if they’re not going to fund welfare properly we need to get way better at grifting these stupid schemes. unrelatedly I can reveal that I’m a master builder, please contact me for a quote https://twitter.com/australian/status/1267215421595250688

Does nobody remember the pink batts scandal

I did some public policy economic modelling stuff at uni before I gave it up as a bad job, and you straight up do not learn about anything involving direct government provision of a service. Everything is geared towards ways to manipulate the market into providing it

The furthest left you go is Keynesianism, which is geared towards manipulating the market by increasing consumer demand, by giving people more spending power — for example, stimulus payments

If you ask the average economic policy wonk why the government can’t hire people directly to do necessary work rather than fucking around with industry subsidies they will look at you like you’ve grown an extra head. They don’t know why. Don’t let them make you feel stupid

The answer is definitely not that it’s too expensive btw they spend INSANE amounts on subsidies to achieve less of an impact

Until well into the 20th century, it was standard Australian economic policy for government to just hire a bunch of people to do necessary work when unemployment was high. It’s wild how fast this has become inconceivable

To be clear, pre-WW2 Australian social welfare policy was also garbage, but it was *differently* garbage to Centrelink

The public policy world is bonkers. Imagine asking someone for the time and they create a policy proposal giving tax deductions to local businesses if they put clocks on their outer walls, at a cost of $3.2 million

when I first started learning about public policy in capitalist countries I kept thinking I had misunderstood because it seemed too stupid to be real