maybe if Republicans set precedents of 'Executive power to ignore', Democrats can follow after with some real cuts to defense spending. Probability of this is low, because Defense is in every district like Hydra - moreso the more useless the program. Also because Democrats under Harris embraced the Bush and Cheney legacies for some strange reason? I'm mostly hoping that the fading Harris legacy will allow them to sweep that under the rug. The Clinton faction likes it, but maybe the Obama faction will be able to shove them aside. The argument right now seems to be between "we lost because of Woke" and "we lost because we had no vision". If the Obama side wins we may see cuts to Defense post-Trump, but I'm not holding my breath.
As to whether tax cuts have much impact ... meh. Annual revenue doesn't seem significantly impacted by these things long-term, nor does the percent that's raised from different income quintiles. If he brings back SALT that will likely shift the burden back from more wealthy states toward the poor ones, which would be objectively a regressive tax move. I'll object to that when it happens. Though to be fair those richer states are already subsidizing poor ones with massive redistribution programs. I happen to know that, for example, much of the 'poverty reduction' programs in KY are a racket to the point where it's largely waste. Should we tax California to send money to Kentucky? Do we really even "tax" to raise revenue anymore, though, or is it all just pruning incentives? It's not like taxation influences spending. Reagan destroyed that important connection long ago.
The drowning analogy is pretty bad in general (which is why it's normally a shallow pond you can stand in) because every year drowning prevention week tells us, "reach, throw or row, don't go" or some sort of similar catchy phrase. Jumping in often just results in two victims instead of one. You're supposed to stay on land or in the boat and throw them a rope, a life preserver, or reach for them with a pole... even if you're a strong swimmer, it's extremely difficult to rescue someone without a flotation device. Even a child can drown you easily, unless you have specific training. Like, Navy Seal training is ideal, but at the very least lifeguard training. Most people do not have that.
If you think you would ever jump in after a child or an adult I encourage you to take a lifeguard training course so you can experience for yourself how difficult it really is. (And that's in a pool, not difficult water conditions like floodwaters!) Then you can make an informed decision.
>So in a discussion of the ethics of canceling PEPFAR, I don’t think it’s enough to say that you care about Americans more than foreigners. You would have to care about Americans more than 100x more than foreigners.
By this reasoning all forms of foreign aid are a one way ratchet which you could never cancel because cancelling them is always going to harm someone but the money goes into the general pool. This is an absurd enough conclusion that it should clue you in that something is wrong with your reasoning.
You are also assuming that action and inaction are the same. Nobody does this except weird Internet guys. Cancelling the program means not giving people any more money, which is a form of inaction.
And the whole thing is is just another variation of the same reasoning which implies that you have to donate everything you own to EA that is not useful in making more money. By your reasoning, limiting EA donations to 10%, or to any amount, is profoundly immoral since by not giving them the rest of the money you are killing prople. Just like you need to let individuals keep most of their money--even though that money could save *real lives* instead--countries should keep most of their money even though giving it away saves lives.
>We currently spend 0.7% of the total budget and ~3% of the discretionary budget on foreign aid.
The "total budget of the government" is comparable to your gross income, not your net income, so applying the EA 10% to it makes no sense.
> The "total budget of the government" is comparable to your gross income, not your net income, so applying the EA 10% to it makes no sense.
That’s not what he’s doing or implying in the article, though? The point is that it’s still an objectively fairly small fraction.
(In your example, the discretionary funding corresponds to your net income minus your taxes, your mortgage/rent and possibly your health insurance, depending on how detailed your model is. No one’s compared that to the gross income.)
Even the "discretionary" budget of the US includes such things as the military, health, and transportation. It isn't comparable to the discretionary budget of an individual, and claiming that 3% of the "discretionary" budget of the US is like 3% of an individual's discretionary budget is misleading.
(Your taxes fund the police, who hopefully will defend you. The government doesn't pay taxes to someone else, but it still has to pay to be defended.)
Scott's also using a misleading rhetorical technique when he says that "We currently spend 0.7% of the total budget and ~3% of the discretionary budget on foreign aid." If he thinks that comparing the total budget isn't valid, he shouldn't mention it at all. If he thinks that it is valid, he deserves to be criticized for it whether he mentions something better in the next clause or not.
The more I think about it, the more I'm reminded of Scott's (paraphrased) "you can't do anything about homelessness unless your plan is absolutely perfect and has no negative externalities whatsoever. The negative consequences of the status quo are conveniently ignored" post.
>This is an absurd enough conclusion that it should clue you in that something is wrong with your reasoning.
He refuses to accept that, as the absurd conclusion is strongly desired.
I agree that government and household budgets are very different in often counterintuitive ways; but I’ll also note that the GWWC pledge is for 10% of gross income, if the donations are subject to a tax deduction.
@Scott: now that you've seen him gleefully torch PEPFAR and other USAID programmes to the roaring applause of... certain people, have you become more open to the notion that Musk is a sociopath/ narcissist?
The problem is the scarcity mindset, the idea that the US's problems are due to a lack of money or resources. The US has arguably more money and resources than any civilization in history! The marginal gains of adding a tiny amount of those resources are trivial. The big losses are in inefficiencies, and that is not solved by throwing in more dollars into the furnace, but by understanding how to reliably create functional organizations that do things, which seems to be one of the deepest mysteries of the natural world.
Companies seem to have managed this not too badly, though. Of course, they do this because those who didn’t got under, and their value system is not the one we ascribe to a government…
Have you ever worked in a company? Companies are horribly dysfunctional all the time. And yes, they also have a selection effect. The point is exactly that: you don't fix this problem by just destroying everything and rebuilding from scratch but This Time We Do It Right. You fix it by building with a certain diversity of approach, seeing what works best, weeding the bad out while keeping the good, and building new stuff taking a page from the good, rinse and repeat. Evolutionary algorithm.
Burning down the ONE program that unquestionably achieves its goal with stellar performance ain't it.
Corporate dysfunction exists. There would be less of it if we made it easier to do hostile takeovers https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/enable-raidershtml and set up Robin Hanson's "fire the CEO markets". But that still leaves them far more selected for efficiency than governments. Compare the ages of for-profit corporations to governments. The age of universities is also a clue to that sector.
I don't know why Scott is so uninformed about this, but the broadband program is actually completely on track with pretty much no delays. You can read more about it from Kevin Drum: https://jabberwocking.com/the-progress-of-rural-broadband-is-no-secret/
The plan, from the very beginning, was to have the FCC create a maps of broadband service across the country, spend 2024 and 2025 on grant disbursement and funding, and actually start the physical part of making connections in 2026 and 2027. As of right now, every state has a complete plan, well more than half has finished the challenge process (which allows people to disagree with the map), and 22 are in the process of choosing ISPs. Delaware, Louisiana, and Nevada have finished that whole process and have their final proposals up for public comment!
Unless you just straight-up disagree with the idea of helping rural americans get broadband, there is no honest way this can be called a boondoggle, and I hope Scott doesn't continue to spread disinformation like this.
I did not know this thank you!
I know of a person who probably "straight-up disagrees with the idea of helping rural americans get broadband" unless it is through the satellite-based services of a company he conveniently owns.
Goodbye broadband program, it was fun while it lasted :-/
The government was supposed to contract with Musk's Starlink to enable such access, but then cancelled their deal.
Because there's been several rural broadband initiatives before which failed. One has to be quite optimistic that to think all this money poured into planning will achieve results that the last several tens of billions did not.
For example: https://news.ucsb.edu/2024/021617/federal-broadband-subsidies-boosted-rural-internet-service-faded-once-funding-ended
>What they found was a 55% serviceability rate — that is, little more than half of the sampled addresses certified as served by the selected ISPs were now being served by them. They also found a 33% compliance rate, meaning that only about a third of the sampled locations that were certified met the requirements for upload/download speeds.
One of the more frustrating things about utilitarian moral calculus is our very willingness to consider the implications of math leaves us vulnerable to weaponizing math by generating obtuse edge-case scenarios.
Meanwhile in the real world, the policy questions which demand ethical answers don't seem to be edge cases. They are things like "should we give every American free healthcare or insure that our nuclear arsenal can destroy the world 3000 times over instead of 1500". There is doubtless room to discuss trade-offs and the term "guns or butter" exists for a reason, but we have a LOT of gunss.
The argument here is a version of the one responsible for Brexit: Let's take the money we send the EU each week and give it to the National Health Service. I think of this as the drunk driver's fallacy - Why aren't you catching burglars and rapists instead of breathalysing me?
Separately the point about the child in a pond argument is proximity, and I am surprised something so thunderingly obvious is not picked up on., Consider the sentence: I am very close to my brother, but we only talk by Skype since he moved to New Zealand. Consider further that the good Samaritan parable is explicitly an answer to the question Who is my neighbour, in Greek ho pleesios mou, the person physically close to me? Which the Samaritan obviously is to the victim. So drowning child analogy has nothing to say about the geographically distant and unrelated.
I am pro pepfar and a regular donor to children-in-Africa charity, but a fallacy is a fallacy.
Drunk driving interdiction is often funded by NHTSA grants that provide for dedicated shifts by officers doing nothing but that all night. Presumably you could instead allocate that funding to hiring additional detectives in rural counties, where the lack of competent investigators is a bottleneck, and thereby catch some additional amount of thieves.
Rape is different of course because nearly all rape is acquaintance-rape. "Date rapes" and child molestations, where the identity of the perpetrator is rarely in doubt, the problem is more one of evidence and circumstance.
The Samaritan only saw the victim because they were geographically proximate at that moment.
That is my point.
I agree with all in the post. I miss a sentence mentioning the US has some famously rich philantrophs (and a bunch of super-rich foundations) who are surely able and willing to take over the funding for this big but manageable and decent program. - Did not Bill Gates say in recent interviews, he talked with Trump at length about those important programs - and that he got his phone number? - Actually, my little theory is, Bill did call Trump. ;) - That specific program might need some government backing to assure the pharma-companies agree to sell their medicine cheap to those places, but the money for the program can be found outside the budget. I do not say it should, but if I had to decide: "End all USAID today and close that agency" vs. "Keep all USAID" .... and I had to decide blindly, just having my intuitions (aka experiences) about gov. aid .... I would, indeed, fire USAID. And let better people/orgs take care about those issues.
That is NOT the situation Trump/Musk are in. That is not what they should do in the situation they are in. Today. But, yes, cut USAID by 90% till 2027. Find new donors for the very best programs. (addendum: how many people in Africa or worldwide knew a month ago about this AIDS program and the good it does and that it is US funded? Less than 1%, I guess. But then, even Gates gets flak more often than praise.)
The elephant in the room here is how much American money is spent on killing and not saving people. It’s not great to ignore a drowning child, it’s a lot worse to drown one.
Zimbabwe's GDP per capita is 1/40 th that of the US so assuming the 100× ratio of caring they should be 2.5× tines more willing to spend money on domestic PEPFAR than the US government.
I am not sure where that calculation leaves you, but the amount of obligation on domestic governments especially poor but not desperately poor ones shouldn't be zero.
I consider myself "libertarian-ish". I wasn't always. I do see a kinda moral obligation to help the less fortunate. At least those whose misfortune is not their own fault.
And, if we are going to have a government, it would prolly be in the business of enforcing moral obligations amongst each other: don't kill each other, don't steal, don't let your kid starve to death, etc. "If you have way more money than you need, give just a Lil bit of your money to help save Africans dying of AIDS (ffs!)" Seems to fall into that basket of moral obligations that a minarchist state should enforce.
But if you're gonna go full ancap, the government is no longer in the business of enforcing moral obligations. There is no government.
But let's just say: foreign aid is one of the last lights I would shut off when shutting down government on the way to AnCapistan.
For so many, it's one of the first. I mean I get it with Trump. He's an extreme nationalist and he dgaf about foreigners. Like you said, Scott, they are worth zero in his mind. I don't agree with such a mentality but I get how cancelling a program like PEPFAR seems to be a much easier decision in his mind than canceling that stupid rural broadband program.
I don't get JD Vance's "brotherhood" mentality. I don't consider my countrymen like my brothers. I suppose I value my immediate family (child, spouse, actual blood brothers and parents) more than strangers. But I don't value a stranger who is a country-man more than I value a stranger who is a foreigner. But maybe I am particularly weird.
But surely, the average American (even the average Trump voter) doesn't value a slight chance at reducing a random rural American's internet bill over saving the life of an African with AIDS?
I say: we put it to the test! Run some fake contest where it's rigged so that most people win and offer them as a prize: $1 for themselves and $1 donated to one of two charities:
* Charity A) basically PEPFAR
* Charity B) basically the broadband one
It wouldn't be a fair test if they weren't also allowed to just keep the dollar for themselves. There's nothing stopping the administration from shutting down the broadband program as well, after all.
> But surely, the average American (even the average Trump voter) doesn't value a slight chance at reducing a random rural American's internet bill over saving the life of an African with AIDS?
The average American does not engage with the actual content of politics like this (and in their defense, has little reason to expect it would matter if they did). It's sentiment and status games all the way down, and right now the winning platform is apparently sticking it to the libs.
In terms of looking at the order on the way to ancapistan, I think it helps to look at the actual history of the US government and how it got to where it is now. Social Security was added in the 20th century, so that can be eliminated prior to the military.
It is a bit weird to discuss discretionary spending from US federal budget as if it was a charity. Federal budget is not a charity is many respects, and, in particular, it is not filled via voluntary contributions.
We are forcing our brothers under gunpoint to contribute to measures that save them from other mortal dangers. And the real question, which you are completely avoiding, is whether we should be forcing our brothers under gunpoint to also save foreigners. The alternative is not to finance another stupid program. The stated aim of DOGE is to reduce federal spending, so the real alternative is to do a bit less forcing under gunpoint and a bit more of leaving money to our brothers and children to use how they see fit. I do not think this is the same moral question as the most efficient charity allocation.
I think the morality of taking money at gun point in order to distribute it abroad is fundamentally a massive problem - its bad enough when the money may be distributed to somewhat help you, but when its effectively forcing foreign charity on people, I'm not sure where the reasonable justification for it lies.
6 billion for 250k lives would put it at 24000k per life, which is better than some charities but is well off the top charities at efficiency which are 5k a life or so. Perhaps this would be more efficient if funded privately - but is there any reason it couldnt be?
At the end of the day, the ideal would be for the government to spend less, not the same amount redistributed. This is a clear example of the government being less efficient than the private sector. I'm not sure why we should be encoraging it.
Tangential to this argument, but given how much it is controlling HIV, is there not a likelihood that PEPFAR does benefit Americans?
For example through a chain of people has it prevented an American getting infected?
Or the improvement in the prospects of poor countries makes them more likely to spend money on US goods as their economy grows?
It feels to me like a no man is an Island thing - the good you do will echo round the world
I do think I do think there’s a selfish case for keeping PEPFAR that American nationalists can be more confident about (https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/every-argument-against-pepfar-debunked?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios): even if Americans have no reason to care about African lives, African states care about African lives, and PEPFAR - in virtue of being so effective - is of great value to the countries it operates in. If one thinks it’s in America’s interest to resist China’s Belt and Road initiative in Africa, PEPFAR is a great tool for twisting the arms of African leaders to serve American interests, not China’s
I don't see how Americans are harmed by Belt & Road, nor how PEPFAR is doing anything against that.
A fascinating comments section – I genuinely had no idea that the arguments people made against PEPFAR might include "AIDS drugs don't save lives", "Saving African lives is actually bad because of overpopulation", and "For me an African life really is worth less than a thousandth of an American life."
Goodness, I’m scrolling from newest, and hitting your comment makes me tremble to keep scrolling
Money saved by cancelling my credit cards doesn't automatically flow to the best possible alternative. Sure, I spend huge sums of money on wasteful nonsense, and our household is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, but these shoes I bought as a present for my sister were pretty good value. And if I hadn't bought those shoes, what else what we have spent the money on? If you make me return the shoes, it means you hate my sister.
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If PEPDAR is such a great program, it should have no problem finding funding on a voluntary basis. And there's no particular reason it needs to be run by the US govt - it doesn't use special powers or operate at some vast scale. So if no-one is willing to run it or fund it if Trump won't, what does that really say about how much people value the program?
The purpose of government is to provide for the common welfare of its citizens. We can legitimately debate exactly what that looks like, and how broadly or narrowly to view that welfare, but foreign aid isn't plausibly intended to benefit the citizenry. As such, it's wholly illegitimate. And, unsurprisingly, it's overwhelmingly unpopular; there are overwhelming bipartisan majorities in just about every Western country to cut foreign aid. It is **the** classic example of the PMC hijacking the political process to fund their own private interests at the expense of the common good.
Zeroing out the foreign aid budget is a moral and symbolic imperative. If the government can't manage something as painless, popular, and righteous as this, they are good for nothing.
Well, I am a citizen and I want some of my taxes to be spent on people in need, some of them (gasp) foreigners. So yeah, programs like PEPFAR do benefit me, as my desire is to be part of a country that does good in the world.
Foreign aid is also intended to buy goodwill from governments and prop them up against alternatives that are less desirable, which is in my jnterest as well.
I happen to have limited sympathy for USAID as a whole, as I believe that 80%+ of foreign aid is a waste of money, at least with regard to helping people in need.
