For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread):
1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
2. Federal spending largely falls into a few categories: taking care of the elderly (36%), defense and veterans (20%), taking care of the poor or disabled (22%), and interest on existing debt (13%). [2] This adds up to 91% of the budget. The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how?
3. The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if you include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?
4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
The proposed Senate budget includes $150 billion increase in the defense budget, which already was 50% of all discretionary spending (that means after SS and Medicare as that is covered by a separate tax).
This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit the rich).
With cuts to other parts of the federal budget, the defense share of the budget will be even larger than 50%.
I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_).
> I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste
In fact, I’d argue that the government’s role is specifically to spend on things that are economically inefficient but nonetheless important.
Right, but theres a difference between "economically inefficient because every dollar spent here translates to less than a dollar of direct returns" and "economically inefficient because every dollar spent on this requires spending five dollars more on administering it".
It's absolutely possible for a government to value investing in health care or education or foreign aid in a way that a corporation could never monetize, but still value doing it in a more effective way.
> "economically inefficient because every dollar spent on this requires spending five dollars more on administering it"
Is there evidence that this is what’s actually happening?
5:1 sounds absurd but I bet most municipal projects that are largely grant funded are probably somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1.
I cringe when I hear about my town getting $20k-200k grants for stuff that would have cost perhaps half as much were my town simply catering to its own needs rather than trying to optimize for getting the feds to pick up the tab. My town's library, several school programs and several intersection renovations fall into this category. The library in particular is pretty stupid for reasons outside the scope of this comment.
exactly the opposite actually, lets look at medicare, Medicare Part A. and Part B. are administered by the government and of their funding about 98.6% is spent on care with the 1.4% going to administration. Medicare part D is privately administered and replaces part A and B, but 15% is spent on administration and often covers less.
More Perfect Union has good video covering it on youtube
And yet an off the shelf drug purchased by medicaid is often hundreds of times more expensive than when retail buys it. Something is happening and people taking their cut aren’t dumb enough to have it appear as top end administrative cost.
that would be medicaid not medicare which are two different programs and is because they aren't allowed bargain on medication pricing expect on a few select medications
Sure we all know _why_. The question is whether, by the time the money gets to where it needs to go, it was an efficient use of $$. If the government (of all things holy in our society) can’t stop itself from getting royally ripped off when purchasing medication, then what warm blooded taxpayer wouldn’t want the problem fixed. Once you fix the problem the spend goes down literal orders of magnitude. Same with corruption. If the way you fund X is by dumping money into an NGO owned by the government official who authorized program X, and 90% ends up in their kids bank account, that’s got to stop.
Anyway, the topic of this tread, DOGE, is reading the books and asking questions and then recommending areas where fraud/waste/abuse can be cut. They are not directly cutting entire gov’t programs for fun and profit. This whole sub-tread feels like it’s on a different set of tracks headed a loosely similar direction. DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
Seems odd to participate in a comment chain, taking it further away from the post topic, and then when you realize you are wrong you say that it is not relevant.
>DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
Let’s follow up in two months to see where this statement stands.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-aides-search-medicare-...
> because they aren't allowed bargain on medication pricing expect on a few select medications
This is absolutely outrageous.
yes, it is. call your representative and senator and complain.
I’m sure you can find some evidence of that. You also need to find evidence that every department that is getting slashed has those kind of inefficiencies. The government is large and complex. Even inside large companies, which are comparatively smaller you’ll find different departments have different level of inefficiencies.
Which is why a discussion on this topic at such a high level isn't really productive. You need to look at each line item and ask whether it’s fraud/waste/abuse and then make a call. That is exactly what DOGE is doing. If you don’t trust them then you’ll never get to a discussion on meaningful details.
Its not. they are just firing everyone they can. if they were being careful and looking at every line item they would not have accidentally fired the engineers that maintain our nuclear weapon initiating a mad scramble to rehire them. you cant have small team doing that level of audit in the time frames they have been in operation.
You can—you’re watching it happen. Sounds like the problem was swiftly remedied.
They wouldn't have fired them in the first place if they had been doing a line by line audit.
This is the equivalent of flipping every breaker in the box turn off one light in an apartment building. Sure the light turned off but you also turned off everyone's refrigerators, and the oxygen machine the old lady in apartment 3b needs to live. But you turned it back on the breakers of anyone who came down and complained... unfortunately the old lady died but she didn't make it down to complain. the question is who are Doge going to kill with their actions that wont get their complaints heard?
Nothing concerns me less than a quickly remedied mistake.
PS: at many time’s I’ve been successful using the “flip every breaker” strategy. A well designed oxygen machine has a battery and a fridge can tolerate a brief power outage.
But that's _not_ what DOGE is doing.
What are they doing, then?
> What are they doing, then?
Un-reforming the civil service:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...
“The government is large and complex” EXATLY the issue.
In any large orgs the more people involved the more deadlocks you have and it can become a policy quagmire. Both meta and twitter achieved more velocity once cuts are in place.
What has Twitter done since cutting?
Twitter has turned an incredible profit and launched an AI assistant since almost the entire user base claimed that Elon was going to run the company into the ground.
no, no it hasn't.
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/31/elon-musks-x-fidelity-valua...
"Fidelity has again marked down the value of its shares in X Holdings, which the mutual fund giant helped Elon Musk buy for $44 billion when the company was known as Twitter.
By the numbers: Fidelity believes that X is worth 71.5% less than at the time of purchase, according to a new disclosure that runs through the end of November 2023 (Fidelity revalues private shares on a one-month lag).
* This includes a 10.7% cut during November, during which time Musk told boycotting X advertisers to "go f*k yourself" during an on-stage interview with the New York Times.
* In terms of publicly traded comps, Meta stock rose 4.9% in November while Snap shares climbed 38.2%."
Couldn’t help but read this comment in Trump’s voice.
Huh? Twitter is unprofitable.
Says who?
Fidelity who helped finance his buy out of twitter and a large owns equity stake in it.
Do you have a source for the assertion that Twitter has "incredible profits?" As a private company I think their financials aren't as widely published any more, but I honestly haven't seen any information on which way their financials are going.
The problem is that all that spending will stop if the US falls
And don't worry, the House is ready to extend and expand tax cuts to more than extinguish any potential "savings" - to the tune of over $3 trillion in extra deficit spending. But don't worry, they've planned for that- just increase the debt limit by $4 trillion to cover the difference!
After all, now that the Democrats aren't in charge any longer, increasing the debt limit is no biggie - we'll just grow ourselves out of the hole! Once we enact those tax cuts, it'll be hard to justify even more debt spending on such silly things like "education" and "research". We've got to pay the interest on the money we borrowed to provide those tax cuts after all.
Wait, I thought the GOP was the party of fiscal conservatism and reducing the deficit? Shouldn't they be reducing the debt ceiling rather than raising it?
> Wait, I thought the GOP was the party of fiscal conservatism and reducing the deficit?
This has not been true since Reagan. The US political right has been selling economic bullshit since the 1980s:
> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[21][22] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[23] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[23][24][25]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_...
It's the same snake oil as "shareholder value" being most important thing:
They’re the party of saying that, but then cutting taxes and launching insanely expensive very-optional wars paid for by credit card. This is just what they in-fact do when given a chance.
They claim to want to reduce the deficit, but are also committed to pretending that the best and least-painful ways to do that just don’t exist. So. Kinda hard to actually do it.
They only care about deficits when a democrat wants to pay for sick children’s medicine or something.
If you think that, then they've been successful at their usual smokescreen: blame Democrats for deficit spending, and then when the GOP is back in power, they do... more deficit spending. Sometimes even more deficit spending. Somehow a lot of people seem not to notice that.
The last president that drove a budget surplus was Clinton, a Democrat.
Google tells me that was fiscal year 1998.
Like the Conservative Party in the UK, I’ve yet to see evidence of them actually reducing the spending deficit in my lifetime.
only when the other team wins the presidency. when they are in the white house they spend as much as they want deficit be damned.
GOP is not what it used to be
Always was
Well… technically the Democrats and the GOP changed sides on things such as civil rights and slavery, so it’s hard to say they always were like that. The people yes, but not the label.
> Well… technically the Democrats and the GOP changed sides on things such as civil rights and slavery, so it’s hard to say they always were like that.
That switch was in the 1960s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
Pre-1960s the racists were mixed between the two parties to a varying degree. In the 1960s the GOP decide to actually go after / court the racist voter.
I believe it was more complicated than that, with some moving around since the 1930’s at least. I think the 1960’s civil rights movement just made it painfully obvious.
Having said that, Americans seem to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to voting, not ruling out someone for being a terrible human being if their policy proposals make sense to the voter. I wish Americans would be more ideological and principled in that situation.
It’s no accident that you have been led to think that. But it isn’t true.
They absolutely should be. The legislature is not representing the will of the voters and refusing to do what's right for society as a whole and pass term limits for themselves. It's not complicated. Those who vote yes are reasonable, ethical, moral people, and those who vote no leave behind a permanent legacy of boundless self-interest.
That solves a symptom, not the problem. You need stronger legislation against lobbying, campaign financing, and investing by representatives.
If that works, the incentive to be a representative is reduced and there won’t be people who make it into a profitable career against the interests of the people.
You don't seem to understand how the game works.
Public sector liabilities are private sector assets. GOP is the party of billionaires and billionaires want more money, so they demand lower taxes and greater deficits.
Two birds with one stone.
I'm not sure if this is true any more, or if it is it's nominally true. But Democrats certainly have a lot of wealth - Kamala Harris raised about $1.4bn to Trump's $700m in her campaign, and in record time.
Banning those 5 trans athletes in college sports is sure looking expensive now.
I don’t think it’s about the budget at all. It’s just an excuse to purge the civil service, since it’s overwhelmingly liberals in it, so that they can swing it more republican. Deficits are just a cover.
> “since it’s overwhelmingly liberals in it”
Source?
DOGE isn't really cutting things to fund others. Many of their cuts are going to be net revenue negative. Many will cost taxpayers more of their money.
It's about gutting the civil service and staffing them with loyalists that will do what Trump or Musk want, despite what the law says. It's consolidation of power and corruption. Musk is also crippling many of the agencies that enforce regulations on his businesses.
Why doesn’t anyone do anything? They risk ending up as the rest of the world according to this, and everything they do is talking 1k+ threads. If everything people say here is true, US is in its own version of Perestroika.
Your question contains a clue to the answer: "Why doesn't anyone do anything". Specifically, what? I've been asking myself this since at least 2016 and I'm sure many other people have too. I've made phone calls, donated money, volunteered for campaigns and gone door-to-door. None of that has made any difference. The problem is in figuring out WHAT to do.
Who? the democrats? they are a minority party in both houses of congress ass such they cant force anything through committees bring bills to the floor or call witnesses in official congressional investigations.
the federal workers union? they got told they don't have standing in a recent court case only the workers can bring a case despite the fact that the whole point of the union is to represent said workers.
the workers well being fired and told by the court their union can't help they are pretty much out of luck they don't have the money as they had paid it to the union that isn't being allowed to do its job.
the courts? maybe some but thanks to Mitch McConal leading the republicans to block filling many of the open judicial seats as possible they were left unfilled for much of the Obama administration allowing Trump to pack the federal judicial system with supporters during his first administration.
we are in the middle of an auto-coup
at this point the only thing that can stop in the shortish term is the democrats winning the next three special elections and having a 1 vote majority then having no defectors in any consequential vote. but even then that will only allowing the to block legislation not pass any as the republicans will still control the senate.
Let's take the other two branches that could theoretically stop the executive from doing what it does:
- the legislative (Congress): both chambers have a Republican majority, and all Trump critics in the Republican party have long since been eliminated or have retired. Democrats are currently debating whether they should use the upcoming funding bill to force the Republicans to make concessions via inducing a government shutdown (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/15/democrats-co...), but many fear this could backfire (e.g. Trump could say something along the lines of "these bad Democrats are forcing me to fire even more people because I can't pay them anymore").
- the judicial: some courts have ruled against some of the actions of DOGE (as well as other executive orders), but Trump is mostly ignoring them. It remains to be seen how the supreme court (with its 6-3 conservative majority) will decide when these cases (eventually) bubble up to them.
Why did nobody stop any of the other historical atrocities?
It's congresses job to reign in the executive here, but the R's in charge have decided to let Trump usurp their power.
Courts are doing their thing, but they are slow. Republicans are already starting campaigns against judges and threatening impeachment against those that rule against them, and we're still all unsure at what point the Trump admin will defy courts and go full rogue. I think it's inevitable.
It's basically up to us now. If you have any Republican politicians representing you, blow them up on the phone, emails. Confront them in town halls and public appearances. They need to feel the backlash. We're seeing a little bit of this the past couple of days:
https://www.ajc.com/politics/mccormick-confronted-by-angry-c...
The most obvious case is the CFPB, which returns roughly twice its cost to taxpayers. I would argue that's honestly very inefficient, I'd like to see the CFPB returning a multiple of its cost to taxpayers... but nonetheless it is obvious shutting it down will cost taxpayers more.
We only see what it's directly returning to customers, not the damage it prevents to happen in the first place by a) forcing companies to change their behaviour and b) possibly influencing legislation and policy making.
Your point is spot on, but I think it actually does have better returns for consumers on paper than that. IIRC, it saves consumers 10s of billions for < 1 billion of expenses.
The CFPB claims to have recovered $19 billion for consumers, total, since 2011. Which is 14 years ago. So maybe it recovers 1.4 billion a year.
It's budget is around 600 million a year. So yeah, it probably recovers a little over double what it costs to operate.
That sounds okay, but bear in mind the recovered funds are... taxpayer dollars that we unfairly paid. And when you factor in the cost in taxes we pay for CFPB, that means... we're only getting a little more than half our money back. That's certainly better than not getting anything back, but I'd hesitate to call it "efficient".
Ah ok, I didn't realize that 19 billion was since 2011. Thanks
> I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_).
We all would, but given that Russia, Iran, China, and NK are aggressive states and all actively claim that the US is the enemy, and that the relative world order expired in 2022, we cannot have nice things. The peace dividend expired years ago
you could cut the US military budget substantially and it would still be the largest military power in the world and well able to defend itself
it might not longer be able to be the "undisputed global power" but, as someone who has lived abroad most of my life and seen American foreign policy from the other side, I don't know that's a bad thing
Although it is worth noting that the war spending the US does do also doesn't translate into being an undisputed global power. They burned a trillion or few in Afghanistan and I doubt that impressed anyone in particular. They didn't achieve anything. Challengers to the global hegemony multiplied in the aftermath.
If they hadn't wasted the resources they'd just be better off with no downsides.
I don't think the current admin codes Russian or NK as hostile states.
Well they both are across the large ocean and it's difficult to invade US from their location (especially for NK which probably doesn't even have ships). US is surrounded by weak, peaceful countries and separated by oceans from not-so-peaceful ones. It could cut the military spending completely and still be safe.
They won’t have any choice soon enough - all that wishy washy they are not our enemy bullshit goes out the window with the first missile/shell/drone flying over.
Why would Russia/NK attack their wannabe ally?
Something something the frog and the scorpion
If you remember Putin is a spy by training, and a damn good one at that, you must consider spies really don’t want to change things when they are advantageous to them. Right now he knows very well what levers to pull to make things happen the way he wants. He won’t change that.
I fail to see how the cuts as being implemented actually make US citizens safer from Russia, Iran, China, and NK. Can you elaborate on how they do that?
Not OP, but I don't think the cuts will do that. I think the additional defence spending might, though, at least w.r.t. Russia and China.
The only thing that we _need_ is ICBMs with nuclear warheads, which we already have plenty of. The rest of it is essentially optional. Even conceding the need for a large conventional military force (soldiers/tanks/boats/aircraft/drones/etc), the US military is way overfunded, and significant budget cuts would actually be on the table if DOGE were a sincere effort to reduce government spending.
Clearly false. Nukes are just not that useful in about anything except the end of the world. If you're fighting a Ukraine-style war, nukes are worthless.
Ukraine is only fighting an Ukraine-style war because it lacked nukes to begin with. Which, btw, they lack because we agreed to defend them from Russia if they agreed to not develop nukes.[1]
Even better than that: the deal was that they should get rid of the ones they had.
Ukraine only exists as a post Soviet country because we agreed with Russia that they (Ukraine) would never have nukes nor be a part of NATO. They otherwise would never have allowed the formation of a separate government.
The insane rhetoric of Biden and Zelensky and specifically entertaining the idea of Ukraine joining NATO is what led to this tragedy.
It’d be like Mexico joining the USSR. Do you think the USA would simply let that happen?
> Ukraine only exists as a post Soviet country because we agreed with Russia that they (Ukraine) would never have nukes nor be a part of NATO.
Key documents:
* Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1975): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Helsinki_Final_Act
* Memorandum on Security Assurances in connection with Ukraine's accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1994): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Securi...
* Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation (1997): https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm
* Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation (1997): https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...
There’s plenty of record that those promises were made to the Russians during the USSR dissolution discussions: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shifrinson-russi...
> In early February 1990, U.S. leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, U.S. could make “iron-clad guarantees” that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.
Whether they were written down and signed is nowhere near as relevant as whether they were actually promised. The word of the counterparty is what makes and enforces a diplomatic deal, not some piece of paper.
Actually, there is no record of that. None whatsoever.
All top Soviets have refuted this. When the German ZDF channel asked Gorbachev about it in 2014 when Russia used this as a pretext for invading Crimea, he directly called it a myth on camera. So did his minister of defense Yazov and minister of foreign affairs Shevardnadze.
Gorbachev even explained that claims of such promise make no sense. Elected leaders of democracies cannot promise what their successors will or will not do. Voters set the direction. Trump is not bound by what Biden, Obama, Bush or Clinton allegedly promised someone in private decades ago. "Had we had an agreement, we would have written it down", he summed it up.
Shevardnadze went further and explained how this myth misrepresents the actual talks they held in 1990 regarding German reunification. The talks were about placement of foreign troops in East Germany before the Soviet forces had left East Germany. They agreed that only West German Bundeswehr would enter East Germany and take command alone to avoid getting multinational foreign NATO forces intermixed with Soviet forces. This was to prevent any potential misunderstandings that could spiral out of control during the handover. Germans upheld their part and everything went as they had agreed.
Shevardnadze said that during his tenure (1985-1991), the question of Eastern Europe joining NATO was not discussed even once with Western representatives, Warsaw Pact countries, or in the communist party circles in Moscow. Why would they discuss it if they didn't expect Warsaw Pact to dissolve? It came as a surprise. Nobody expected that the USSR itself would disintegrate, and parts of it would declare independence and join NATO.
Gorbachev, Yazov and Shevardnadze have passed away, but Shevardnadze's successor who was in charge of Russian foreign affairs from 1990 to 1996 is still around and active on social media. If you're not convinced, you can contact him directly and let him explain this myth personally: https://x.com/andreivkozyrev/ Putin's senior advisor from 2000 to 2005, who departed over disagreements with Putin's increasingly authoritarian style, is also active and recently published a video where he tears the myth apart (in Russian, sadly): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFCNwGjko54
This myth is rather unique because three different generations of officials have refuted it: the Soviet representatives (late 1980s / early 1990s), people from Yeltsin's tenure (1990s), and people from early Putin's admin (early 2000s). Rarely do myths get so strongly refuted. No paper trail exist either. Western countries make a huge military commitment, but it doesn't get mentioned anywhere in internal Soviet meeting notes, private diaries, or other sources? That's hard to believe.
I find this myth a very good subject for a case study of a hoax. It is internally coherent and derived from an actual fact (the talks about German reunification), but doesn't connect to anything else. It floats around in isolation.
As if neither Trump nor Putin has reneged on a deal before.
For fucks sake, who gives a shit about what Russia thinks? They suppress democracy and political opposition. They poison journalists outside of Russia. They jail and kill public interest figures. They kidnap and jail Americans on false pretexts.
>For fucks sake, who gives a shit about what Ukraine thinks? They suppress democracy and political opposition.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1110577439/zelenskyy-has-cons...
>They poison journalists outside of Ukraine.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/6/us-intelligence-say...
>They jail and kill public interest figures. They kidnap and jail Americans on false pretexts.
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int/24744-the-tragic-end-...
Food for thought.
False equivalency, comparing the aggressor Russia with a country that's in a literal fight for its survival. Straight up Kremlin talking points. Not food for thought.
There is nothing in the Budapest Memorandum about defend from Russia.
Yeah. In fact Russia was one of the nations that promised to protect Ukraine from attacks.
But back then it didn't look like Russia was the primary risk to the free countries of this planet.
Yes it did, the Cold War had just ended but Russia and USSR was still seen as the enemy by the US. It’s not that different from now. The difference is Ukraine was basically considered to be a part of Russia back then.
If the only weapon a country has is nukes, would you attack them, knowing that their only possible (and pretty much guaranteed) retaliation is nukes?
Think about it. Would you be willing to end the world if your neighboring country just took one town? How about a city? A region? Countries need more than nukes to defend themselves because it's not credible or sensible to threaten to end the world over what could be just a border dispute.
its not a end of world scenario until you get to superpower vs superpower even then the southern hemisphere would probably hold up fairly well if Russia and NATO went all out.
The list of wars that countries with nuclear weapons have lost against countries without nuclear weapons is pretty much all the wars those countries have list since 1945. It's a very long list.
On their own ground, deep in the heart of their most populated cities, using their own civilian aircraft, knowing they're unlikely to destroy their own cities and believing that your vision of God is on your side .. sure.
As rhetorical questions go, that one's not great.
Nukes only deter your enemies from doing something that you are willing to end the world over. They are useless for everything else.
would you invade your neighbor if it meant they would nuke you capital and largest population centers. its called mutually assured destruction and its what got us through the cold war alive neither side would face the other head on as they both would be turned to molten slag a few minutes latter you just make clear you have low bar to initiate the Samson option.
as long a they believe you would nuke them for taking a single town they wont do it, so you won't have to.
and wars can be led in such ways that it never seems like the enemy is attacking the thing over which you would be willing to end the world. aka salami tactics
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang&pp=ygUOc2FsYW1pIHR...
Nobody can use Nuclear bombs without serious repercussions.
Putin considered using new, smaller tactical nukes on Ukraine and that set off huge international opposition. The mere mention of nukes is extremely counter productive to whatever a state is trying to accomplish.
By some estimates Israel dropped 4 Hiroshimas worth of explosives on Gaza.
https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/the-israeli-destruction...
The US dropped far more destruction on Bagdad in 2003 than on Hiroshima.
Modern conventional bombing is far more effective and just as hideous.
I think governments are afraid of nukes not because of the destructive power. Nukes are the only weapons that put the actual people in charge in danger, not just the civilians or the military. People in charge are afraid for their lives, not for the people they are supposed to protect.
It’s a simplisic view, I know.
The senators and president will be OK, they have plans to evac to a huge bunker with everything they need. I don't know about you but I don't seem to have a taxpayer funded mega bunker.
For some definition of OK. It would be a big negative change to their lifestyles even if they're still alive.
Also, it assumes they can get to those locations in time from wherever they happen to be.
They'll have no one left to pander to.
A lot of their families and friends are not going to be in the bunkers.
I don’t find it simplistic, but realistic. Their asses are pretty safe and they can play their soldier games from the deep bunkers until the atom starts speaking. People in charge are rarely heroes and everything revolves around their safety, by design.
Trump supports Russia now. They are allies
> Trump supports Russia now.
If the rumours are true, he's had no option but to support Russia since the 80s.
Yes, he apparently needed help with his finances.
Can you define "no option" here?
I would not be surprised if that "no option" list involves videos of Trump from FSB bugged hotel rooms.
Sure, but my point is that "suffering personal shame for the good of millions of other people" is an option. Not very Trumpy, but a feasible option available to him.
Worst case, it'd be a little reminiscent of the very first Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Anthem_(Black_Mir...
> Not very Trumpy, but a feasible option available to him.
For someone who is (I would suggest) a malignant narcissist / borderline sociopath like Trump, "suffering personal shame for someone else's benefit" is not an option because it just wouldn't occur to them. Even if you sat down and patiently explained it, the concept just doesn't make sense to them, like, eg., the concept of a flat earth doesn't make sense to non-lunatics.
