> This is what's frustrating about America. There is so much bureaucracy that exists only to pay for itself, and I suppose, provide a few jobs,

No, it exists to prevent people from receiving public services, both by its direct operation and indirectly by making the service more painful to use so people who would be entitled to use it nevertheless avoid it.

For the first part, that will always be necessary. The people are supposed to decide through indirect democracy who is qualified to receive welfare.

But your second point is very true. It can be very painful to interact with the bureaucracy, something people shouldn’t have to deal with when they’re at the bottom of the barrel.

> For the first part, that will always be necessary.

There's no reason it has to be.

> The people are supposed to decide through indirect democracy who is qualified to receive welfare.

There's no reason the people couldn't decide, through democracy (direct or indirect, as is their pleasure; certain existing governments only embrace one, but the people can always change that, too) that the answer is "everybody gets the public service/benefit; and the payment comes through the tax system" and have one tax bureaucracy instead of a tax bureaucracy and a separate eligibility verification bureaucracy for each program.

Okay but, what about scammers who pretend to be your grandma to steal her benefits? What about people who died and their children are now stealing their benefits? What about a 16 year old child who runs away, does he qualify for benefits? What about the children of divorced people, who gets the benefits? What about non citizens? There absolutely has to be a verification system.

I guess, to steel man your argument, you could issue cryptographic IDs or have government offices with biometrics to authenticate. That would simplify some of the problem. I’m definitely not saying simplification isn’t possible—just saying that verification will always be necessary work.

And yet when someone tries to cut down bureaucracy, it's called fascism and people start burning cars.

The concept of cutting costs of things is totally orthogonal to political opinions. Fascism and bureaucracy are not really related, it's just that there are fascist ways to do things.