But to pretend that money which ends up in the hands of foreigners who need help goes against a national citizen’s interest in principle is silly.
The claim that there is an overwhelming bipartisan majority to cut foreign aid in about every western country is false. Even after a massive drop in support for foreign aid in Germany over the last two years, about half the population still wants to keep or increase current spending. And this is in a recession. In 2022, not exactly a success year either, support to keep or increase current spending was at 68%. An overwhelming majority, if you will.
https://weltkirche.katholisch.de/artikel/56679-studie-zustimmung-zu-entwicklungspolitik-broeckelt
>"Well, I am a citizen and I want some of my taxes to be spent on people in need, some of them (gasp) foreigners."
Tax cuts plus you voluntarily donating would have the same effect, but what I think you actually mean is you want some of other people's taxes to be spent that way, which is just theft with extra steps.
Well, if we have reached the taxation is theft level of discourse, we are probably too far apart to reach some kind of agreement.
Besides, I wasn’t even introducing the premise that taxes should exist. I was assuming that that premise was held by the person I responded to when they said that a government should provide for the welfare of its citizens.
My point was that foreign aid is not in principle a worse way of spending government money, which is what OP implied.
Again, if your assumption is that taxation is theft anyway, then I don’t know why foreign aid specifically is worse than other forms of spending tax dollars.
Correction: “I don’t know why” is wrong. It should be “I don’t think that”
I'm not a saying that taxation is theft; public goods have to be paid for somehow.
But taxation for the purposes of transferring resources to another is literally robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Yeah, again, i think our basic assumptions about how society ought to be run are too far apart to have a good discussion in this forum.
I do think that taking money from me (who is fortunate enough to make a decent living) to pay someone else (who isn’t) is, in principle, a fine thing to do.
But what’s actually important in the context of this discussion is the citizen / non-citizen distinction.
As far as I understand your logic, transferring (tax) money to people in need is wrong, period.
The question this discussion revolves around, however, is whether transferring money to citizens in need is fine whereas transferring money to non-citizens is not fine.
>"As far as I understand your logic, transferring (tax) money to people in need is wrong, period."
That is correct. No amount of need makes robbery acceptable, and having a third party (government) do it on one's behalf does not change the fundamental character of the act. Calling it "taxes" is merely masking the distinction between necessary funding mechanism for public goods and robbery-by-proxy.
>"The question this discussion revolves around, however, is whether transferring money to citizens in need is fine whereas transferring money to non-citizens is not fine."
I did not read it that way, but I can see how one might.
Okay, I want you to imagine a leftist. Rather than focusing on trying to argue for the places where their statist policies are arguably good - health care, welfarism, whatever - they instead spend an enormous amount of energy arguing for agricultural collectivization, a horrifically bad policy that just kills a bunch of people for ~no benefit. That's you right now with your "taxation is theft, so make sure those babies get HIV."
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-programs/comment/91821075
You don't seem to understand (pretend not to?) the difference between your personal interests, and the *common welfare* of the citizenry.
You also don't seem to understand (pretend not to?) that "X is true in just about every Y" implies that there are indeed one or two Ys for which ~X.
You are right that foreign aid could *in theory* benefit domestic citizens, but this isn't the actual justification, this isn't the basis on which aid programs are selected, this isn't the reason you want them, and this isn't true in practice. It's just a silly smokescreen.
In summary, I am not surprised with the level of good faith you display, given what you are arguing in favour of.
I understand all of these things, at least I believe so. If it comes across as if I don't (or pretend to not), then I apologize.
However, I wish that we could communicate in a way that resembles the politeness we would probably show to each other in person.
I don't claim that my personal interests are the same as the common welfare of the citizenry.
I am saying that the way that public money is spent should at least vaguely reflect the interests of the people this money was taken from in the first place. I assume we generally agree on this principle.
As I am a tax-paying citizen (not a US citizen, but of a country spending money foreign aid), my interest should have some weight. And that interest is to be part of a nation that spends some of its wealth on people in need.
Again, in my view, the foreign aid sector is massively ineffective, with most activities not achieving much of anything, so I am not shedding tears for most of the programmes affected here.
What I am disagreeing with is the blanket pronouncement that a national government should not spend money on foreign aid because it is inherently in. conflict with the welfare of its own population. Unless, of course, you define "welfare" narrowly enough as to definitionally exclude a representation of my interests that doesn't materially benefit me.
The algorithm currently theoretically being followed by DOGE seems to be on the order of "pause everything while we audit. Restart programs only when successfully audited and confirmed to be useful. Cancel everything else".
It seems to me an absolute improvement to add "look to the best programs being defended honestly from the other side of the aisle and prioritize those for auditing and restarting quickly".
Is this not close to what happened here? Trump puts everything on pause for 90 days, Musk and DOGE team start looking into everything >Lots of people cry out, but some of those people are using good arguments to defend PEPFAR > PEPFAR looks to be restarted hopefully.
If this is the case, it would seem that the role of altruistic defenders of effective foreign aid programs should be to identify the programs currently on pause that were actually saving lives, cry for their reinstatement form the rooftops, or more likely on X, since that seems to be from where Musk will have the quickest response time and thus help DOGE reduce the quantity of babies thrown out with the bath water to the minimum.
Yes.
Well, their process doesn't seem to be very broken then? They paused programs with a bias on casting a wide net, then they unblock those that have a consensus of being very valuable (in which case people making noise about the good ones is good information and probably expected by design), then start permanently defunding and cancelling programs waiting for reactions and consequences.
It's not a process you'd pick if you trusted the bureaucracy, but it's one of the few that work if you don't. When asked, everybody will say their project is critical (to them and possibly their livelihood). You need a metaphorical gun to the head to have people actually pick the projects that really need to survive.
The problem is that if you only look for noise, then you're not evaluating the arguments, and if you say you'll look at noise + arguments, then noise is the worse signal, because what people make noise about doesn't tell you whether they're right or wrong.
The noise approach would make sense if we had no idea what a program and so we wanted to learn where dollars were going, but you don't need to shut off programs to do that sort of thing when there is documentation and people to ask for clarification, *even if you don't fully trust them*.
Put another way, it would be valuable if you wanted to check if Social Security was a third rail in politics, not if you wanted to evaluate if Social Security *was a good program*.
>"… it would be valuable if you wanted to check if Social Security was a third rail in politics …"
This is plausibly the sort of thing they're actually doing at this phase.
If pausing a given program doesn't result in an intolerable amount of noise, you can expect to be able to comparatively easily cancel altogether, saving your energy for the fights over programs that *do* generate a lot of noise.
> This is plausibly the sort of thing they're actually doing at this phase.
Then they're lying, or all the people defending the idea here and elsewhere are misleading the rest of us. The rhetoric around these cuts has always been "we're going to cut waste in government", not "we're conducting a study on what issues are third rails in government".
I may not have expressed my hypothesis clearly; it's not necessarily an either-or.
Assume arguendo that they do think it's all waste that they want to cut. They could be deliberative with each cut, except they're capacity constrained and wouldn't be able to get to all their targets. So they just start cutting everything, and only reverse when there's blowback. Then almost all of intended targets are hit before they have to start prioritizing their very limited capacity for deliberation.
> They could be deliberative with each cut, except they're capacity constrained and wouldn't be able to get to all their targets.
They had anywhere from 1 to 4 years to plan this, and there is more than enough intellectual capacity left from the anti-government types in the Republican Party. There is little excuse for not knowing what to cut.
They are looking for posts like this one.
If a program is quietly failing, the general public won't complain, won't write blog posts, won't protest, if it's canceled.
This isn't perfect. It relies on the public to know what's important. But it's a signal.
Or they could just look at the actual analysis and make a decision after being able to explain why they're cutting *that particular program*.
Moreover, posts like mine mean absolutely nothing. If they knew I said these things, they'd probably also know I've never supported them and will never support them. They don't gain a damn thing by listening to me.
That's a general counterargument against doing anything. We don't know what their metric is for "this program has proven to be load-bearing, so we'll restore it", but it's a fair assumption that they have one. Assuming a priori that such metric is impossible or that they're not good enough to come up with one is... a bit much. Let's see how they do first.
No, it's not a general counter-argument. I'm not demanding they achieve 100% support for cutting a program. I'm saying they and their defenders shouldn't conflate how much will people scream with how wasteful/inefficient/bad a program is. That's remarkable easy to do, and if you applied an iota of thought to the problem, you wouldn't ever do this "see what makes people scream" nonsense.
There are many (very different) reasons for providing development assistance through governments. And there are counter-arguments for not providing development assistance through governments to most/all of these. Plus counter-counter arguments to these again, and so on.
…So the real decision-making problem is much more complex than an effective altruism, Singer-type cost-benefit calculation of where the money does most “good” in some health/social welfare sense.
..Mind you, it is certainly relevant to wrote blog posts like this one by Scott. But do not focus the whole development aid-discussion around “effective altruism”! That is fatally narrowing of the objectives of development aid (or development cooperation, as we say these days).
Some other arguments than effective altruism (not an exclusive list):
a) Avoid negative externalities. Boosting the capacity of a country to fight infections diseases is useful for one’s own country, since virus and bacteria know no borders. This is particularly important if the country in question has even more immediate problems to spend its own limited tax money on, than fighting infectious diseases within its borders.
b) Related: Prevent collapsed/failed states. Failed states are safe havens for terrorists (who also know no borders), and also implies that the health care system will go to hell (=not be a priority of in-fighting warlords), leading back to problem a).
c) Secure friendly allies, or keeping existing allies happy. This was particularly important during the cold war, and has become important again with the rise of China.
…none of these objectives necessarily implies that development aid is to go where it saves most lives. If it sometimes does, it is a nice side-effect, but that is not necessarily the chief objective. Or among the important objectives at all.
For example, governments in frail states often have to buy the loyalty of strong regional elites to keep them loyal (typical patron-client logic, which is a way to keep the peace in many countries). To a Western eye, this looks like “corruption”. But it might be a very important, and very rational, way to spend the money (including your development aid money), if the alternative is the risk of civil war & a failed state. Incidentally, this is why the (often very repressive) leaders of frail states have a good bargaining chip when they talk to Western donor governments: “If you cut out aid to me, you may well bring me down, since my own taxation capacity is very limited – but what do you prefer, me or a high risk of chaos?”
…these are examples of the type of policy goals government-owned development aid agencies can take (and do take) into consideration, that a NGO-owned “effective altruist” organization does not take into consideration & probably should not take into consideration.
I feel like there is a game theory component to this, with the big caveat that I do not know much about game theory.
Let's say you are politically selfish. You care about yourself, your family, and then your friends to an extent. You only care about this circle. Therefore, when making voting decisions, you prioritize the interest of yourself, your circle, and nobody else.
A big failure mode for this strategy are friends or family members socially shunning you for it. If liberals start advocating for socially disowning people who vote selfishly, and your kid is a liberal or one of your friends is a liberal, then you start to run into big problems.
I am not saying that most conservatives think this way. However, a good amount do, and as a result you see a lot of insecurity and culture war messaging from the right trying to socially ostracize anybody who prioritizes ideological morality over direct peer relationships. This doesn't refute the point of this article, which makes a good point, but it does try to explain why figures like Vance constantly go out of their way to emphasize this 'ordo amoris' type messaging.
I'm not American, I have no skin in the game, but...
US budget deficit is around 2 trillions dollar per years nowadays. Money saved in USAID may not be used in another way more efficiently, but if it isn't borrowed, then it's a net gain anyway. If I see a child starving and my family is already knee-deep in debt, then yes, maybe there is a net good to be gained in buying him food, but it's still irresponsible towards my first responsability to deepen this debt for the sake of someone else.
Doesn't most of the world economy function on the background assumption that just about everyone owes a big pile of money to someone.
Doesn't this mean I can take out a small loan, and then get a "don't want to go deeper into debt" get out of morality free card?
The US is not in the situation of having taken a small loan, it's in a situation of being systematically funded through debt, year in year out for the past two decades.
the claims about the efficacy of pepfar are coming from pepfar
PEPFAR’s record-keeping on individual patient progress is sufficiently meticulous that if its numbers are way off, there would have to be an active conspiracy to lie about the data, not just a case of “the number of lives saved could be anywhere from 16 million to 26 million, so we’re just going to pick 26 million because it’s the number that makes us look best”.
well
since you insist that their records are meticulous because trust me bro
and since it is inconceivable that a large enough number of members of a non profit would lie (or spin or exaggerate or sweep) about their org
because neither their livelihood nor their feeling of worth are dependant on it
then
I sit corrected
and the american tax payers should totally go on giving them all the money
sarcasm aside
is there any examination of pepfar by someone adversarial ?
if not then SA wasn’t arguing for it in good faith
especially when claiming the money could not be spent just as well inside the USA
“is there any examination of pepfar by someone adversarial ?
if not then SA wasn’t arguing for it in good faith”
Well, that wouldn’t follow. (It might be that all the serious examinations of PEPFAR come from researchers who happen to be sympathetic to the program since (a) it’s hard not to be sympathetic to PEPFAR because it’s obviously great, and (b) critics of PEPFAR tend to be deeply unserious (Cf. https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/every-argument-against-pepfar-debunked?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios). The most serious critical ‘deep-dive’ I’m aware of is this report from the Heritage Foundation which, despite reaching for every criticism of PEPFAR under the sun (including ones for which the report cites no evidence — e.g., that Biden’s PEPFAR is [was] secretly promoting abortion overseas, in defiance of US law), didn’t dispute PEPFAR’s “25 million” estimated. (Given that the Heritage will have had the time, resources, and ideological motivation to find fault with that number — since it’s the best pro-PEPFAR argument— if there were fault to be found, you’d expect him to have raised it [especially since the report is willing to make other criticisms with little or no evidential backing.]) https://www.heritage.org/budgetand-spending/report/reassessing-americas-30-billion-global-aids-relief-program
heritage is irrelevant to my point about SA faith because HE didn't use adversarial sources
but since I'm bored
404 on the heritage
so can't check it myself
but as you have read it so please tell
did heritage actually check? in the report do they say "we used methodology X and concluded that the reports of lives said are OK"
or
did heritage just assume the reports to be accurate and argued regardless
?
and what was methodology X if it was?
I didn't read the whole report, but I did a quick CTRL+F to find all the places where the 25 million number comes up. The two mentions of it seem suspiciously ambiguous:
>The program **is credited with** saving an estimated 25 million lives and is a tribute to the American people’s unparalleled charitable spirit in helping others who are in need.
>[...]
>Although PEPFAR **claims to have** saved 25 million lives, could those resources have saved even more lives if they had been distributed proportionally based on disease severity?
The authors acknowledge that others have claimed PEPFAR saves 25 million lives, but they never claim to have verified the numbers themselves nor do they even make any claim as to how likely this number is to be correct. They seem to just be granting it as a premise for the sake of argument.
That's an argument against everything.
“If you ascribe literally zero value to foreigners, you probably don’t want PEPFAR. But most Americans are not in this category, and I think your love for your countrymen should move you to let this majority of people use 1% of the federal budget for something they care a lot about.”
This was interesting. Obviously, the view that Americans have no reason to care about foreigners is nuts, but if you do think you have no reason to care about foreigners, it’s not clear to me why the love of your fellow countrymen should move you to want to keep PEPFAR.
First, most Americans are (or would be, if they knew about it) pro-PEPFAR; but most Americans aren’t *that* fussed about it, so most won’t feel aggrieved by it’s abolition. (You might think that even if most Americans don’t feel aggrieved, their actual or latent desire to save foreign lives will be frustrated if Trump cuts it, and, on desire-satisfaction theories of wellbeing, that will mean cutting PEPFAR is a harm to those Americans. But nearly all desire-satisfaction theorists will stipulate that the desires whose satisfaction or frustration affect your wellbeing have to be “about your life” in the relevant way, precisely to avoid the upshot that total strangers dying of AIDS is something makes your life go worse (Cf. Parfit’s Stranger)).
Second, if you think your fellow countrymen are just substantively wrong about foreigners mattering, and think that even a small cash injection into the least effective domestic program is better than money spent on the most effective foreign aid program, it’s not clear why - given the first point - PEPFAR-critics have any reason to want the government to actively spend money on these misguided concerns. (This seems importantly different from, say, pro-choicers supporting the Helms Amendment, which stops PEPFAR funds from supporting overseas abortions. Intuitively, one might have reason to *omit* to fund abortion out of fealty to the beliefs of pro-life American taxpayers, even if one thinks they’re substantively wrong; but if a majority of Americans had a vague, fairly weak, and misguided desire that <1% of the budget should pay for the digging and refilling of holes, premised on the belief that the Earth likes to be tickled by spades, I don’t think you’d have reason to support *actively funding* the program.)
That said, I do think there’s a selfish case for keeping PEPFAR (https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/every-argument-against-pepfar-debunked?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios): even if Americans have no reason to care about African lives, African states care about African lives, and PEPFAR - in virtue of being so effective - is of great value to the countries it operates in. If one thinks it’s in America’s interest to resist China’s Belt and Road initiative in Africa, PEPFAR is a great tool for twisting the arms of African leaders to serve American interests, not China’s
Has PEPFAR done any of that twisting? As far as I'm aware, funding has never been conditional on any stance toward China.
My sense is that when it comes to politics in general, and especially geopolitics, the arm twisting is often done in private and by implication.