The US spent more than twice (and almost three times) what Russia, China, and Iran spent on their military combined in 2023. If we can't match up with them by spending twice as much as them then maybe the military is the first place we should be looking for inefficency.
> I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_).
I would rather not spend taxpayers money on any of these and especially on military.
On what would you be okay with the government spending taxpayers' money?
> This is much more than any DOGE savings
DOGE is an 18 month project. Confidently asserting the end result after a few weeks is bold.
I confidently asserted the results before it even started. Haven't been wrong yet.
It's not a bold prediction.
DOGE cut all the easier stuff first -- such as firing employees on probationary status, shuttering USAID. To achieve any meaningful cuts they have to gut Social Security/Medicare, Medicaid or the Military. SS/Medicare is off limits. Cutting Medicaid would not only break Trump's promise to "not touch Medicaid", but would directly hit his prime voter base. And cutting the Military won't be allowed by Congress (who as I mentioned, wants to raise, not lower, the defense budget).
He already got their votes, I doubt he would really care about his voters now, especially in his second term.
But Congress does -- and they're the ones who set the budget, not POTUS.
Having said that, of the three, Medicaid is the most likely to get cut and in fact the GOP is already proposing this, which is abominable.
A bit off topic: end result and how to measure it is often the point against DOGE - that their “move fast and break things” approach would in fact break things, causing unexpected and excessive long term costs.
I get your point, they are still active and there will be more to evaluate.
Side note here in the unread downvoted realm:
"Move fast and break things" was an early FB motto, that they abandoned in 2014. Pretty sure Musk has never said it.
> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...?
Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease.
> What do you think should be cut, and how?
Given the complexity in the details, I don't think a 'serious discussion' about this is even possible in this forum. But if the question is 'do you think an effort should be made to look for things to cut', I'd say 'yes, of course.'
> Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?
Absolutely, it should be looked at! I don't think it's a trivial problem to solve, but as RFK was confirmed as the secretary of HHS we should expect a lot of scrutiny on big pharma and insurers.
> Why shouldn't corporations .. be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?
By definition of 'fair', they should. But again, tax receipts falling as a % of GDP isn't evidence that they're not.
> But if the question is 'do you think an effort should be made to look for things to cut', I'd say 'yes, of course.'
This is such an unbelievably lazy response. Every single person in existence thinks there’s some amount of government waste that we wish were cut and either returned to the citizens or put to better use elsewhere.
The interesting and important question which GP poijted out—and which you completely dodged—is where and what should be cut. DOGE is looking at the set of government spending that accounts for less than 9% in aggregate of the entire federal budget. At best if they found that 10% of this money was abuse, it would account to less than 1% of the overall federal budget.
This isn’t about reducing government spending. If it was, they’d be going after larger targets. It’s about fulfilling their long-stated wet dream of finally drowning the government in a bathtub.
> It’s about fulfilling their long-stated wet dream of finally drowning the government in a bathtub.
Except for the parts for the government that can shoot you or kick down your door. Those parts are sticking around for sure.
Yeah, those parts are the primary reason to have a government.
As I recall, the reasons are to: "form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity"
Whether all that was sincere or not is not the question: that was the promise I learned. 'Common defense' is well taken care of ... unlike 'general welfare' and/or liberty, particularly for 'our posterity'
Good point! I’m not a constitutional scholar but I think basically all of those except “general welfare” are related to defense and peacekeeping.
I’d forgotten about “general welfare” and now I wonder how that got in there considering it didn’t really make it anywhere else in the founding vision.
Maybe they didn’t intend it like our modern reading at all?
It scales linearly because the same ratio of services to people continues. There aren’t suddenly less kids to educate, less elderly that need health care or less cases in federal court as the population grows.
—- As someone that has been in healthcare for 12 years it’s broken because of the corporate structure and administrative state of companies. The payors and providers share the same incentive to raise rates because they each collect a percentage of premiums. This is a solved problem in every OCED country in the world except here. RFK isn’t going to fix this, he hasn’t even labeled the problem correctly. He has some ok ideas around nutrition but the rest of his ideas range from futile to dangerous.
—- Corporate tax contributions aren’t at fair levels the national debt is increasing even while spending isn’t. They get access to markets created by society and government and yet as debts increase their ratio of tax payments is going down. The fair level would cover social service costs. I haven’t even gotten to the companies that receive subsidies or pay workers so little that they are in social support.
> It scales linearly because the same ratio of services to people continues
That would be scaling with population, not GDP.
> The payors and providers share the same incentive to raise rates because they each collect a percentage of premiums
This must be an oversimplification. Why would insurers ever reject a claim, or spend time negotiating lower rates, if they're only incentivized to see health costs increase?
> That would be scaling with population, not GDP.
This is Baulmol's Cost Disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect) in action, and it's something that advanced economies must take into account.
A barber today is not much more productive than a barber in 1900, but a haircut today costs much more than a haircut in 1900, even adjusted for goods inflation. Why is today's haircut evidently more expensive?
The answer lies in the labour supply. If haircuts didn't cost more today than in 1900, would-be barbers would work in goods-producing sectors that have seen real productivity growth and consequently 'naturally' improved wages.
In some sectors, this has led to the replacement of labour with capital. Domestic help was once hired by the ordinary middle class, but now we have kitchen and household appliances instead. We see fewer expensive hand-crafts and more factory-produced goods. Even fast food joints try to replace human service with ordering kiosks.
This replacement is much more difficult in the government sector, where transfer payments tend to relate to income rather than absolute provision of hard goods and where health-care and education are two of the sectors most affected by the Baulmol effect.
Domestic help was once available because there was an extreme surplus of dirt poor people.
After the economic boom due to rising productivity, there weren't enough dirt poor people willing to work for peanuts, and today things like minimum wage and various benefits programs make it easier to not work for so little money a middle class family can easily afford it.
People would rather buy cheap factory goods than the more expensive hand made ones because they prefer to spend money on other things instead.
Google says the average barber haircut in 1900 for a man (women often did their hair at home) was 25 cents, which is just shy of $10 adjusted for inflation. Most places around me offer basic haircuts for $20.
In 1900, only the state of Minnesota had a requirement for barbers to be licensed (it was the first state to do so, in 1897). No beautician school requirement, no licensure payments, no state or federal income or sales taxes.
In short, it's surprising that the rise in cost of a haircut hasn't been higher.
I think there's something to Baulmol's theory, but there's a lot of hand waving that isn't really supported as well by the examples given here or elsewhere that I've seen. That, or the effect isn't all that it is claimed to be; it's almost tautological that as supply of workers for a low paying job dries up, the wages for the job have to go up to retain workers.
> Domestic help was once available because there was an extreme surplus of dirt poor people.
That's precisely the Baulmol effect. When your next-best job is subsistence farming, being employed as domestic help is a step up. When your next-best job is (e.g.) something relatively well-paid in a factory or a phone exchange, being domestic help is no longer so attractive.
> That, or the effect isn't all that it is claimed to be; it's almost tautological that as supply of workers for a low paying job dries up, the wages for the job have to go up to retain workers.
I think we agree here. The mechanism of the Baulmol effect is pretty boring and pedestrian, but the outcome is surprising in aggregate. It's "why are we paying X times more for the same number of teachers?" and "why are there fewer tailors and more fast fashion?" and "why can't I find a handyman who won't refuse to fix something around my house because the job is 'too small'?" all wrapped up in one.
In most of the world, a haircut averages at $5.
In France the average man cut is between 15€ and 30€. You can find cuts at 8-10€ in poorer areas.
For reference, a visit to a family doctor is 30€, 28€ is reimbursed (you pay 2€ effectively)
> You can find cuts at 8-10€ in poorer areas.
It's not about poor areas. My city is middle-class AF and there's a 8€ barber there.
It's just that they have a list of exactly one haircut they apply to everybody, and a few more shaving styles.
Sure, this will depend on the region. I am west of pairs (middle-class AF as well :)) and the cheapest haircut is 13€ in a somehow shady place without any fancy information about the kind of haircuts.
Barbers are crazy priced (because hipsters and whatnot) and the typical chain (Jean Louis David) is 30€ or so.
The cost of goods does not change. It just means someone else is paying the 28 EUR part
Yes you are right of course - my main point was about the cost of an MD visit. The reimbursement part was just to flex about how our health insurance is good :) (unrelated to the discussion)
Not in Europe or any other developed country. Haircut is that cheap when worker lives on super low wage.
> [wiki:] The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains results from the need to compete for workers with jobs that have experienced productivity gains
This implies that higher productivity gains result in higher wages, which is historically not the case. This explanation appears to only establish a weak correlation (productivity->wages) and stick to it where other factors like cost of living better explain even regional differences. Or what do i miss?
No, because the level of services and cost to provide them scales also.
Inflation. What paying workers costs. What is considered an “acceptable” level of poverty vs abject poverty as we get richer. New, expensive medical procedures. And as the world gets richer, defense gets more expensive.
We can’t pay 1930 salaries to workers, field a 1930s army, nor would we consider it humane for our elderly to end up with an impoverished 1930s standard of living with 1930s medical care.
Inflation is misleading for these purposes, too, because it includes hedonic adjustments. So a new better procedure or bigger apartment costing 40 pc more might only be 10 pc higher from an inflation point of view, even though you can’t really buy the old one.
Re: insurers— it is an oversimplification. Suffice it to say they are at scale where they have market power and thus don’t price where p=mc, and the regulatory pressures and price opacity push them even further away from efficiency. They are not completely insulated from costs or market pressures, but it’s fairly close.
> Inflation. What paying workers costs.
GDP without qualification is 'real GDP', not 'nominal GDP', i.e it's already adjusted for inflation. I agree that costs need be adjusted for inflation
> GDP without qualification is 'real GDP', not 'nominal GDP' i.e it's already adjusted for inflation.
Nah.. I can't intuit what you are thinking or arguing. But I already addressed much more than you responded to. e.g.:
> > Inflation is misleading for these purposes, too, because it includes hedonic adjustments. So a new better procedure or bigger apartment costing 40 pc more might only be 10 pc higher from an inflation point of view, even though you can’t really buy the old one.
Claims approval has nothing to do with rate setting. Insurance companies can deny individual claims and still use the total payments in the aggregate to argue for premium increases with their regulators. Remember they are entitled to a statutory administrative costs fee. That’s how they really make money. 10% of a $2B is more than 10% of 1B so they want spending to go up.
> That would be scaling with population, not GDP.
Educating kids the way we did in 1910 would certainly be cheap, but I don’t think anyone in the country is looking for that.
What about educating them the way we did in 1980?
That may actually be an improvement. One of my math teachers in high school hated the text books and gave us sets of problems from the 1950s. Instead of 20 easy problems, it was 3 much more difficult problems. The problem in our education system is the standards are in the toilet because they are afraid to fail people. This does not cost money to correct.
Is that because we’d bring standards back? Harvard is finding that students can’t read books. https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/why-elite-students-ca...
Haha, fair point. It might actually be better to educate them like in the 1910’s.
They don't read books for entertainment anymore. They play games people on this forum made. That is about it.
No. Modern kids in the US were trained on short form articles. As a result they experience anxiety when as to read a single book per semester. They really hate being asked to read multiple books per semester for just one class.
Don’t worry, RFK will be gone in 6mo once the pharma lobbyists get through to Congress members if he touches anything that affects their profits.
I do worry - in a sense. I have no doubt that a mugging gone wrong or a car crash because reasons could occur or is being considered actively.
Too often the enemies of the deep state wind up dead under suspicious circumstances. I see no reason why any of the new guard will be exempt from those methods.
Who would be so bold as to kill a Kennedy?
I think there’s been about 60 years to have the shock value wear off
> There aren’t suddenly less kids to educate, less elderly that need health care or less cases in federal court as the population grows.
There are fewer kids to educate, but all the school funding formulas are based on number of kids, so as there are fewer kids, there are less federal and state funds for the kids (but schools have a lot of fixed costs). And there is a lot more legally mandated costs for special education than in previous decades due to legally mandated “Individual Education Plans”.
This means less resources overall, and especially less resources for higher achieving kids. Rich people who can supplement their kids’ education will benefit, and lower class kids who used public education systems to break their families out of the lower class will be less likely to succeed.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/03/education-enrollment-cliff-...
> By the numbers: The U.S. is expected to reach "peak high school graduate" in 2025, when around 3.9 million young people will graduate, per WICHE.
>By 2037, there'll be only about 3.5 million high school graduates, WICHE projects — a 10.7% decrease.
I'd argue that we shouldn't expect government expenses to be effected that much by advances in productivity. Government services largely exist to handle situations that are inherently inefficient (disability, national defense, civil rights, education, elder care, etc.).
What's the argument that corporations should be laying a lower share of the GDP? Due to their greater proportionate wealth, corporations and the wealthy can better afford to pay. They also tend to disproportionately benefit from the government.
Service delivery can be improved by advances in productivity for both public and private sectors equally - The difference is that the private sector is constantly focusing on reducing costs of the most expensive business areas. For most businesses this is operations/service delivery, and reducing these costs allows the business to extract higher profit and gain the flexibility to compete on price. Employees who deliver cost out effectively are also rewarded. There is risk but also high reward.
Government organisations don't have the same profit incentive as they aren't in a competitive market, nor are there any personal incentives for executives to achieve these efficiencies. Government does eventually implement productivity improvement however it lags behind the private sector, with investment in productivity only occuring once risk has effectively been eliminated.
I've worked in both sectors, and people working in each sector are equally frustrated with inefficiency and seek to improve things. The problem with government isn't really the people nor the agency nor the sector, it's that the organisation and it's people only gain rewards by improving the status of the politician running the agency.
Nowadays saying that $X billion is being spent is more important than whether it successfully achieved the outcome. The effect of this is that one politician can announce $X billion to more efficiently achieve the same outcome as another politician announcing $2X billion at half the productivity and the second politician sounds like (or can easily be spun to sound like) they are achieving more/ care more than the first. The end result is massive expenditure on very little.
They absolutely benefit significantly more, from roads for shipping/traveling to educated workforce, to a more stable economy, more stable international trades, to a more stable electrical grid, plumbing, more stable buildings to house their business, and on and on etc… etc…
it’s absolutely wild to me how people fail to see how much more companies benefit from taxes.
The tax code can be looked at as written by the rich to pad their pockets. But it can also be looked at as the main lever by which the government manipulates us to get what it wants: affordable housing, high employment, cheap energy. There are a lot of real estate, business, and exploration / mining tax breaks presumably because the government wants to incentivize that activity.
The book “Tax Free Wealth” covers this and points out that the tax code looks pretty similar across all western countries when it comes to the way the activity the code is trying to stimulate.
I personally don’t like the tax code being used for such manipulations regardless of the motive behind it.
Most politicians are doing all sorts of real estate deals on the side. That’s why there are all kinds of tax breaks and incentives for real estate. It’s not to encourage such activity, but rather to directly benefit themselves and their associates.
> Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease.
This isn't the question. The question is about the premise of federal spending being "out of control". By what measure is it out of control?
"Better tech" is a double edged sword though because it can result in more efficient output but also more demand for output. The military was a lot cheaper in absolute terms before the technology existed to build nuclear powered aircraft carriers. But if you want to maintain a capable military you need to build nuclear powered aircraft carriers not just equip your troops with more efficiently made muskets.
While certain specific functions of government can and probably do get more efficient as technology progresses, the demand for new functions or more of existing functions goes up. You didn't need an FAA before air travel and you needed less FAA when there was less air travel, for example.
I think we all agree that making the Gov more efficient is a good thing but this is about terrorizing federal employees for ideological reasons. There is no crisis to justify this. We do have a crisis in healthcare which is being ignored.
Ha. I have the complete opposite take. That the terrorism being done here is by unelected bureaucrats weaponizing tax payers money against the tax payers like myself. And it’s gone unchecked for decades. That’s the crisis.
Unlike Elon who is actually an unelected bureaucrat who wesponizes tax payer monet against the tax payers?
Unelected bureaucrats can weaponize public spendig against citizens ... sounds very distorted and biased to me. "Weaponized" is a term i immediately associate with propaganda.
Could you please elaborate on that decades long terror, but please try not to make it about only you.
In what ways have unelected bureaucrats (of which Elon Musk is now one) weapenized your tax dollars against you?
Did anyone elect daddy elon?
I am certainly not a supporter of this government, but I do find it unsettling to have massive amounts of ideologically fueled bureaucrats running the government. It goes both ways. The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction. I am losing hope that it will return to the middle one day.
What makes you think that "massive amounts of ideologically fueled bureaucrats" run the government?
Probably not fueled but in some agencies most staff is Democrats
> Democrats made up about half of the workforce during the 1997-2019 data period (compared with about 41% of the U.S. population). Meanwhile, registered Republicans dropped from 32% to 26% during the period, with an increase in Independents making up the difference. The most heavily Democratic departments are the EPA, Department of Education, and the State Department, where about 70% of employees are registered to the party, while the most conservative departments are Agriculture and Transportation.
https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/study-finds-the-...
Also American First propaganda site lists some individual cases where career staff hinders agenda due to ideological reasons.
Wasn’t there a study that identified that college educated individuals are more likely to be Democrats? Most US government jobs require a college degree (or higher), so it wouldn’t be surprising to see that population match the findings in the general population?
Additionally, the republican image typically espouses the idea of private industry and private capital more so than the democrats, where public service takes a bigger role. If people already identified with a given ideology, it’s likely that their career choice would reflect that.
Finally, one’s political leanings aren’t being used to determine if they should be hired.
How is being registered with a political party even anywhere in the same ballpark as "ideologically fueled"? And why does that only apply to one political party? Career government employees by definition serve during both Republican and Democratic administrations and at any point the President is going to have a lot of people in the executive branch who voted for the other side. If this partisan mismatch was such a massive problem, we'd have heard about more than a handful of individual cases.
Ideologically, it seems like Republicans or Libertarians oppose the federal government generally. Wouldn't it make sense for there to be less of them wanting to work for the government?
I'd imagine you wouldn't find an abundance of pacifists working in the military either
> massive amounts of ideologically fueled bureaucrats running the government
You will have a different type of ideologically fueled bureaucrats running the governemnt, just look at what’s happening and who got appointed where. I mean, come on, Kash Patel running the FBI? Kash Patel was selling his own merch.
> Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I
GDP per se, maybe not, however we should still expect it to scale with the costs of services and goods that are correlated.
Ex: If the dollar price of rent doubles, then dollar expenditures to keep the elderly from dying in ditches will likewise double, even with no change in population.
GDP increases are generally measured in real (i.e. inflation adjusted) terms, so a doubling of rent costs don't imply a larger GDP. If we're talking nominal GDP, then I'd agree we should expect gov expense to increase as well.
Inflation refers to the money supply and is one number applied to everything in the economy. It does not account for things getting legitimately more expensive. Rent can go up faster than inflation, indeed we'd expect it to as presumably buildings are built or improved to higher standards and the surrounding neighborhoods have improvements which make the local real estate more valuable. Likewise for many other goods and services.
There's a lot of other data on the site the graph in 4 came from. I put together my own chart comparing corporate tax receipts to annual corporate profits, and it doesn't look any better. Looks worse, in fact. I have successfully convinced myself that corporations are not, in fact, paying their fair share.
See the CPROFIT, CPATAX and FCTAX charts.
To understand what's going on here, compare corporate income tax with VAT.
These are very similar taxes: A business takes its revenue and subtracts its expenses, the tax rate is applied to what's left. The distinction is that VAT is paid to the jurisdiction where the corporation's customers are, whereas corporate income tax is paid to the jurisdiction where the corporation files paperwork. It should be obvious what happens when you do the latter: International corporations start filing their paperwork in the countries with lower tax rates.
To fix this you need to tax corporations using a different kind of tax which is tied to some actual activity happening within the jurisdiction, which is what the US has been doing piecemeal rather than all at once, with corporate income tax playing a smaller role as time passes.
> To understand what's going on here, compare corporate income tax with VAT.
Under classical economics, there's also another effect at work. Corporate income taxes are capital taxes, whereas the VAT is a consumption tax.
Under "spherical cow in a vacuum" economics, capital taxes wind up reducing wages in equilibrium. The idea here is that investors care about their after-tax return, and if corporate taxes (on profits) go up they'll simply forego less-profitable investments to keep the marginal return on capital at the right level. With less capital investment, workers are less productive, and under the same spherical-cow assumptions workers are paid in proportion to their marginal productivity.
Conversely, VAT is assessed on consumption but not investment because corporations receive a VAT rebate on their inputs. The same "taxes are a disincentive" effect orients the economy towards investment (on the margin) and away from consumption. Capital intensity, productivity, and wages increase in equilibrium.
Reality's messier, of course, and economic academia engages in lively debate about the real incidence of all of these taxes.
>> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? > Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease.
Over time it _can't_ scale linearly with population, unless you decide to not adjust for inflation. It _could_ scale with population and inflation, assuming that you agree that you don't want more services from your government.
Don't forget, a percentage of that GDP increase is just inflation.
Most people, as they get richer, want to have services increase, as they can afford to pay more. For example, they go to nicer restaurants, nicer hotels, maybe they get a massage, where previously they would not have, etc.
This is largely also true of a population. We expect that our children will be better educated. We expect better roads/bridges/other infrastructure. Heck, we might even expect better public infrastructure such as trains, buses, etc.
> Don't forget, a percentage of that GDP increase is just inflation.
By design, GDP measurements are adjusted for inflation, unless you're looking at 'nominal GDP' (which nobody does because it's pointless).
> Most people, as they get richer, want to have services increase, as they can afford to pay more
This makes sense. But I'm not sure how many people believe that they're getting what they pay for, esp when it's not actually paid for, but financed
> Why should it scale linearly with GDP?
It doesn't have to. But GDP is a good proxy for the tax base. If the problem is deficits and spending isn't increasing linearly with GDP, that suggests the problem is with taxation. Not spending.
Another factor is cost of debt. In a decreasing interest rate environment it's possible to run with increasing deficits without any major issues, but once you bounce off zero, even if thos deficits are not currently a problem, projections show that they will be.
spending doesn't take into account debt payments though, and those snowball.
> spending doesn't take into account debt payments
Spending is related to debt only inasmuch as it exceeds taxation.
If you increased debt in the past, interest on the debt then becomes a recurring expense. You then have to reduce spending relative to taxes, not only to pay the interest, but to eventually pay down the principal if you ever want to stop paying the interest.
Eh, not necessarily. Inflation will eventually reduce the effective principal amount over time and you would stop feeling the effect of any interest
I’ve seen several reports recently that the interest on our debt will exceed the defense budget within the next couple of years. Is that not accurate?
> several reports recently that the interest on our debt will exceed the defense budget within the next couple of years. Is that not accurate?
This happened, I believe, in FY 2024 [1][2].
We're currently running a 6.5% primary deficit/GDP [3]. With real GDP growing around 2.5% a year [4], that means we need to cut about 4% of GDP, or $1.2tn [5], to stabilise our debt/GDP ratio. That's two Medicaids [6]. (Which would probably trigger a recession.)
[1] https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg... $842bn
[2] https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/the_baseline_and_inte... $870bn
[3] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/deficit-tracker/
[4] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2024/06/how-much-did-the-us-...
It already was in 2024 (if you exclude veteran related costs.) Some of the increase is due to the government debt being larger, and some from interest rates rising. (The average interest rate we pay on our debt has doubled in the past 4 years, from 1.59% in 2020 to 3.28% in 2024.)
I don't understand this logic.
For simplicity, imagine one program like food stamps. It costs X dollars per person on the program.
The cost of that program should scale with inflation and population. If taxes and government should scale with GDP, that implies either making more programs or expanding existing ones. As an example, you'd increase the amount of people eligible for food stamps as the population became wealthier.
I can understand that as an argument but implying that the government isn't growing because the relationship to GDP hasn't changed seems to prove the opposite to me.
The federal budget, if the size of government remained static, should be Inflation * Population increase, shouldn't it?
