Posted on 09/07/2016 10:16:27 PM PDT by GilGil
By Peter Thiel
September 6
The writer is an entrepreneur and investor.
Our government used to get things done. The Manhattan Project coordinated the work of more than 130,000 people in over a dozen states. It was difficult, unprecedented — and successful. Less than four years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the go-ahead, the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bomb.
Today our government finds it hard just to make a website. Our newest fighter jet has already been under development for more than 15 years and it costs more than 15 times as much as the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation), but last year it lost a dogfight to a plane from the 1970s.
Similar dysfunction is everywhere, at every level. One of the most dramatic examples is in the nation’s capital: Metro was a marvel when it opened in 1976, and today it’s an embarrassing safety hazard. Ticket machines don’t work; escalators are broken; the trains sometimes don’t even stay on the tracks.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
This is what the democrats propose as a new president. No wonder the government is in total shambles. This puts new meaning to empty suit.
Good educated discussion of the problem.
Would have been better to mention a more positive project for National Unity, such as the late great Space program.
Hillary has NO record of accomplishments.
Trump on the other built a country.
Career politicians rely on words; Trump’s life is full of deeds.
There is NO contest.
I thought this observation of Thiel goes to the heart of what’s wrong with Washington:
“Today we live in a financial age: The right is obsessed with tax cuts, and the left is obsessed with funding increases. Republicans joke about the incompetence of government to please wealthy donors who don’t want to pay for it; Democrats enable incompetence because they are beholden to public-sector unions that expect their members to get paid whether or not they do the job.
Lost between the two extremes is the vast majority of citizens’ common-sense expectation that the country’s transportation, health care and defense systems should actually work. As a result of both parties ignoring competence while they fight over money, today we have the broken D.C. Metro system, the hobbled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and justified public skepticism of government health care.
The establishment doesn’t want to admit it, but Trump’s heretical denial of Republican dogma about government incapacity is exactly what we need to move the party — and the country — in a new direction. For the Republican Party to be a credible alternative to the Democrats’ enabling, it must stand for effective government, not for giving up on government.
I believe that effective government will require less bureaucracy and less rulemaking; we may need to have fewer public servants, and we might need to pay some of them more. At a minimum, we should recognize that success cannot be reduced to the overall size of the budget: Spending money and solving problems are not the same thing.
When Americans lived in an engineering age rather than a financial one, they mastered far bigger tasks for far less money. We can’t go back in time, but we can recover the common sense that guided our grandparents who accomplished so much. One elementary principle is accountability: We can’t expect the government to get the job done until voters can say both to incompetent transit workers and to the incompetent elites who feel entitled to govern: “You’re fired.”
We need accountability and expect people to get the work done. That won’t happen under Hillary. That’s why people hate Washington, its waste, corruption and incompetence. And no amount of money seems to fix it.
Someone should put a bug in her ear...
If America keeps heading in the wrong direction, one day someone will dig up part of a light bulb...and will have no clue what it is. (H/t Ayn Rand.)
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As if wealthy donors were the only ones paying for government programs. This advances the idea the Republican party is made up of rich fat cats that are stingy with their money. No, the party is made up of rank and file people who know they will spend their own money more wisely than government will.
I also spotted the idea that we can't do away with government. No it just needs to be run more efficiently.
He does talk about perhaps cutting the ranks of government workers, but leave no doubt this guy thinks government is the answer to all our problems.
Ah no, it isn't...
Most of the time, it is the problem. So many pundits and Leftists just do not get it. After decades of not getting it and watching how government screws it up more often than not, I wish they would wake the hell up.
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Things were functional back when they were run by cold-eyed, flint-hearted, white men. We can come back, any time they are willing to endure us. :)
... or at least a golf course! My original attraction to Trump ( of whom I was always a bit suspicious ) was "He did a great job on Doral." On the Golf Channel, they used to clown around with him, and even had Peter Jacobsen imitating him, at the Doral Tournament. Now the PGA yanked the "Doral" tournament from that venue, and I really wonder what the story is there.
Let's hope this is small potatoes, and so much the worse for the PGA.
finally a guy from silicon valley is on our side.
Uniparty = Epic Fail and we are mad as hell.
“Less than four years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the go-ahead, the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bomb.”
Terrible journalist. Harry Truman gave the go-ahead.
Truman gave the go-ahead to drop the bomb. Four years earlier, FDR gave the go-ahead to develop it.
Nope. Harry didn't even know about the Gadget until he became President. VP was insufficient clearance.
When he was in the Senate, one of Harry's hobby horses was government waste. He saw a lot of apparent government extravagance going on around Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, and he made noises to address it loudly enough that Secretary of War Stimson found it necessary to assure him that it was very secret and very important to the war effort and that all was on the up and up.
Read my comment carefully. The journalist said that FDR gave the go ahead to “detonate” it. Truman gave the order to bomb Japan with it.
>>As if wealthy donors were the only ones paying for government programs. This advances the idea the Republican party is made up of rich fat cats that are stingy with their money. No, the party is made up of rank and file people who know they will spend their own money more wisely than government will.
They are the only ones who have the access to actually complain and be heard. Threaten to raise taxes on the wealthy and the Rightosphere on radio and the Internet go crazy with projections of all the wealthy taking their money and hiding it under a giant mattress.
But talk about raising fees or some tax that disproportionately affects middle class workers and you hear silence, except for the calls to “just tighten our belts a little more”.
Cut profits and the world is ending. Cut wages and....well...time to tighten that belt again folks.
Thiel’s most important idea in this is that when America was an engineering nation, we did great things efficiently. Now that we are a financial nation, our inefficiency seems to be by design.
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