Scott's been blind to the public choice theory realities on overregulation and institutional reform for a while. There is a desperate need for institutional reform, but I would say the chance to do any of it quickly via 'move fast and break things' came and went around 2012-2020 at the most generous. Now you have mongol invaders, sadists, psychopaths and criminals who want to smash things because its fun and gets them twitter likes vs all the slowed stagnant institutional problems we had before. It shouldn't be so but it is.
"$42 billion effort to give rural Americans Internet which, after endless delays, has failed to connect a single rural American."
The $42 billion hasn't been spent yet. It passed 3 years ago, not an especially long time for US infrastructure projects. The US is a very wealthy country so it's always going to be more efficient to spend money helping Africans. But the evidence given that this is an especially bad program is really weak. Is the idea that you have to agree a lot of current government spending is total waste in order to gain credibility with the people in power you are trying to persuade?
I thought the problem was their plans keep getting out of date technologically.
Regarding the ordo amoris, it's worth noting that Thomas Aquinas literally says in his Summa Theologiae that the dire need of a stranger may justify helping them over one's family members who need help less urgently: https://christandcounterfactuals.substack.com/p/the-ordo-amoris-has-an-important
I obviously agree with the thrust of the argument, but if PEPFAR costs 6 billions per year, and the budget is 1500 billions, it represents 6/1500=0,4% of the budget, so to cut foreign aid to 0.1% you would have to cut PEPFAR, right?
Us government budget is closer to 6T?
Oh that would explain it
Sorry...
If you ascribe literally zero value to foreigners, don't you still want Africa to become more developed for the selfish reason that it's good for the American economy in the long term to have better countries to trade with?
...Why? We're already getting our manufacturing needs met. And developing these countries isn't going to magically improve the... quality of the population. All it's going to do is make it more expensive to exploit their natural resources.
It's easier to sell computer chips to rich people than to poor people.
Why the hell would we sell computer chips to them? We're already using all of them to train AIs.
Hello, I like money.
I do want it to be more developed, but that doesn't mean I want tax dollars devoted to its development.
Well, if we're gonna be arguing theology...
...is the money for PEPFAR corban?
Mark 7: 9-13
"9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ 11 But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God) — 12 then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”
Ordo amoris is *expanding*, not *contracting*, the circle of love. It's natural to care about and for those nearest to us:
Matthew 7:9-11
"9 Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!"
But what we are then told is "very well then: who is my brother? who is my neighbour?" and that gives us the parable of the Good Samaritan. *Everyone* is now your neighbour. *Everyone* is now your concern, if you are to be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.
But that does not mean we get to skip out of our obligations by deeming some things corban: 'oh I'm terribly sorry, elderly neighbour unable to afford your heating and so freezing to death, I've devoted all my giving to Good Deeds Out Foreign, so I can't spare anything for you. Why, that would not be maximally efficient giving! Comparing the QALYs, saving one old Western woman from dying of hypothermia is nothing compared to giving drugs to a long-distance truck driver in Lesotho who likes frequenting prostitutes all along his route but doesn't like condoms because they don't feel as good during sex!'
(If you can be sarky about real estate agents in Des Moines, I can be sarky about guys who are not practicing safer sex and so need to be saved from their own folly. Just because they're Out Foreign doesn't absolve them of responsibility for their own health; Des Moines is Out Foreign if you're a native of Lesotho, after all).
Those in need close to us also have a claim on our help:
Epistle of James:
"14 What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?i
15 If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day,
16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it?"
PEPFAR is a great programme, I'm not arguing about that. But there's a false correlation here: things like BEAD which are a boondoggle should be scrapped and the money taken back. But PEPFAR and similar programmes are being used as a shield - "you want to scap the budget? but look at the good things it does!" (There's an Irish saying "hit me now with the child in my arms" and PEPFAR is the child here).
Maybe, if it takes threatening to cancel things like PEPFAR to get the outcry and attention enough to be able to scrap things like BEAD and demand accounting for it, then that's the price that has to be paid in order to clear out the waste and bloating that's there.
Three hundred comments already, so maybe this has already been said, but your numbers also assume literally zero value of PEPFAR to Americans, which is implausible: saving foreign lives makes America more popular elsewhere in the world, and extends American "soft power"; I have no idea how to quantify this effect, but I'd wonder how PEPFAR compares in cost and effectiveness-as-propaganda to actual soft power initiatives
The administration doesn't want soft power, they want hard power. Those who will not kneel will suffer.
I don't think Americans get any benefit from it. What do we get from that "soft power"?
https://docs.aiddata.org/ad4/pdfs/WPS86_Foreign_Aid_and_Soft_Power__Great_Power_Competition_in_Africa_in_the_Early_21st_Century.pdf
> US aid similarly decreases support for China while increasing support for the US—a more straightforward substitution effect. These results suggest that Chinese aid is actually diminishing Chinese soft power in Africa, while US aid is bolstering American soft power, both in absolute terms and relative to China. American aid also increases support for the liberal democratic values that are more often associated with the US than with China and other authoritarian regimes, including a belief in the importance of multi-party elections.
So we can sit back and let China diminish its own "soft power in Africa"? Not that I care about whether China has any there.
What do you want me to say here? You asked a question and then declared its answer irrelevant.
>I have no idea how to quantify this effect
And yet, you assume it exists!
We *don't* actually know that it makes America more popular in the rest of the world, the people that voted for Trump don't necessarily want America to be more popular, and they have been inundated for years with "AMERICA BAD" progressive messaging- to the extent soft power exists at all, they're going to assume it's mostly been damaging us.
The government does so few things effectively, we should keep functional programs around even if they only represent the interests of a few hundred Americans.
If there was a group of people out there who cared about something, like the habitat of some weed that has no economic or ecosystem-wide value, and we came up with a government program that protected the weed at little economic cost to great effect, I think it’s worth leaving around just to keep those few people satisfied.
Government for literally everyone involves getting taxed for things you think are stupid, if not for any other reason that there are people who value and prioritize other things than you (inevitable with hundreds of millions of people). I think it’s fine if you shut down stupid-looking programs that do their job incredibly ineffectively (EPA environmental reviews…), but if they’re low cost high benefit to causes you just don’t agree with, we should just leave them untouched for our other American’s satisfaction.
Otherwise come next election when the [opposing party] is in power, they will make trouble for you with the programs you want to keep going.
I’m optimistic that after the foreign aid freeze, Trump will quietly reactivate some of the more valuable foreign aid projects. I would be surprised if he keeps the freeze going across the board for the whole 4 years.
I disagree. Taxes don't exist just because some minority of people like a thing. That's "concentrated benefit, dispersed cost" as public choice economists warned about. Taxes exist because the government has to be funded, and the government has to exist to fill the power vacuum and prevent some other government from taking its place (and taxing the people how it chooses). If a minority of people care about some habitat, they should fund it with their own charitable donations rather than forcing everyone who doesn't want to fund it to do so via taxes.
What do you think of federal spending that doesn't benefit all citizens equally? Farm subsidies, infrastructure spending, telecom expansion, etc. (basically everything? Even the military) never serves the interests of the nation as a whole equally.
I oppose all farm subsidies and want to privatize infrastructure as much as possible, along with shrinking the military to only what's necessary to defend the US (being surrounded by oceans and relatively non-hostile neighbors helps).
That’s a fine position to have, but it’s not shared among the vast majority of people. If you disagree generally with anything more than a minarchist state, then it’s not really a disagreement specifically with my assessment.
But if you’d like, you can preface my comment with “Given that the government spends money on things that don’t serve the interests of all equally, then…”
I do have a larger disagreement with a lot more than this program. I'm not even in favor of government post offices, although those are at least specified under the Constitution. And due to that larger disagreement I'm also going to disagree specifically with your assessment.
While PEPFAR operates as a program specifically focused on HIV/AIDS, it is managed and administered by several U.S. government agencies, including USAID which plays a key role in the implementation of PEPFAR's activities.
Looks like California Man 10^100 Bubble Rationalist here is again too brainwashed to figure out that its purpose isn't to help your brothers, foreigners, or Americans, but to give the CIA and Shady Bunch a leg up in controlling the local populations in the interest of power not humanitarianism.
Who cares?
If it saves lives, then it saves lives. All the pro-market people keep saying that markets lead to economic growth which improves people's lives, even though market participants are encouraged to act selfishly. If PEPFAR is actually just a way to exercise soft power, it still has saved millions of lives.
Everyone who hasn't been brainwashed cares.
PEPFAR doesn't save lives, it *costs* lives, it is funded by extorting resources from decent people and transferring them to the corrupt Shady Bunch. It's not a way to 'exercise soft power', it's a way for people like you to support brutal authoritarianism by proxy and rejecting all responsibility for the abuse.
Actually, PEPFAR does save lives. You believe it costs lives because you have fallen into an epistemic black hole from which no light can escape. Trump's pick for NIH head, Jay Bhattacharya, is a co-author on a paper calculating that PEPFAR saved ~740,000 lives from 2004-2008. I eagerly await whatever nonsense you have to dismiss this evidence.
No, I believe that you don't understand that resources are limited, and that opportunity costs and quantitative fallacies don't exist.
Trump's pick for NIH head can compute all the 'lives saved' and compare body counts like it's 'Nam 1968 all he wants, it's no argument for sound policy.
1. Measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes.
2. Disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
3. Presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness.
4. Say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
— Daniel Yankelovich
Claiming mystifying magic unmeasurable stuff is just a way to admit you've lost the argument: if that money really could be put to good use saving American lives, or whatever other opportunity cost you imagine, you ABSOLUTELY could point to evidence of that.
One imagines, say, a $6B domestic program that saves millions of lives would leave quite a visible footprint; that if a mere $6B total increase in consumer spending led to a significant uptick in life expectancy, you could point to evidence of that by some study that would have found such a massive effect by accident and then been confirmed by ten followups.
But the reality is that PEPFAR is good, and all you can do is make up "oh, well, maybe somehow it's bad." That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
We're not arguing, I'm explaining why you're wrong.
'Saving lives' is a shit metric, there's a qualitative difference between the lives of "a 92-year-old demented bachelor in a nursing home" and a "22-year-old pregnant wife in a maternity ward".
If there weren't, you wouldn't exist because men would have slaughtered every one of your female ancestors.
You can imagine $6B programs that are magically funded by mana falling from the heavens, and say, sterilize everyone and put them in chemical comas for an uptick in life expectancy, "uptick in life expectancy" just isn't an argument when qualitative factors dominate.
The reality is that you can't actually have arguments because you don't know how to think, and the "PEPFAR good" opinion simply has been assigned to you, in same way and to the same extent as all your other opinions.
First, a quibble: some people are getting rural broadband from that program. I know two personally, one of which had a bundle of fibers buried up to her house, which is 8/10 of a mile from the highway. There is no way that could be done profitably without government largess. (This doesn't make it a good program. Giving out Starlink subscriptions would have been cheaper, I suspect. And who says people in rural areas are entitled to the same conveniences of the cities?)
The general rule of thumb to be biased against foreign aid has less to do with worthiness and more to do with ability. It is easier to know what is truly going on in our own country, and our government has authority. Trying to use that authority in other countries frequently backfires. Notice our attempt to create an Islamic democracy in Iraq or our attempt to give women some rights in Afghanistan.
I think we should also be strongly biased against small federal government programs. The superpower of the federal government is that it is BIG. There are some projects that it is really hard to raise charitable money for due to the daunting scale of the problem. This is where the IRS is rather handy.
But piling up wealth on one place doesn't increase the amount of wealth. It just makes it an impressive pile which then needs to be distributed. If it is distributed via thousands of small budget items, bureaucratic overhead and/or corruption cancels out the efficiency of the fundraising.
Shouldn't we model it as going to reducing the defeciet? The shape of this argument would mean we could practically never reduce spending.
What evidence are you going to need to acknowledge that foreign financial interventions do more harm than good?
Tyrants and lack of rule of law impede the innate human desire for improvement. What charities and NGO’s have been responsible for elevating billions of people out of abject poverty? Markets and rule of law consistently delivers those outcomes.
Development economics has an extensive track record of creating & supporting tyrants - by gifting them resources - and undermining rule of law - by supporting progressive coded policies over local democratic empowerment.
The US has >40 trillion in debt, another ~50-100 trillion in deferred liabilities. PEPFAR got cancelled for a week. This is a good opportunity for EA’s to self-reflect on why they’re now suddenly defensive of ineffective government spending.
I think there are a couple pieces of context missing from the discussion: first, the "ER" in PEPFAR stands for "emergency response", and the program was already trying to move away from providing health services and be more of a partner to increase sustainability. You cannot have a 15-20+yr "emergency" program. Eventually, the work would need to be taken over by local actors. Second, PEPFAR is highly inefficient as a single disease focused effort. It often had the effect of distorting local health systems by focusing on HIV, paying high salaries for contract staff and consultants, and neglecting other things. That is why it slowly morphed into other "wrap around" areas like nutrition and education. It was too unwieldy and difficult to manage. Third, it is basically impossible to reform a program like PEPFAR. Congress barely reauthorized it last time and there are too many interested parties to update it. It was not nimble enough. In order to even spend funds you needed approval from like multiple different coordinators, you needed to develop yearly country operational plans, there were multiple earmarks you needed to hit, then managing a contract/grant, reporting, etc. It was a mess. Lastly, countries will adapt. It is not all bad news. Look at the case with Zimbabwe (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/globalhealth-july-dec12-zimbabwe_07-17).
During Bush’s second term I worked for a USAID-funded nonprofit that got totally upended by the way PEPFAR was implemented. The new rules stated that the lion’s share of aid had to go to PEPFAR, leaving only nominal sums for any other kind of program, so everything pivoted to AIDS prevention. We had to re-apply for everything, so our existing AIDS-prevention work was briefly suspended or severely limited. We were also forced to promote things like the “A-B-C’s of AIDS Prevention”: A is for Abstinence, B for “Be Faithful” and C is Condoms. Needle exchanges were suspended or limited, at least temporarily. And religious groups could compete for funds, which in reality meant they could spend more of their own budgets proselytizing and were not obligated to spend any on condoms. I left and found a new job before things really hit the fan, but about half the organization got laid off. I hadn’t really been following PEPFAR in the years since- I’m sure it underwent a lot of changes between Obama, Trump and Biden, and I’m glad it seems to be having some success. But there were a painful, chaotic couple of years for all the people who surely contributed to that success. And a lot of people abroad fell through the cracks as the programs that might have helped them had to scramble to completely rearrange themselves, compete for funds under new processes, lost established resources and connections, and had to reassemble teams that had been fired from assorted jobs during the budget gap.
1. Some of us believe that Americans should be allowed to decide which foreign charities to support individually, rather than collectively. I don't like being required to donate a portion of my tax dollars to domestic charities either, but there is a stronger argument for that.
2. If PEPFAR is so wonderful and cost-effective, surely organizations such as the Gates Foundation and possibly even African governments will step in and replace the U.S. funding. Perhaps they might even be able to afford this by eliminating ineffective programs.
I agree. The point of government is not to run global charities. Institutions should focus and avoid scope creep.
Scope creep has already happened, which means what's required is rollback.
PEPFAR has been around for more than two decades. I have no doubt that it's saved many lives, and suddenly canceling it sounds like a bad idea. However, I do think it's a good thing to question its effectiveness and not just turn it into an equation of lives saved / cost. It was set up as an "emergency" response to AIDS/HIV, and now twenty years later I would have hoped it could be winding down its operation by creating sustainable improvements. Maybe it has, although based on the fact that its funding has tripled, and canceling it will cause many deaths, I kind of doubt it.
This is a mistake-theory perspective. All true, but it misses one important thing -- the cruelty is the point. Cancelling a program that actually doesn't do anything useful (like that broadband program) just wouldn't be so popular among the target audience, which is why they didn't choose that program to cancel. Which is why I wouldn't expect that broadband program to get cancelled.
Hurting someone is the point; preferably in a plausibly deniable way; preferably for a very low level of "plausibly" -- so that you know, and they know that you know, and you know that they know that you know.
Each political tribe has its "Voldemorts". We had the ones who enjoyed drinking white or male tears, now we have the ones who enjoy drinking black or female or trans tears. Each political tribe does certain things designed specifically to appease its dark-triad members. In return, it gets their vocal support on the internet.
If they restarted it, then I guess it didn't accomplish that purpose.
You need to think like a Trump voter. Let me explain...
When they cancelled the program, it was awesome, because they *owned the libs*.
And when they restarted the program, they showed everyone that the libs were *lying* about them wanting to stop the program.
From a Trump voter perspective, those are two consecutive wins. A huuuge victory!
(It may not make much sense now, but trust me that one month later, some of them will remember that Trump was awesome because he cancelled the program, and some of them will remember that Trump was awesome because he *didn't* cancel the program despite the lying liberals accusing him of doing it.)
Your analogy doesn't seem accurate. In that fact pattern it's save a child or do nothing. The choice would be to save a random child vs. your child if both were drowning and you could only save one. Also, the random drowning child is one that has parents that have a history of letting their unsupervised children wander around dangerous bodies of water knowing, and not caring, that they can't swim. Not the first and won't be the last.
While I think PEPFAR is absolutely worthwhile and should continue, the process of a full accounting and examination of foreign aid is also necessary considering the lack of accountability and waste in that area. That's what he was hired to do.