GDP is rising faster than inflation so the services that the government provides should take less, as a percentage, of the population's money.
The cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has been decreasing year over year when adjusted for inflation since 2021. It was also decreasing when adjusted for inflation from 2013 to 2019.
The logic for food stamps does not really apply to other programs though. The amount of calories people need is constant, so supplying a given population with enough food to survive should be easier as time goes on. However for most things, we're not aiming for a fixed outcome but one that scales with GDP. For example medicine - providing people with 1970s levels of care would certainly be cheaper adjusted for inflation than it was in the 1970s, but providing access to modern medicine in modern hospitals performed by current doctors is substantially more expensive, and providing 2050 medicine will be more expensive still.
> But if the question is 'do you think an effort should be made to look for things to cut', I'd say 'yes, of course.'
You mean like Reagan did, bringing in the private sector:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission
* https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/president...
* https://www.gao.gov/products/123531
* https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/convening-experts...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463355
Or Bush (43):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene...
Or FDR:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownlow_Committee
Or Truman:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission
Or Clinton/Gore:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
There's an entire agency whose job is auditing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
Scaling with GDP, rather than population, implies that government spending is scaling with the country's ability to provide services commensurate with prosperity.
Who said the problem is solely deficits? I don't think spending should just "scale" with anything and there is empirical evidence that that is a horrible way to run an economy.
You are literally just suggesting we spend more no matter what. Obviously, there is a massive difference in types of spending right? And we have an incredible amount of bad spending. In fact, in places like public education and health, we continue to spend more to get worse outcomes.
You're making large, sweeping generalizations and most of the positions espoused are more political than scientific.
"Bad spending", according to who?
Conservatively, 20% of the nation's wealth goes to the top 1%. The people who need it the least.
I can buy the argument that we could be more effective with spending, but not with the idea that we need less wealth transfer from rich to poor.
The entire premise is to cut wasteful, corrupt, and ineffective spending. I’m sure nobody will agree with every single line item cut, but generally throwing money away on ineffective and fraudulent spend isn’t contributing to wealth transfer. Putting “bad spending” in quotes like none of the spend being cut is actually bad is disingenuous. If you tax the wealthy and get $100, but 95 of them end up in landing in other wealthy people’s pockets along the way, the people who need it aren’t winning. if you can remove $90 of waste, give the people who need it $20 instead of $5 and spend $5 to grease the wheels, you’ve cut spending 3 fold while transferring more wealth.
Then why are we talking about personnel at all? That's like 3% of spending. The only way to achieve actual savings is to reduce program spending, which isn't even an executive power.
They aren’t just talking about personnel. And I disagree that 3% isn’t meaningful. And cutting workforce isn’t just about saving money on headcount.
What else does it do?
You understand that firing a program manager doesn't de-obligate the spending of the program he managed, right? Because I'm seeing a lot of people online who don't seem to grasp that.
> Scaling with GDP, rather than population, implies that government spending is scaling with the country's ability to provide services commensurate with prosperity.
This is only true if the value of government services increases over time and not just their cost. If GDP doubles and the government then spends twice as many real dollars to provide the same level of services as before, all you've done is cut efficiency in half.
> you could also expect better tech/productivity
A lot of government service does not scale that way. When a veteran needs help getting groceries, or getting to the VA, or has to go into long-term care, for example, there isn't technology to scale up a human being helping them with the groceries, or the transportation, or the nursing.
The government mostly serves human beings and the options for scaling that problem domain (which aren't dehumanizing) are limited.
There kind of is though. There are now grocery delivery services that amortize the cost of the trip by delivering groceries to multiple people, and self-driving cars.
Moreover, a major role of the government is record keeping, which computers have made dramatically more efficient. Many of those roles have in fact been replaced in the government, with the savings being reallocated to new spending rather than returned to the public. And many of them haven't been but could be; take any instance of something that could reasonably be done via a government website only the website doesn't support it or is broken so instead the government is still paying a large staff to do it manually.
Self-driving cars aren't nearly ready to solve this problem.
Besides the fact that they don't work yet (source: I'm working on it ;), a self-driving car can't bring the food to the door because the veteran is in a wheelchair. It can't knock on the door, have short chat, ask about the wife (who is deceased five years), and when necessary... Call elder care services when the veteran says he just talked to her yesterday.
None of this is part of the formal job description; it's the stuff that keeps real human beings from "falling through the holes" of the social safety net.
There's a lot of the web of government support of people that doesn't scale because the human-to-human contact is part of the point.
> Besides the fact that they don't work yet (source: I'm working on it ;)
They don't work everywhere all the time. They clearly exist; they're out there on the roads.
> a self-driving car can't bring the food to the door because the veteran is in a wheelchair.
It could, however, deliver the veteran to their appointment, in the many cases where the path between their home and the VA is one of the ones a self-driving car can already navigate.
Grocery delivery, by contrast, could still be done by a person, but modern logistics technology allows that person to deliver groceries for multiple people with one trip to the store.
> It can't knock on the door, have short chat, ask about the wife (who is deceased five years), and when necessary... Call elder care services when the veteran says he just talked to her yesterday.
That is an entirely different service. To see why, consider the veteran who has that problem but has never needed (or anyway requested) to have groceries delivered.
I don't get your self driving car point. It's just an analogy, or do you believe the government should be buying/using self driving cars?
I am also not sure if grocery delivery is as big of a problem as we are talking about? Does the government even provide grocery delivery?
>Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe)
That does seem more intuitive, but I think throwing GDP in the mix is intended to measure something different—kind of our theoretical ability to bear the cost.
>but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease.
To some degree, yes. But, this potential decrease is limited by the proportion of our spending represented by direct transfers, such as Medicaire and Social Security.
Medicare is very much not a direct transfer. It's highly dependent on the cost of providing healthcare, which, if reduced (e.g. through regulatory reform) would allow the same value in benefits to be provided at a lower cost.
Social security is a direct transfer, but it's also... not a very well-targeted program. The nominal purpose is to prevent indigent retirees from being on the street, but then it not only makes payments to the retired Bill Gates, those payments are larger than the payments people who had made less money will receive. A major efficiency improvement would cause everyone to receive the same payments. That would face obvious opposition from the affluent retirees who are currently receiving payments and spending them on luxury vacations etc., but it could certainly save a lot of money without at all compromising the goal of the program.
Medicaire is not fully a direct transfer, but not for the reason you mention.
But, on the substance, you're correct that it was a horrible example, because the outlay is influenced by a highly inefficient system. Feel free to ignore.
My larger point to OP was that, the higher the proportion of our spending that is represented in transfers, the less likely it is that the same general technology and productivity gains that lifted per capita GDP would likewise decrease government spending per OP's assertion.
But, I missed the mark a second time in my comment by failing to mention that very little of those private sector productivity gains would flow to any government spending by osmosis. Beyond true direct transfers, other services would require regulatory change (to your point) or a review of specific government processes.
So, in any case, there's little reason to believe that per capita GDP increases would cause a corresponding reduction in government spending. They're coupled very loosely, if they are at all.
Part of this is that specifically social security has become a monstrous program which is in need of significant reform but consistently fails to receive it because it's the third rail, and then because it has been allowed to become so large, it's crowding out the rest of the government.
There are a lot of other de facto transfer payments in the government, but those programs do have the potential for significant efficiency gains, because they're not just transfer payments. They're each making relatively small payments and then have associated eligibility and means-testing bureaucracies. They would also be better replaced with tax credits for the same people for exactly that reason, but in a comparison against the historical programs, the current programs should be benefiting from significantly improved administrative efficiency as a result of computers etc.
And the budget items that aren't direct transfers generally aren't individually large budget items (the military being an obvious outlier), but cumulatively they're still most of the budget.
Well, to be clear, I'm not claiming that there's no room for more government efficiency. My point here was just that these efficiencies don't happen automatically, simply because the private sector figured out how to increase productivity (i.e. a simplification of what increases in per-capita GDP presumably proxy).
Your point that the current programs should be (emphasis mine) benefiting from improved efficiency "as a result of computers, etc" suggests that we are in agreement that it's not automatic (since it's not happening). Likewise, we agree that direct transfers are the larger individual items.
But, that's not to say that I agree with you 100%. For instance, recent data suggests that only 0.5% of the money paid to Social Security recipients goes to administrative costs [0]. So, I don't want to overlook the programs that are administered efficiently. And, if by "monstrous" you mean we pay out a lot of money, then this is only a potential issue relative to what we take in. That is, the implication is always that cutting benefits is the answer.
So, the other third rail seems to be having the wealthy pay more by raising caps on FICA or otherwise. I mean, at what point do we consider that billionaires and centibillionares are increasingly common, and we're well on our way to minting a trillionaire? Yet, we're considering cuts to programs that contribute to mere subsistence for others? (I'll leave aside the irony that it's the would-be trillionaire who may well drive the cuts, because it's almost too rich).
>They would also be better replaced with tax credits
I'm not sure that adding to our already insanely complex tax code/bureaucracy gains us much, or that it would approximate needs as accurately as the current means testing approaches (even if it were more efficient).
[0]https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/top-ten-facts-...
> My point here was just that these efficiencies don't happen automatically, simply because the private sector figured out how to increase productivity (i.e. a simplification of what increases in per-capita GDP presumably proxy).
You can argue that the increase in government productivity wouldn't be exactly the same percentage change as the increase in private sector productivity, but it's highly implausible that it would be zero.
> that it's not automatic (since it's not happening)
That's not necessarily what's happening though. Some of the efficiency improvements have been realized by the government. But instead of taking the efficiency improvement as lower spending, other spending increased to consume the surplus.
> For instance, recent data suggests that only 0.5% of the money paid to Social Security recipients goes to administrative costs
That doesn't necessarily imply a high level of efficiency given the massive outlay though. "Oh, it's only 0.5%... of $1.5T." That's still billions of dollars in overhead. If you could cut the overhead in half you could save billions of dollars.
It's also not even accounting for all of it because a lot of the overhead from Social Security comes from the administration of the tax, which falls under the IRS. Which then uses the same trick where they hide a huge administrative budget by comparing it to the entirety of all income taxes paid by everybody to turn a large number into a small percentage. And then the separately budgeted federal law enforcement resources that go into investigating social security fraud etc.
It's easy to make something look more efficient by shifting its costs into someone else's budget.
> And, if by "monstrous" you mean we pay out a lot of money, then this is only a potential issue relative to what we take in.
Well no, any given program should have to stand on its own. Just because you could hypothetically collect more tax revenue doesn't mean you should raise taxes, nor does it mean that you should spend the money on program A instead of program B. For example, which is a better use of tax dollars, sending a social security check to millionaires, or increasing the child tax credit?
> So, the other third rail seems to be having the wealthy pay more by raising caps on FICA or otherwise.
The far better solution is to eliminate FICA whatsoever and put Social Security and Medicare into the general budget. Having a separate tax for them is an anachronism and it would eliminate the wailing about the "social security trust fund" which was never anything but Congress immediately spending the money when social security was collecting a surplus and funding the shortfall out of general revenues (or, let's face it, deficit spending) now that it isn't.
> I mean, at what point do we consider that billionaires and centibillionares are increasingly common, and we're well on our way to minting a trillionaire?
Why does anyone think this has much to do with taxes? Taxes in general are a percentage of profits. If someone's company becomes worth three trillion dollars and as a result they now have $800B, is the problem actually that the government took 30% of it instead of 38% or something like that? No, the problem is that the market is so consolidated there is a three trillion dollar corporation roaming around, which there still would be even if you changed who owns it unless you do something about that, which is a competition problem rather than a tax problem.
> Yet, we're considering cuts to programs that contribute to mere subsistence for others?
The point is that the program's budget is so expansive because it's cutting larger checks to affluent people who are not relying on it for subsistence.
> I'm not sure that adding to our already insanely complex tax code/bureaucracy gains us much, or that it would approximate needs as accurately as the current means testing approaches (even if it were more efficient).
You don't have to create a separate tax credit for each individual program. The programs all do the same general thing: Transfer payments to lower income people. Create a single refundable credit in the combined amount that everybody gets (and parents can claim on behalf of minor children) and it replaces all the different programs at once.
>but it's highly implausible that it would be zero
I agree that it's likely not technically $0.00. But, as the entirety of the rest of your comment suggests, many of the opportunities for increased efficiency will come from structural or other changes, specific to how we administer these programs.
>Some of the efficiency improvements have been realized by the government...other spending increased to consume the surplus
I would have to see the data on all three assertions here: that we have realized significant efficiency gains; that they were owed in any significant way to private sector gains; and that we simply spent the gains. Actually, that last point is likely incalculable, as it'd be buried in overall increases in spending, which is a separate issue in any case.
>doesn't necessarily imply a high level of efficiency given the massive outlay though
But it does. I rightly focused on percentages, not size, to convey efficiency. You can argue that even tiny improvements in efficiency can yield meaningful numbers when the outlay is massive, which you also did...
>"Oh, it's only 0.5%... of $1.5T.
but it's impossible for either of us to know how much room is there. We can reasonably say, however, that 0.5% reads as "impressive", given that it's far below the percentages for private retirement annuities (see previous citation), and there's numerically just not a lot of room there.
>lot of the overhead from Social Security comes from the administration of the tax, which falls under the IRS.
As it should, since tax collection is the IRS's function. Look at it this way, if instead this were on the SSA's budget, people would say the IRS was pushing off its collection budget onto the SSA, and they'd be more correct.
Same with some part of fraud enforcement falling to the federal law enforcement budget (i.e. the actual LE-related part). The SSA does have its own investigation office, as it should. That office then coordinates with federal law enforcement, as needed to enforce the law.
So, you can't simply zero out the federal LE budget there and I'm sure you don't want to replicate an entirely new SSA-only LE apparatus within the SSA.
>Which then uses the same trick where they hide a huge administrative budget by comparing it to the entirety of all income taxes paid
But, it's not a trick. Income taxes paid is a relative proxy for the number of taxpayers involved, the implicit complexity of tax returns, etc.—all related to the IRS's function. Now we can say the administrative overhead is 80% of taxes paid or 0.5% or whatever as a way to measure relative efficiency. There's nothing nefarious going on here.
>The far better solution is to eliminate FICA...Having a separate tax for them is an anachronism
It's an anachronism with value, in that it represents what's supposed to be happening here. But, now that it is off of that original design, we do need to recalibrate, particularly WRT to having the wealthy more fully subsidize the program; whether that's by increasing the corporate share, raising the cap on collection and reducing the max benefit, or adding it to the overall general tax. I do think keeping it separate has the benefit of clarifying the subsidy effect and the focus on subsistence. I also think it's protective of its intent, because adding it to the general budget/tax collection is the gateway to nullifying the subsidy effect as the wealthy continue to lobby for (and receive) tax cuts.
You could perhaps set a baseline percentage of the general tax for this purpose, but it gets really murky, really fast.
>Why does anyone think this has much to do with taxes?
Because, as it is, there are maximums and loopholes, etc. that mean the wealthy and these massive corporations pay a much lower percentage of their profits in taxes. I'm all for anti-trust for multiple reasons, but litigation and restructuring our economy are not the most efficient paths for addressing this tax problem. Increasing the corporate tax rate is.
>cutting larger checks to affluent people who are not relying on it for subsistence
I'm not sure an increased budget size, owed to higher payments to wealthier people, is really the issue here. Remember, that the point is subsistence and that we don't know who is going to end up wealthy. So, we try to calibrate how much we collect over the working lifetime of each person by collecting based on what they're making at any point.
So, wealthier people are likelier to receive higher payments, but we do cap their payments. So, I'm not sure exactly what you're proposing as the efficiency gain here. Are you saying don't pay people anything if, at the end of their lives, it turns out they don't need it? If so, that sounds like means-testing and the current lack thereof is exactly why the SSA is as efficient as it is today. So, I don't see what we gain by adding means testing, simply so we can say the budget is lower. That reads like a likely net efficiency loss.
>Create a single refundable credit
You won't find me arguing against simplifying the tax code, but I have a suspicion that it's not quite this simple. Too many variables, including people's specific circumstances (and regular changes therewith) affect this. For instance, how does a tax credit help when someone suddenly needs (or no longer needs) SNAP benefits? OK, so you start prepaying the credit as-needed, then try to settle up at tax-time (oof) or just carve it out of the tax credit altogether and keep SNAP. But, you can start pulling threads like this everywhere and what you weave out of those threads is a picture of how we got here (e.g. the problems we're trying to address). I agree that improvements can be gained by looking at the entire system in hindsight versus its piecemeal construction, but I'd wager the solution set is far more complex than simply moving everything to a single tax credit.
> Absolutely, it should be looked at! I don't think it's a trivial problem to solve, but as RFK was confirmed as the secretary of HHS we should expect a lot of scrutiny on big pharma and insurers.
Eh, we're going to see a lot of scrutiny on proven vaccines and other proven medications that RFK harbors a lot of delusional beliefs about, because he's a conspiracy addled pudding-brained nutjob.
And we've devolved into ad hominem arguments 2 replies in. I don't think this is the forum
The problem is, RFK is a conspiracy-minded nutjob. If you want to have an honest discussion there’s no real avoiding that fact.
Number 3 can’t be overstated. Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe.
Global health insurance plans usually come in two flavors:
1. Global coverage
2. Global coverage excluding United States (for half the monthly premium of the first plan)
The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even population health (ex. higher obesity rates)
20 years ago I read a story about an obstetrician in the USA.
His premiums at that time for professional negligence were $1m per year. He would have to keep paying those premiums for 18 years after his retirement.
Same for every obstetrician.
Professional fees then must be set to cover those insurance premiums.
Has that changed for the better in the USA? Seems very unlikely to be the same in Europe.
Obstetrics is obviously a illustrative case. How are the professional negligence premiums across the other specialties?
Why does the effect of the US legal system never seem to come up much in the “US healthcare is insanely expensive” discussion? Is the effect of it really not significant?
Australians are more litigious than Americans, with similar insurance costs for doctors, yet our healthcare costs are still half of the USA's.
So insurance costs may be a factor, but its doubtful that its a large factor in healthcare costs, they largest factor is by far the public vs private system.
I experienced US healthcare when I went to visit a doctor in the US for a simple (obvious) ear infection. I was charged $600 USD for a five minute consult because the doctor wanted to milk as much $$$ from me as he could, giving me lots of unrelated/pointless blood tests (which were pointless because I was flying out the next day and wouldn't get the results).
In Australia it would have been a $65 fee paid by the government, and $10 for the antibiotics, around 1/10th of the US costs.
The problem in the US is that doctors and hospitals are incentivised to give patients unnecessary tests and medication, because it inflates their bills, and they make more profit.
I've noticed the same thing happening in Australia with private vets & vet hospitals because they are less regulated. They try and talk you into a lot of unnecessary procedures, test, and drugs because they make more profit, and the industry is not where near as well regulated as healthcare.
At least with a vet you can usually shop around, when you are sick often you cannot.
> The problem in the US is that doctors and hospitals are incentivised to give patients unnecessary tests and medication, because it inflates their bills, and they make more profit.
You’re right about what happened, but not for the wholly right reasons. The hospital charged you so much because they have to also negotiate prices with insurance companies (health insurance companies are just for-profit government agencies, they don’t actually serve a market value today) and pay for those who are uninsured. There are for-profit healthcare systems of course, but that’s only part of the story.
If the cost of the doctor’s time and the medication was $100, they can now cover let’s say 3 uninsured people for $300 each then take the other $300 you paid and book that against someone going bankrupt or a difference in negotiated cost with the insurance agency.
In America we have privatized profit for the insurance companies and socialized loss. They deny a claim, book a profit, the person with the claim doesn’t get treatment, then can’t work, then needs care, and society pays for it.
Purely from a cost perspective we should just go to single payer, but we won’t do that because who is going to the the politician that causes 10s of thousands in job losses of highly paid white collar professionals?
I was effectively uninsured as a foreigner, and had to pay for it myself hoping that I'd be reimbursed by my company later.
I had a nasty ear-infection, could hardly walk, and was in no state to argue, but the nurse gave me dozens of what they said were completely "normal procedure" blood tests from their in-house lab, which the doctor would have profited from directly. I told them I was leaving the next day and wouldn't get any results if they took a day, but they ignored and persisted.
I looked at the bill later and they were for loads and loads of completely unrelated conditions, diabetes, HIV, etc... a useless waste.
It was price gouging from the doctor directly pure and simple, no insurance providers involved, but I'm sure that normally that also adds an extra layer of silly costs.
In Australia its carefully regulated what a doctor can charge, and its a different company that does any tests, or gives out medication, the doctor or company can't profit directly from sending patients off for more testing, or for prescribing medication.
How does the doctor profit from directly your bloodwork like you allege?
They did the blood work on premises, the doctor owned the clinic and the on-site pathology.
The main issue is you went to a hospital for an ear infection. You are subsidizing someone who is destitute getting a bullet wound treated potentially. The solution is the urgent care clinic for these situations. You would have paid quite a lot less. My last urgent care visit cost me $50 and I walked out with a $10 prescription.
I would need to see a citation for this story. Medical malpractice/negligence premiums are very high - OBGYNs pay some of the highest rates. Just a few google searches shows that rates can exceed $200k (annually) in some locales in 2024.
So to claim in 2004 that there are doctors paying > $1m/year in malpractice insurance is at least an order of magnitude away from what casual googling discloses.
I agree that the whole system is fucked, but I would like to make sure we are working on a solid set of base facts.
I found this article [0] from the NYTimes in 2005 that highlighted a neurosurgeon who was paying >$200k/year in malpractice premiums around that time
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/business/behind-those-med...
Is it hard to believe that some types of insurance may cost 4x as much as 20 years ago?
I totally believe you could find examples of insurance products that have increased in price 4x over the last 20 years. I have a harder time believing that obstetricians were paying $1m/year in insurance premiums 20 years ago (the claim in the GP) when obstetricians make on average around $300k per year now. You'd have to believe they gross around $1.5m to net out a $300k salary, which seems unlikely.
This was an argument in the 90s/early 20s. TX, where I live, implemented tort reform in 2003 to limit doctor's exposure, and decrease insurance costs.
It hasn't had much impact on costs:
https://healtheconomicsreview.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
It’s because physician compensation is only around 8% of medical costs and physician services billed are only 14%. So that’s your limit to how much reducing malpractice insurance premiums can reduce healthcare costs.
Also over the last 20 years physicians groups have mostly been bought up by private equity, so any actual savings just gets vacuumed up as their profit.
> Obstetrics is obviously a illustrative case.
OBGYN is not an illustrative case, it's an outlier.
> How are the professional negligence premiums across the other specialties?
The malpractice insurance is about 1-3% of the cost. The physician and nurse salaries are about 15% of the cost in total.
The majority of expense goes towards prescription drugs, devices, and for the admin costs.
> The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even population health (ex. higher obesity rates)
Are you sure? People comparing US healthcare costs to European costs don't realize that these are two very different products. The US population is much more unhealthy, yet it has about the same life expectancy as an average European country. This would suggest that Americans actually have access to significantly more healthcare services than Europeans do.
I think a lot of people assume that some of this stuff is linear when it actually seems to be exponential (or super-exponential) in cost. The median American spends half of their lifetime medical bills in their last year of life. That's a lot of money for not a lot of time. Incidentally, American doctors also tend to spend a lot less in this period, indicating that they have a much more healthy relationship with at least one of health or death.
I haven't been particularly convinced, looking at the healthcare systems across the pond, that they are providing anywhere near the same level of service that you get from the ultra-expensive US healthcare system. They are somewhat more optimized for efficiency and the US healthcare system is much more optimized for outcomes - partly because Americans are so litigious and IMO partly because the patient is the customer. That doesn't lead to low costs.
If US healthcare is optimizing for outcomes, it’s doing a poor job and maybe we should optimize for something else. Our outcomes based on relative rating does not justify the additional cost.
What do you mean by that? The population of the US is incredibly unhealthy, but that has little to do with the healthcare system and a lot more to do with consumption habits.
It has a lot more to do with food safety regulation.
