If Trump materially changes the bureaucracy, that will be his biggest accomplishment

All the hype gets put on things like taxes, immigration, budgets, etc. This stuff is "urgent", but is not as "important" as rooting out the rotten core that everything else grows on. (If you are not familiar with Ike's point with these words, look it up.)

I lived in Singapore for 4 years, and have traveled there for a long time before that. Singapore is the one place in the world where I would say government works better than private enterprise. They appoint really good people to lead the government and they pay them very well. They keep systems modern and world class to minimize the need for "make work" employees. They hold people accountable.

We have so much dead space in all layers of government, and it NEVER stops growing, yet it all works just so badly. Go into any post office and show me 5 things they do or have that could not be straight out of 1985.

Anywone that calls himself conservative and has not watched "A Time for Choosing" is missing the I Ching of the mindset.

A few passages follow. They may be out of order. I was looking for certain points and did not circle back to make sure they were pulled sequentially.:

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We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they are going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer and they’ve had almost 30 years of it, shouldn’t we expect government to almost read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?

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No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this Earth. Federal employees number 2.5 million, and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation’s work force is employed by the government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards.

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But now we are told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than $3,000 a year. Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you will find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those 9 million poor families, we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year, and this added to their present income should eliminate poverty! Direct aid to the poor, however, is running only about $600 per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.

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Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we are denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we are always “against” things, never “for” anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so. We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.

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At the same time, can’t we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provisions for the non-earning years? Should we allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn’t you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under these programs, which we cannot do? I think we are for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we are against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program was now bankrupt. They’ve come to the end of the road.

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