Philosophically it makes plenty of sense to me that we reprioritize our care to family, friends, neighborhood, city, state, country, and then the rest of the world. There are way too many people with their lives and families in shambles that fret too much over national or international issues.
Trump has no humanity, he does not act ethically and he has no empathy for his fellow human beings. He is amoral, he does any business as long as it is financially profitable and cutting off supplies to the poor african people is very profitable.
Trump himself doesn't get to collect any of the cancelled funding.
This article is just like what happens whenever someone gets elected to city council and cuts the budget.
- the unions strike
- the parks get shut down; the gates get chained shut.
Why the parks? It's not that they were expensive, it's that they are publicly visible and shutting them down is cheap. It's a tactic to make city council unpopular.
The agencies are being forced to justify their spending. The usual method of an audit that doesn't disturb their functionality (i.e. their spending) has never worked - because it does not disrupt their spending.
And what we're finding out is that for every PEPFAR there's ten grants to Politico to run hit pieces, and a hundred grants to shell organizations where the money eventually ends up in a Congressman's net worth.
Numbers are always important.
"In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are suffering? Shouldn’t we value American lives more than foreign ones? Can’t we spend that money on some program that helps people closer to home?"
I think these are the wrong questions. PEPFAR has been around since 2003. After *22 years*, is it too much to ask for African governments to take responsibility for the prevention/treatment of AIDS among their own citizens? I don't want anyone to die, but I also don't want people half a world away dependent on American largesse for f#$%ing ever while we're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt about every 100 days. I take your point about ineffective government spending, but to me you could kinda defend any government program with "they'd only waste it on something else instead."
This, yes. It has been made affordable. It should now be seen as something basic the governments themselves do, just like making sure people are fed, or building the dictator a palace or buying him a new Gulfstream. The dictator buys his people the HIV medication that they need and will need forever. This transfer of responsibility should happen while we have some influence in Africa.
Discouraging this expectation, that it should be off the table for discussion because utterly impossible, does not seem to me to be an attitude toward Africa that will bear fruit.
Is it so unreasonable to think they might need our help for a little longer, especially when, as the numbers cited by Scott elsewhere in the comments show, they really are getting better? How long did it take the US to get its shit together?
In 1799, the US Government was in arrears of $140,000 to Algiers and some $150,000 to Tripoli. 1/5 the congressional budget went to tribute payments, and we weren't able to fix the situation until 1815--which, depending on how you count it, was somewhere between 39 and 27 years after the country was founded. We started off in a much better position in terms of demographics and resources.
You talk about trillions, but again, the numbers for this specific program are less than a rounding error in the scheme of things. It's not fixing debt, or lowering taxes; it's just taking a lot of good out of the world in a way which is very damaging for Americans (both the ones who thought the program was good and the ones who benefited from the additional overseas clout) with no upside.
Was the US some big recipient of foreign aid back in 1799? I'm not sure I see the relevance, otherwise. Also, weren't these debts you're talking about a result of North African piracy, and not...ya know, typical commerce? Either way, I don't think it's relevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War
As for your first question, yes, that is my point. It's pretty unreasonable in 2025 to not be able to handle AIDS, which has been around for almost fifty years now and which has had effective treatments available for thirty years now. I'm not saying the program should be ended today, but yes, after two decades we should be looking to pass the funding off to someone else. I understand the scale issue; in the grand scheme of things, it's not that much, but the old saying "how do you go bankrupt? $1 at a time" still applies.
Really, the argument that African governments can't provide governmental services to their people is an argument against decolonization.
The US didn't require charity.
> When studying charities, Toby Ord found that of two randomly chosen charities, one will be (on average) 100x more effective than the other.
Is there a particular place where Ord stated this?
I would also be very interested by a link for this studies.
I agree with this but feel like it is in tension with some of your other views.
If the marginal government dollar does no good, then canceling this program 'to free up money to help americans' will do no good.
But if the marginal government dollar does no good, an increase in taxes takes away money from people to do no good with it, and a tax cut gives people more money without losing us anything good.
I don't know enough about the structure of government to say exactly where the marginal dollar goes or how valuable it is. But if you think the answer is 'not valuable at all', I would like to revisit your past posts about how tax cuts are bad.
This post makes a great argument for why PEPFAR shouldn't be cut *conditional on this being the only program being cut*. But since it's not the only thing being cut, we have to assess the bigger picture: what's driving the DOGE cuts and what would happen without them? And if we believe Musk the answers are:
- The driving force is the growth of deficit, which has been getting worse and worse ever since the 1990s.
- If we don't do the cuts, eventually the US will declare bankruptcy or enter a Weimar-Republic like hyper-inflation cycle, causing far more cataclysmic side effects than cancelling PEPFAR ever could.
From that perspective cutting PEPFAR might actually be a good thing: it gets "cuts" on the small list of policy questions people can keep in their heads and increases the chance of Musk succeeding and triggering a massive wave of cuts that will avoid the incoming bankruptcy. Even if the chance is just 10%, the disaster of going bankrupt is so huge that I'd say its more than justified -- or at least disproving it requires a far more complicated formula than the 1-to-100 ratio presented here.
Except that we could cut every discretionary program in the country and not balance the budget. Essentially every single one of your tax dollars goes towards: Medicare, Social Security, Defense Spending. If someone says they're working to balance the budget but they do not cut Medicare, Social Security, or Defense Spending, to the point where those are essentially different programs, then they are grifting you. And frankly there's big limits to what they could do by just cutting defense spending.
Your options, since the 1990s have been to be for: 1) higher taxes, 2) cutting programs that are broadly popular, or 3) budget deficits. Americans have decided to delusionally embrace none of those options, so we end up cutting good programs that save lives and keep America secure, and laying off half the government workforce to save 6% of the budget.
I know, I know. Every little bit helps. Let's completely eliminate every useful program other than those three and pretend we did something about the deficit.
Let’s say we did start from those 3 programs. What do you imagine would be the criticisms of the naysayers? My prediction:
- “You guys want to cut my pensions but you won’t cut a study of tribal languages in Djibouti?”
- “You want to shut down the army base in Syria? But you won’t stop funding this one rebel group which allegedly planned to attack the U.S. at some point?”
- “You’re cutting Medicare? How come we’re still paying $2B to help healthcare in Burma?”
If you tried to do it all at once you’d have lobbyists from both sides unifying in a crying rally saying the wrong things are being cut and you’ll never get anything done. So what’s left? You do it the “salami method” way where you start with the least popular programs, cut those away while promising great riches to the welfare state. Then once that’s done you go after the military. And finally you declare that everyone must remain in solidarity and that as the very last resort we must rescue pensions and healthcare.
Is this going to happen? I would bet not but if it did happen, I don’t see how it could be done in any other way. My bet is on Musk having this plan in mind as evidenced by how well prepared Trumps executive orders were - and if any human could play 5D chess, it’s him.
So...eliminate the entire discretionary budget to get rid of one of several arguments against making actually meaningful changes. Ok. I think Imma just stop trying to talk about politics on the internet.
If you make giants cuts to discretionary spending, it will take deficit from critical levels to merely bad. Also it means less cuts to those mandatory programs which will be wildly unpopular.
I see a giant misalignment with what you think the purpose of foreign aid is vs. what the actual purpose of foreign aid is.
Politicians love to sell foreign aid as charity. The purpose of foreign aid is not charity, if that ever became its only purpose it would be terminated, killed, and buried in one day. The purpose is to propagate American influence around the globe. Have a stick by which we can threaten revoking foreign aid if Panama or Egypt or Saudi Arabia doesn't comply with our demands.
This should explain why the Democrats have started throwing a major temper tantrum over USAID after finding, and why Republicans finally found it within themselves to yank: Because DOGE found out that 90% of it is money-laundered back to Democrat NGOs and domestic political causes.
Even if foreign aid was normatively supposed to be charity, I still think there's a time-place concern. If there's a child drowning in the river, you'd be stupid to think "well I paid my taxes, that will pull the child out". Charity is not homogeneous like that. You are the only person on the face of the planet capable of pulling that child out of the river at that moment, SO YOU DO IT. That's the major point of the Good Samaritan parable: You alone are that child's neighbor, nobody else is, so YOU do it. Not a foreign nation thousands of miles away.
The point of the Federal government budget is to support the American nation. This is justified. It's doubtful Africa shares our values. I seriously doubt the life saved numbers are that high. Only ~40% of AIDS medications distributed are taken as directed. There was a good video about the One Laptop project along these lines too. Western values misalignment is rampant like this. We just assume people value life and education and our values the same way we do, and frequently they just don't.
Tyler Cowen had two excellent posts about USAID: the long one is here: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/deep-research-considers-the-costs-and-benefits-of-us-aid.html
In the other post he explains Trump. :D Merci! USAID he mentions thus:
(...) keep in mind the main point is not to eliminate Black History Month, though I do not doubt that is a favored policy. The main point is to get people talking about how you are eliminating Black History Month. Just as I am covering the topic right now.
How is that war against US AID going? Will it be abolished? Cut off from the Treasury payments system? Simply rolled up into the State Department? Presidential “impoundment” invoked? I do not know. Perhaps nobody knows, not yet. The point however is to delegitimatize what US AID stands for, which the Trumpers perceive as “other countries first” and a certain kind of altruism, and a certain kind of NGO left-leaning mindset and lifestyle.
The core message is simply “we do not consider this legitimate.” Have that be the topic of discussion for months, and do not worry about converting each and every debate into an immediate tangible victory. -
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/trumpian-policy-as-cultural-policy.html
Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …
All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —
Michael Kirk: What was the word?
Bannon: Muzzle velocity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-trump-column-read.html
I suspect we’re all talking past each other a bit because of the term “value.” After all, my stance isn’t rooted in a belief that human worth differs across borders. Rather, it’s because I value human life pretty consistently across borders that I arrive at the position I do. I believe it is a practical response to two constraints: (1) the accountability gap inherent in global aid systems, and (2) the asymmetric risk of unintended harm when operating in contexts where local knowledge and feedback loops are absent.
You’re right that certain interventions (e.g., PEPFAR) show measurable success (I do not inherently trust the measurement, though that's an argument for another time given my current ignorance of PEPFAR), but this doesn’t resolve the structural problem. Let's assume PEPFAR is as effective as you say it is. For every PEPFAR, there are countless programs where overhead costs, cultural misalignment, or outright graft don't just negate, but reverse intended benefits. And the issue isn’t just variance in effectiveness—it’s that the variance itself is often invisible to donors. When we lack reliable mechanisms to audit impact (or worse, when aid infrastructure becomes a self-perpetuating industry), the null hypothesis should shift toward harm reduction, not maximalist utilitarianism.
This isn’t a rejection of global empathy—it’s a recognition of practical subsidiarity. Proximity allows for iterative correction: I can observe whether my neighbor’s food bank incentivizes dependency or empowers recipients, adjust accordingly, and build trust through repeated interaction. By contrast, foreign aid often operates in a moral hazard loop: the donor’s moral satisfaction is disconnected from outcomes with varying polarities of good/evil, while recipients (and intermediaries) face perverse incentives to game abstract metrics (ultimately making them almost entirely unreliable).
Your charity-effectiveness distribution example is telling ("of two randomly chosen charities, one will be (on average) 100x more effective than the other"). If we model interventions not as “neutral vs. good” but as “harmful vs. weakly beneficial,” the expected value flips. Consider the replication crisis in development economics: many celebrated studies (e.g., deworming RCTs) now face methodological scrutiny. When even experts struggle to evaluate impact, why should we assume lay donors—or governments—can reliably distinguish 100x-effective charities from those exporting harms, intended or unintended?
And a fake/poor charity isn't just 100x less effective while remaining neutral; it can be almost immeasurably harmful. Look at Dr. Cyril Wang's impact on Alzheimer's research as an example in the medical world. Would you merely call GLP-1 research "100x more effective than Wang's amyloid beta research"? I'd probably state that a completely different way, and with a great deal more venom.
I posit that it's way more likely for the harm/good distribution to be weighted towards harm due to, again, (1) the accountability gap, and (2) the asymmetric risk of unintended harm.
And as a lived example, it's incredibly difficult to do something good and productive that's additive rather than subtractive. I don't know where I read a version of this quote, but I think about it often in my work (and it has proven true every single time: "If you want to make something 1% better, improve your processes. If you want to make something 90% better, stop doing something stupid." I think government-driven foreign aid is the "something stupid" in this metaphor.
I’ll concede this creates a tragic tension. We should care about suffering everywhere. But when our capacity to act effectively diminishes with distance, the ethical imperative shifts toward building robust local systems rather than outsourcing virtue via untraceable (and non-consensual) donations. To paraphrase Ostrom: complex problems are best solved by nested, polycentric institutions—not abstracted global markets in moral credit.
I think we also shouldn't forget the fact that foreign aid programs boost how people see America around the world, so there is a self-interested reason to do it too.
It's a common conservative fantasy that by cutting the programs they want to cut they can balance the budget. It's not actually possible to do it that way.
https://manhattan.institute/article/a-comprehensive-federal-budget-plan-to-avert-a-debt-crisis-2024
In that light, it's dumb to fight over PEPFAR, there are excellent reasons to keep it going and axing it won't fix anything or even move you closer to fixing anything. It's likely going to piss off a lot of people just like the woke did, MAGA is absolutely capable of generating an overwhelming amount of backlash like what is happening with wokism, don't become the reverse-woke.
The post makes the good point that if we cancel the Africa AIDS program, we need to think how the money will be used instead (of course, we haven't cancelled it yet, just paused to do exactly that thinking, but the point is still good).
But we also need to think about whether if the US doesnt pay for PEPFAR, it will disappear. If it's such a good program, why wouldn't these African countries do it on their own? They are poor--sure-- but they do have governments that spend money on lots of things, and if PEPFAR is so good, they can divert money to that. Then, the question we must ask is what other African government programs will go unfunded if the US stops funding PEPFAR. And so it is the average-quality African government program we must look at as well as the average-quality American government program.
I'm a guy that lives in India. I think completely altruistic stuff like PEPFAR that "helps foreigners" in third world countries is, in fact, one of the most valuable, self-interested things the US government and other developed countries can actually do. It's the same principle as when the US military invested sizable amounts of money just to make chocolate and ice cream widely available for troops during World War II. That's the sort of thing that sticks in people's minds for decades. Because it's the sort of thing only a true "land of abundance" in it's golden age would actually be capable of pulling off.
Sure, PEPFAR and other foreign aid programs do help impoverished Africans (or whoever). But simultaneously, they are proof of "national capacity". A whole bunch of different capabilities in disparate domains (leadership, administrative capability, technical capability, affluence, the rule of law, governmental integrity etc.) have to exist and successfully come together to create something like PEPFAR. If that kind of national capacity exists, increasing it is only marginally difficult. If that national capacity is lost, it's usually lost forever. Merely demonstrating that the US has *surplus* national capacity gives the American economy tremendous advantage.
Imagine you're a US citizen that wants a high-paying job. Or a businessperson of some kind that wants to make lots of money. Or maybe you're a local non-profit that could benefit from donations. Or you're a local government official that could benefit from tax revenue. Or you're a local University that does research and hopes to win the Nobel Prize and maybe some royalties from patents. In all of these situations, you would maximize your benefit if you had around you, people that could and personally WANTED to succeed alongside you.
For example, right now, there are 5.2 million Indian-Americans in the US. A further one million Indians have applied for permanent residency, to be eligible for US citizenship. A further 331,000 Indians are paying full price (over $7.6 Billion) just to study in the US and be eligible to work between one to three years in the US economy, and then maybe an H1-B. And that's just from India.
What I'm trying to say is, Indians, and other non-Americans, have seen and heard of the national capacity of the US and this has had the effect of millions of non-Americans actively rooting for you and simply showing up to your doorstep, legally, and wanting to contribute to your specific success. Their only condition being to succeed alongside you and become a fellow American like you. This is a GREAT deal for anybody in the US and is the reason the US is the richest society in recorded history. All that was necessary for millions of non-US citizens to be rooting for American success was the US simply demonstrating national capacity it already had.
As a real world example, in 1914 an American inventor called Jesse Dubbs and his son Carbon Petroleum Dubbs (that was his legal, real name) founded Universal Oil Products. The family of the Armour meatpacking company invested in UOP and funded its lawsuits defending its patents. At the same time, a Russian chemist named Vladimir Ipatieff got sick and tired of Lenin's bullshit and defected straight to the US, and landed at UOP. The Big Oil of that era finally got tired of UOP's lawsuits and decided to acquire it, and in the process gave a share of the resulting company to the American Chemical Society as an endowment. Ipatieff, UOP and the ACS kicked ass and took names in the field of innovative fuel mixtures and lubricants.
UOP, ACS' and Ipatieff's success resulted in the US having the edge in fossil fuel extraction and refining, and that contributed to success in WWII and the Cold War. Today, UOP is headed by a guy named Rajesh Gattupalli. The US succeeding in WWII and the Cold War in turn motivated Sergey Brin's parents to flee the Soviet Union and come straight to the US. Brin and Larry Page co-founded Google and combined with Eric Schmidt to, like, reshape the evolutionary trajectory of humankind, I guess, and make trillions of dollars of wealth for American investors and pension/retirement funds. Google/Alphabet is now headed by Sundar Pichai.