Noone can be an expert in everything so everybody needs to fall back to authorities to advise or act in unknown fields. Blaming it on habits is like saying "why did you choose the doctor that botched the surgery?"
Look at births - they are safer in EU. Also, there is no reason to think the difference is not in Healthcare quality in general.
The life expectancy of the USA is a few years lower than the average in Europe. And of course Europe is poorer on average, plus has a war ongoing. Adjusted for those, I imagine the gap is larger still
That's the point of looking at global healthcare plans, which are giving two prices for the same person depending on whether they will or won't be in the US.
And while they aren't giving the same service, there isn't much evidence the service is necessarily worse. More healthcare doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes, it's not uncommon for more liberal treatment guidelines to only improve through statistical errors or to lead to compensatory idiopathic illness.
This is systematically incentivized in the US, where both the doctors (obviously) will be paid more for more/worse care, but also the insurers which have to follow the 80/20 or 85/15 rules and are therefore incentivized to increase costs to increase total profits, especially in places where they have little competition, or agreements with hospital systems to pay a similar amount to other insurers.
Additionally, the spurious nature of claims in the US system wastes massive amounts of resources where insurers (with their 15-20% of premiums) but also practitioners (sometimes even over 20%) spend their time just haggling over approvals instead of using a clear and deterministic system, which also causes knock-on consequences later.
I don't think your methodology of looking at global plans holds up, because on balance those are a self-selected crowd (a bias, likely toward healthier people) and if you note that the standard of care is different, the price is going to be different. These healthcare companies know what product they are selling well.
I think it's clear that there's significant waste in terms of advertising, haggling with each other, etc. that you don't get in a universal healthcare system. However, there is also waste in universal healthcare systems around the cost of the bureaucracy to manage the leviathan.
If that bureaucracy is needed to manage it, why is it waste?
The way to attack the problem economically would have involved giving everyone in the USA an HSA that was funded to allow them to directly consume healthcare services with price exposure. It would naturally force competition on price.
The ACA that we got instead cemented the separation of people from the price of their service and costs have ballooned even more than that were previously.
The economic approach is the only real way to fix things long term.
I think you’d be surprised how little price competition there would be if everyone paid out of pocket. It won’t change insurance premiums; it won’t change the amount of investment (training and certification) needed to become a health care provider; it won’t change the price of advanced medical equipment; and it won’t change the price of patented drugs.
Before you conclude that the free market can solve everything, consider too that health care isn’t a typical service that follows ia supply/demand curve. The demand curve is practically vertical, especially when your life is on the line. You’re not going to shop around when your appendix is about to burst. Plus there are still high base costs, and scarcity (artificial or otherwise) of healthcare resources. And the monopolies granted to medical device and drug makers through the patent system keep prices high so the patentees can recoup their investments.
There is no easy way to solve this problem, despite breathless claims to the contrary that have been plaguing our airwaves since the 1980s.
Sure there is. It's called single payer. There's no way to fix this with the current layers of middlemen milking profits from what should be a public utility.
I meant to say there’s no market-based solution to the problem.
That said, single payer has problems, too, which is why few countries use it in its purest form. Everyone gets a “floor” of coverage, which is a good thing, but people also hate waiting long periods for treatments and the inability to choose a specific care provider. Britons love NHS, but they hate it, too.
There’s absolutely a market based solution.
You can’t go single payer in the US without actually destroying the entire insurance industry overnight and because of that, there’s no way to transition to it smoothly. The HSA plan does both.
All of those prices exist from negotiations between the insurance companies and not the free market.
Mark Cuban’s cost plus drugs is proving this in pharma right now.
This is just silly talk.
Are you going to shop around different pathology labs when they snip a bit out of your colon during a colonoscopy where you are under general anesthesia? Are you going to be googling for reviews of different neurologists when you get taken to the emergency room with a bad concussion or a stroke?
I don't think so.
So how is your market-driven medical system going to work? This isn't like picking a restaurant.
An HSA is essentially attached to high deductible insurance, so major emergencies that would cost over your high deductible would be covered in full.
All of the lower cost, non-emergent services would get the benefit of you shopping around.
You’d also need to be able to select your own insurance provider directly (pretax) rather than being stuck with whoever your employer selected.
In the current situation your employer selects your provider, your medical service providers have to deal with that provider whether they want to or not. You and your medical service provider were both removed from the decision of whether your insurance company was a good choice or not.
The HSA plan puts everyone back in direct contact with their providers and allows market forces to work naturally again.
It’s the only proposal that has a prayer of fixing things.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/carson-campaign-pr...
This wouldn't work when you can't get an accurate, up-front price for anything, and all unexpected costs fall on the patient with no real recourse.
You can’t get an up front price because of insurance, not because it can’t be provided.
Why do Americans think competition on price is practical for health services? The most expensive services people receive tend to trauma care or for long term debilitating conditions. In both cases the ability to "shop around" is either literally impossible, or geographically limited (and the ability to travel is just another regressive tax).
Because HSA with high deductible coverage for emergencies addresses both situations.
I know of at least one source arguing that in fact, population health (mainly obesity and gun violence) explain upwards of 70% of the difference in healthcare spending between the US and other developed nations.[1] To me, this seems like the most likely explanation because I believe we have pretty similar diagnostics and treatments to other developed countries, and I don't feel like a British doctor would give me any treatment that an American doctor wouldn't, and vice versa. As for the other 30%, I think it's probably due to inefficiencies in the insurance-based payment system and our patents lasting too long making drugs more expensive.
[1] https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...
It is very expensive to run the insurance companies, plus all the time the hospitals need to spend to talk/plead with the insurance companies.
When you have the state as a single payer then all those expenses just vanishes.
A doctor I know worked in the US and then returned to Canada. In his US clinic, each doctor had 2-3 employees devoted to billing (patient-paid and insurance). In his Canadian clinic, they had 1 employee doing the billing for 4 doctors.
Even the various single payer models in Europe and asia still have insurance companies.
The difference is that in these systems the government has some stake — whether it’s providing the public insurance fund, or owning the company itself — so that the government is financially incentivized to reduce costs.
In the US case everything is private so all parties are incentivized to increase costs as much as possible.
We really should to copy the Bismarck model. Public owned “public fund”, heavily regulated private insurance and care.
Competition among insurance companies in most other systems (like the Bismarckian system) is far more constrained and so consumes far less capital. A huuuuge portion of health insurance premiums just go toward spending on ads to pull members from other insurers and otherwise retain your own (especially while they are paying into the plan rather than pulling from the plan, at which point you’re happy to lose them).
> A huuuuge portion of health insurance premiums just go toward spending on ads
Wrong.
"I̶n̶ 2̶0̶2̶3̶ a̶l̶o̶n̶e̶, t̶h̶e̶ f̶o̶u̶r̶ b̶i̶g̶g̶e̶s̶t̶ i̶n̶s̶u̶r̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶n̶i̶e̶s̶ i̶n̶ t̶h̶e̶ U̶.S̶. p̶a̶i̶d̶ a̶ t̶o̶t̶a̶l̶ o̶f̶ $̶3̶.7̶ b̶i̶l̶l̶i̶o̶n̶ t̶o̶ g̶e̶t̶ t̶h̶e̶i̶r̶ n̶a̶m̶e̶s̶ o̶n̶ y̶o̶u̶r̶ s̶c̶r̶e̶e̶n̶s̶" [1] (EDIT: It's less than $30bn [3].) out of $1.5 trillion of premiums collected [2].
[1] https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/insurance-advertising...
[2] https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf
[3] https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-healthcare-pharma-ad-sp...
1. Your $3.7 billion figure is about auto insurers
2. I misspoke and meant "marketing" broadly, not ads in particular. This all fits under administrative overhead which is one of the major sources of inefficiency between private health plans in the US compared to Medicare/Medicaid.
> misspoke and meant "marketing" broadly
Do you have a figure for this?
Sure: Private insurance overhead is around 15% (up to 20%) while Medicare/Medicaid overhead is around 2%.
They are both insurance programs.
Aside from variations in fraud detection efforts (which Medicare/Medicaid should do more of), what justifies such a gap?
It's various methods by which they grow and retain market share, which Medicare/Medicaid don't need to do.
> Sure: Private insurance overhead is around 15% (up to 20%) while Medicare/Medicaid overhead is around 2%
This doesn't say the difference is in marketing.
I believe there should be a government backed, credit union style, non profit operating in every industry as a baseline for companies to compete against.
I don’t think that would work. The big insurance companies would find a way to undermine that. But also, the government insurer would end up with the most expensive patients who can least afford premiums, and then the libertarian types will use that to show how the government isn’t as efficient as the private sector.
I have no idea what the actual solution should be, though.
I have an apples to apples comparison here.
I had almost identical cases of cellulitis, one in the US and one in the UK. In the UK, I opted for private hospitalization in one of the fancier hospitals in London. The care was noticeably superior in the UK hospital. The attending doctor was available for a case summary on a few minutes notice, the sterilization and cleaning of the room was vastly better and the nursing staff could recite my case notes and recent test results and vitals at any time. None of these applied for the US hospital.
The bill in the UK was about half what it was in the US and the walk-in price in the US if I hadn't had local insurance would have been nearly double the price I did pay.
The kicker was that the UK hospital was run by HCA, an American corporation.
The U.S. has orders of magnitude of admin costs due to middlemen at every stage in health care. This should be obvious to HN types.
Also should be noted that health insurers’ marketing costs are part of “administrative overhead.”
> I believe we have pretty similar diagnostics and treatments to other developed countries
I don't know. I remember reading an MIT PhD thesis describing how Kaiser Permanente does autism diagnosis [0] – and comparing it to my personal experience of the same topic in Australia, it seemed significantly more rigorous – e.g. specialist centres that only do autism diagnosis, using the multidisciplinary team diagnosis model instead of the single clinician diagnosis model, use of research reliable examiners for ADOS (the training and validation process required to use ADOS in research settings is much more intensive than that required to use it clinically), etc. Now, the thesis does acknowledge that Kaiser is somewhat of an outlier in this regard compared to the US average (plus it is 10 years old so now so I don't know how things have evolved since), but I still get the impression that this highly rigorous approach to autism diagnosis is much more of a thing in the US than in Australia – and if that's true of autism, maybe it is true of other conditions as well.
[0] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070 – the first half of the thesis uses the pseudonym "Allied Health", but I know from other sources that "Allied"=Kaiser; the second half discusses Kaiser without any pseudonym
Kaiser is above average in the US, but in the major cities on the East coast you can actually find care that is much more sophisticated than you will get at Kaiser. If I were dying of a rare and aggressive form of cancer right now, I would rather be in Florida (Mayo), New York (Mount Sinai and Sloan Kettering), Boston (Dana-Farber), or DC (Johns Hopkins) than California. Kaiser's big advantage is the whole-life aspect of care, which is pretty appealing as a healthy person, but the medicine available in the US gets much more complicated.
A recent study showed Kaiser had the lowest denial rate of any major insurer, at 7%, versus the industry average of 16%. https://axenehp.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/20241218_char...
If you live in an area served by Kaiser and don’t have a very specific health reason to choose a different provider, I highly recommend them. They might not be able to treat that rare and aggressive cancer as well as the Mayo Clinic, but because it’s whole-life care, you’re more likely to find the cancer early.
Edit: Question. Can Mayo expand to cover everyone in Florida? Or is their advantage in hiring the best of the best? What makes their model better than Kaiser?
I agree with you that the Kaiser model is very successful and has great outcomes at relatively lower cost. I was just pointing out that if you want to show off the complexity of US Healthcare, Kaiser isn't the best model.
> I know of at least one source arguing that in fact, population health (mainly obesity and gun violence) explain upwards of 70% of the difference in healthcare spending between the US and other developed nations
I have my doubts. Over the last 50 years the ratio of US per capita health care costs and European per capita health care costs (or per capita health care costs for most of the rest of first world countries) has stayed about the same.
In other words, health care costs have risen at about the same rate throughout the first world over the last 50 years. So if in 1970 the US was paying say 3x per capita what some other country paid the US would still now be paying about 3x what they are now paying. Both would be paying maybe 35x now than they were in 1970.
Over that same time both US and European obesity rates went up, but they went up way more in the US. If obesity was a major factor driving health care costs then I'd expect US health care costs to be rising significantly faster than European health care costs.
The us healthcare statistics include people paying out of pocket for care that is extremely expensive and literally not available anywhere else.
A number of gene therapies are to expensive for any public health system, so are only available in the us.
Needles to say they're experimental and carry lots of weight in a effectiveness vs cost analysis.
Experimental therapies do exist in public healthcare systems, the costs are generally borne by the universities with special financing for experimental treatments. Many universities in public systems are run directly by universities which simplifies the process.
I went into the hospital for shortness of breath but my main issue was fluid accumulation. I had 3 paracenthesis procedures and was hooked up to a drip of Lasic and a catheter bag for 20 days. I didn't even recognize that I was in the ICU until I got the bill.
They charged $194,000. Insurance claims they paid $193,781. Of that, it was $7300 a day for staying in the ICU. My ambulance ride was $2500 for an 11 minute trip where one guy listened to my lungs and took my blood pressure. I had a palliative care doctor who met with me for 1.5 hours during my entire stay. She charged me $1K per hour.
>palliative care
When you consider that the PE firm that owns her group skimmed half of that off the top, if she met with you for 1.5 hours, she spent at least twice that time thinking about you, ordering meds, completing notes, and answering questions from the rest of the team caring for you, she probably made about $250 an hour or less.
Then consider that she accepted liability for you. Which includes the possibility that if you had a bad outcome your family could sue her for more than the total payout of her malpractice insurance, so she could literally lose her house.
And palliative care requires a fellowship so she has 12 years of total training with probably $200k-$400 in student loans. And she didn’t start making any serious money until her 30s. Then factor in that she’s on call constantly and frequently works terrible hours and she pays thousands a year in certification fees, and continuous education (plus in most cases hundreds of unpaid hours a year training residents and med student, sitting on advisory boards, or other unpaid expected service work).
I think $250 an hour is pretty fair.
The entirety of what she did was record keeping. Palliative care is a broad term, but she did not (a) do any diagnosis, (b) prescribe or change any meds, or (c) treat me in any way. She was basically an extension of the case manager. Our most impactful meeting was when she recorded the names, phone numbers, and associations of my emergency contacts, which had already been done a few days prior. Had she never shown up at all, nothing about my stay or outcome would have changed.
I didn't pay $250 an hour. I paid a thousand an hour. You don't get to arbitrarily eliminate money because it didn't go directly to her. It still got paid.
With rates like that, you could at least argue that everyone is HIGHLY incentivized to keep you alive
> Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe.
And so are the salaries.
>> Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe.
>And so are the salaries.
The original estimate was off by at least a factor of ten, so alas your comeback falls apart.
I don't think a reasonable discussion is possible.
Congress is supposed to fund the government and say how money is spent.
The executive "cutting" things to "save money" is basically the executive assuming the power of the legislative branch.
That said, what we're witnessing doesn't actually seem to be about spending. It seems to be more about obtaining direct dominance over the whole branch so it can be run essentially free of any oversight or connection to legislation and law - IE to create a quasi-imperial executive branch narrowly focused on the priorities of it princely leaders. So most of the "firings" are basically to make a point, winnow things down to loyalists who will ignore the law, and keep the news so filled with surface reporting on each new small outrage that the big ones don't get noticed, not so save any money.
Anyone who truly believes that there's tons to cut and that government institutions need reform can't also think that getting rid of huge swaths of the institution without attempt to identify improvements, priorities, or waste, will actually create efficacy, unless their real goal is not reform and cutting waste, but rather to make the whole of the current form of government fail.
I've seen some wild social media posts that suggest that people have really absurd views on this, too - someone I went to high school with like 20 years ago is having some kind of issue with navigating the Social Security Administration for something via phone and he's cheering on what's going on like it will actually solve his issue.
I have the same concerns as you regarding the constitutionality of everything that's been going on. The thing is, the judicial branch interprets the constitution, and while the Supreme Court likes to maintain a pretense of cold impartiality, in practice they try not to run too far out of step with popular opinion.
Which is to say, the opinion of your old high school classmate matters, for better or for worse. And I'd like to believe that our conversations matter, in so far as we can talk civilly with each other, and perhaps, just perhaps, change each others' views over time. We need to reverse this trend of shouting at each other over the Internet and hating "the other side" that we've been on for the past 10, 20 years. Our democracy depends on it.
> The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how?
Old people [1], veterans [2], high earners and homeowners [3] turn out to vote. The only demographic we can cut benefits to are the poor. That's what's happening. (Given partisan polarisation, my guess is Democrats will take an axe to veteran benefits next cycle.)
> Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?
Health insurance is orthogonal to federal spending. The correct question is why Medicare shouldn't be allowed to directly negotiate pricing with providers on more items.
> Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?
The term "fair share" is always loaded in tax discussions. Be honest and say why shouldn't corporations pay more. The answer to that is it's an inefficient way of taxing the wealthy since absent a progressive corporate tax structure, which nobody seems to be proposing, you wind up taxing a lot of small and medium-sized businesses.
Better: add tax brackets at the $1mm, $10mm and $100mm thresholds.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnou...
[2] https://ivmf.syracuse.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2024_Re...
[3] https://nlihc.org/resource/new-census-data-reveal-voter-turn...
> Health insurance is orthogonal to federal spending.
As an Australian looking at the USA - I'm not sure how you make that claim sincerely.
Perhaps you're constraining it specifically to 'insurance', rather than the only slightly broader question of private health coverage. It still feels like a tenuous claim, given parent's valid point about health costs at the federal level, and intimation around the poor comparison to almost all the other advanced nation states on the planet.
> Be honest and say why shouldn't corporations pay more. The answer to that is it's an inefficient way of taxing the wealthy ...
You seem to be conflating corporations with wealthy people.
Taxing corporations more has been shown - in your country, albeit some decades ago - to be both eminently achievable and effective.
Taxing corporations less has, in recent years, demonstrated clearly how poor a decision that is.
> Perhaps you're constraining it specifically to 'insurance', rather than the only slightly broader question of private health coverage
Correct. Our major uses of our $4.9tn of annual healthcare funds are 31% to hospital care, 20% to physician and clinical services and 9% to retail prescription drugs [1]. Lowering that number begins and ends with better price transparency from and efficiency in hospitals and physicians' practices.
Our sources of funds are private health insurance (30%), Medicare (21%), Medicaid (18%) and out-of-pocket (10%). Within the context of federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid are relevant, as well as the price and utilisation of the aforementioned uses.
> You seem to be conflating corporations with wealthy people
I'm specifically saying these are separate, and that taxing the latter would strike me as fairer than raising taxes on McDonalds franchisees.
> Our major uses of our $4.9tn of annual healthcare funds are 31% to hospital care, 20% to physician and clinical services and 9% to retail prescription drugs.
The adjacent 'National Health Expenditures by type of service and source of funds, CY 1960-2023' paints this picture more clearly, and identifies $1.5T of that $4.9T as going to 'private health insurance'.
It's odd that you overlooked that 30% figure in your summary of major uses (or 'wealthy corporate parasitic recipients', in this case).
I think it's this bit that everyone outside of the USA can't understand the high tolerance for.
> I'm specifically saying these are separate, and that taxing the latter would strike me as fairer than raising taxes on McDonalds franchisees.
Perhaps, but perhaps try both? Anyway, as I said, the USA used to have high corporate tax rates - up until Reagan, I believe - and almost every graph showing something awful happening in the USA at some point in the past 80 years has a suspiciously consistent inflection point of Reagan. [0]
I mention this only as it relates to any proposal to reinstate higher corporate taxes. I don't think anyone's suggesting chasing large numbers of (likely already acceptably taxed) $500k franchisees are the place to focus on. I don't understand why you would assume that's what I meant.
Between 2011 and 2020, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet (the owner of Google),
Netflix, Apple and Microsoft — known as the "Silicon Six" — paid roughly
$219 billion in income taxes, which amounts to just 3.6% of their $6
trillion-plus in total revenue. [1]
[1] https://www.salon.com/2021/06/01/amazon-facebook-and-other-t...
> given partisan polarization…
Democrats do a lot of things deeply wrong, but they seem to exhibit punitive behavior like this a lot less than their Republican counterparts. Republicans pay a lot of lip service to veterans but actual GOP legislation in favor of them is sparse at best
> they seem to exhibit punitive behavior like this a lot less than their Republican counterparts
It's not about being punitive. It's about finding resources to deliver goodies to your voters. Democrats have plenty of spending priorities. They're also, at least now, cognisant of the electoral impact of inflation. That means no more trillion-dollar deficit packages, but finding places to cut. Republicans have the poor. Democrats had deficits; if they can't figure out how to pass tax increses on the wealthy or corporations, that only leaves cuts, and the first place to start is where people who will never vote for you (and are already turning out to the opposition) live.
Do you really believe this? No policy proposal I've seen targets veterans.
> No policy proposal I've seen targets veterans
Hence next cycle. Nobody will say they’re punishing veterans. The pitch will be increasing efficiency at the VA and the reason to fund e.g. the energy transition or some other Democratic priority. Hell, the GOP might wind up going along with it to pay for their tax cuts and border priorities.
Why would they do it next cycle when they haven't done it in the past, especially when there's fair odds that the military will be more Democratic in the future?
Just making up stuff vs Trump actively not funding stuff during his presidency https://www.veterans.senate.gov/services/files/7F94ECBD-C23B...
R's are much more likely to cut veteran benefits/services and the VA. Some of that is happening now through DOGE, in fact. I don't see this as a likely path for the D's at all.
I think they have plenty of appetite to tax the wealthy and corpos... and we're possibly seeing the first stirrings of a new populist backlash to the billionaire bros. If D's can ride that wave back to power, they'll have a mandate to stick it to the uber rich.
B/c honestly, Musk, Theil, Adreessen, et al, through their recent actions, are making the argument that billionaires shouldn't exist much more effectively than Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ever could.
> Given partisan polarisation, my guess is Democrats will take an axe to veteran benefits next cycle
I highly doubt it. The Senate “Democrat” in charge of the VA is Bernie Sanders himself, and he’s been a stalwart supporter of improving veteran benefits his entire career. There’s also the whole “it would be political suicide” thing.
Partisan polarization is a good way to predict a lot of things, but if you lean into it too much you will in fact be wrong.
> the whole “it would be political suicide” thing
It was political suicide because the 18% of Americans who are veterans turn out to vote, are seen sympathetically by other voters [1] and were often swing voters.
The last part was critical: veterans are already turning out, so offending them was less about turning out votes for your opponent than losing your own votes. But if they aren't voting for you [2], you aren't losing anything by them. Meanwhile, the resources they're getting could help you gain votes (or turnouts) with others.
[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1363-7.html
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/30/military-...
I feel like you might be contradicting yourself a bit there, though. If veterans mainly don't vote Democrat, then sure, pissing them off isn't a problem. But if veterans "are seen sympathetically by other voters", then you maybe won't want to piss off those other voters, unless we know that they also primarily vote Republican.
Or you could just not assume some random unsignaled shift in own goaling might not happen? What's your goal to argue this hypothetical with no evidence or reason so hard?
Googles net income in 2024 was 100 billion. How much did they pay in taxes? And why %wise my company pays more. This should be DOGEd on top of what is being doged now.
> absent a progressive corporate tax structure
AFAIK, we had a progressive corporate tax structure prior to Trump’s 2017 TCJA bill.
The social security administration estimates ~$60b a year in fraud on ~$400b budget! [1] [2]. People can have a rational discussion as to where and how fraud and abuse are rooted out, but I have trouble understanding how people don’t think it’s an issue?
[1] https://blog.ssa.gov/medicare-fraud-prevention-week/ [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
The problem is that the real perpetrators of the fraud are just trying to redirect the blame to regular citizens. The biggest source of fraud is the insurance and hospital industry itself. See the example of Rick Scott: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott, yes, that Rick Scott- current Senator from Florida.
> Scott was pressured to resign as chief executive of Columbia/HCA in 1997. During his tenure as chief executive, the company defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs. The U.S. Department of Justice won 14 felony convictions against the company, which was fined $1.7 billion in what was at the time the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history.
