Krugman: Spend Now, Save Later

[mrstickball]

richardhutnik said:

HappySqurriel said:

Squilliam said:

I wonder how many people complain because the U.S. government is inefficient. Would the same issues be raised if the people here were from Australia for instance?

I’m from Canada, and while there are areas where our government does a dramatically better job (education), I see the same kinds of incompetence and inefficiency across all levels of government in Canada that plague the United States; and I believe incompetence and inefficiency is a characteristic of all governments.

Consider that when a private organization sees a reduction in income they have an incentive to improve efficiency to maintain the quality of their services in order to prevent their competition from stealing their customers. In contrast, when a public organization sees a reduction in income there is an incentive to become less efficient and to make cuts in the most noticeable way possible so that the funding will get returned. This is why teachers are always the first to lose their job (and often the only people to lose their job) when education funding is cut even though the cost of bureaucracy has been estimated as high as 33% of the cost of education in some systems.

Consider this article:

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/04/lay-off-the-layoffs.html

What do you do about industries, in their collective wisdom, decide to end up trashing their employee base to maximize profits?  Also, answer how exactly in doing this, customer service has improved.  When you call in for tech support to get equipment fixed, is the service better now or worse, because they offload the tech support to people in India who speak with thick accents, and you can't understand what they have to say?  Currently, I am looking at a printer here that stopped working with my laptop, and I get NO help for it.  It is do it myself.  Is this your idea of improved quality?  And consider Walmart.  How is customer service when you go into Walmart?  Walmart has entered into pay the least amount of money, and cutting costs, quality be damned.

Then customer service gets bad, and the company takes a hit from massive losses of subscribers. Look at AOL and Sprint. Both have had major tech support problems for a few years running, and have been decimated by their better-perfoming rivals. Wal-Mart actually has improved their customer service significantly in the past few years, as evidenced by approval/disapproval ratings for their CS versus other companies.

And let's look at health care.  Do you know where America ranks for quality of health care among industrialized nations?  Near the bottom in life expectency and other things that show a signs of people taking good care of themselves.  Oh yes, emergency response is excellent in America.  So yes, America is great at jumping on one crisis to another but sucks at preventative health care.  It alos shows it is great at manifesting obesity, diabetes and so on.  All these signs of people taking their collective freedom and running it into the ground. To this, you want to argue that America needs MORE freedom here?  Whe people can't handle the freedom they have now, why the heck would there be even more given them?

So every time someone is irresponsible, we should remove all freedoms from them? At what point do we give the power over to someone else to decide if we are being irresponsible or not? There was a point that a governing body was allowed to make choices for its people, based on if they were deemed irresponsible. It was called the dark ages, and the Catholic Church. Still today, they do it in heavily Muslim countries that decide the government needs to step in when someone is doing something wrong...Like a woman showing her face in public.