All of this sounds like serendipity, or something, but it's a fact that it happened in the US and benefited millions of Americans financially, because of the simple fact of the US not shying away from expanding and demonstrating its national capacity in the past.
I think the US cancelling foreign aid and taking an isolationist stance will have the opposite effect- of atrophying US national capacity and consequently losing out on a bunch of stuff. This effect won't be felt for a decade or so, but after that, the US will probably not be top dog anymore.
Troops in WW2 were employees (some involuntary, via the draft) of the US government. Not at all like charity recipients. If the US cut off all charity, it could continue. If it didn't pay its troops, they would likely mutiny.
There are governments which haven't tried to be world policeman, like Switzerland & Sweden. My impression is that they're doing fairly well, although Sweden is having some problems with its immigrants.
> Not only you but lots of folks here seem to be thinking pretty tactically instead of strategically.
"Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics". I discount such talk of strategy from people who would experience no negative consequences for their strategic ideas being wrong.
> I think it's ignorant to assume that non-policeman states like Switzerland and Sweden don't benefit directly and perhaps even exist as-is only as a consequence of a forceful US-led world.
If they are getting the benefit without such spending, such spending seems less necessary on the part of the US. But also, they existed before the US led the world.
> It's to offer a reminder of an alternative to European, Chinese, and Middle Eastern development with a goal of reducing their spheres of influence and ensuring US hegemony.
I don't see a problem with "European development" in Africa, whatever that means. Nor do I think the US needs hegemony as far away as Africa.
> they don't get so tied in that then they pursue Chinese surveillance architecture
We're worried that African countries are going to spy on us?
> many countries that could find their ideology shaped by such an arrangement into hating the US and going to war with us fifty years down the road
I just don't see African countries going to war with us. Any US involvement with them would be a war of choice.
> Or if land war is incomprehensible, can you imagine where this leads re the primacy of the dollar?
I think the Swiss do just fine without the Swiss Franc having "primacy".
> US culture is dominant across the world
I think that's due to US media. https://www.ggd.world/p/cultural-leapfrogging-swiping-past
> In a continent of people for whom the clearest regional memory of the US is "oh those people used to buy and sell us,"
The US banned the international slave trade not too long after it came into existence (the Constitution included a period of delay before it could do that).
> Foreign aid is actually an answer to the question of how you get US people in countries around the world without guns in their hands
I think trade can do that.
> I see soft power as the major alternative to global policeman.
"Soft power" would not be an effective alternative if Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs. "Soft power" doesn't stop the Houthis from interfering with shipping.
> One way or another, the US, the West, or some contingent of "progressive" (including US conservatives here) state needs to involve itself if we don't want to live in a world that is increasingly in a Chinese sphere of influence or a radical Islamic sphere of influence or whatever.
We don't "need" to insert ourselves into the third world. We tried doing so in Afghanistan, but radical Islamists took it back anyway.
> Isolationism is an approach, and maybe if we get a sweet iron dome and dominate our continent, we can amass enough resources and trade to let the rest of the world figure itself out.
Israel has an "iron dome" because it's neighbors are hostile. The US is not, it is already dominant on its continent.
> If you don't like to talk about the future with strategists
Is every commenter on the internet a "strategist"?
> We could ask the question, "how did the US get into its global policeman role back when?"
The most obvious preceding factor would be the relative decline of the UK.
> Soft power is the advanced guard.
You haven't established it does any guarding at all.
> The relevant aspect of the Houthis attack on shipping in the context of soft power is "if the US ran Middle-East diplomacy in a way that warmed the hearts of Houthis (the unbearable two-state solution, for instance), there would be no shipping attacks."
The Houthis attack ships that have nothing to do with Israel. They aren't trying to make any deal with the US over them either.
> That there is just demonstrates a failure in approach.
What would be an example of a success?
> Policy in Afghanistan is not about who controls Afghanistan but about Iran and the broader Middle East.
The Taliban killed a number of Iranian officials and nearly went to war with Iran prior to 9/11. We didn't overthrow the Taliban for that reason, we did it because of 9/11. Iran was empowered by us overthrowing hostile neighboring regimes.
> Frankly US policy wonks might feel our investment in Afghanistan was perfectly worthwhile.
They can believe the moon is made of green cheese, that doesn't make it true.
> Re African troops and the iron dome--have you heard of boats and ICBMs? An ocean ain't as big as it used to be. Africa is just an example here. It's every continent and every country.
The US hasn't been attacked by boats since Pearl Harbor (really, that was planes launched from boats), and there isn't a navy that can compete with ours. African countries don't have ICBMs, and the countries that do have them don't need to launch them from Africa to reach us. There is thus no apparent gain to the US from political wrangling there.
>If the US cut off all charity, it could continue. If it didn't pay its troops, they would likely mutiny.
You're missing the point, TGGP. I was talking explicitly about *National Capacity* That is, what a country is *able* to do. You're talking about the minimum a country can get away with doing. My point was that in practice, national capacity either expands or contracts. Everybody wants some kind of magical dial where they can set what they think is the *correct* amount of national capacity at any given time according to their beliefs, but that sort of thing usually ends poorly for the citizens and the economy. Either the US is vibrant enough to export governmental competence to Africa for free, on a whim, via PEPFAR or it is shrinking into a despotic state. There is no in between. There's only a time lag.
Why, a guy named Leon Trotsky contemplated the problem of impoverished and poorly supplied troops mutinying and came up with the idea of 'Barrier Troops' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrier_troops Trotsky realized that no, a country didn't have to figure out how to get chocolate and ice cream to the frontlines, instead it could just position soldiers to catch and execute fellow soldiers trying to retreat, for any reason.
Like I said, I'm from India. India was a Soviet client state from the late 1960s, and the Soviet-approved dictator Indira Gandhi amended the constitution about a hundred times and nationalized a bunch of industries to implement Soviet-style Commanding heights of the economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commanding_heights_of_the_economy
doctrine.
What nobody realized at the time was that Soviet national capacity was continuously shrinking because of their bullshit statist policies and every Soviet client state that copied the Soviet Union and followed stupid Soviet advice on who to trade with (Soviets) and who not to trade with ("Evil Capitalists") also destroyed their own national capacity just like the Soviets. The result is that all of the former Soviet states and all former Soviet client states are dysfunctional countries. Every single former Soviet or Soviet client state has a corrupt government that "protects" its citizens through heavy statism, taxes and societal control, and every citizen is impoverished and has to succeed in spite of the government, not because of it.
>There are governments which haven't tried to be world policeman, like Switzerland & Sweden. My impression is that they're doing fairly well, although Sweden is having some problems with its immigrants.
Yeah, practically speaking, the "World Policeman" is the UN Security Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council
The US simply happens to be the richest and most militarily powerful member of the UNSC. For now, that is. Power is a zero sum game and other countries are also jockeying for the position of "world policeman", so if US national capacity declines and someone else's increases, the US will lose influence and clout, that's all.
The US maintains its diplomatic "soft power" and it's military and economic "hard power" for it's own self interest. It just happens to have its fingers in many pies, economically speaking: protecting the petrodollar in the middle east, "protecting" its favorable trading partners in Scandinavia, Western Europe and the Far East and browbeating them into deals favorable to the US (for example, every single Japanese airline has exclusively bought Boeing airplanes for several decades), "protecting" the <link> Sea Lines of Communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_lines_of_communication</link> to favor US interests and disfavor US enemy interests (eg. North Korea and Iran)
Overall the US is doing a pretty good job. Extra "humanitarian" work is simply a low-marginal-cost extension of existing US national capacity, and the US is not alone in doing humanitarian and free stuff, even developing countries like India and South Africa also do similar things. The US just happens to be capable at a planetary level, relative to other countries.
On state capacity, see Bryan Caplan https://www.econlib.org/state-capacity-is-sleight-of-hand/
> Either the US is vibrant enough to export governmental competence to Africa for free, on a whim, via PEPFAR or it is shrinking into a despotic state. There is no in between. There's only a time lag.
Nonsense. Switzerland doesn't try to manage other countries, and that hasn't caused it to shrink into despotism. There's no actual connection. Nor, of course, is PEPFAR free. That's what the parent post has been arguing about!
> Trotsky realized that no, a country didn't have to figure out how to get chocolate and ice cream to the frontlines, instead it could just position soldiers to catch and execute fellow soldiers trying to retreat, for any reason.
You have to ensure the barrier troops don't mutiny either.
> Yeah, practically speaking, the "World Policeman" is the UN Security Council
Maybe during the Korean War, but afterward the US acted repeatedly without UN backing (the Soviets boycotted the UN's decision there and would have vetoed subsequent actions).
> "protecting" its favorable trading partners in Scandinavia
How is Norway being "protected" by us?
Yeah, I was talking about *national capacity*, similar to what Caplan calls "social capacity". I agree with Caplan that Statism is an awful worldview.
>Nonsense. Switzerland doesn't try to manage other countries, and that hasn't caused it to shrink into despotism. There's no actual connection. Nor, of course, is PEPFAR free. That's what the parent post has been arguing about!
Are you kidding? Switzerland is basically a confederation of Alpine villages with a couple of cities thrown in. And even Switzerland has an annual $4.5 billion foreign aid budget, including food aid in 38 countries.
I don't know what you mean by "doesn't try to manage other countries". If you meant to say that the US sticks its nose in other countries' affairs and Switzerland doesn't, you're quite mistaken.
Being a neutral country, Switzerland is diplomatically involved in almost every conflict in the world today. Swiss diplomats have negotiated with Boko Haram, South Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Kosovo, Lebanon, and even Catalan separatists in Spain. In addition to that, Switzerland also mediates between the US and Cuba, Saudi/Iran, US/Venezuela, Russia/Georgia and apparently also between Iran and Egypt.
Source: https://www.americanswiss.org/switzerland%E2%80%99s-humanitarian-traditionsOLD/
I'm aware that PEPFAR costs money to the US. I am agreeing with Scott's point of view that the US spending the money on PEPFAR is better than the US squandering the money elsewhere. I'm just going a bit further and saying that programs like PEPFAR are proof that the US is capable of doing great things.
I personally don't have HIV/AIDS and don't personally know a single person who does, so I'm not personally invested in PEPFAR's continued existence. As a guy from a third world country, PEPFAR is an example of the awesome things the US *can* do. Other examples are the Berlin Airlift https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/3072635/the-berlin-airlift-what-it-was-its-importance-in-the-cold-war/
US Navy Construction Battalions in WWII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabee
The moon landing and so on. These are all *evidence* of national capacity.
>You have to ensure the barrier troops don't mutiny either.
Yeah, the Soviet strategy for that was to have the barrier troops overseen by the Cheka/NKVD secret police, and the NKVD technically overseen by the Politbureau, but in practice having an incestuous relationship with each other, to the point that Joseph Stalin was terrified of his daughter getting raped by the NKVD chief Stalin himself appointed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria
Anyway, my point was that "abundance" is a much better situation than "no more than necessary".
>Maybe during the Korean War, but afterward the US acted repeatedly without UN backing (the Soviets boycotted the UN's decision there and would have vetoed subsequent actions).
Uhh not really? The US usually goes through the UNSC. It did so for the Afghanistan invasion, Iraq war, Libya, against ISIS/Daesh in Syria, and now Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_United_Nations_Security_Council_resolutions
My point was that the "World Policeman" role is played by a group of countries and not the US individually. Of course, the US also unilaterally declares war on any country it wants, but that is a right that every sovereign country has and exercises. For example, India unilaterally fought Pakistan in 1971 to stop a genocide and because of that, "East Pakistan" became Bangladesh.
>How is Norway being "protected" by us?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Corps_Prepositioning_Program-Norway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A6rnes_Air_Station
https://www.usafe.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3984192/strengthening-arctic-defense-trilateral-exercise-tests-fifth-generation-air-pow/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/us-marines-join-huge-nato-training-exercises-norway-rcna143167
https://www.europeafrica.army.mil/ArticleViewPressRelease/Article/3702883/press-release-over-the-pole-mission-kicks-off-arctic-exercise-between-us-and-no/
https://www.forsvaret.no/en/exercises-and-operations/exercises/jv25
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FS_Marjata
I also kinda get where you're coming from on the 'no link between foreign aid and despotism', but I'm still sticking to my position. Like I said, *in practice* national capacity either expands or contracts. *In practice* your elected representatives have some empathy for citizens and foreigners alike, or they don't have any empathy for either. Its only a matter of time before you find out.
You want the government to *only* perform basic common services and leave the rest to the individual decisions of individual citizens. And yet, can you name a single country that actually does so, *in practice*?
The closest you can get are the tax haven island countries, like the Cayman Islands or Bermuda - for which, obviously you'd have to be pretty rich to even consider living there. Also, these countries themselves are recipients of foreign aid: https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/cayman-islands/cayman-islands-overseas-territory-profile-july-2020
You've perfectly explained the weakness of doing anything via government or central planning. There's no natural inclination for government capital to flow towards efficient uses.
At the very least, private doners *could* evaluate and selectively choose what charities they donate to.
Yes, I could stop funding GiveWell recommended charities if I came to distrust them. I can't do that for my taxes.
It is absolutely *wild* that you can look at the spending priorities of the US and conclude "enemy action" is the cause of debt and missalocation of funding.
Unless your political philosophy is specifically "I like war and corporate tax cuts", I have no idea who you think the enemy is.
> like the Broadband Equity And Deployment Program, a $42 billion effort to give rural Americans Internet which, after endless delays, has failed to connect a single rural American.
Hello. I work at an organization that is advising several state and local governments on the BEAD program. I have noticed that the BEAD program has been catching a lot of flack recently, so I thought I would take this chance to explain what is actually behind those delays.
tl;dr: BEAD has definitely taken longer than it should have, but the delays have been due less to government incompetence than to the decision to pick one side of the tradeoff between "move fast even if it means a lot of the money will end up going to the wrong places" and "move slow and make sure the money doesn't get wasted". When the BEAD program kicked off, we didn't have good data on which households had broadband access and which didn't. There is a timeline where we just decided to push forward quickly with the data we had, but in that world a lot of the money would have been at risk of getting deployed to areas that already had broadband, and a lot of households would have been skipped over because the ISPs had fudged their coverage claims. I also think the program would have had a harder time reaching its goal of 100% broadband coverage.
Instead the government spent around two years creating a new set of broadband maps for the country, then going through a back and forth process to clean those maps and get grant programs set up in each state. Reasonable people can differ over whether all of this this was worth a ~2ish year delay (I definitely have my own gripes), but I don't think BEAD has been quite as big of a failure as people in these parts seem to think. And for the record: I judge DEI to have played a negligible part of this, and, as much as I like them, I don't think "give all the money to Starlink" was ever a feasible solution.
I dashed off some longer thoughts here, for those who are curious: https://aboutradishes.substack.com/p/network-connection-issues
Interesting read! I’m guessing the gap in the calendar between Match 2020 and July 2021 was mainly covid, or was writing the FCC’s request this complex?
Thanks! And that's a good question. Looking at some of the FCC reports from that period, it seems that part of the problem is that Congress directed the FCC to start creating the maps in March, but didn't actually give them the funding to start working on it until the end of the year. The rest of the time seems to have been spent reformulating the data submission standards in preparation for the contract.
Thanks for your reply, this looks like a very silly failure mode from Congress (nine months…).
I also had another question: Do you have thoughts about the amount of expenses? The US is a large country and infrastructure is expensive, but how does it add up to over 40 billion? (Isn’t this much more expensive than what the ISP could have got by fudging their claims?)
A good reason to not direct 100% funds to one super effective program is risk. Humans are dumb and prediction is hard. If you mess up and send all the funds to program A that is merely 10x less effective than program B, you are doing a lot worse than a 50/50 between A and B. You can imagine how the same dynamics apply. It's like diversifying in the stock market, even though you could probably go through most of sp500 1 by 1 and "prove" why each individual stock is a bad pick compared to MAG7.
This post has all the ingredients for an argument for libertarian extremism, but somehow fails to put them together.
```Is it unfair to focus on BEAD and other especially bad programs? Shouldn’t we expect the average newfound dollar to be redirected to an average program? I think we should expect somewhere between average and worst. We should expect it to equal the worst program if government spending rationally picked the lowest-hanging fruit first (ie invested their first X dollars in the best program, the next Y dollars in the second-best program, and so on, always investing the marginal dollar in the best available program). We should expect it to equal the average program if the government has no idea what it’s doing and just funds random things based on what cable news show a Senator watched last night. In truth, it’s somewhere in between, so we should expect a newfound dollar to go to something in between an average program and the worst program.```
Here you admit that, in expectation, new government spending makes the average value per tax dollar go down, for reasons I wholeheartedly accept.
Why wouldn’t that same logic work in reverse? Randomly axing government spending would, in expectation, get you more value per tax dollar.
And if you accidentally axe something that provides really good value for the dollar (say PEPFAR), well the money didn’t disappear. It’s just not being taxed anymore. So the people who would no longer have to pay the taxes could fund it directly, for a lower overhead cost.
Your counter-argument, the most important sentence in the whole post, you put in a footnote:
```It could also go to tax cuts and deficit reduction, but don’t get too excited - the biggest ever drop in the size of the federal budget was something like 10% and very temporary, so we should still expect the vast majority to go to other programs.```
You take it as read that this entity that sometimes does good things like PEPFAR, but on average does things like BEAD, cannot be reduced in scope or scale.