THIS. I had to search this thread for Rick Scott. The sources of real fraud are promoted by Trump and Musk.
See my third point. :)
Article from 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/upshot/medicare-advantage...
In short, yes there's fraud, yes it's a problem, and the biggest offenders are probably insurance companies. This shouldn't surprise anyone who has dealt with the US health insurance scam, er, I mean system.
P.S. To clarify for others who may not bother to click into the links, the parent post mentions the social security administration but the numbers and sources are specifically referring to Medicare, which is what I'm responding to.
The Medicare budget in 2023 was $830 billion [0]. Where are you getting $400B from?
[0] https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/what-to-know-about-...
Medicare would not include SSN payments, though? With a quick search showing Medicare will have a trillion dollar budget. Feels like you are picking incompatible numbers to exaggerate a point.
Fraud is also tough, as it is an optimization problem. You want the amount of fraud to be less than what it would cost to fight it more. Especially since a lot of mistakes are labeled as a type of fraud.
You linked to a blog post about Medicare fraud, not Social Security fraud.
That's because the original responder's data was about medicare fraud although the estimate was provided by the Social Security Administration
But they explicitly said $400B which is not medicare's budget, but rather social security's budget
It is an issue and should be addressed. But it should be fixed, not burnt to the ground.
Indeed. In fact, one couldn't be blamed for thinking that perhaps all of this is about something else entirely.
1. Is personal spending and wages growing with GDP? Answer in no. How is it fair for government spending to track and exceed GDP, but personal not to follow? GDP itself is a flawed metric that politics push to overstate.
2. This is all true, but much of the fraud takes please "in name" of something good. You will easily find things like funding some NGO to host a party in the "taking care of the elderly" code. Many things get misclassified to hide them better.
3. You don't really want to be fast and loose with health because it can produce some very bad headlines like people left with no care. Truth is, you can cut some spending and some pharma company who is on the receiving end of it can just stop supplying drugs or services leaving people to die and blaming you. And because it's a private company with it's own accounting, that may be true or not, but in any case it's better business for them to sabotage you and teach you a lesson.
4. This has more to do with accounting quirks than anything else. Companies have ways to spend money on intangibles with less and less scrutiny and it makes no sense to book any kind of cash profit, especially with higher inflation among other factors.
> 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been rising steadily for a century and is now approaching 40%. From IMF: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA. The recent trend is shaky due to Covid, housing crash, maybe dot com crash, etc., but it looks like it's probably still trending upward.
I've actually heard claims of the opposite -- that government has been under persistent and increasing attack since the 70s (or alternatively, since Reagan). I just can't see how the numbers square with that.
> Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been rising steadily for a century and is now approaching 40%
No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years.
And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth. This was a worldwide phenomenon too, not just the US. People asked for more from their governments. This is a good thing.
It does not look like it's currently trending upward, from your own data.
> No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years.
Yes it has. In 1980 it was 34.25%, in 2022 it was 36.25%.
> And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth.
US government spending on healthcare is about as most other developed countries yet they are able to provide universal or similar healthcare access. Americans spend that amount again privately on healthcare, and the result is worse outcomes in many objective measures of public health. Just one example since healthcare is one of the biggest expenditures. This is not a good thing.
The idea that "some government good" = "more government better" or "less government worse" is just not a sound argument. At all.
> This was a worldwide phenomenon too, not just the US. People asked for more from their governments. This is a good thing.
Not many Americans I know of asked to pay universal healthcare tier costs without getting universal healthcare. Not many asked to pay for forever-wars and interventions and meddling all over the globe.
> It does not look like it's currently trending upward, from your own data.
It does to me. The linear trend plotted from 1980 to 2022 does have it increasing too.
> Yes it has. In 1980 it was 34.25%, in 2022 it was 36.25%.
Honest question, do you expect people to take your position seriously when this is the stat you’re putting up in defense of your argument?
Yes. What would you put up in the defense of an argument that says it has not risen?
2% in 45 years is a completely meaningless amount. You are technically and pedantically correct, but in the context of the actual conversation being had it is so little as to be irrelevant.
On the graph they shared earlier, 2020 is 44.82%, exactly on the 1960 - 1992 trendline. The 2022 and 2009 dropoffs coincide with major disruptions (don't know about the late-90s one), which almost seems to hint that's the value we should be looking at: +10.57% in 20 years.
2019 was 35.97, and 2022 was 36.26, but we shouldn't use those, we should use the 2020 number? Come on, the 2020 and 2021 numbers are not representative of the overall trend.
Honest question, do expect people to actually believe you're a serious person interested in rational debate with that kind of response?
What Trump / DOGE has proposed or claimed to have cut amounts to far less than $500 billion / year from the budget. Like 1/10th that amount. Yet people are seriously concerned about those cuts. Clearly it's not a reasonable amount, as you would understand if you had any idea of the context of this conversation.
What DOGE has claimed to have cut is a similarly meaningless amount (and likely significantly overinflated), and what's worse, the value we were getting from those expenditures likely greatly exceeds what we were paying for them.
$500bn/yr would be about 15% of the annual budget. That number doesn't even pass a basic sniff test.
2% of US GDP is 500 billion. I don't know what you're confused about. I'm taking numbers linked from the IMF so perhaps you know better? Also it's obviously not a 2% increase over 45 years, it's a nearly 6% increase, so not sure if numbers are your strong suit here. At least you did admit I was correct though, so I don't know what you're really continuing to try argue about. What I wrote originally stands.
I think GP misread what you were saying, and thought you were asserting that DOGE had cut $500B/yr of spending.
(I sympathize; I read it that way myself at first, but realized what you actually meant during a confused re-read.)
2% over 40 years is too small to back up the claim that it is "rising steadily" in any meaningful way.
It's risen almost 6% over 40 years, and you're wrong it's not too small to claim that it's rising.
Rising steadily is what you said. It's really not doing that.
It's funny that you latched onto the mention of the year 1980, because if you used 1982 (or 1983, 1984, 1985...) you'd see that it has gone down. The most recent measurement is lower than it was in the years around 1990, and the measurements before covid hit were also lower than those years.
And I just realized. If you actually want to go back 40 years from the most recent data point, the year to use is... 1982.
> Rising steadily is what you said. It's really not doing that.
It really is.
> It's funny that you latched onto the mention of the year 1980,
Excuse me, I didn't latch onto 1980, crazygringgo nominated that date.
> because if you used 1982 (or 1983, 1984, 1985...) you'd see that it has gone down.
Sure unless you choose a different end point, right?
> The most recent measurement is lower than it was in the years around 1990, and the measurements before covid hit were also lower than those years.
A linear regression from 1990 to 2022 has it trending upward too.
> > Rising steadily is what you said. It's really not doing that.
> It really is.
It was dropping for most of the 1990s, and most of the 2010s.
So it's been rising steadily over the past 45 years...except for about two decades of that time? This isn't what most people call a steady rise.
There’s no reason we have to be spending so much on healthcare. I’m convinced if Joe Lieberman didn’t block the public option in 2009, or if the Democrats had a spine and actually bypassed the filibuster to make sure the bill was as good as it could be, we’d have universal health care today. Instead, we decided to bail out insurance companies, to the benefit of nobody but insurance companies.
We still could have single payer, but that’s not going to happen with the current group in charge.
Right. Healthcare expenditure just looks incredibly wasteful. Even if it is (as its defenders would say) buying more for the money, it just seems to be costing way too much when you look at others. And it's not as though those other developed countries' healthcare systems are paragons of efficiency themselves.
That people are so flabbergasted and astounded that voters should be concerned by government spending and waste is actually the incredible thing to me.
1. US GDP estimated GDP in 2024 is $29 trillion. According to your first source, U.S. Federal Spending was 23% of GDP. If that were reduced to the 2014-2019 average of 20%, that would trim $870 billion from federal spending. That seems like good progress toward avoiding a potential debt crisis.
2. Reduce defense overall and make the process of getting money to the needy more efficient.
3. No comment. Healthcare is mess.
4. Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers. I'm in favor of tax reform, but thinking that taxing corporations is a way to stick it to rich people is shortsighted, IMO.
1. I actually mostly agree with you (and the other reply that said something along the same lines). IMO, the debt situation isn't great, and it's getting worse. Bringing down spending as a percentage of GDP doesn't necessarily require trimming the budget, though - it could also be done by keeping the budget flat and letting GDP growth catch up.
2. Personally, I'm not opposed to trimming defense spending. However, how do we square that with the current security environment (an increasingly antagonistic Russia, China, etc.) and the fact that defense spending is also essentially a domestic jobs program?
4. The share that corporations have been paying has been falling over time. I'm not saying we should stick it to rich people - but what about making corporate taxes more in line with what they've paid in the past, instead of having employees (those same consumers you're talking about) pick up the slack?
Don't worry about #2, Canada is taking care of this for you, to prevent fentanyl and illegals from pouring in over the top border (assume because of gravity...)
> it could also be done by keeping the budget flat and letting GDP growth catch up
This in practice requires real cuts due to inflation.
Are you sure about point four? Taxes on corporate profits might be indirectly passed on to consumers (e.g. corporations take advantage of the knowledge of the taxes to justify raising prices), but since goods and services are presumably already optimally priced, and taxes on profits aren't an increase to costs, they shouldn't be directly passed on.
It would be an extraordinary claim to say that corporations are not pricing as high as they can without decreasing profits. If you believe that there is some other mechanism by which taxes on corporate profits could increase prices, please explain it.
Prices are set by supply and demand. Taxing corporate profits offsets the supply curve, resulting in higher prices. The data supports this.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27058/w270...
Thank you for actually providing a source. I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but their methodology seems reasonable, although it's not certain that corporations would behave the same in response to a federal tax. As is, that paper supports the assertion that some percentage of taxes is passed on to consumers, though not a total pass through, which is very different from a blanket "taxes get passed on to consumers".
"A one percentage point increase in a state-level corporate tax rate leads to an increase in affected retail prices of approximately 0.24 percent." is much less strong of an affect than, say, tariffs.
They also say "Pass-through is larger for products purchased by high-income households, higher priced goods, and in less competitive markets.", which makes it seem like corporate taxes might still be highly progressive even with pass-through.
Saving this paper in my references folder.
> Prices are set by supply and demand. Taxing corporate profits offsets the supply curve, resulting in higher prices. The data supports this.
Reducing corporate taxes also appears to reduce what is paid to labour:
> From 2010 to 2013, the Chinese central government cut the corporate income tax rate in 21 cities for service firms whose revenue from outsourcing services offshore surpassed half of their total revenue. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design with proprietary administrative data, we find that a one percentage point decrease in the statutory corporate income tax rate induces a one percentage point decrease in the firm-level labor share. Firms respond to the tax cut by increasing their physical capital and bank borrowing while keeping their employment unchanged, consistent with a capital deepening process documented in recent theoretical models. Our results suggest that falling corporate income taxes could have contributed to the global decline in the labor share. […] Labor share is defined as the share of gross value-added paid to labor and can be measured at the level of the firm or the economy.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
Shareholders often take the biggest hit from corporate taxes. Consumers can to, but in most cases I think it's primarily the shareholders. But it will vary depending on the business and the market.
And yea, not like tariffs at all.
> Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers.
Perhaps, but that's not really how it works. The market price doesn't care how much it costs to make a particular good, it's just the market price. If you raise prices in order to pass on new costs, fewer people will buy your stuff.
Put another way, if consumers would tolerate higher prices, corporations would already be charging those higher prices.
The more competitive the market, the less that companies are able to pass on income tax increases (as opposed to input tax increases - like tariffs). If companies are able to pass along income tax increases, it means that they have pricing power.
> Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers
Never heard this argument before - it sounds very implausible. Do you have any studies or source for that claim?
According to that, corporate taxes are passed through at a rate of .24. And the pass-thru decreases as there’s more competition and for cheaper goods. In other words it’s a fairly progressive tax. Tariffs are a 100% pass-thru by definition because they’re a sales tax. This hits lower income people the hardest (unless we only tariff luxury goods).
>Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers
The manner by which tariffs and taxes effect the price consumers pay are not at all the same. Tariffs have a far more direct (and immediate) impact.
And, in the case of taxes, these are not "just passed onto consumers" in healthy markets with good competition. But, I agree that this does not describe our current market, which I'm all in favor of fixing.
As it is these oligopolies and monopolies are double dipping. They get us on price and selection to their own gain, then threaten to get us even more if we ask them to pay more taxes on those gains.
Not from USA but the q’s seems strange imo: 1. Is spending as a % of GDP the metric used to determine whether spending is out of control? If so, 70’s was Vietnam and other things since, is that why the date starts there? Is all spending the same? If I had limited money and spent it on luxury cars where as before it was beans for food I haven’t changed spending but it’s not far off to say I’m out of control. The USA govt isn’t necessarily doing that though just an example. 2. If those are the categories, are the $ spent in those categories spent well? If a $ marked for the elderly category is spent badly, is stopping that taking $ from the elderly? 3. Why should it? Would I be wrong to expect that theoretical timeline to have 3. instead be something like why should healthcare be first in the chopping block? Kind of like 2. alludes? The chopping block is t/f sometimes good. 4. National debt isn’t included in 1. Is locking in CTR as a % of GDP what’s fair?
Seems that you want more taxes instead of spending cuts and to go after health insurance. Maybe that’s the right thing to do I don’t know but the q’s seem loaded.
> The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how?
The callous, cynical and on-brand answer to that question is: "the number of elderly, in the cruellest possible fashion". You've got to balance the age pyramid somehow, right? And if that sounds obscene, you're not alone.
The depraved part is that from an inhuman, entirely utilitarian perspective there is a ruthless logic to it. For many Western societies it would be fiscally so much easier if you could just ... get rid of the over-aged population. Or at least the segment who don't have dynastic wealth to protect them from the ruin.
It seems to me the US now have a government who have no problem trying out their own variant of Logan's Run.
Those with dynastic wealth should be the first to go. The sooner the inheritors get their hands on what's coming to them the better off they'll be.
It’s also notable that those who used “death panels” as a scare tactic back when Obamacare was being created were perfectly fine with saying some old folks just have to be sacrificed during COVID and will be perfectly fine cutting Medicare and Medicaid if they can get away with it. And, of course, they are also ok with the private-run death panels most of us are subject to by our insurance refusing to cover necessary treatments.
Ironic, given the age of the leadership.
The cuts are justified regardless as they are in wasteful areas that don’t contribute to anything you listed.
The next argument would be that most of the spending is not wasteful, so doge will fail to make a dent, as most money is going to directly help people.
Lets see!
A deeper issue is one I mentioned here on how contractors outnumber US government employees by more than 2-1, quoting experts in public administration: "Washington Monthly "Fire the Contractors": paradoxically add government employees to reduce costs" https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1iq66qa/washington...
From the article: "Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it."
And also: "That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."
Why are there so many contractors? As the article explains: "There are two reasons why the number of federal workers has flatlined over the past six decades. Republicans have been distinctly unsuccessful in cutting federal programs—and often have been complicit in increasing them—but they’ve found that attacking federal employees is a useful proxy battle in the war for controlling government. Democrats have been too afraid of being labeled as apologists of big government to fight back very hard. As a result, the two parties have reached a quiet understanding. Government can grow, as long as it doesn’t grow its workforce. ... After decades of the “no more bureaucrats” political feedback loop, private contractors working for the federal government now outnumber federal employees by a factor of more than two to one, as estimated by the New York University professor of public service Paul C. Light. That’s right: There are more than twice as many contractors working for the federal government as there are federal employees. The result has been an endless parade of stories about cost overruns and policy snafus, which get blamed on Washington—and on incompetent federal bureaucrats. ..."
The solution? "What we ultimately need is a massive increase in the number of civil servants in the federal government— upward of one million more by 2035, according to the eminent political scientist and scholar of government John DiIulio. ...""
Well just give it some time, the axe is coming for fed contractors IMO. It’s no secret they cost a lot and Elon hates consultants anyway. I’ve spent the past 5 years in my firm’s public sector practice but am transitioning out over the next 6 weeks. I’m heading to an entirely different practice and bringing the pick of the litter from some of my past projects with me. We’re being welcomed with open arms. I think the writing is on the wall that the fed consulting gravy train is coming to an end.
An even deeper issue is the fact that Trump's and Musk's plan isn't to eliminate government waste, it's to privatize as much of government as possible in order to funnel money to their corporate cronies. And on top of that, eliminate much of the government's ability to make and enforce regulations, so those same corporate cronies can spend less on regulatory compliance.
> For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions
Have you seen this? https://balajis.com/p/americas-175-trillion-problem
GDP does not equate to government revenue. The expenditure to GDP is irrelevant. GDP also considers government spending and it’s easy to inflate the number when a good chunk of it is borrowed money [1].
I agree with (3) but don’t think (4) has substance. “Fair share” is subjective never used in good faith.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
The core question is less about the cuts themselves and more about if we the people are getting what we're paying for.
1) It kinda doesn't matter if it was caused by the pandemic or not, what matters is it needs to be fixed. Cherry-picking "since the 1970s" keeps us in difficult times energy-wise which we've attempted to correct for with more spending. If you go further back, our current ratio is what it was during WWII. Do you currently see federal government production as similar to during WWII, or are we not getting value out of what we're spending?
2) Assuming we all agree with those percentages, there's still an obvious 9% to look into. At these levels, that's real money. Also, certain initiatives are way more destructive than the spending would suggest, e.g. just about everything found out about USAID impacts hearts and minds, which impacts further negatively productive efforts outside the federal government.
3) Of course healthcare is on the list. Single-payer systems have their problems, free market systems have their problems, our current hybrid gets the worst of both. So it needs to be addressed, but perhaps not "first" because the answer here is a total rework, whereas there's plenty of other savings available right now as low hanging fruit.
4) Corporations do not pay corporate tax, their customers and employees do. Why should we burden our productive populous with tax on their income, tax on their workplace before they even get paid, inflation due to government spending, etc? If the argument is that tariffs are passed on to the customer, then corporate tax is definitely passed on to the customer and the employee. Additionally, corporations are not currently benefiting from a healthy workforce (look around), or an educated workforce (steady decline since the DoE was established), or a safe environment (go to SF), or a working transportation system in many cases. Again, are we getting what we're paying for?
Thank you for responding. I'm glad we agreed in principle on #3. I'm afraid we'll have to disagree on the other points though:
1. The claim that spending / GDP is at WWII levels is simply wrong: please take a look at the link in my original comment.
2. 9% isn't nothing, agreed. It does, however, pay for: scientific and other research (mostly medical, then much smaller slice for general science, then a much much smaller slice for everything else); keeping national parks running smoothly; keeping planes in the air; shutting down financial scams; and other wonderful things like that. Like you said, it comes down to what we get for that spending. I think there's bound to be some waste here and there, but I rather like all these things our tax dollars are paying for. Oh, and funny you mention USAID - I rather like the idea of feeding starving children around the world too, with a triple whammy of moral impact, winning hearts and minds in other countries, and putting money into the pockets of US farmers. Would love to hear properly sourced arguments on why USAID is as terrible as you seem to think it is.
4. You forgot about the shareholders. Corporations mostly get taxed on profits, not revenues, so it's hard to see how consumers are part of the equation. (We're not talking about consumption taxes, which tend to be state level anyway.) And employees pay income tax - the only part that the corporation covers is the employer end of payroll taxes. Wikipedia has a nice breakdown and comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
(Yay, thanks to whoever saved the parent post so my thumb exercise wasn't entirely wasted.)
1) I conflated debt vs GDP with spending vs GDP. Debt levels are at WWII levels. I was wrong here, but directionally accurate. We've been spending way too much.
2) USAID has nothing to do with humanitarian efforts. It is not "aid", it is Agency for International Development. Specifically developing "capabilities" in those foreign countries, with "capabilities" being defined as things our intelligence and defense departments can use for their missions. It's not humanitarian. It's international manipulation, with a heaping side of money laundering. Seriously, it's horrible.
4) Employer end of payroll taxes is a thing. Tax on profit is a tax on the customer. Companies would not exist if they are not profitable; they protect profits harder than they protect anything else. Therefore additional costs, including taxes, are passed on to the customer, even if it's indirectly.
> Corporations do not pay corporate tax, their customers and employees do. Why should we burden our productive populous with tax on their income, tax on their workplace before they even get paid, inflation due to government spending, etc?
I can answer this one: Corporations come with a veil, to shield risk takers from financial liability and ruin.
That’s normally good, as we want to encourage business.
But the corporate veil was never intended as free pass to break or subvert the law; nor to undermine national interests.
It’s both the corporate veil and the sheer size of some multi-state and multinational companies: It takes considerable resources to police.
A single multinational has the resources to undermine any state, with lawyers to delay; and lobbyists to influence legislators against their constituents interests. This undermines government credibility and rule of law.
Look at the broadband fiber fiasco: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/verizon-wiring-u...
Or the garbage tier right to repair law, written up by the NY lobbyists: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/29/23530733/right-to-repair...
You say corporations are very productive, but these hidden costs are being born by everyone including the consumer.
This why limited-liability businesses are expected to pay more: It takes a lot of money to provide necessary oversight.
Most of the problems you call out here would be addressed by actually enforcing anti-trust laws, which is something we need to get way better at on both sides of the political isle.
> Corporations do not pay corporate tax, their customers and employees do
Corporations pay tax on their profits not, revenue. Employees have already been paid and customers have already bought before these taxes are levied. (The first bit is of course more complicated; for example, salaries paid for R&D don't always count as a deductible business expense.)
The market price is the market price. If corporations could raise prices further (even without new taxes) without losing customers, they would. If corporations end up being taxed more, raising prices in order to "pass on" those taxes will just cause them to lose customers, and end up with lower revenue (and likely profit too), perhaps even more than if they just sucked it up, paid their taxes, and left prices alone.
> If the argument is that tariffs are passed on to the customer, then corporate tax is definitely passed on to the customer and the employee
No, because they're not the same thing. Taxes, as I said, are applied only to profits. Tariffs are essentially in increase in COGS. They more or less require corporations to increase prices, with the expectation that sales will decrease. (They can also choose not to raise prices, and live with lower profits, if they have the margin to do so.) And this is the actual point of tariffs: to get people to buy less of that particular good, and presumably buy more of a similar locally-produced good. (The problem, of course, is when the locally-produced good already has a higher price, so everyone either has to pay more, or do without.)
Corporations protect their profits above all else. They will lie, cheat, steal, and change their revenue models to protect profits. Customers pay the taxes, just indirectly.
> tax on their workplace before they even get paid
After. Corporate taxes are paid on income, not revenue. Income is what's left after paying employees.
Corporations get more productive by having fewer employees or paying them less. That's not a bad thing, it's what's supposed to happen in a competitive market with technological progress. But it also means tax revenue will shrink unless taxes on workers increase. I don't see how that's better.
Customers and employees are not burdened by corporate taxes and this can be shown by a simple equivalence. Savings and profits are not passed onto customers OR employees, they're pocketed by wealthy investors and the c-suite.
Who 'pockets' the profits is not relevant. Fact is corporations exist to generate profit, and they will do anything to protect those profits - including using any loophole, accounting process, business model, or pricing strategy to protect said profits.
A simple/common form of this subversion is giving the c-suite ungodly salaries such that there are no profits, on the books at least, to be taxed. In that case, and basically all others, the customer is paying the corporate tax because the corporation has shifted all burdens (including tax) away from the protected profit.
Are you sure customers pay corporate taxes? Corporate taxes are on profits. I keep hearing corporate taxes are passed on, but I genuinely cannot figure out a mechanism for them to be directly passed on.
1. Public debt 120% of GDP, higher than it has been since WWII [1]
2. I would support cuts in all of those categories. Pete Hegseth has ordered the DoD to begin budget cuts. [2]
[1] https://www.capitalgroup.com/individual/insights/articles/us...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/19/pete-hegseth-orders...
