Thoughts on Technology ( That is not Information), Economy, and Public Policy.

The Core Idea: User Pays for Government Services Directly Instead of a general tax pool funding everything, you're suggesting a more direct system where individuals and corporations are billed for the specific government services they utilize and benefit from.  This is a shift from a "common pot" model to a "fee-for-service" model for the public sector. Let's go through your examples and see how billing could work:  * "Probably US government should bill corporations and people for services, rather than collect tax": This is the fundamental statement. The implication is that the current tax system is inefficient, opaque, or perhaps unfair in its distribution of costs and benefits. Billing aims for greater transparency and accountability – those who use the services pay for them.  * "Collect the cost of welfare benefits collected by Wal Mart employees":  This is a powerful example.  The argument here is that companies like Walmart, by payin...

 Shiny Tech, Broken Promises: Are Government IT Systems Failing the Citizens They’re Supposed to Serve? It’s a well-worn joke in the tech world, but with a painful grain of truth: IT failures far outnumber successes.  And in government, where the stakes are higher and the users encompass the entire, diverse population, these failures are not just costly – they can be devastating.  Working within the public sector in recent years, I've witnessed firsthand a pattern of repeated mistakes, a relentless pursuit of the "new and shiny" over fixing the fundamentally broken.  It's a march toward the next deadline, the next budget allocation, the latest technology buzzword, often with little consideration for the actual human beings who are supposed to use these systems. While the private sector certainly isn't immune – the graveyard of failed SAP and ERP implementations is a testament to that –  government IT failures feel different.  They lack the clear accountabil...