Maybe you’re right. I can think of many reasons why you would be. But I think it’s worth making sure, rather than taking it as a premise.
hey my PhD topic doesn't come up very often! I used standard econ modelling with a "parameter" that reflects that relative value of your own/brother's life to that of a foreigner (in this case it is welfare in a welfare maximisation setting). It is not a clean illustration of just what happens if you choose 10x or 100x or whatever, because the model also includes absorption constraints which mean that if you try to give a country too much aid is gets wasted, but we chose 10x for that parameter, just for illustrative purposes, and it implied levels of foreign aid far above actual aid levels. Here is that paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022199614001263
I am struggling to find a citation or source that supports the claim in this article that Toby Ord says, of two charities chosen at random, one is typically 100x as effective as the other.
The closest claim I can find from Toby Ord is "There are many ways of helping to improve our world, but they are not created equal. Even just within global health, some approaches are thousands of times more effective than others. If you choose two at random, then on average one is a hundred times better than the other." (from https://www.tobyord.com/research)
But there is no reason to think this is true of charities in general, and I would expect to have a hard time even measuring this across charities in general. Health is relatively easy to measure effectiveness of, but I wouldn't even have a guess for how to measure downstream outcomes of e.g. charitable organizations in the arts. I suppose you could measure the economic effects (perhaps a grant to a small theater company allows it to pay the equivalent of 5 additional full time salaries) but a lot of the benefit of funding the arts is... having art.
Relatedly, one of the many reasons for the US to save lives overseas - besides the moral benefit of saving lives - is that international human development writ large is beneficial. Not all spending needs to be evaluated in terms of immediate good. (Never mind the downstream economic effects of creating goodwill among potential trade partners, which I suspect may pay for PEPFAR on its own.)
I can easily see how "If you choose two at random, then on average one is a hundred times better than the other." could be paraphrased as Scott did, especially since "approaches" isn't in that part of the quote so inferring it to be about "charities" is a reasonable mistake.
The carping about BEAD (the rural-broadband program) is pretty disingenuous. That program was never for the feds to just hire contractors and start laying new fiber; if that had been proposed it would have been laughed out of Congress for good reasons.
In the first place in most rural parts of the country no plans or engineering for such a network yet existed. Also the program as authorized is for the _states_ to do the implementing (that was a key part of how it passed muster politically), and no state yet had any such capacity in place. So the federal agency was directed to first give all the states time to write their own plans, then review those for consistency so it will work as a national network, etc.
There never was any sensible idea, nor any claim by the previous administration, that a new nationwide piece of rural infrastructure could be getting physically _installed_, by the 50 individual state governments just three years after the program was authorized to design such a thing from scratch. Across a literally continental-scale nation? Come on now....real design engineering takes time, at waaay smaller scales than that, for good reasons.
About two dozen of the state plans have now been approved by the feds, the rest have been completed and submitted for approval, and the first RFPs were being published for contracting during 2025. That was an entirely sensible timeline given the actual task that the federal and state governments were given.
(Of course it's all moot now since Trump is trying to cancel the program.)
I’m not an expert on this stuff but would the improvement in satellite internet remove the need for rural fiber networks? Sort of how in many developing countries you don’t see telephone poles because people just leapfrogged to using cell towers and cell phones. Personally I’m not a fan of satellite internet because I’ve read that these things are leaving paint chips and debris all over the place but I guess this could be one upside to them by connecting rural areas quickly
Someone else gave a write-up of what is happening with the program (https://aboutradishes.substack.com/p/network-connection-issues); as per the FCC, satellite is not quite up to the task yet (for the numbers we’re considering).
And they spent 50 BILLION dollars on this?
No. The program is authorized to end up costing 42B in _total_, most of that for the construction phase still to come. Only a small portion of the authorized funding has yet been spent.
The question that remains is how altruistic are rhe Charities? Are 90% of every dollar donated paying a miltimillion dollar CEO? In that case we adding to the problem and ethically defrauding those who with their hearts donated the funds believing they are actually effectuating change. Instead, 90% of their donation goes to excessive salaries to fund personal jets and holiday homes. Or, in your example goes toward funding Internet for all which has not produced a single connection. So philosophically, of course, writing huge checks and combining them with propaganda to sway public opinion exploits the altruistic wishes of the donor while intentionally robbing their intention. The system of donations requires complete transparency so expectations can be achieved, whitnesed and questioned if necessary. The current corporate/Congressonal system of shifting vast sums throughout the ledger is an ethical disaster, and primarily results unintended, often unknown, payments and reimbursement for expenses never disclosed to the donors. Large scale charity in many cases has the appearance of being a business of deceit. It's time to request altruism throughout the entire charitable process.
Errrrr, remember that A.C.X. is an ultra-W.E.I.R.D. space where moral universalism is taken as an axiom. In most of space and time, people outside of the local community, or even one's family, weren't due any moral consideration at all. (IUUC in the traditional Netsilik Eskimo culture, if a hunting band came upon a single hunter, if he couldn't establish that he was related to anyone in the band, he would be killed as a matter of course.) And remember that though the US is really W.E.I.R.D., it's less W.E.I.R.D. than *we* are. Yeah, money saved by cancelling PEPFAR may not be redirected to a really good cause, but at least it will not-increase the national debt, so in the future we will pay incrementally smaller taxes, which is much more important than the lives of foreigners.
I'm missing something more foundational. U.S. government and its citizenry are bound by a compact in the form of a constitution. At its conception, I don't see it as ever having considered spending such amounts on foreign humanitarian efforts. Obviously, it's evolved, but coming back to first principles - is there effectively no limit to what the U.S. government can spend on any noble effort and correspondingly tax (i.e. use the monopoly of force to command its citizens to pay) to fund? Clearly, a lot of spending vastly exceed the initial compact, but can't we call out foreign humanitarian aid as amongst the most egregious and start by cutting there?
Relatedly, a lot of the logic here seems to be simply utilitarian: $X/life-saved is cheap, therefore spend. I'm curious if any of the advocates for the spending here would use the same logic when appointed to act as CFOs/controllers/treasurers/admins of all the organizations in their lives. It doesn't matter that I serve in a state government and instituted to serve the interests of my state, the neighbor's state is poor and I can save their lives at $X/life; it doesn't matter that my daughter's girl scout troop sold cookies to fund a camping trip, I can save lives at $X/life to help a challenge in another continent. At some point - even if spending is effective, isn't it legitimate to say that organizations exist with finite charters and spending outside such a charter is immoral on its face?
Yes, when the left has the majority, the left can contend its been given the authority to do all these things. In this case, when the right has the majority, isn't it legitimate to say: "This is out of scope. Our contract didn't include this, shouldn't include this, and (we contend), never has included it. Time to re-establish some limits. If that work is to be done - great, let's talk about other means of addressing, but heaven knows an out-of-control federal oversight can't be trusted to do so."
Even if you ascribe zero value to foreigners, you should still support foreign aid, which improves our standing and influence in the world. We can support foreign aid for selfish reasons!
Enough that even eliminating all foreign aid will make no difference.
I don't believe it helps Americans at all.
You don't think it helps Americans that when foreigners think of America they think of the country that came in and saved their babies from HIV?
You don't think it helps Americans to have pro-American values in foreign media?
You don't think it helps Americans to manage disease outbreaks in foreign countries, reducing the risk of the outbreaks coming to America?
This assertion should be empirically verifiable yet there has been literally nothing from people making the claim along the lines of, say, "these X Y Z countries were recipients of $1093589 worth of foreign aid, and they made these specific A B C decisions that resulted benefit to Americans plausibly due to the good will from the foreign aid". Yet for how many times I've heard this line of reasoning in support of foreign aid, I've not seen a single instance of anyone identifying an actual specific outcome that benefitted Americans, only general rationalizations about trade or soft power or whatever
Also PEPFAR started in 2003, and AIDS declined in the US long before PEPFAR. That's a strong indication that such international disease prevention programs are negligible when it comes to protecting Americans
I'm not sure it would be verifiable, and I'm not sure it matters. $1mil (the amount in your example) is such a minuscule amount in the federal budget (0.00001%, or $0.002 per US citizen), that we should be willing to throw it at things that have even a small chance of helping.
Also, WRT PEPFAR, saving babies from HIV is valuable in its own right, even if it doesn't help Americans.
You can't justify it by saying it's just a small portion of the budget. You could create that entire budget by a multitude of smaller portions added up together.
Saving babies is valuable even if it doesn't help Americans, which is a justification for charitable donations, not taxing Americans.
You're being deliberately obtuse. That number was obviously just an example, but I'm glad to know you don't actually give a shit whether public funding of international causes benefit nationals of the governments doing the funding as is often argued
>Also, WRT PEPFAR, saving babies from HIV is valuable in its own right, even if it doesn't help Americans.
My comment was obviously aimed at the argument that "ackshually foreign aid helps Americans because soft power and stuff". What I got back from you: "it doesn't matter if we can verify if that's true, spend spend spend your money on Africans anyways"
I'm not the one being obtuse. It's not that I "don't give a shit" about the benefits, it's that the level of success necessary to justify the cost is so small that it's not worth measuring; it would probably cost more to measure it than to just provide the help on the strong likelihood that it will have a positive impact.
WRT PEPFAR, I addressed that in the first comment (saving babies makes countries feel good about America). There are plenty of other diseases that could make their way to America which are more effectively treated at the source.
No for the first two, possibly in the third case (like with COVID) but HIV was never actually at risk of breaking out into the broader population and was instead already endemic in a subpopulation of the US.
You really don't think it helps Americans if foreigners, who we want to trade with and who we want to support us in international discussions/conflict, are informed about world events, especially in a way that supports American views?
I think we can trade with them regardless of whether they receive pro-American propaganda.
Ordo amoris, as it's invoked in this debate, reminds me of the 'Murder is actually really frowned in Japan. It goes against the traditional concept of 生きる, which means "to live"' tweet. Which makes (a certain class of) adult convert catholics the equivalent of weebs, which check out.
The issue is not that there are bad (or good) humanitarian programs in USAID.
The issue is that there are all manner of color revolution, domestic societal manipulation, and no doubt other fuckery going on there. And it is by no means obvious that any program fits into any one of the good or bad buckets.
That's what happens when you mix wolves and sheep. Benz and many others have noted how even ostensibly legitimate humanitarian programs for USAID wind up being naked regime change ops. He cited this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_in_Pakistan
Then there's the millions going to the BBC, the NY Times and what not. Bought and paid for.
> Then there's the millions going to the BBC, the NY Times and what not. Bought and paid for.
There was a similar Skeptics.SE question recently about Politico. It turns out it’s a professional subscription (one per staffer?), since it’s apparently easier than tracking directly what happens in Congress.
Also on the topic of 'interesting to argue about and therefore wrong/irrelevant':
I'm no expert, but everyone I hear from who is an expert on this topic seems to tell me that foreign aid is not primarily a humanitarian endeavor, and is almost entirely used as leverage to force poor foreign governments to negotiate favorable treaties and trade deals and diplomatic concessions and etc. Basically that it is an investment in soft power that pays extremely real dividends both economically and geopolitically, not a deadloss charitable expense that just disappears out the door.
So the framing of 'what percent of our budget should we spend on foreign charity' is, as I understand it, also incorrect. We spend noting on pure foreign charity and probably never will; everything is an investment will real returns, and the question is where and how much to invest.
The collective West - the source of by far the majority of aid donated - couldn't even get a strong majority of the aid recipient countries to support symbolic UN motions against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. If foreign charity can't even be leveraged to do that, imagine how little it accomplishes when it comes to anything of importance
I'm not sure why you think we would preferentially spend our political/diplomatic/financial leverage on unimportant things instead of important things.
Like, assuming any competence at all, you'd expect the important things to be the first ones that get accomplished using limited resources, and the unimportant ones to be last.
"Would"? Did the collective West *not* in fact try to diplomatically isolate Russia by, among other things, getting "the Global South" - the aid recipients - on side?
Okay, fine. We don't have to count that then. List those important things that have been accomplished and benefitted donor countries plausibly as a result of foreign charity from those donor countries
Legit realization. Elon Musk's philosophy is basically the same as Thanos' in Infinity War. He thinks there's a resource problem and rather than fix it in any sane way his solution is to grab as much power as possible and randomly destroy half of everything on the assumption suddenly things will work. And if you thought that was a stupid plan, this is a stupid plan for exactly the same reasons and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
EDIT: I obviously didn't explain the metaphor well (because it was intuitive to me but obviously no one else based on replies). The thing being destroyed in this case isn't half of the population, its half the federal government.
Yet it has backing in the right-rationalsphere.
As we are seeing in this comment section, although I'm relieved by the number of people who seem to be pushing back on the claim that you can burn something down and just magically erect a more efficient structure in its place.
Surely Elon Musk's solution is to develop space travel so we're no longer limited to the resources on earth? Which may or may not count as a sane solution, but it's rather different to killing half the universe's population.
Nothing in his approach to his issues with perceived government inefficiency looks like a Rocket Ship to Mars conceptual solution.
No, Elon Musk is a pro-natalist rather than a Malthusian.
I obviously didn't explain the metaphor well (because it was intuitive to me but obviously no one else based on replies). The thing being destroyed in this case isn't half of the population, its half the federal government.
Ah. I want to destroy the entire federal government, regarding city states as preferable to nation states and 50 independent states as at least an improvement. So in that case I'd be more extreme than Thanos.
It might take a lot more than 50 city states to cover the current territory of the United States. I guess it depends on how borders are established. And they'd be constantly shifting because city states tend to be in perpetual low-level warfare with each other.
But you can advocate for whatever extreme reorganization of existing power that you want and hope it catches on either through some kind of succession movement or division process or whatever. What the Trump administration is doing however, is more like if you got elected on the basis on one mandate, took it as permission to implement your city-state policy, and then began to do so by randomly restricting payments that acknowledged the existence of the federal system in the hopes that people would just adapt and recognize we weren't doing that anymore and would just magically fall into your city-state system (and of course you would continue to punish them by whatever arbitrary levers you have available if they didn't figure out the specific city state system that you wanted).
Yes, like I said, 50 independent states is a mere improvement on the way to only city states.
I snort-laughed at "most Americans are not in this category", and again more loudly at "your love for your fellow countryman". I was a mistake theorist about Trumpists for years, the same way I still am about most fiscal conservatives, and I just kept on being surprised that none of them seemed to be seeing the mistake as it got more and more obvious over 2015-2020. At some point, I just had to accept that these people have different terminal values to me - they know exactly what Trump is, they know what he's doing, and they vote for him and support him because he is what they want.
Ever since, it's been years of watching mistake theorists being surprised over and over and over again, exactly the same way I used to be. My theory of "the average Trumpist's goal is to tear down everything any decent person holds dear" consistently predicts their actions, while their theory of "the average Trumpist is a decent person who has simply been misled about their rational self-interest" consistently fails to. Hell, Kamala's entire campaign was built around the idea that maybe 5-10% of Trumpists were fundamentally decent people who could be lured into voting for a sufficiently bipartisan alternative, and look how that turned out.
The median Trumpist takes one look at the fact that cancelling PEPFAR kills foreigners and makes the liberal half of the country feel sad and hopeless and is immediately and thoroughly in favour. They don't care about efficiency, or what else the money will be spent on, or even from a purely nationalist perspective whether or not completely destroying America's soft power is a good power. They just want it gone, because the cruelty is the point.
Scott, I understand that you write posts like this in an attempt to do some good in the world and pull some people back from the abyss. But they're already gone. You're better off using that energy to mitigate what they've brought into the world, if that's even possible at this point.
You don't know much about the UK, do you? Two of our four main political parties are run by open Trump supporters (Badenoch and Farage) and two of our last four prime ministers have been open Trump supporters (Johnson and Truss). Also, Brexit. I assure you I am all too familiar with the strain, and I don't think we're in any way immune.
I mean, the conseratives on Reddit do seem to be upset about the plans in Gaza. Not because 2 million people would probably die as a result, mind you, but because it would be a waste of tax money. So part of it is also that they want lower taxes.
Thank you for deciding that your terminal values are the clear and obvious correct ones that all decent people hold dear.
I mean, I'm not going to go to the wall over things like "ketchup on well-done steak is bad". I know perfectly decent people who disagree with me on that, even though they shouldn't. Ditto real issues like state interventionism versus laissez-faire, or the merits of immigration or a welfare state. These are issues where taking the wrong approach can do and has done incredible harm, but they're complex issues and it's very easy to be wrong about them while still having only the best intentions. I'm almost certainly wrong about some of them myself, and I don't agree with "the left" (insofar as that's a single belief system rather than twenty angry cats in a fairly flimsy bag) on all of them either.
But when those values are things like "human suffering is bad and we shouldn't cause more of it for the lols", "acquiring and spreading knowledge is generally good", "the rule of law is important enough for it to be worth changing bad laws rather than burning the entire system down", or "existential threats to civilisation are a thing we should care about"? When we're disagreeing on things like whether dictatorships are better than democracy, and whether it's a reasonable thing for every second word out of your leader's mouth to be a lie, and whether rape is excusable if it's by someone on the right team, and whether my trans friends should be allowed to live free? Not just one of those things, but all of them, with several dozen more I could add to the list?