As discussed in the reports above, these budget cuts are not for the sake of saving money, but for redirecting said money towards "border defense" and other priorities of the new administration
The opposition against spending in itself is a subset of a wider issue of spending well beyond our means - taking on ever mounting debt. This [1] is a graph of the US debt to GDP. That's a rather unpleasant graph. The countries with comparable debt:GDP ratios (2 worse, 2 better) are Bahrain, Maldives, Laos, and Cape Verde. [2] In fact we have the 7th worst debt:GDP ratio in the world.
So the obvious response here should be - who cares? Nothing apocalyptic's happened so far. True. And the reason for that is because the US has (and to a lesser degree) retains a unique superpower to export our inflation [3] to other countries. This was because of a perfect storm of a number of factors including:
- the USD being world reserve currency (the currency other countries kept under their bed in case of a rainy day, or if they wanted to buy oil...),
- the US being the largest consumer economy
- the USD being the standard in global trade
But these factors are all coming to an end, some slowly and some not so slowly. The petrodollar is basically dead, countries are gradually to detaching themselves from the dollar, an increasing chunk of the largest economies in the world are now no longer settling trades in the USD, and so on. The world becoming more multipolar, the introduction of alternative global currencies, and such will only accelerate this trend. This is also happening that the US economy is starting to slow down.
So basically this level of debt spending is simply unsustainable. If the spending is indeed necessary, then our economy will have found itself in a situation where it can't sustain itself, and there will end up being a 'correction' that'd be far more painful than some bluntly targeted cuts.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
> 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
That might not be the best metric. Sure it's only "~13%" higher than the running average, but in that 55 year period only 4 years (2008, 2020,2021,2022) had a higher spending to GDP ratio than 2024. Also those years all had ZIRP
ZIRP ?
Ok, Zero Interest Rate Policy
I think these are good reasons why our fiscal picture is not hopeless, but not good arguments agains improving our efficiency:
1. Thank you for linking that graph, it seems to show that our spending is 25% higher than it was in the 1970s as a % of GDP (23 vs 18). But our level of _debt_ is approx 375% higher (as a % of GDP) than it was in the 70s (120% now vs 32% then). That doesn't sound like we are sustaining it well, and tht interest is compounding as we borrow to pay it.
2. The underlying assumption that makes this argument compelling is that every dollar being spent on these noble categories is being done efficiently. What if fixing healthcare costs cut them in half for the same effect? What if there is fraud to cut in the programs for the elderly? We should tighten these and prepare to pay more as we age.
3. Strongly agree and hope to see some action. It seems that fixing the incentives and inefficiencies of the healthcare system is the core mission of RFK Jr., despite all the vaccine FUD.
4. Strongly agree. I wonder if a VAT would be effective for this.
We all know what efficient healthcare systems should look like, there are a dozen countries with lower overall healthcare spend per capita than US with better outcomes. What specific skillset of RFK do you find as compelling evidence they they will be extract higher efficiency similar to these other nations?
I'm not sure I meant to take a mantle as RFK's personal champion, but my _hope_ comes from hearing his points on prevention and improving the quality of the food supply. The incentives of both the healthcare and food industries in the US seem to be misaligned with a healthy population, much moreso in the US than in other countries in the West.
Improving the diets of Americans enough for it to have a real impact on healthcare spending is a 3-4 decade undertaking. Without significant support from Congress, this is basically just a windmill that RFK is charging at.
Being antivax is not a very effective way to prevent diseases. RFK is a national disaster waiting to happen
Just think of all the other diseases that will be prevented when millions of kids die from the following: preventable illnesses due to lack of vaccines, suicide without antidepressants, starvation after DOGE slashes food stamps, and treatable diseases because DOGE slashed S-CHIP./s
> 4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?
1. Aren't shareholders already taxed? Maybe revise how they are directly taxed instead of indirectly taxing them again which they can compensate for (see point 2).
2. Aren't corporate taxes simply passed on as costs to customers and employees as lower pay and benefits? Maybe that's the opposite of what should happen, see point 1.
One loop hole that I think is more important to close is taking loans against volatile assets. This lets the very wealthy live lavish lifestyles without apparent income on any balance sheet, and so no tax owed. ProPublica documented this a few years ago IIRC.
> Aren't shareholders already taxed?
Employee wages are "already taxed" too, for the same underlying reasons even if not the same mechanics.
> "4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [1]"
That needs some context. Here [2] is a graph of corporate profits after tax versus GDP. Corporate profits are, counter-intuitively, a far smaller percent of the total GDP, so it's rather logical that tax from said profits would be a smaller percent of GDP. This is one sample of why looking at things as a percent of GDP can be quite misleading.
This may seem like a minor objection, but I think it's substantive. The term "their fair share" is a deliberately wordsmithed term designed to manipulate people's thinking process. (Not by you, but by the politicians; it's very easy for all of us to miss these terms.) It makes a substantive discussion harder and less likely. A much more objective way to state this question is "Why shouldn't corporations pay more".
FWIW many people who believe that federal spending is out of control would say the same about 1970s.
Can someone who says federal spending has been out of control for the last 50 years point to a time period when it was _in_ control?
Non war times pre 1913, federal spending was such a low percent of gdp as to barely be noticeable, generally far below 5%. The 15%+ I pay now is painful, 2% would barely be noticed. Especially in the context I have to pay (state) taxes on all the new federally required stuff like air bags and emissions controls.
So federal spending has been "out of control" for over 100 years in your view?
I guess I don't really think we can have fundamentally similar views on what it means to be "in control" of something, because I don't think something can be "out of control" for 100 years.
But, if you want to go back to pre-1913 levels of federal spending, you must mean to significantly cut or eliminate all federal entitlements?
If that is your view, do you think you're representative of others that would argue that federal spending is "out of control"? Do you think it would be fair of me to assume that most people who think federal spending is "out of control" also want to significantly cut or eliminate social security/medicare/medicaid? Or do you think your views are an outlier among those that think federal spending is "out of control"?
People who think spending had been out of control for 50 years, your original question, generally are against the 30s era expansion of federal government which is the genesis of the modern federal spending expansion.
Generally if 50,then at least 90.
>your original question
To be fair, though, my original question was in response to someone saying that "many people who would say spending is out of control now, would say it was out of control in the 1970s".
I guess I'd love to get some kind of intuitive sense for what fraction of people who think spending is out of control _today_, would think it was out of control in the 1970s, and what fraction would think it was out of control in the 1930s.
Honestly, my naive my assumption is the number of people who would think spending has been out of control since the 1930s, and want to totally eliminate things like social security and medicare completely is small enough to be politically ignored. I could be wrong about that, though (I get the feeling that _most_ of the political actors who are aiming for this goal have decided to lie about their intentions, because it's such a politically toxic position to take today; but that makes it hard for me to get a sense of how many of those actors there are).
But, then I'd assume that the number that have thought it "out of control" since the 1970s would be a higher fraction (I would've guessed maybe...30% or 40% of the people who think it's out of control today). I would've assumed that a decent chunk of people thinking spending is out of control today, would've at least looked back favorably on the Clinton era deficit elimination and mild surpluses.
Anyway, I guess my point is, I have no idea how many people would hold to each of these positions, but I'm quite curious about each since it seems like my naive assumptions don't really line up well with how you think the distribution would be. And since you hold those beliefs, I think you probably have a better intuition about those belief distributions.
Sure, and to return to that the first thing we would need to do is shut down Medicare and Social Security and also sell off most US military equipment for scrap.
Absolutely, that's my goal.
but why?
Where I grew up, federal spending has been out of control since the Spanish American War.
GDP includes government spending as well. Cut government spending and GDP goes down. Our ability to make debt payments is not very great when you look at it this way. GDP is not revenue. Revenue as a percentage of the debt is nearing all time lows.
Ignore all of that is it even within the president's purgative to cut the spending? As I understand it congress, specifically the House of Representatives, hold the power of the purse and sets that national budget. Congress apportions funding for specific programs to be spent, and its the job of the executive to execute the legislation as specified by the legislative branch. They must spend the money on what they are told to spend it on. Similarly congress created many of these agencies and department Trump/Musk/D.O.G.E. are trying to kill and as such only congress can dissolve them. This is a massive executive overreach. Trump is trying to claim that all congress can do is set a ceiling on spending rather than tell him to actually spend it which is patently ridiculous as then he could just defund anything he disagrees with congress with and de-facto nullify any congressional action.
Corporate income tax is a bad idea. It should be cut to zero.
If you run a corporation, and a larger tax bill comes, you will keep your own salary (hence, wealth) and either pass the tax onto your employees or cut employee benefits/jobs to afford the tax.
With corporate tax in effect what you are doing is handing the responsibility of allocating obligations to the owners/controllers of the corporation. They will definitely choose to pay the tax in a regressive manner.
Instead what must be done is a progressive income tax, enforced evenly, even for owners of corporations. Unsurprisingly, what we are seeing today is an immense tax cut for high earners.
Former quant, current economist here.
One policy economists of all stripes agree on is having 0 tax on corporations. We should tax the profits when they show up in the owner’s income. Otherwise, you are taxing owners who are poor.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-...
That's not how taxes work, though. By the time a corporation pays taxes, employees have already been paid, and that's a business expense that hasn't been taxed.
Ironically, if you reduce employee salaries or benefits, then you will have lower expenses, and thus a larger amount of profits you have to pay taxes on (regardless of the tax rate).
I do agree that corporate tax should be progressive, though, just like personal income taxes are. Corporate taxes used to be progressive, but Trump and the GOP changed that in 2017.
Corporate income tax exists because S-corps have legally distinct income. If you set that rate to 0, there would be nothing stopping everyone from forming an S corp, transacting solely via that S corp, and evading massive amounts of tax.
1. My main concern is the total debt and its interest, as you mentioned in point two. With DOGE, ensuring orders are followed to fix policy is crucial, but some of these cuts do seem more about installing loyal personnel than just reducing costs.
I also worry about shifting staff to contractors. From friends that work in the DOD contracting they get paid 3-4x what an equivalent gov employee does. If contracts are cut too that could be a much bigger win than the gov staff.
2. They've discussed cutting programs like the F-35 and shifting towards robotics and drones for defense and offense. The goal is to move away from expensive Cold War-era weapons that are easy targets. If this just redirects more money to Anduril and Silicon Valley, that’s unfortunate. But if it reduces overall costs, that’s a positive step.
3. Diabetes and dialysis treatments are extremely expensive. Addressing obesity could significantly lower end-of-life healthcare costs. RFK has explicitly focused on this issue.
4. Agree.
Another major issue is the sheer number of regulations involved in anything. Not all are federal, but it's revealing to count how many laws you unknowingly break. For example, where I live:
If your dog chases a squirrel—illegal.
Flying a drone and disturbing a bird’s flight path—illegal.
Using a quadcopter to photograph your house in snowy conditions (when visibility is below IFR limits for airplanes)—illegal.
Taking pictures of dolphins from a boat, even if they move away on their own—illegal.
I don’t own a business, but friends who do often describe the nightmare of dealing with regulatory agencies. They may not be police, but the experience feels just as stressful—especially since they can effectively shut down your business. Compliance is incredibly expensive for the company.
> I also worry about shifting staff to contractors. From friends that work in the DOD contracting they get paid 3-4x what an equivalent gov employee does. If contracts are cut too that could be a much bigger win than the gov staff.
Why would contracts be cut? If you're firing federal employees but the work still has to get done (as directed by the laws enacted by Congress which the president is obligated to faithully execute to the best of his ability) then the only solution is more contractors, not less. In addition as you hollow out the expertise in agencies by buying people out or letting them take early retirement you're going to have more government consultants and contractors providing that expertise at a multiple of what the existing employees cost.
Is the Stalinist purge of perceived enemies by the president and resident billionaire worth all of that extra spending? Is it worth introducing more spending and inefficiency in the name of saving money and efficiency?
That's was I was trying to convey. They do seem to be cutting contracts and that is publicly what they are saying.
From personal anecdotes, I'm seeing a lot of people in my town at gov contractors laid off already.
I think this is hard to discuss because if you disagree with the premise that the cuts are targeting “fraud waste and abuse” then you’re already talking past the other side. In order to have a productive discussion you need to defend the specific spend being cut, not argue about the ideal spend pie chart.
Trump’s administration believes they are cutting legitimately outrageous spending across every piece of the pie. We can ra ra all day about how an effective and ethical government shall include some layer of social welfare, but cutting out pieces of the pie is not specifically what DOGE is doing or was tasked to do.
So we should spend on elderly: why must it be 36%? What makes up the 36% and is it legitimate? Are there portions of that percentage deployed in a way that does not serve taxpayers’ interests? Is the workforce tasked to manage the “give money to the elderly” program performing to expectations? Are there redundancies? Why are any of those type of questions bad to ask especially when you’re asking them unilaterally (across all gov’t programs)?
From what I gather these people don't understand country scale spendings and debts. They think it's 1:1 the same thing as a family budget, that if we don't "pay the debt" some kind of magical entity will come and collect their cars an houses
I can’t even make my car payments, so I might as well eat out for lunch every day.
> Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?
I don't understand this question: how can the private companies in the industry be placed on the chopping block? By outlawing them?
If the government offered a public option for medicare at rates that were sustainable for the government, but significantly below market prices for health insurance companies, that could be a real danger to health insurance companies.
So that's what I'd like to see happen.
By having a national health care system that would obviate the need for private insurance.
Pay your own bills.
Medicare?
In the context of government it would mean nationalizing them.
Not from USA but please explain 28% healthcare? I thought health care is not free and people pay ton of money from their pocket?
The following categories of people have much or all of their healthcare expenses covered by the government:
1) Military (and their families)
2) Retired military.
3) Government workers (all levels of government—not all paid out of the federal budget, but paid by public dollars nonetheless; this includes teachers. To be clear, these folks all pay quite a bit themselves, too, but their insurance is covered by the taxpayers. This isn’t a complaint, just an observation)
4) Many of the very poor (Medicaid, CHIPS)
5) The old (Medicare)
6) The disabled (Also Medicare)
7) Elected officials.
Probably a few more groups I’m forgetting about.
This ends up being a large proportion of all people in the US.
On top of this, the government funds things like healthcare research.
End result, our government spends as much per capita as some OECD states do to provide universal healthcare… but we spend that much and don’t cover everyone.
Part of the reason the math works the way it does is that the government covers a lot of the costs for some of the most-expensive groups of people (old, disabled, veterans with extra wear n tear if not outright injuries).
Medicare and Medicaid are mostly paid for by taxes. They are massive programs.
That’s a lot to go through but, off the top of my head, for #1 I don’t see why gov spending and GDP should be related at all.
1. I do not really care about any historical precedent, they take 40% of my money and there is clearly a ton of waste, if not grift.
2. All of those things can be done more efficiently. Drug prices, crappy mega defense contractors, welfare work traps, etc.
3. People eat themselves to death. RFK is going after this problem.
4. I'm in favor of simplifying the tax code and charging a flat tax to corporations, ending tax havens. We should end the tyranny of the shareholder and start rebuilding the American worker.
> and there is clearly a ton of waste
Can you be a bit more specific? I mean, I can use that "argument" everywhere.
* Pointing to a government building "there is clearly a ton of waste"
* Pointing to a car "there is clearly a ton of waste"
* Pointing to a rock "there is clearly a ton of waste"
The point after the first one (number 2) has some examples. The USAID money going into NGO admin salaries is another. Cost plus defense contracting. Medicare overpaying for drugs. Farm subsidies.
> I do not really care about any historical precedent, they take 40% of my money and there is clearly a ton of waste, if not grift.
Er what? The top marginal tax bracket is only 37%, and no one will pay that percentage on all their income. Perhaps you misunderstand how marginal tax rates/brackets work?
I was very tax-inefficent a few years ago, and my effective tax rate was still under 25%. Usually it's under 20%, even though my income does sometimes put me in into the tax brackets that are in the 30s.
If you're paying 40% of your income in taxes, you're either a) doing something exceptionally wrong, or b) one of a very small, sub-1% group of people who need to do super tax-inefficient things on a regular basis for some reason.
> All of those things can be done more efficiently. Drug prices, crappy mega defense contractors, welfare work traps, etc.
How? That's the meat of the question and problem here. It's easy to say "government is inefficient". It's a lot harder to identify what those inefficiencies actually are, and come up with a plan to reduce or eliminate them. Simply saying that certain things in government are inefficient is not useful.
You are falling into the trap of thinking that federal income tax levels are all that matters. When you account for * Federal AND state income taxes * Payroll taxes (SS & Medicare/Medicaid) * Property taxes * Sales taxes * Car registration taxes You realize that depending on income level, the level of taxation in the US is much higher than the typical numbers thrown about. I have seen estimates but couldn’t find them as almost every search ends up taking me to stories and research doing the exact same thing you mention: federal income tax rates only.
>Er what? The top marginal tax bracket is only 37%, and no one will pay that percentage on all their income. Perhaps you misunderstand how marginal tax rates/brackets work?
Perhaps you forget that state taxes exist. Add in sales tax after that. Then, perhaps, recall that property taxes exist.
These questions are about common sense, but the election of Trump has proven once again (if it needed proof) that politics don't have anything to do with common sense.
Politics is about sticking it to the other side, even if it means hurting oneself in the process.
I'm not sure anymore the famous Churchill quote about democracy[0] is true. Elections inevitably produce populism, and populism often lead to catastrophe. But we haven't tried "all the other" forms of government, and some could be tried again. Sortition being a prime candidate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
[0] “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
As a fan of democracy, I always like to point out when people complain about the results of the democratic process in the US, that the US has many well understood flaws in its democracy that could be fixed to the benefit of all by increasing the level democracy.
Some examples are:
* Voting systems that don't encourage polarization * Mandatory voting * Anti-gerryamndering
But there's lots, from small scale to large, within and outside of political parties and politics generally.
It's a bit "no true democracy" but generally giving people a say seems to work really well, even in the face of people trying to sub wet it.
> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic?
To begin with, that is a chart of federal spending as a percent of GDP. Since 1960, real GDP per capita has increased by 360%, so if real government spending per capita would have only increased by 360%, federal spending as a percent of GDP would have been flat. Instead it increased by 35%, which is to say by 486% in real dollars per capita.
> Federal spending largely falls into a few categories: taking care of the elderly (36%), defense and veterans (20%), taking care of the poor or disabled (22%), and interest on existing debt (13%). [2] This adds up to 91% of the budget. The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how?
The premise of "government efficiency" is to improve efficiency. That doesn't inherently mean discontinuing programs as much as investigating them to see how they're wasting money.
For example, a large chunk of that money is Medicare and Medicaid, and we would like people to continue to have healthcare, but maybe we would like to not pay so much for it. Medicare is paying significantly more to provide healthcare to the elderly in the US than the healthcare systems in most other countries. What's going on there? Are certificate of need laws or other rules inhibiting competition between healthcare providers? Are regulations imposing onerous compliance costs on providers? Lower the cost of healthcare and you can lower the Medicare budget without reducing benefits.
Likewise, there are a lot of assistance programs for the poor. A convoluted, overlapping bureaucratic mess of them that burden the recipients with paperwork and create perverse incentives as a result of stacked benefit phase out rates. The purpose of the whole lot of them is simply to make transfer payments to lower income people, so the entire bureaucracy could be deleted and the programs replaced with a refundable tax credit in the same total amount to the same set of people.
> The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if you include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?
The insurance companies aren't where most of the money is going, it's the healthcare providers. Which in turn is down to the healthcare regulations that inhibit competition between them or require them to spend an undue amount of money on administrative and compliance costs -- a government efficiency problem.
> Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?
Corporations pay a variety of taxes, one of which is corporate income tax. Corporate income tax is essentially a tax on profits, but that leads to a problem. Where is the "profit" from an international supply chain? There is no principled way to pin it down because it's just the number at the bottom of a spreadsheet where all of the inputs are in different countries. But if you let the corporation decide, or leave enough play in the system that they can squish it around, international corporations will arrange to have their profits in jurisdictions with lower tax rates, and furthermore cause corporate income tax to act as a penalty on purely domestic corporations, which then promotes market consolidation because international supply chains gain a major tax advantage.
But to do otherwise you have to pin the profits down to something which is happening in a particular place. If that's workers, it's equivalent to payroll tax. If it's real estate, property tax. If it's customers, sales tax or VAT. If it's shareholders, the income tax on dividends and capital gains. So of all the taxes you can collect from a corporation, corporate income tax is one of the least sensible because the megacorps you most want to pay are the ones most able to avoid it, and giving them another advantage over smaller domestic companies is nothing we need, whereas those other taxes they can't avoid while still doing business in your jurisdiction.
Thanks for the response. I think we agree on a fair amount - in particular, I absolutely think Medicare and Medicaid can and should be made more efficient. I'm doubtful, however, that an administration that tries to antagonize its civil servants at every turn and an organization like DOGE is going to do the kinds of things you're suggesting. At the end of the day, I don't efficiency is really even the goal for them.
Regarding insurance companies, I was writing a bit hastily - my train of thought is that providers are able to charge obscene amounts largely because insurance companies pass on these costs to consumers, who have little choice (and only see the result as steadily rising premiums). Meanwhile, these government programs end up paying the same kind of increasing costs to health care providers.
On your first point, I think sibling comment threads already have some good discussion about why it may make sense for spending to keep pace with GDP.
Y'all, original poster here - please don't downvote or flag kill responses to this that are good-faith attempts to discuss the issue, even if the response seems misinformed to you. I don't think anyone will change their minds when that happens.
Thanks for making a sensible comment. I’m very concerned about the fate of America right now, and particularly the sudden hard-right swing of the tech community. It’s comforting to see a factual post on HN and see many others responding reasonably.
In many ways I love the US and its citizens, highly diverse and fascinating folks that you are, but recent events have been crushing that view. Us Europeans have always felt our differences but also an acknowledgement that we are essentially “on the same side”. DOGE’s apparent violation of the constitution has eroded that bond, as America turns away from democracy.
I understand the anger that fuels Trump voters, but it is a misdirected anger and I hope that America can recover its path and also reform itself to address the genuine concerns of trump supporters.
I'm a bit torn on this request of yours: I don't think people should be penalized for good-faith responses that contain wrong information (so, no flagging), but unless we're all going to spend the time to reply to and refute the wrong information, we should be downvoting those so the stuff with correct information has a better chance of floating to the top.
HN mods (or perhaps pg) have said in the past that "I disagree" is a perfectly reasonable use of the downvote button.
most GDPs around the world are printed.
1. The higher the debt-to-GDP ratio, the less likely it becomes that the country will pay back its debt and the higher its risk of default. The most recent number for the US is 123%. $28.83 trillion GDP vs $35.46 trillion debt.
2. They are "overlapping" categories. The money you give to the elderly is then spent by them in healthcare. So the true expenditures in healthcare are higher when you take this into consideration.
3. The pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies share a lot in common with organized crime. It is here where most of the money is leaked.
4. Because there is tax avoidance and tax evasion. Tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is not. If there's a way to achieve tax avoidance, someone will find it and use that approach.
> 4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?
I'd be incredibly careful assuming that lower tax receipt from corporate income is due to lower tax rates.
Why? Because lots of things impact corporate tax receipts beyond tax rate.
If you look at the graph since 1980, you can clearly see a correlation with economic downturns. In fact, they tend to lead downturns which makes sense as corporations see a drop in profits as the economy slows and heads into recession.
Corporate tax receipts would also drop as corporate investment increases. When Amazon spent billions on expanding their business, profits dropped and so did tax receipts.
I think you're only half right. Yes, the nominal rate is far from the only thing that determines corporate income tax receipts. But in practice, what you see is that the effective tax rate has been steadily dropping. That is, corporations are more and more profitable, and contributing a smaller and smaller fraction of those profits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...
You'd need a in depth analysis to really see the impact.
Companies always do something with their profit after tax. Most commonly it's paid out as a dividend (which would be taxed) or used in a stock buy-back (increasing share price and eventually taxes as capital gains).
1. it is, we're bound to pay $1T in interest and that will spiral us out of financial hegemony
2. this is the typical response i've seen to this and it's missing the point entirely. in government spending you typically pay off lots of groups, pay too much, and give some guy's friend's cousins shop some business because it puts money in people's hands. this is wasteful and can be cut out. it's not the point of DOGE to cut programs that people want, they just spend their money irresponsibly and that can be further optimized to deliver the same results for less money. just as was done with twitter
3. without even getting into it, trump didnt campaign on this. the healthcare system is big and complicated and it needs a lot of magnifying glasses to go through it, if you want that then find a candidate who supports it
4. they do, they pay a lot and those costs can be inhibitive. the taxes generated from this process doesn't pay for what we need, the problem is that government spending is way higher than what industries generate and this is backwards. private business is supposed to support the government through its taxes, not the government spending supporting businesses through nepotism
The Constitution doesn't protect the many bureaucratic organizations that have sprung up since it's inception. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's any amendments that protect the agencies either. For example, the CIA has been controversial. There's nothing protecting it in the founding documents.
1. The GDP is largely raised due to costs of services, tech innovation, & inflation. Note that the measurement of inflation has been revised several times over the past few decades. Why would we not expect the government to become more efficient due to tech innovation? Should they not get better & more cost efficient with the services they provide? Why is the expectation that the public budget must always grow to match GDP growth?
2. I don't think your numbers are correct. There's also bad accounting & no public source (possibly nobody) knows the true budget. For example, the Dept of Defense hasn't passed an audit. $11 Trillion went missing around the time of 9-11. There's also black budget projects that are top secret. Those projects are substantial & don't factor into the numbers. There's also rampant corruption with contracts. An example is the "Homeless Industrial Complex"...though that may be more of a select state + city government issue. Nonetheless, contracts are heavily padded for incumbent contractors in general across all sectors of the Federal Government.
3. IMO, the black budget projects along with the Dept of Defense should be the first to be audited & cut. The Health Care segments a close 2nd. USAID is a good cut, as it's been a vector for color revolutions & regime change. Looking forward to the IRS going away as well. Since it's founding justification was to support the war effort...And we have had never-ending wars (technically conflicts) since. And the Federal Government simply doesn't provide value to justify it's expenses.
4. I believe the argument is to attract companies. But I otherwise agree with you.
I'm skeptical over the changes that are occurring, but the size & scope of the Federal Government is clearly unsustainable & counter-productive to private commerce...particularly with small businesses. Considering how regulatory agencies are often revolving doors with industry incumbents with the incentive to stifle competition & promote incumbent interests.
> The Constitution doesn't protect the many bureaucratic organizations that have sprung up since it's inception. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's any amendments that protect the agencies either. For example, the CIA has been controversial. There's nothing protecting it in the founding documents.
Not sure what you mean by "protecting". Of course none of those agencies are mentioned in the constitution, but that doesn't matter. They were all created by bills passed by the legislature and signed into law by the president at one point or another. Their existence has been upheld by the judiciary on more than one occasion. The executive branch doesn't have the authority to disband something that Congress has created by law.
If you don't like that those agencies exist, you are free to lobby your congresspeople to write and sponsor bills to disband them.
Knocking out USAID, Health Care programs, or the IRS by executive order isn’t how our system works. The Constitution places agency creation and dissolution squarely in Congress’s hands under Article I, not the President’s. Even under a strong unitary executive theory, the President can’t just repeal statutes establishing these agencies; that power belongs to the legislature [1]. Congress also controls the purse (Appropriations Clause), so the White House can’t simply “defund” an agency on its own [2]. Furthermore, the Administrative Procedure Act demands reasoned legal processes; you can’t arbitrarily shut an agency that Congress told you to run [3]. If the President could unilaterally dissolve such agencies, he’d effectively be acting as a dictator, collapsing the separation of powers Madison emphasized in Federalist No. 47 [4].
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-1... [2] https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a... [3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/706 [4] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed47.asp
the comparison with GDP is useless. If the federal budget is putting the country in massive debt, that's the only thing you should care about. Debt will kill your country sooner or later.
Well, perhaps it is useful in pointing out that taxation, and not spending, is the real problem.
1. Yeah, they weren’t good at reigning in spending in the 70s either.
1. But debt as percent of GDP has been growing. Can't do that forever. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
2/3. If the US pays more for health care and gets worse results why should we give them more money?
I don't think health insurance companies should be abolished by royal decree. I think the government should offer an alternative and when that alternative is 4x as dollar efficient the health insurance companies will die a natural death.
4. Your chart shows corporate tax rates have been flat for 50 years. Seems fine?
As an aside, I dislike the overemphasis on Federal spending and Federal income tax. The real question is federal+state+local spending and revenue.
I wish as a society we could work backwards. What services do we want to provide? How much will that cost? How do we pay for it? We've turned into a culture where some people thinking spending is good solely for the sake of spending. When politicians trumpet how much money they're going to spend rather than the benefits they're going to be provide I get very sad!
1. Agreed.
2/3. Then perhaps the US should elect representatives who will expand Medicare to more people. (Or go back in time and get the public option added back to Obamacare.) Unfortunately, instead we have an increasing number of people using Medicare Advantage, essentially a private wrapper around a public insurance plan, which costs taxpayers 22% more per participant.
4. Are we looking at the same graph? The ratio is almost half of what it was in the '70s. The economy has grown substantially; corporate tax contributions, not so much.
I agree with your sentiment that we should talk about what spending achieves and not just the dollar amounts. Hopefully, now that a lot of things are being cut, more people will appreciate what the government has been quietly providing for us all this time. I just hope that the rebuilding won't be as slow and painful as I fear it will be.
4. Sorry, been flat for 40 years not 50 years.
> The economy has grown substantially; corporate tax contributions, not so much.
Hey wait a second. Why should the PERCENT of corporate tax contributions increase as the economy grows? That doesn't make any sense. Corporate tax percent has been basically flat for 40 years.
The absolute value of corporate contribution has, of course, increase substantially alongside GDP. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FCTAX
Personally I find the whole "tax the rich / tax the corpos" philosophy to be misguided. That's not how countries like Sweden and France pay for robust social services! They do so with extremely regressive taxes (20% or 25% VAT) and very high tax rates (40%+) at relatively low income rates (50k to 80k depending on country).
If we want to decrease inequality and increase social services then the average blue collar worker is going to have to pay for it. Taxing the rich is populism that cares more about being punitive than useful. But I digress.
I don't have time to dig into the history of US corporate tax rates, but two things:
1. The effective corporate tax rate has been decreasing over time. Corporations are enormously profitable, and contributing a smaller and smaller share of those profits over time. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...
2. The corporate tax rate was cut by the last Trump administration in 2017, which also removed tax brackets and made the rate uniform. So even the nominal rate hasn't been flat.
But at the end of the day, I actually agree with you. There are other ways to raise revenue, and the US needs to decide if it wants to pay to support its old people, its poor people, and its military. Right now, it seems like the answer is trending towards "no".
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Sixty percent is high. So high, that it almost seems impossible. Can you provide some details? What's the breakdown?
I was curious so tried running my own numbers. TL;DR I find it’s about 34.5%-43.5% for a single person earning $100k-$300k in SF. So taxes would have to rise half again to hit that 60% claim.
According to https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#QL3tlUFIae, it’s an effective tax rate of 28.3% for federal/state/local income tax for someone making $100k in SF. For $300k, effective tax rate is 38.13%.
Then the total sales tax in Sf is 8.63% according to https://www.avalara.com/taxrates/en/state-rates/california/c....
So, for each gross dollar, you have 71.7¢ net after income tax, which gets taxed 8.63% on purchases, about another 6.19¢, bringing that original dollar’s purchasing power down to about 65.5¢ for a $100k/yr earner. At $300k, this goes to 61.87¢-5.34¢=56.53¢.
Edit: I don’t think I’m calculating the sales tax burden correctly, but don’t see my error yet. Would I just subtract the 8.63¢/$? That’d make the combined tax rate 36.3%-46.76%.
Next year, the highest federal tax rate will be around 40%. The highest state income tax is 13%. I guess if you factor in sales tax, and various soft taxes, you could get pretty close, but yeah. Seems exaggerated.
Oh boy. Tax brackets are incremental. Most people in the 40% bracket will not pay anywhere near 40%. There is a theoretical possibility that someone, who's income exceeds the highest bracket MANY times will have an effective tax rate approaching 40%. But in reality people with that kind of income derive their earnings from sources that are taxed in a very different way such as long-term gains.
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The people doing the cuts think their taxes are too high. Their plan to cut their taxes is to raise yours.
Seems like all the savings we need could be gained by a 50% (or more) cut to "defense" spending.
Doesn't that align with US conservative principles? Instead of trying to be the world police (in actuality suppress our "enemies'" access to dwindling oil and minerals) we could focus our efforts domestically?
I'm all for it: more education, healthcare, arts, housing, green economomy, less BS libertarianism (loot the treasury and "break out the bootstraps, you poors")
It's also the case that even if you wanted to make the remaining few percent more efficient via spending cuts, randomly grepping through database entries and claiming success without any real understanding of what you're cutting is complete bullshit.
> defense and veterans (20%)
Since USA just surrendered from their role of global hegemon you can reduce this just to veterans and nukes.
2. Techbros are young and they dont care about old people.
This blathering about the federal budget has been going on for 50 years.
What I think if if you want a real discussion then you need to talk about the real federal budget separately from the retirement, income security, health benefits for and paid by the peons.
So take away social security, unemployment, welfare, Medicare, VA and federal retirement benefits. And lets talk about what left. And pikachu there ain't any fat and little meat.
The whole debate from where I sit is based on innumeracy and wishful thinking.
It's politics, same as ever. We're not talking about the best way to balance the books of America LLC, we're talking about "who gets what, when." That's politics.
I'm not a "MAGA" guy at all. (Except my last name LOL)
But I do think the government should constantly be using tech and putting systems in place to accomplish three things:
1. Become more efficient
(use AI to solve Bloom's two sigma problem)
2. Become more transparent
(data.gov, blockchain)
3. Become more useful and friendly
(online, not on-line at the DMV)
Of course, I later learned that I was way too optimistic. They never even read these applications. They are just more of the same... a blunt government hammer that isn't actually solving much, just doing surgery.
I hate that they are removing data.gov datasets and other scientific and health data. That's less transparency. It smells of sharpiegate all over again.
I like that they are exposing a lot of waste and corruption. I really like that they will be going after the GOP's sacred cow: the Department of Defense budget, which is the LARGEST discretionary budget, where we can get the most bang for the buck. The Pentagon can't account for $35 TRILLION in spending, that's insane.
But there is a lot more transparency that needs to be done, than simply budgets. I am somewhat hopeful that Tulsi Gabbard will clean up the "deep state" in terms of transparency, as CIA fomenting avoidable wars affects many people's lives around the world: https://community.qbix.com/t/transparency-in-government/234
Now, to answer your questions:
1. We've seen this before. The Grace Commission in the 80s concluded: "With two thirds of everyone's personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the federal debt and by federal government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services that taxpayers expect from their government." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission
Subsequently, Clinton got a surplus, Gore campaigned on putting Social Security into a "lockbox", and Obama reduced deficits by 2/3 from $1.5 Trillion (after two wars, etc.) It's the Democratic presidents who actually get things done. Bush and Trump just did massive tax cuts which balooned the deficits to trillions, and the current idea is to cut a check to Americans, a la 2021. I thought the goal was to reduce deficits? In that case elect Democrat presidents (not Biden or Kamala, though, LOL) with a Republican congress.
2. Go for the discretionary budgets, working your way from the largest items on down. But Trump has done the opposite back in 2017 and 2019, giving them even more than they asked for, even though they failed audits for decades: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/10/pentagon-eyes-windfall-...
If MAGA makes Republicans step aside and cut wasteful spending of the DoD, that would be very impressive indeed. Kind of like Bernie's movement would have done with Democrats.
I agree that USAID and CIA causes a lot of damage and costs (not just in money, but human lives) around the world with their regime-change operations, so I would like to see that brought to light and limited.
3. The health insurance agency is actually the only part of the health system whose incentives are aligned with people being healthier. Think about it... if people are healthier, they pay out less. Everyone else in the industry on the "supply side" makes more if people are sicker and aren't cured. If you really want to know how bad it is, read this: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
Besides, their profits are only like $18B I think. Not much savings there.
If you want us to pay less, phase out the Patent System, where we go after the rest of the world for daring to share our R&D costs. We pay the most for drugs, and
Also if you want us to pay less, then stop letting lobbyists write laws such as Medicare Part D, forbidding Medicare to negotiate drug prices as a single payer health system. That's insane. Let me quote wikipedia:
Former Congressman Billy Tauzin, R–La., who steered the bill through the House, retired soon after and took a $2 million a year job as president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the main industry lobbying group. Medicare boss Thomas Scully, who threatened to fire Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster if he reported how much the bill would actually cost, was negotiating for a new job as a pharmaceutical lobbyist as the bill was working through Congress.[58][59] 14 congressional aides quit their jobs to work for related lobbies immediately after the bill's passage
And the revolving door with regulatory capture is a systemic problem in general:
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2023.00418
This is not rocket science, people. If government should do anything, it should be taxes, followed by single payer or UBI. That's it. The Patent system being enforced internationally only makes drugs more expensive, not less.
4. In my opinion, Corporations and LLCs etc. should be the only ones paying tax, and also required in order to be employing people. The personal income tax is stupid! And I say this not just as a libertarian, but because Milton Friedman already made these corporations withhold our taxes. They know exactly how much we make, since they pay us. Why should every employee be forced to pay an accountant in order to report the same info? Rich people can pay accountants to save money, perhaps, but that leads to just more loopholes and corruption, typically the rich people can afford to pay more tax, they'll just drop down one tax bracket.
On the other hand, corporations have well-defined budgets, and they need accounting. You could cut the number of accountants -- and staff at the IRS -- in half by phasing out the individual income tax, and instead requiring this tax of the corporations which pay them, in various forms. In fact, you should tax automation and robots, as corporations increasingly fire their staff and cut their salaries. But I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
I'll throw in a critique of our monetary system. Our money is issued by banks on the basis of guessing whether a business or a consumer will be solvent in X years. Instead, a UBI would be issued on the basis of what people actually need, now. People ask "how can we afford it" because they don't understand that the role of taxes in a modern monetary system is to remove money from the economy. As long as people fear taxes and money printing, they entirely miss the point. Giving every American a UBI (monetary policy) coupled with massively increasing Pigovian Taxes (fiscal policy) would give government much better levers to do things like curbing pollution, congestion, fossil fuels etc. Much better than the Green New Deal!
[flagged]
Umm, no they didn’t? Nothing “maga” about UBI or UHC.
[flagged]
It doesn't look good for the quality of discussion here if the most substantive response to your questions was flagged & killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143579
I agree. I actually typed up a whole response to that post (which I vehemently disagreed with, but appreciated nonetheless) but by the time I hit submit it was already dead. Vouching wasn't enough to bring it back. I understand the temperature is running hot, but I hope that at least on HN we can strive to have civil discussions about these issues. I say this even though I am personally quite distraught about the current state of affairs.
Since it's still accessible to read, I'd be eager to read your response
EDIT: The response was saved from the dead, yay
Long doesn't equate to substantive.
Edit: I didn't flag it, to be clear.
Sure but parent said "substantive" so since you're implying it's not (but rather just long), I'd like to read why you think it wasn't
The reason these questions are not front and center is that the people with money don’t want to talk about them. And, the ensure we are kept busy with cheap gadgets, entertaining tv and movies and enough controversies that don’t matter to last a lifetime.
Alsr, the population is less educated and able to actually think critically about these issues than they used to be.
You don't need their permission to have these conversations.
GP is not talking about permission. It doesn't matter that people can have these conversations if they won’t.
> doesn't matter that people can have these conversations if they won’t
People aren't having conversations about the federal deficit? Where?
That’s not the argument either. Read GP’s comment attentively, they’re making a general commentary on how the people with money manipulate the conversation by distracting everyone else. If you’ve ever read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, you’ll recognise the thought.
Being pedantic about which particular conversation is or isn’t happening where and by how many people is counter-productive and only serves to exhaust everyone and exacerbate the issue.
> Being pedantic about which particular conversation is or isn’t happening where and by how many people is counter-productive and only serves to exhaust everyone and exacerbate the issue
I'm arguing there is no conspiracy. It would be lovely if rich people (namely, anyone) were coherently running the government. But the reason we're seeing chaos is because there are fundamental interests attached to each of those major spending lines that have wide voter support (and antagonism).
I’m pretty sure the US government has a rich dude in the presidency, a rich dude pulling the strings via doge, and all the members of the presidents official inner circle are rich people.
In congress, it’s very much a rich persons club.
Maybe this is how it’s always been, but it feels even more obvious and extreme today.
> I’m pretty sure the US government has a rich dude in the presidency, a rich dude pulling the strings via doge, and all the members of the presidents official inner circle are rich people
That doesn't mean they're coordinated. Particularly not on matters of deficit reduction, let alone controlling the national conversation around it. Saying the conversation around the deficit is being suppressed is more a statement of ignorance than anything happening in reality.
>I'm arguing there is no conspiracy.
This is usually the correct view to take, but in this case I'd disagree. Hot button political topics are easy "conspiracies." Political parties are groups that get together and decide what to talk about. They pass around memos with talking points to their members. They often focus on problems that are divisive but either unlikely to happen or unlikely to affect much if they do. It's not too keep the little man down, but to win elections and avoid making hard decisions with unclear consequences.
Consider transexual rights. Very divisive, but transexuals are a tiny minority. Transexual voters won't be deciding elections, so it's "safe" to bash or advocate for them. Another topic I believe had been seen as "safely impossible" was pro-life stances. Because abortion rights had been asserted through the Supreme Court and based on a Constitutional right, politicians felt safe to rail against it. They never thought they could do anything short of a constitutional amendment. Republicans were thrown for a loop when the SCOTUS reversed the decision, and the "red wave" of 2022 was much smaller than anticipated.
The ability to distract people is orthogonal to the ability to functionally operate a government. I mean, that’s Donald Trump’s (and his protégés like MTG’s and J.D. Vance’s) entire schtick.
Yes you do, leftist talking point are systematically downranked on X.
If you don't believe me, open a new X account, navigate to the "for me" page and count the number of left-leaning tweets. The expected number is zero.
> leftist talking point are systematically downranked on X
This is about as relevant as when Twitter was a cesspool of far-left nonsense. Twitter and X aren't the real world. They influence it. But what people are talking about there has about as much correlation with policy and politics as what your neighbourhood housecats might be yapping about.
Back then, twitter moderation was right leaning - favoring right and allowing them more.
Just not far right enough. So, stop with this nonsense. Right has to be either go out of their way to harass peoppe or post swastikas to be removed.
Twitter has been a cesspit of right wing drivel for years. Before that it was a cesspit of left wing smugness.
I don't feel like you can compare a few terminally online leftists being annoying about pronouns to literal neonazis openly discussing the "jewish question" with the owner of the platform.
Also, studies proved that conservatism was always the favored ideology by the algorithm. Republicans just like to claim they're being censored and play the victim.
Citation on that last point? The amount of people I know who were the first in their family to attend college, and sometimes even graduate high school, makes me question that people are measurably less educated.
Education + thinking critically and having educational credentials are not the same thing. At least, there needs to be some justification that they are related.
> (Education + thinking critically and having educational credentials are not the same thing. At least, there needs to be some justification that they are related
It's ironic how often people criticise the lack of critical thinking in higher education while simultaneously not bothering to examine the hypothesis.
Cognitive development is associated with critical thinking [1], and the "number of years of formal education completed by individuals is positively correlated with their cognitive function throughout adulthood and predicts lower risk of dementia late in life" [2].
So yes, voters with educational credentials are more likely to be better critical thinkers as well, as a bonus, not suffering dementia in their later-voting years. (Whether this is a selection effect or product of education is unclear. And it doesn't suggest everyone in academia is an excellent critical thinker.)
This is not a valid argument. In a complex system (like the human body), you can't go from A related to B, B related to C, therfore A related to C.
It may be true that there's some A-C relationsip, but having two separate studies for A-B and B-C does not prove there's any A-C relationship.
> So yes, voters with educational credentials are more likely to be better critical thinkers as well
Not based on your argument, no.
> having two separate studies for A-B and B-C does not prove there's any A-C relationship
You're making a claim about the world. The evidence points in the opposite direction. If you have a problem with cognitive function relating to critical thinking, put forward some evidence about it. Because the link between those seems much more intuitive than your unsubstantiated hypothesis.
A-B - education/cognitive development
B-C - cognitive function/critical thinking
I don't have problem with either. But you're claiming A-C(education/critical thinking relationship) based on the above two without any justification other than your intuition.
B is not even the same thing in the two studies you mentioned. One uses "Lawson CTSR" measure secifically, the other uses nothing in particular, it's just a summary of research in which you didn't point to anything in particular. When it uses something it measures cognitive decline (which is not the same thing as the cognitive development measure in the first study, it's difference between two measures of cognitive development at different times).
Even the example table in the study pretty nicely disproves what you're claiming:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7425377/table/table...
Someone with 22 years of education has cognitive performance of 10 while someone with 10 years has performance of 15 at the same age in that table. Lower educated just decline faster over time, but are still "smarter" in the end.
You also cite no numbers for correlations. So if A-B has correlation 0.2 B-C has correlation 0.3, A-C will have correlation 0.06 in general, which is nothing that proves A-C has any meaningful relationship.
Again, I'm not saying there's no A-C relationship. If there is it just needs to be studied directly. Pointing to two random studies proves absolutely nothing.
The quality of high school educations have fallen, which is the most important to develop critical thinking. This is measurable when the education level of U.S. high school students is compared in global rankings.
On top of that social media has put people in echo chambers and force fed them outrage content. People who are outraged and surrounded by peers who are also outraged are less likely to think critically.
I personally think that the replacement of newspapers that invite critical thinking by yellow journalism and social media has had a more significant effect on critical thinking than the drop in education quality.
I believe it's more the critical thinking piece that's the problem. And, perhaps there has not been a decline there, but we're just witnessing an unprecedented cultural and technology-fueled abuse of an existing lack of reasoning ability (expansive reach, bot farms, algorithms, conspiracy theories, etc).
I mean, any actor—including state adversaries—can essentially run military-grade psyops on our population. In a "stable" environment, an inability to think critically is somewhat buffered and fallout is limited. But, in a hostile information space—intent on manipulating subjects for the destruction of their society—it's catastrophic.
Cambridge Analytica
> reason these questions are not front and center is that the people with money don’t want to talk about them
You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain why cutting benefits to old people is politically toxic.
1. The federal government has been bloated for a long time, as you mention. Getting back closer to 10% of GDP is a better target.
2. As we've seen with DOGE, there's clearly a lot of waste and inefficiencies. So first cutting out all of that, plus the grift, etc. would go a looong way, as we're seeing with DOGE currently. Also obviously the healthcare system has a lot of grift and inefficinecies on a massive scale that can drastically reduce the spent on healthcare, but this applies to so many systems that government is involved in, again DOGE is clearly proving this to be the case.
3. Yes definitely healthcare needs DOGE
4. Corporations should and do, but corporations are also made of people who also already pay their fair share of keeping national debt in check
The private industry fraud and overcharging that targets Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense has been long term problem.
There are also outlier issues like being unvaccinated and unhealthy-lifestyles that tax payers are forced to pay for.
I highly doubt DOGE is actually targeting these types of fraud, however.
> 3. The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if you include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?
Because late stage Capitalism. Greed.
1. The simplest answer is that federal spending has always been out of control.
2. This assumes a 100% effective government. If it's only 70% effective, you can cut spending by 30% without affecting the noble goals you list.
3. This is the Luigi argument. Get rid of health insurance and we'll all be happy! What exactly to replace it with is TBD.
4. The main argument against high corporate taxes is that it leads to companies moving to countries with lower taxes. The US still has higher such taxes than most and suffers from that, but the optics of lowering further are too bad, so we live with it.
In #2, doing the DOGE way you cut by 30% but the efficiency is now lower than 70%. Government is now less effective, costs less, wastes more. Cuts in education, research and consumer protection will cost a lot long term.
For #3 there is like dozens of models from different countries around the world. The U.S. could start by looking into those.