Yeah. Yeah, on the whole, I'm going to call my values clearly and obviously correct. I'm not going to call someone who doesn't share at least most of them "decent". And I no longer believe that the median Trump supporter shares any of them.
I'm sure *some* of governmental aid spending goes to good causes. Just as I am sure some of the charity donations from Madoff or SBF were going to really good causes that helped a lot of people. That's not a good argument though against prosecuting them for bad things they did - which yes, if successful, would necessarily deprive them of the ability to spend money on the good causes. And that would lead to children starving, etc. Still not a good argument. There's a very good evidence now USAID spending in part and government aid spending in general is completely out of control and corrupt. And thus, needs to be reigned in, even if... etc. etc.
> We should expect it to equal the worst program if government spending rationally picked the lowest-hanging fruit first (ie invested their first X dollars in the best program, the next Y dollars in the second-best program, and so on, always investing the marginal dollar in the best available program). We should expect it to equal the average program if the government has no idea what it’s doing and just funds random things based on what cable news show a Senator watched last night.
The latter sounds more plausible to me regarding the marginal dollar. There is some minimal amount of funding necessary for the government to continue existing, and thus governments which don't spend that cease to, but with an affluent government like ours there's little constraint at all.
> So in a discussion of the ethics of canceling PEPFAR, I don’t think it’s enough to say that you care about Americans more than foreigners. You would have to care about Americans more than 100x more than foreigners.
I exclusively direct my charitable donations to the third world, where a dollar can go farther. But I don't think the government should be taxing Americans to give to non-Americans at all, altruistic charity is simply not what the government is for (voluntary donations fill that role).
> Valuing a foreigner at less than 1/100th of an American would put them somewhere between a cow and a chicken, which if nothing else seems like an awkward thing to have to bring up at UN meetings.
It's a good thing the UN has no power to tax some nations in order to redistribute to other nations then.
> we discharge whatever claim foreigners have to our charity
Charity is not determined by the recipient having a "claim" but instead the donor deciding to give. PEPFAR is funded by taxation, and thus not really charity in the usual sense.
> I have no principled method for deciding how much of the US budget should go to foreign aid, but the current amount of ~1% doesn’t seem excessive
We should have some reasoning, or else we can't determine what amount WOULD be excessive.
> I think people should donate 1-10% of their income to effective charities, then not feel obligated to worry about altruism beyond this leve
Ok, but this isn't a dispute about charitable donations, but instead a taxpayer funded program.
> If you ascribe literally zero value to foreigners, you probably don’t want PEPFAR. But most Americans are not in this category, and I think your love for your countrymen should move you to let this majority of people use 1% of the federal budget for something they care a lot about
I have stated that I direct my charitable donations abroad, so I don't place a value of zero on foreigners and thus you would place me in the "majority". But I also don't agree to taxing any American for that purpose, and am thus opposed to a "majority" you merely imagine by conflating two things!
Way back in 2004, I remember arguing with a conservative coworker about aid to Indonesia after the tsunami. He said it was a waste of tax dollars; I said Indonesia was the most populous Muslim country on Earth and it was a good thing for the US to be conspicuously helping a bunch of people in Aceh at a time when we were fighting a GWOT across the globe and desperately needed the cooperation of the Muslim world.
We didn’t convince each other but I think my argument holds up pretty well.
https://adst.org/2019/10/the-u-s-response-to-the-2004-tsunami-in-indonesia/
And how exactly does having the approval of random Indonesians help Americans? They're still not going to go to war for us.
Did you read the linked article?
Yes. It explained it improved the public support in of US improved and public support for Bin Laden has worsened. That does not necessarily lead to material gains in the US, especially considering Bin Laden was killed anyways.
I think your coworker was correct. The GWOT was also a waste. It would have been better if we had done nothing. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/forget-911html
True, but that’s not the counterfactual – the GWOT was already ongoing in 2004 and the US had already shown to the world that they didn’t think they needed proof to invade a country of Muslim people (which made them quite unpopular). Showing a little goodwill (a rounding error compared to military expenses in Afghanistan or Iraq) was probably better than not to.
I don't think we got anything from that "goodwill".
'But I don't think the government should be taxing Americans to give to non-Americans at all, altruistic charity is simply not what the government is for (voluntary donations fill that role).'
Exactly right. Scott's last few articles have not been up to the usual standard for clarity of thought unfortunately
I think most people are fine with money going to poor/starving people, what they absolutely do not support are the thousands of DC locusts that are taking home 6-figure salaries at NGOs and non-profits who do absolutely nothing of value, they’re essentially just keyboard warriors and zealots making amazing wages while so many working people can barely get by.
Will canceling their sinecures put a dent in the budget deficit or alleviate working class woes? Absolutely not but I still think 70-90% of this stuff needs to be axed (that’s the proportion of usaid money that is being reported as not going to actual foreign aid).
Many hardcore Trump fans are watching Russia Today, so maybe the purpose of this is to destroy all programs that might possibly provide aid for Ukraine, and the African kids are just collateral damage (because a more precisely aimed attack would expose what it is actually trying to achieve).
By the way, https://united24media.com/latest-news/elon-musk-shares-fake-video-claiming-usaid-paid-hollywood-stars-to-promote-zelenskyy-5653
Hmm, interesting. I was wondering whether the seeming antagonism between Trump and Putin was real or just kayfabe... I guess a US-Russia alliance isn't off the table yet. Maybe they can assemble a new Axis powers.
"the money wouldn’t automatically redirect itself to the single best domestic aid program which saves millions of American lives."
What if we just... ended the programs and stopped spending the money?
A couple of random thoughts:
(1) I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned the idea of (for want of a better term) remit. The remit of a government is to rule its own country well, not to help other countries. Of course, that doesn't mean a government should *harm* other countries -- even if, hypothetically, the US would hugely benefit from invading and genociding Canada, such a course would still be ruled out by moral considerations -- but I don't think a government is obliged to actively help other foreigners. By analogy, consider a charity whose remit is to promote literacy in the third world, and which decides to start spending some of its money on mosquito nets instead. Is spending money on mosquito nets inherently bad? Of course not. But it's not part of the literacy charity's remit, so I think it would be quite reasonable for its donors to object that their money is being spent on non-literacy-related causes.
(2) Some people on this thread are talking about the soft power gains of international aid, but TBH it doesn't really seem like the US, or any western country for that matter, gets much goodwill from its aid budget. In fact, I rather think it's the opposite. The (implicit, and often explicit) premise of international aid is that it's unfair that some countries are richer than others. But once you've accepted that premise, spending a few billion on condoms in Africa isn't really going to cut it: you need to keep giving, and/or keep accepting third-world citizens into your country, as long as your country is in any way better off than the third-world places you're trying to help. Anything less would be unfair, after all. And of course, the recipients of your largesse aren't going to thank you for being marginally less unfair than you might be, they're going to resent you for not doing away with the unfairness altogether, and view any aid you give as a pathetically inadequate attempt to buy them off. Saying that the US has a moral obligation to help poorer countries is a way to make the US hated, not loved.
Did they actually go back on stopping PEPFAR? Is the money actually flowing again? As far as I am aware basically all of USAID is shut down now.
It’s folded into State Dept, so basically like everything with Trump there is no way to know whether the sound and fury will signify anything. Looks to me like Rubio just basically said “yes please I would be happy to add their budget to mine.” It would not be at all surprising if Rubio calculates that PEPFAR (which buys us favors from African nations whose support he will want on occasion) is one of the programs he’d like to keep. To Scott’s point, if this is more bureaucratic reorganization than erasure, then the funds will just be redirected to a foreign aid initiative that Rubio decides is in line with Trump’s foreign policy goals - which (obviously, I hope) is a decision that could have made just as loyally and effectively by a Trump-appointed administrator of USAID. But that would destroy the illusion of Big Things happening …
Apparently funding has not resumed to the point that PEPFAR can resume operation, and Rubio is seemingly using the fact that they're not working as an excuse to purge the organization.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/health/trump-usaid-pepfar.html
> On Jan. 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for lifesaving medicines and medical services, ostensibly allowing for the distribution of H.I.V. medicines. But the waiver did not name PEPFAR, leaving recipient organizations awaiting clarity.
On Sunday, another State Department waiver said more explicitly that it would cover H.I.V. testing and treatment as well as prevention and treatment of opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times. The memo did not include H.I.V. prevention — except for pregnant and breastfeeding women — or support for orphaned and vulnerable children.
Although PEPFAR is funded by the State Department, roughly two-thirds of its grants are implemented through U.S.A.I.D. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neither organization has released funds to grantees since the freeze was initiated.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Rubio appeared to blame the recipient organizations for not acting on the waiver, saying he had “real questions about the competence” of the groups. “I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” he said.
Yeah I’m following that too but I think it’s essentially “not yet,” not “not ever”. I don’t mean to minimize the immediate impact (people really won’t get paid temporarily until the machinery restarts), but until the announced 90 day review is complete we have no clue how it will finally resolve. Given the way things went in the first Trump administration though, my very strong suspicion is that after the drama it will be pretty much the same as it was before: foreign aid will be used, at pretty much the same funding levels and in mainly the same ways as it always has been: to buy political support of foreign governments. I don’t doubt the programs might be shuffled around a little and 10% or so of the staff may turn over. But in the end, it’s going to be just like it was before: a self-interested nation-state using ostensible altruism as another tool in the foreign policy toolbox. If the reorg into State is one of the elements that is still there when this thing takes its final form, then the only real difference will be that one Trump appointee (Rubio) is calling the shots instead of a different Trump appointee (the USAID administrator if he’d named one).
Also, since Americans are among those humans who enjoy having sex with other humans, and since some of the other humans would otherwise be foreign nationals who are HIV positive, it saves American lives too. I mean, if we value the lives of American sex-with-foreigner havers roughly as much as we value the compatriot fuckers.
I am extremely confused about how the relevant people have the authority to do all of this. I'm not American, but I was always sold the idea that the American governmental system is so great because of all of the checks and balances , and that seemed broadly plausible to me.
That story doesn't seem at all compatible with what we're seeing now. Putting aside any discussion of the object level, how does Musk or even Trump have the unilateral authority to do all of these things? Was the checks and balances thing just a fig leaf all along?
Yeah, in retrospect, it was a pretty stupid system. The only reason it lasted so long was because nobody even tried to break it. But unfortunately, democracy now has to end because the price of eggs went up. How unfortunate.
This arguably *is* one of the checks (depending on how SCOTUS rules in the inevitable impoundment case).
The Executive branch (specifically the Treasury Department) is the entity that actually writes checks on behalf of the Federal government, but is prohibited by an explicit clause of the Constitution from spending money unless Congress has appropriated it for that purpose.
There's some ambiguity about whether Congress can require money be spent as appropriated (except for payments on Federal debt) or whether there's inherent Presidential power – analogous to prosecutorial discretion in criminal law – to simply not.
Assuming that Lyman Stone post is correct, first you should ask how actually effective is PEPFAR?
https://open.substack.com/pub/lymanstone/p/does-pepfar-actually-save-lives
Of course, this wasn't the question of the post. But your completely theoretical philosophical question assumes that the efficacy of both programs under discussion was known with 100% accuracy.
It seems like you could push a slightly different argument. If PEPFAR is one of the most effective programs at saving lives, should we eliminate other programs and use their funding to bolster PEPFAR spending? Are we obligated to have a minimal government that mostly funds programs that are good at saving lives?
For instance, can we justify the Department of Agriculture spending $68 billion when we could be using that to prevent AIDS deaths? $43 billion by the Department of Education?
Taking the x100 effectiveness difference at face value, it should be trivial to find programs to cut. You could do it randomly and come out way ahead on average.
To think about PEPFAR, I have to first mention something very general that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread (though perhaps it was - see Vesa Hautala's reference to Aquinas).
One of the most obvious reasons that occurred to me for ordo amoris is a general recognition that there is a lot of suffering in the world, but also a lot of people capable of rendering care, and so a logical emergent strategy is to *care for the suffering in your immediate vicinity and trust other people to do the same*. If most suffering is close enough to someone who can care, most suffering will get covered; any suffering in some remote area is tragic, but not easily addressed, and no one is to blame. This is so intuitive to me that I assume it was a commonplace belief, so I'm surprised to not see it covered here, so... here it is.
This gets around the family argument. I don't have to agonize over how many strangers equals one family member. If a stranger is dying right in front of me, I can render care, and hope that if my mom fell down the stairs in some building a thousand miles away, some stranger near her is rendering care in turn. That stranger doesn't have to care a whit for mine, and I don't have to immediately book a plane to my mom, and if we tried, we'd lose both my dying stranger and my mom. (Again, to me: intuitive.) I don't have to agonize about why I was a thousand miles away from my own mother; there are reasons for close family to still be geographically far; presumably this was discussed beforehand, and the risks were acceptable.
Large scale suffering can require large scale coordination to address; this is well enough; even individualists can see this. In our timeline, that coordination is often done by governments. But also in our timeline, suffering exists at home as well as abroad. So, ordo amoris: each entity focuses care on whomever's closest, *on the premise* that other entities are doing the same. The US prioritizes one American over 1000 Ugandans while expecting Uganda to value one Ugandan over 1000 Americans; we are each other's fargroups, after all.
Long term care is different mostly because there's time to coordinate further. One entity can now organize long term care for a fargroup in exchange for something. One ought to ask what the US is getting for PEPFAR. (And this is not a rhetorical question. There exist Americans in Africa, who can expect care for international goodwill reasons stemming in part from PEPFAR.)
At the same time, there are Americans suffering in America. Surely $6B per year would help them. Possibly more! OTOH, America does actually spend much more than that on Americans. I think the priority is already established, and this would be a good thing to consider as well.
Ultimately, conservatives argue for local care because it's much more direct, and much more efficient (esp. considering how easy it would be for a grifter to infiltrate an intercontinental chain of charity where the taxpayers aren't able to know the people in the chain). This is independent of the argument about relative worth of life, and doesn't require US conservatives to utterly disregard African lives. Indeed, given the amount of resources they spend on missionary movements, as well as willingness to fund PEPFAR anyway, it's clear to me that that care is still abundant.
This makes a LOT of assumptions, such as that all regions are suffering equally at all times, and that regions are never in particularly bad situations that make it impossible for themselves or surrounding regions to help. Do you think no other countries should help the US if they had a massive earthquake that turned half the country to rubble, simply because "ordo amoris"?
If you don't care about African lives, that's fine. You don't have to do all these mental gymnastics to justify it to us, you're not a politician.
Is there a reason you've been unusually rude and insulting these past few days? This is just about the opposite of my actual position regarding African lives.
...What? I was not trying to offend. Again, I genuinely do not care about how much you value lives, but there's no need for you to come up with such an arbitrary rule to justify it.
Look at this way: your mother is suffering from a horrible illness in another country. You know you could help her by caring for her. You do fly over to help her, right? Right?
You appear to be trying even less to be polite.
If a close family member were suffering a long term anything, I'd naturally want to help, and since it's long term, help would actually be possible. But the example posits a drowning child, not a child suffering from a chronic illness, and since the thought experiment necessarily plays off the audience's emotional intuition, the immediacy necessarily affects the response. It's not arbitrary.
...What does any of that have to do with PEPFAR? We're not talking about drowning children, we're talking about long term international aid that will kill people if discontinued suddenly. You care about saving lives, right?
You just seem to ignore that by saving "Americans are suffering too", but Americans are already being cared for to the point where they are not afraid of starving or dying of easily preventable diseases. Our resources would be much better spent saving lives that take less resources to save, "ordo amoris" be damned. That's basically the whole point of EA! You can't just say it's "not efficient" when neurotic organizations like GiveWell have been funding AND verifying these charities that actually save lives, despite being overseas.
Anyways, I don't even know why I'm arguing with you about this. Here's a Scott post from over a decade ago about what he thinks about your ethics, and he is ten times more rude about it than I am because he actually cares about human lives.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/17/newtonian-ethics/
Those aren't even my ethics.
I think your argument would have gotten much farther if you hadn't imagined a completely different version of me, argued with that, and then claimed you were arguing with me.
Money saved should be used to pay down the deficit. We owe this to future taxpayers. This in itself is an act of charity.
Agreed. Everyone has a reason to think their pet program is the most important. You can’t save them all and cut the deficit.
Every cent is going into the next big tax cut, it’s already decided.
Re. Broadband stuff: This is all downstream of the US post regan deciding that is actually bad for the government to even be able to do things, let alone actually do them.
I shouldn't complain because I made a decent chunk of my money pre covide college degree working jobs that 1000% should have been state run from start to finish at average final cost 75$ an hour per manhour (such waste! the government has no incentive to efficiently allocate funds!)
and were instead private contracted out for an effective cost of 700$+ an hour per manhour (the efficiency of the private sector! The invisible hand of the market!), not that I saw more than 30 of that 700, on account of my boss was working very hard from wherever he was getting high and cheating on his wife.
The broadband thing is a particular pisser, that shit should be a publicly owned utility. Pure rent seeking bullshit; every time I leave the US and end up in the middle a fucking jungle and still have better network access than if I were to take the massive journey from close to a major urban hub to slightly further from said hub I get closer to jihad against Cox et al.
Yah it really pisses me off that it seems impossible for people to see it as just a systems engineering problem.
Yes, the free market is very efficient when there is competition but a private monopoly or monopsony is strictly worse than a government one -- the individual people running the system aren't magically better but now they also need to try to return profits.
This is idiocy. The real answer is there is no reason to provide broadband internet to rural areas if they are not able to pay for them.
Hard agree. High Speed broadband is strictly a luxury good; especially now that starlink exists. You can do anything you need to do at 5 mbps; if you need 4k video that bad simply download it overnight.
Unfortunately, Rural America has most of the voting power per person in the US, so they get as much pork as they want.
I don’t care about Americans 100 times more than foreigners but the government of the American people absolutely should. Putting Americans first is its entire purpose.
“Putting America first” is not actionable, unless you specify the distance between first (America) and whatever is being put second. And if nothing is in second place, how meaningful is it to be first, anyway?
Even if the US government doubled its foreign aid spending, it would still be putting Americans first, by a wide margin.
You are elected president of the union in your industry. You are negotiating its wages.
“Before we begin, I feel the need to specify that I value union members at a rate of 15.34 times that of those in in the industry not in the union. I value my union compared to the teachers union at 5.8621. I value my union compared to the steelworkers union at 4.4492. I value…”
Well, the union I used to be a member of, back when I had a job where being in the union made sense, spends some of the dues it collects in ways that benefit non-union members (for instance, by organizing community activites that supported poor families). I approved of this, some other members probably less so.
However, most of the money was spent to benefit union members in one way or another.
So, the union put union members first. Just as a government that spends money on foreign aid puts America first, by a much wider margin.
Saying that the US government is obliged to prioritize its own citizens over foreigners is entirely compatible with that government also spending money on foreign aid.
Sure the government can spend money on foreigners but you made a bigger claim that the government had to justify prioritizing its citizens.
Ah, I guess we misunderstood each other: I don’t mean to say that a government needs to justify prioritizing its own citizens.
What I mean to say is: Saying that “a government needs to put its own people first” doesn’t tell me much about what it should spend on foreign aid. Putting your own people first could mean spending anything between 0 and 49% of your budget on foreigners.
If we agree that the government should prioritize citizens then doesn’t mean when cuts need to be made, benefits to citizens should be prioritized over non citizens?
But it is? Foreign aid is 1% of the federal budget, and since there are about 20 times more people outside the US than inside – in fact, let’s say 10 to remove China, India and the European Union who can take care of themselves – that means it values one American as much as 1000 foreigners.
So what, America lucks out in getting a government that prioritizes its interests because it has a large population? Does that mean small countries should always value foreigners more than its citizens?
No, it’s normal for a government to prioritize the interests of its population.
And of course the ratio is misleading as a measure because of what it implies for smaller countries.
I simply think that the current amount of foreign aid shows that the US is prioritizing its citizens.
Yes but as much as I don't like how Elon is doing things I do think there is some potential upside to just restarting a department/agency -- and let's be honest that's what is going to happen with most things Elon kills, some later administration is going to rebuild them (live by EO die by EO).
And yes, you do lose institutional knowledge but there is also the issue of code rot (well administrative procedure rot). Except when it comes to gov programs we are even more reluctant to tear things down and start again lest someone accuse us of not appreciating those goals.
Having said that, we could have just achieved the upsides without the downsides by taking a little more care and building the new version before tearing down the old. Basically, I think every government agency should be rebuilt from the ground up at least every 25 years or so. But you do it by phasing over and building the new system while you keep the old one working and move people and processes into the new version.
While your proposal sounds pretty good in theory, I wonder how much more expensive it would be?
Insofar as Musk and the Trump admin is concerned, Federal ineffectiveness is a feature, not a bug.
I generally agree with this article, and, in fact, I recently signed Leah Libresco Sargeant's "Pro-Lifers Who Support PEPFAR" letter, which I hope saves PEPFAR permamently. BUT.
Vice President Vance's comments about the ordo amoris weren't made in the context of the foreign aid controversy, but rather in a discussion about why the Left feels so much compassion for illegal immigrants and so little compassion for the victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants.
Here's the tape. Colloquy starts at 3:11 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o98Po0lWZxE
Not sure why I feel the need to defend Vance here. Vance *has* defended the foreign aid cuts in general. Also, Vance's comments were still very controversial in the illegal immigration context, for good reason! Nevertheless, it just didn't sit right with me. Scott *did* totally destroy the argument Scott presented here, but that isn't the argument J.D. Vance actually made. That's un-Scott-like, which rankles.
Well, it is an interesting and important philosophical question. Given that we owe more consideration to people we feel closely related to, however defined (not necessarily just biological relationship), this doesn't mean that we owe distantly related people *nothing*. We certainly are not justified in delivering bad treatment, at least not for this reason. The last time we did this, we separated families and orphaned innocent children.
Worrying that something similar might happen now just seems prudent, and not an example of "having more compassion for illegal immigrants than for fellow citizens."
What is the point is not to optimize how gov money is spent, but to create the perception that vast sums of money are now being saved (billions!) and therefore a big tax cut can be enacted?
And to create the impression that this tax cute would benefit anyone other than the very wealthy.
'But most Americans are not in this category, and I think your love for your countrymen should move you to let this majority of people use 1% of the federal budget for something they care a lot about.'
This is a terrible way to apportion tax money. The reason to have constitutional republics is so that people don't just get to spend tax money on 'things they care about', because a majority of people could then decide they care about their own pockets and spend tax money filling them. Unfortunately, too much of this already happens, but there's no reason to encourage it!
I wonder what would happen if someone proposed spending 1% of the federal budget making cute kitten videos?
I think you're thinking about this too rationally. (Haha!) I'm not sure about that old saw of "evil can't understand good" or its inverse "good can't understand evil", but it can be harder to understand people who think very differently from you.
They see the government as the instrument of a hostile institution. It brings over people from other countries with different languages and looks, takes their money in taxes, supports people who tell their kids to use drugs and surgery for any gender confusion, sends their kids to war, and a couple other things I'm probably forgetting. The more it gets decreased in size, the better.
The rest is commentary.
Agree here. I think conservative voters are tired of worrying about other people's problems (this doesn't just include foreigners, but many groups of American as well). They would rather risk their economic interests and civil rights in exchange for more local independence. Whether the MAGA movement leadership is telling the truth to these voters is another issue.
I agree with you. After all, we had rich liberals voting for Democrats who were going to raise their taxes because they were worried about the environment, minority rights, abortion rights (even if male or rich enough to fly to a state where it was legal), or countless other things. Why wouldn't lower and middle-class conservatives do the same?
While I think I see your underlying point, I'm not sure your example is symmetric. Having a difference of political opinion on policy is one thing, it's another to tolerate (or even celebrate) the weakening of our democratic institutions in favor of a strongman because policy doesn't go your way.
I don't think that MAGA voters are voting on policy (which *would* be the symmetric situation). I think they are voting against social change, the world becoming more complex, and having to compromise with communities they have no emotional stake in (like urban dwellers). They want a strong man to suppress those other people, not compromise with them.
The US produces more carbon than ever before, but liberals still support separation of powers. They took away Roe vs. Wade, but feminists still support leaders who obey the law. We still do not have single payer health insurance, yet democrats didn't try to rig an election (unless you think they did, in which case I guess we need to have *that* discussion).
At this point I am expecting two things to come out of this mess: 1. the realization that current antiwoke rationalists were to Elon/Trump what ye olde social democrats were to Stalin - useful idiots 2. In short time, the great woke restoration - from the insight that woke might have been right about the evils of the right wing (dark web etc included), proceeding rapidly towards raising the prestige of everything else the woke stood for.
1) I don't think that social democrats were that useful to Stalin, and that's an important insight, with clear contemporary implications, if true.
2) Still not sure what "Woke" is, unless it's just the extreme Left. But anyway, it wasn't just a small minority of extremists who were concerned about the evils of the right (not just the dark web, but esp "Dark Money").
3) The clearest thing I get out of this mess: We badly need to get money out of politics.
There isn't going to be a "great woke restoration" if the woke are snuffed out. Permanently.
Scott, I think you're getting lost in the "arguments as soldiers" object level, when there's a much more important meta level going on.
Trump/Musk are doing what in the business world is known as Zero-Based Transformation/Redesign (search that up and you will find loads of consulting companies that you will recognize offering to help you do this; it is a well-known thing). Basically you start from nothing and add things back in as they justify themselves.
Trump didn't cut PEPFAR to be evil; he cut everything and then will add things back in as they justify themselves.
Now why did he take this approach? Your comments sections will answer that question readily: softer approaches have failed; the bureaucracy in general has proven very able to stonewall, and USAID in particular has resisted democratic oversight.
There are a few levels at which this can be analyzed. There's the basic good governance level: How can we run government agencies such that they can be reformed with less blunt instruments? Why didn't Obama or Biden do so?
There's the tribal politics level: when you don't keep your extremists in check, you put the things important to you in danger. They use you as human shields, and you cannot rely on the other side to hold their fire in that circumstance. People outside a tribe cannot reform it with precision. As it stands now, I think we all know DOGE is going to keep digging up incriminating programs to hang around the necks of whomever they feel like cutting. When you hold power next time, you can probably do some utilitarian calculation where every time a government agent throws up some culture war chum, that's a 0.001% hit against PEPFAR's longevity (and then multiply it out).
There's the practical politics level about how the nearly-total Democratic capture of these institutions has in a way made them more vulnerable. Republicans have no investment in them at all; it is completely enemy territory that they can shell at will without risking anyone on their team. Even simple self-preservation would advise other institutions (looking at you, higher ed) to get themselves some slightly-above token conservative representation. People only take care of things they feel some ownership of.
Now, this next part is tricky, because part of the ZBT process is seeing which programs drum up enough support to justify keeping/reinstating them, and having people loudly complain is the main signal for that. This may well be the most effective place to spend your internet points right now!
But ultimately you're still down in the trenches using arguments as soldiers, and what a lot of people are going to hear isn't "I care a lot about PEPFAR specifically" it's "I am focused on this because Trump Bad and this is the best way to show people he is bad." And they're thinking "this is a tiny piece of a vital reform of a government that had turned hostile to me and mine and you're trying to block it" so now they're deploying their own soldiers. I guess the question is: How sure are you that Trump Bad really isn't your major motivator?
"Trump Bad" is *my* major motivator, for exactly the reasons you describe. I have no investment in the Republican party, the Trump administration, movement conservatism, Big Tech, or the "Billionaire Club" at all, so attacking same does no damage to me or the side I feel loyal to.
Unless you are also suggesting that government reform should have some slightly above token liberal representation?
Token is fine, let’s talk terms. Polling indicates that the Federal civil service is 90% Democrat in affiliation. So my proposal is that by the end of this process, the civil service will be 90% MAGA Republican and 10% Democrat. Do you consider this reasonable token representation? If not, why not? Do you have prior recorded objections to the status quo you could show me?
Can you show me the polling? Political discrimination is illegal, so if that's been happening I am 100% behind stopping that. But I need proof first.
But that's not what my comment was about, nor your's, I thought. Reform is being undertaken by small groups of specially selected people. DOGE for example. I was referring to more than token liberal representation on *That*.
Are you just arguing for affirmative action for conservatives? Federal government jobs disproportionately require advance degrees and advanced degree holders strongly lean Democratic.
Relatedly, about half of federal government employees are military personnel and they strongly lean Republican. I’m a Democrat and don’t think that’s a problem. I have never heard any Democratic politician raise it as an issue. Some jobs just disproportionately attract certain kinds of people.
This is the kind of issue that is very hard to be rational about. My perception is that most human beings balance a felt emotional need to be charitable to strangers against a felt emotional need to promote one's nationality (ie, tribe). This is obviously going to be more dependent upon shared emotional states than any quantitative ratio. The way I see communities of people promote a set of values is via symbolic dramatic action--so canceling the best foreign aid program probably carries more symbolic value re defending the nation than canceling a less effective one. It may be more insidious than that--Republican political messaging seems to associate being nice to foreigners with Democrats and Liberals, so to the extent that the "national tribe" is equated to one's political party, canceling the foreign aid program that educated liberal democrats like the best is even better. There may even be a kind of race to the bottom in the sense that the person who can vocalize some version of "Screw the foreigners" in the most colorful way signals their loyalty to the tribe.
Of course, liberal democrats have their own version of this.
Here's a ratio, albeit one that probably cannot actually be calculated: the countryman to foreigner ratio is sensitively dependent upon how defensive people feel about the strength of their country's institutions. The in-group bias takes over from there.
The way to solve this (if you see this as a problem) isn't to bandy facts about--it's to craft messaging that overcomes political polarization and helps people trust each other more. unifying messages directed at average middle income people might do more to help the poor than any amount of analysis. "A rising tide helps all boats"
The less insecure we feel, the more generous we become.
The value of anything is subjective. Gold isn't valuable to someone dying of thirst in the desert, who would trade gold for water.
The value of life is especially subjective. As you said, your brother is a more valuable life to you than a stranger's. A cow's life is less valuable than your brother, but you're basically saying a local cow's life is more valuable than a distant cow's life, since you can harvest the local cow for meat products. And cows produce more food products than chickens.
When it comes to non-human life, where does it end? You assume the value of a stranger's life is more than zero, but is the value of a worm's life more than zero? A bacterium's life? A nanobe's life?
We only have so many resources, and so much caring, to spread around. The value of other lives to the human brain not only varies by individual, but when it gets to be marginally low enough it can indeed round down to zero, and thus effectively BE zero. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
In my opinion, the government shouldn't be in the business of charity to other nations unless it somehow furthers national interests. The government's job is to govern THIS country. If giving to other countries is judged to improve relations with other countries then we should do that. Leave giving to foreign countries in the hands of individuals, who can decide if their money is better spent on such, or helping a local stranger, or their brother.
I think Jesus assumes a hierarchy of loves, and uses that to help us see where we're lacking at the moment: "love your neighbor as yourself" is there because we usually don't have any trouble putting ourselves first. I think of it more like taking the limit of y as x approaches infinity: many different functions will also have a limit of infinity, but they will get there at different speeds. e^x will get there pretty fast, and log(x) will be very slow, but it will still get to infinity. So if our souls are infinite, then eventually our love for others will be too.
If you change 1% of budget to y% of surplus you have my vehement agreement.
I’m with the straight line people to paraphrase you on other topics. Our convex line problem has to take precedence here because of geometric divergence (debt increase).
Painful and true. Not saying we are doing this perfectly, but we have the order right.
I think you disagree that we will pay down the debt with the unspent funds. If you are right about that you are right and in the next decade (handwavey) we won’t have any ability to deliver foreign aid anyway bringing us back to where we are today.
Two points:
1. Because the government is huge, the best I could expect it to do is to make decisions initially on broad categories, and then refine the categories later. That is consistent with what has happened to date. All international aid was stopped (possibly deemed net negative by administration priorities), and then later life saving treatment programs (deemed net positive) were re-instated. Soon, maybe different life saving treatment programs will be considered on an individual basis. In my most hopeful prognostication, the individual parts of PEPFAR will be considered and PEPFAR will become even better.
2. Even if the broad category is net positive (so that any break in the broad category program is a cost), it could still be a net benefit to pause funding until the agency makes an affirmative case of its benefits, making the case and having to live by it could be a self-improvement process which outweighs the cost of the pause.
If we want to compare value, then we need a simple function with a handful of parameters. We constantly want to compare things of different classes and lack any reasonable tool for calculating. Instead we always revert to standardizing in money, I’m not convinced this is good.
I don't know anything about PEPFAR, but if it's so effective and gets cut, can't other funders step in and continue to fund it so it continues to exist?
The rational-actor anarchist take here looks something like this:
Trying to resize a government involves dismantling the web of incentives and memes that spurs the growth process.
While e.g. foreign aid programs cost ~0 from a bird's eye view they are great for optics (memes) and great for untraceable spending (incentives).
They also don't affect many people in your country, so dismantling one is about as low-risk as you can go in terms of creating negative memetic energy.
On top of that "likes government foreign aid" and "would vote a trump government" or "thinks DODGE is not literal Satan come to destroy America" crossover is about 0.
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So dismantling foreign aid programs is about as good of a practice run as you can get.
You get to understand, in practice, what it's like to dismantle government programs fast (a novel action, sociologically at the cutting edge, this might be impossible).
You get to observer and fight against the memes and the incentives.
It's not a perfect practice run, but, if DODGE was to stop medicare/medicaid, the probability of failure is ~100%. So what is an action they can take to bring that to, say, ~90% ? This seems like a reasonable first step, it at least provides a plan of attack, even if bad.
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As an analogy, whenever I'd have to refactor a codebase, I don't start with "refactor the broken core".
I start with "refactor a bit around the edges that seems as confused as the core" -- and that gives me a lot of valuable information even if overall it has no long term benefits, and the simplicity I get by refactoring is counterweighted by bugs I've accidentally introduced in the way it interfaces with the rest of the code.
Same applied when I tried to reverse engineer and simplify mechanical/electronic systems.
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To be clear, I don't think that the few people wishing to fix the US government will succeeded, and most people claiming this likely just want more power/influence/money.
But your argument is not a good faith argument against a steel man of DODGEs perspective. It is a political argument to an absent political audience (i.e. one that is sensible to reason, and if such existed, the US wouldn't be where it is in the first place)