This framing is a bit far from the actual motivating issue underlying the federal "budget" itself. I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country. If you frame it as simply whether to spend money on this or that or if you're getting comparable value to other countries, then it is inevitable for the sides to talk past one another.
I think it is more productive to understand the "federal budget is out of control" argument in its spirit and motivational effectiveness. The simple fact is that many people are unhappy about HOW the money is spent and would rather reserve the choices on how to spend that money to the households.
To respond to your specific callouts, the growth of federal programs in the post WWII era is a fundamental point of contention. Averages going back to the 1970s (pegged to GDP of all things) are somewhat beside the political point. The federal bureaucracy is enormous. The ancillary industries that service the federal budget is prone to grift, graft, and corruption. Anyone who has worked in or near Washington DC knows this.
I believe you are talking about Social Security, which is a bit different from "taking care of the elderly." It is more like a public pension. Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary. Your framing is already misleading but let's go on.
Combining "defense and veterans" is also misleading. I believe somewhere south of 5% goes to Veterans Affairs (if that much). If you think the US government should spend 15% of its budget on its war machine and the inevitable foreign wars that feed the military industrial complex, we can have that discussion. I don't think 15% of budget is an absurd amount to maintain a global empire, but I assure you it won't be cut all that much.
"Taking care of the poor and disabled" is also a misleading number. Much of that is towards the "welfare state" which is a very gameable and corrupt program. Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote. And if you think the corruption only helps the poor, you are ignoring the many services that benefit from a large pool of welfare recipients.
Health care costs in the US are too high, but there are many perverse incentives at work leading to those costs that would be tedious to go into here. You cannot begin to fix them without removing the main sources of cost. One is that the population is unhealthy, but also over-medicalized. If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day. You don't charge that kind of money unless you have someone by the short and curlies.
Corporations are the employers of the workforce. Many are also owned by you and me as common stockholders in our 401k and other savings. You say they are declining as a percentage, but that says nothing about what the optimal percentage is. Too high and you will choke off dynamism and job creation, and drive industry overseas. Who does that benefit?
But all this penny-counting is a distraction. The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie. As the recent political realignment suggests, most people don't want to be governed by this a federal bureaucracy (or civl service, if you prefer) that has its own political interests at odds with the rest of the population. Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption. It's useful to point out "waste" in terms of inefficiency, but more revealing to point out spending at odds with the values of the majority of the population. People may not want their tax dollars spent on projects they find diametrically opposed to what they value. They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network that extends well beyond any benefits that come back to them. It is at those moments that people start to think that the government isn't working for them. Is that so hard to understand?
> unaccountable bureaucracy
I'm not sure what's unaccountable about a bunch of people who report to political appointees who have been confirmed by the Senate (a body elected by the people), who then report to the president and vice president (also elected by the people).
> I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country
Is having a federal workforce that's managed by an unelected, and unaccountable, oligarch more in line with the best interests of any country?
> Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption.
Isn't putting oligarchs with significant conflicts of interests in charge of the federal bureaucracy also susceptible to graft and corruption? Isn't halting enforcement of the law banning Americans from bribing foreign government officials also susceptible to graft and corruption? Doesn't pardoning a former governor convicted of literally selling a Senate seat make us more susceptible to graft and corruption? Doesn't the Supreme Court continually narrowing the conditions for bribery, making all but impossible to ever charge someone for accepting a bribe make us more susceptible to graft and corruption?
Honestly, it seems strange to me to say that the current administration is reducing graft and corruption, when the policies of this administration and the current conservative Court all seem to be *pro* graft and corruption.
Social spending has overwhelming public support, with majority calling for more spending, and under 20% call for less spending.
https://apnews.com/article/ap-poll-government-spending-socia...
It depends how you word it. 'Would you rather put your money in stock indexes or pay out N shares of 1/N of your contribution to old people then hope and pray the same is done for you' ( which is more or less the realistic question for the middle class ) and I bet they'd say shitcan it.
With that wording most would struggle to understand the question.
I also would like to believe that quite a small minority see social spending solely as a personal investment.
The question isn't so much whether social spending is a personal investment but rather whether trigger pullers with badges and automatic weapons enforce it or the laborer personally invests as he sees fit in ways that enable social charity and retirement without the threat of imprisonment.
I'd bet around 100% of the population support trigger pullers with badges and automatic weapons to enforce the rule of law.
Sure but the question is about the law that the trigger pullers enforce. If the laborer can invest his retirement rather than having it taken, redistribute, then told if there is no Trump v2 maybe there will be something for him -- maybe he decides the rule of law is to put the power of social spending on the individual rather than a corrupt government who's treasury system is controlled by unelected billionaires.
> I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country.
The word "unaccountable" gets thrown around a lot in these discussions. The leaders of these bureaucracies are ultimately appointed by and accountable to the President, who is in turn elected by and accountable to the public. In what sense are they unaccountable?
> Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary.
I'm talking about both Social Security (21%) and Medicare (15%). Historically, families were much bigger; you'd have many children who could all pitch in to help take care of their parents. Historically, people also didn't get treated for cancer, heart disease, etc.
Families, churches, and charities still exist, and still can help in this capacity. As a person with gradually aging parents, I fully intend to help my parents however possible, but I'm also glad that society (well, for them, Canadian society) sees fit to provide them some support too. And as a Christian, I'm both happy when I see churches serving the poor and elderly, and happy when I see society agreeing with these Christian values and also collectively striving to serve the poor and elderly.
> Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote.
If you're talking about welfare traps where government benefits disappear when your income increases over a (fairly low) threshold, disincentivizing extra work or raises, I fully agree that there are changes to be made.
On the other hand, if you think people don't work because they think they can live off government handouts, I'm curious if you've ever tried that, or put yourself in the shoes of someone who has.
> If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day.
Fully agree on Medicare negotiation. I've seen my fair share of hospital bills, and believe me, I wasn't laughing...
> The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie.
Only if you pretend that FDR, LBJ, etc. are not "American" (or perhaps, as American as apple pie - but maybe pumpkin?). Yes, there's always been a strain of rugged individualism in American political thought. We'll see where it leads, I guess.
> They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network... Is that so hard to understand?
What's hard to understand is how this (IMO) distorted view of the government has taken hold. The government may be slow at times, may be wasteful at times, but, til now, it's worked. Old people get health care. Social Security checks get cashed. National parks stay open. Science gets funded. Planes stay in the air. The US university system is the envy of the world. And so on.
What hasn't worked is that people's lives haven't really improved that much. Jobs have gotten worse - more part time, more "gig economy". Housing prices have shot up. Health care costs are out of control. Etc. But please, help me draw the line between excess government spending and all of these problems, because I can't seem to see the connection.
People voted for change, and now they're going to get it I guess. Let's see if it's the kind of change they wanted.
It only will make sense when you reintroduce the idea of "the political" into your framework. Without that, a government is simply a territorial administrative apparatus or provincial satrapy. If your parents are Canadian, perhaps you are as well (or at least very familiar with Canada), and can relate to a government seeing its population as simply interchangeable units of administrative responsibility managed by a hedonic rationalism. I think Canada is a great example of what US voters in the last election don't want to be. It's kind of a nice, albeit cold, place but very authoritarian and prone to treating its identity as something of little value and an embarrassment, except contra the big bad United States next door. Canadians look at our health care system and school shootings and suppose their system is obviously better, but Canada comes across as very naive and ungrateful for the benefits it receives as our northern neighbor. I suspect there are many Canadians who also don't like their government's policies but are at a loss on how to effect change because their government is less susceptible to populist political waves than the US.
The government works in some areas and not in others. Our once envied university system has become a human gristmill cartel, indenturing a generation of our youth under debts they will never dig out of because of perverse incentives engineered via vast federal spending programs. Foreign students may still come for the prestige but many diplomas are effectively worthless and many schools properly should be mothballed. In any case, measuring a government's worth by how many people receive benefits is a pretty pathetic standard. It's beneath human dignity to have such meager aspirations for a country.
Unaccountable civil services aren't hard to understand in history. Like a military that is ostensibly under the control of the king or president but not really, so have civil services sometimes constituted as separate government that can just ignore the commands of elected representatives of a people. Laws can and are passed to entrench the civil service even deeper, making it hard to fire any but the top-level appointees. These can try to get the institution to do something differently but if the institution is unresponsive they can rant and rave all day, the careerists can just wait them out. It's not hard to understand if you study incentives. They are deeply misaligned and it is only because the administration learned some of these lessons the first time around that they came in with a much more effective game plan this time. You can see how dramatic actions are required to overcome the institutional resistance. I'm sorry that good people have/will lose jobs, but government should not be a tenured jobs program. The taxpayer doesn't have that luxury, why should this subgroup? Why should we all engage in a fantasy that federal employees aren't people who, sometimes despite the best of intentions, are going to pursue their group interests even at the expense of other groups? Huge pots of money are going to attract huge pressures from outsiders trying to access funding. Many of the high profile grants to ridiculous projects are not surprising when you see these institutions as participants in political patronage networks. There has to be some way to officially distribute the money. Have them dig and fill holes or put on puppet theater for the blind. It doesn't really matter.
Keep in mind there is no ultimate fix for this. All institutions decay and need to be replaced from time to time. Getting upset about this particular patronage network being disrupted is the wrong worry unless you were a particular recipient of its largesse. If not, then you might come out better off at the end of the day.
It sounds like you have a fair bit of pride in the US, and a fair number of grievances as well. Goodness knows there's plenty of grievances to go around, and I can hardly fault you for having pride in your country and desiring to see better days for it.
So, I suppose I'll just hope (against hope) that you're right in your optimism about these changes.
I'm a Canadian expat who's lived in the US for many years, partly for work and partly because of the relationships built up over these years. I can only laugh a little and shake my head at your notion that Canada is authoritarian. I suppose it all depends on how you define freedom, and whose freedom ultimately matters.
You posed the original comment in one frame (costs). I responded with a different frame (politics). If I have a hope from interacting with you and others about our political moment (or history in general) on HN it is simply that you may broaden your horizons on the role and function of government to be more than as a sort of beekeeper of the hive. I have personally done very well materially under late stage global liberalism and have nothing to be resentful about. But even so I find the its ideology inhumane and offensive in the nose.
>As the recent political realignment suggests, most people don't want to be governed by this a federal bureaucracy
I don't believe this conclusion can at all be drawn from the many variables involved in the "political realignment".
From, Gallup [0], top 5 issues for Republicans:
Economy
Immigration
Terrorism and national security
Crime
Taxes
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-...
> Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption
Does it look like we're going to less of that though?
Also, just looking at the numbers, I wonder if a few percent savings in the federal budget could possibly translate to positive changes for the working class. Maybe part of the population will be happy to know they don't fund hypothetical gender studies anymore, but let's hope the cuts don't affect them negatively.
Inevitably, there will be eggs broken to make omelettes. I will consider the realignment successful if there is a reset in the current grift industrial complex and some interregnum until new patronage networks are established and corrupted that will, in their turn, be destroyed to make room for the next generation. If you think the issue is the amount of money spent on "gender studies" you really don't understand the far greater value of what the education of our children should consist in and who gets to decide what that education will be. Those are battles worth fighting over. Penny pinching is missing the point.
Why would you think they are trying to get rid of grift? It seems fairly obvious they are moving in exactly the other direction.
> If you think the issue is the amount of money spent on "gender studies" you really don't understand the far greater value of what the education of our children should consist in and who gets to decide what that education will be.
I can't parse this sentence at all. Are you maybe able to better articulate your point?
Many people got a chance, during the pandemic, to see that contemporary K-16 education consists of a lot of political ideology (aka indoctrination). Many thought their kids were learning useful skills and were shocked, shocked, to find that they were being groomed to reject the worldview and values of their parents. They didn't like it no matter what it cost. It became a hot-button issue and an own-goal by the cultural gatekeepers, who consistently present themselves as our betters. Framing this as a cost issue is missing this critical fact. A majority doesn't care what it costs. They don't want it even if it's free.
Considering the way things have played out, if they were trying to indoctrinate the kids all this time they must have been doing a pretty bad job! Its not like the dems have much good will with the kids or the left in general right now.. What a screw up! Only thing worse than facism is inpet facism perhaps, good to be out of the woods there.
Agreed there has been blowback, but the 20% of true believers don't accept its validity. But I would argue the indoctrination has been very effective.
I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like “they’re cutting something important!” Or “they’re stopping critical research!” because every government contract needs justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire industries dedicated to simply analyzing and tracking contracts and spending. None of them are above ~90% accurate. Many “analysts” born over the last couple weeks are talking about things they know nothing about; for example measuring savings off calls on BPAs or IDIQs is silly because a call = spent money. You cannot save money you have already spent, but you can stop the vehicle.
I’m not saying DOGE is definitively good or even that they are going to actually accomplish their mission (probably their cuts will become a piggy bank that gets raided by OTA’s at the end of the fiscal year). But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
What is on paper for government contracts is totally different from reality. Most of these programs accomplish nothing, are totally un-utilized, filled with employees who literally do not show up to work.
I could write a novel with examples but here are some notable anecdotes:
- Once, I built an intelligence solution for a large-ish intelligence program within a civil agency. After 6 months it was not used once but cost the government a cool ~12M$. Only after a full year did the program leadership finally take a look and discover, wait a second, none of these people have worked more than a week total in the past year. Only half got laid off, the rest are still gainfully employed elsewhere in the government. Many such cases!
- I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!
- Dozens of cases of the government spending on “XYZ tool” that sounds super critical. In reality they are paying $12M for a postgres database and an extremely basic data entry UI on top. Also, I can’t believe I am about to defend Sharepoint, but realistically something like tracking 10 SIM cards can go in an excel spreadsheet and doesn’t need a $12M “inventory tool.”
- Many cases of projects investigating bird flu in depth and tracking its spread as early as 2022. You would think this is critical with bird flu being a thing right now; however none of these $20M+ contracts have accomplished much at all.
You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same. The only way to go from GS-12 to GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 is just to spend recklessly. They are experts at justifying their budget and navigating internal hierarchies. However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.
(Disclaimer: “government” above refers to civil, exclusive of DoD)
> But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
It's also absolutely true that private companies are endlessly wasteful. I've worked for four large companies now, and the waste is mind boggling. I think what upsets people about government is that tax dollars are used to fund it, but I would claim from my own observation that beyond a certain size any kind of organization is filled with waste.
I'll point out, though, that there are areas of government that have been studied and found to be very efficient, and have high levels of satisfaction. It's been quite a while now, but I recall around ~2006-2007 an academic study came out which was originally intended to look only at private insurers. As they designed the study they realized that given the size of Medicare they should also include Medicare as part of the study.
What they found:
- A much much higher percentage of the money going into Medicare goes toward patient care than in any of the private insurers. Like low single digit percentages of overhead vs. 10-25% overhead in the case of the private insurers.
- Customer satisfaction from dealing with the bureaucracy (claim processing) of Medicare was much higher than customer satisfaction with the private insurers.
- Patient satisfaction with the care they were receiving from Medicare was as high or higher than the private insurers.
It’s still worth looking and finding that stuff out (carefully and transparently). There’s only been token attempts at a meta analysis of gov efficiency in the past. GWB created a small version of DOGE with almost the same mandate that never really did anything notable because it was small and never ambitious (it also still exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene...).
Most large wasteful private organizations are often the ones who get comfortable in their existing market, employees get hardened in their ways, and eventually are threatened by changes in the market and competition and die off. There is no competitive pressure on gov agencies. It’s almost always a one way street after an agency gets formed that it continues as is indefinitely with only occasional changes in leadership. The number of agencies (>400 federally in US) only increases. Congress rarely looks backwards with spending, they only challenge demands for new spending plans to expand agencies. Otherwise budgets only go up with new line items as US tax revenue forever increases each year.
> There’s only been token attempts at a meta analysis of gov efficiency in the past.
Citation needed. The OMB has been around for a while.
Trump has also attacked parts of the goverment doing anaylsis/oversight of the budget as well as hobbling prosecution of corrupt politicans
> However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.
Reading your comment I saw so many similarities to any large organisation which I worked for that I can't help but think it's simply on the same level.
Hell, my first internship was 100% budget filler and, in line with my role, I was useless.
Regarding inefficiency: I'm a contractor for a large organisation and have been for over three years now.
My contract is up in a few months and by that time I will have a total of four years of cancelled projects under my belt. At least one of them started out as an Excel sheet and in truth could have remained so.
Makes you think that waste is a universally emergent issue which gets worse with the size of an entity. Not making any distinction between governmental or corporate structures.
Everybody cries when the government raises taxes. Yet, when corporations increase prices despite not having higher cost, we just accept it as "business as usual".
As corporations rival the power of nations more and more, some people should rethink their attitude to public and private enterprise.
In theory, competing firms keep each other honest. In reality, the managers care more about their petty kingdoms than the health of the corporate empire. If theirs goes bankrupt, they use their skills to build a new fiefdom elsewhere.
> As corporations rival the power of nations more and more
See: British East India Company. I don't really have a relevant point to make here but corporations being more powerful than countries actually seems to be the default state that has already been dealt with somewhat, rather than a novel growing problem.
True that. There are plenty of historical companies which have absolutely dominated politics. "Standard Oil" being another example.
What's different in our time, is that it is not just one company, but a whole range of mega-companies (Particularly in technology). It has changed from a few powerful and malicious actors to a systematic problem, fueled by the dynamics of the financial markets and passive investment.
I say govt politics is so much worse because it is not like, a handful of people trying to get ahead by spending a lot, it is almost all of them.
They're also vicious, many times I have been cussed out by bureaucrats over stupid things like css padding on a table. There are lines that don't get crossed in corporate politics, none of those lines exist in government.
There are NO LINES that aren't crossed on corporate politics. Verbal abuse, illogical decisions based on vibes, favoritism or just plain stupidity are common in companies not listed and not rare on those that are.
The majority of things illegal in governments are business as usual in the private sector. Want to take a kickback of a supplier? Perfectly fine and normal on non large corporations. Still happens on those.
Because you had luck with your career is not representative of overall corporate behaviour. I worked as a third party seeing lots of large companies as clients. The amount of BS is outstanding and awe inspiring.
I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them about it, and they shrugged it off by noting, “We are way more efficient than our competitors.”
I’m not defending DOGE’s specifics or competence here, but do we need to clean house? Absolutely, yes.
> I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts.
As an aside, you're actually making the argument that we need more federal employees. The push to privatize everything has led to higher costs and more abuse. So DOGE is currently doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison. So when I see USAID or whatever with some bleeding heart mission statement, all i can think of is how many vendors are siphoning off that money while paying lip service to the culture war theme of the year, like a drug lord making sure to be seen at church every every Sunday. It’s not a question of, like, is it one third fraud or half fraud. There is absolutely no accountability and there is not a single competitive aspect about these projects. At no point whatsoever is there a credible attempt to deliver on promises made. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does and what that program I saw does is let about 150 people bill about $100 per hour to the government. All you have to do, to collect your $800 per day, is report that your jira ticket is taking more story points than expected due to technical debt, and make sure your MS Teams stays green from 8 to 6 (buy a mouse wiggler)!
Stuff like this is why the Skunk Works at Lockheed was such a big deal.
Just a whole department of people who innovated without any of the red tape, in a government setting.
You might find this Washington Monthly article interesting as it echoes your point: "Fire the Contractors" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractor... "Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it. ... That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."
Contractors are hired by civil servants, these are not independent things.
I don’t think DOGE will fix this because the solution is easy but very counterintuitive — we would need around 30% raises to all federal employees at GS-12 and higher, to match market rates.
Right now they cannot hire civil servants that are skilled due to being unable to compete on comp; instead they have to reach to private sector, which will charge them 600 a head, while paying each contractor 200. Because GS only affords 120-130 for those positions, it becomes necessary to reach for contractors.
PWS contracts are the biggest suck on budget; eg there are more PWS contractors manning what would normally be FTE positions at Dept of State than total FTEs.
Unfortunately, it is so backwards to actually spend more and raise payscales to save money that I don’t think DOGE will land there as a strategy.
that's right, an anecdote is my own contract handler / sponsoring exec was (former) Deputy Dir of Medicare/Medicaid Data Systems Group, who had just flipped private. My comp as a self-employed software engineer/consultant is higher than his, a SVP doing biz dev. And this is his comp on the private side! 30% is not enough
100%
And it's like 10 to 1 of contractors vs civilians that work for the gov. You'll find a hell of a lot of casual corruption there too -- companies bribing the civilians who select contracts to pick them. It cuts across public & defense spending.
i honestly could not find any root cause analysis in that article that i agree with. it is not a problem of “too few bureaucrats”, it is that the contract procurement process is not competitive, nor is literally any other process on the government side, including meta processes like the bureaucrat hiring and selection process. the entire govt side system top to bottom has evolved in a world where money does not matter and the contractors have simply evolved to the constraints of that interface to get at the money the way a plant grows towards the sun.
... i actually considered becoming a "civil servant" after this experience to try to help (on either the govt side or private side), but I could not see a viable way to actually make a difference, even a small one. Everything is so jammed up and deadlocked with outrageous anti-competitive regulation —go learn what is "IDIQ" "SPARC" "8(a) STARS II" "GSA IT Schedule 70"—that it's not actually possible for a startup to bid these contracts without partnering with the 800 lb gorillas and therefore becoming a part of the thing that you are trying to destroy. "Disruption does not come from within"
Because of the existence of [1] FedRAMP and other compliance initiatives that are blanket applied to everything even though 90% of SaaS contracts do NOT need it, and [2] past performance being predominantly the #1 factor for evaluation, contracting itself is an enforced oligopoly.
You need to be a big-ish company to enter, and will have to kiss the feet of existing oligarchs.
There's no question this exists.
But firing a bunch of government employees doesn't fix this problem. Where there is waste, it mostly comes in the form of contractors bilking the government, not the government employees themselves.
Is DOGE going after the private sector and their bilking of the government?
Who do you think hires contractors and puts out contracts?
The only way to get promoted at and above gs-12 is to amass reports and budget authority. The wasteful spending is not handed down mandatory by congress, it is conducted using budget authority afforded to federal employees.
If you lay off 70% of federal employees especially those in gs-12 to 15 range, you could probably easily cut 70% of discretionary spending with literally no negative impact.
You will never see them reduce their budgets because it reduces their political power; look up “Washington Monument Syndrome” for how they have evaded cuts for the last two decades.
Congress wants to _increase_ the defense budget by $150B instead of decreasing it. You could gut as many employees as you want, and that money is still going to be spent somehow.
The only way to reduce 70% of the discretionary spending is for Congress to reduce the discretionary budget by 70%.
Perhaps the private sector and their bilking of the government is what we are witnessing.
Yes, I maintain anyone who has spent any measure of time in govcon will come to the same conclusion. Our government is endlessly wasteful -- this was a universal, bipartisan take 3 months ago but now people are getting successfully gaslit into believing every dollar the government spends is efficient and critical.
That's why I like where I am. We usually work in really lean teams. One person in each role. And usually we're making a physical product so that's one mechanical, one electrical, one sideways, etc. Has its downsides but I don't feel like we're wasteful.
Are you in the private sector or government?
Yeah, if you're actually interested in government efficiency, Ro Khanna has been advocating for significant cuts to the federal budget in a way that actually improves efficiency.
Good. We need a lot more representatives genuinely interested in eliminating government waste. Because the graft is real regardless of political party.
I love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”.
I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired.
I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more successful prior to acquisition.
So yeah , sorry, startups can be extremely inefficient too.
I’ve also worked for some of the biggest tech companies or have friends that work there now, including Meta, they are extremely wasteful in nearly all cases. They just make a lot of money. Probably like the collective United States.
The moral of my story is that efficiency isn’t necessarily profitable, desired or even required.
In my opinion DOGE is telling stories to distract and achieve other ends. Last I hear most of Musks companies actively received government welfare :)
More people need to internalize that moral. Efficiency is an optimization after you are achieving a goal. It is not the goal. Unless you are not looking to do new things, maybe?
This can be seen in every resource consumption ever. We get far more out of any single input now than was ever achievable in the past.
I don’t mind startups wasting money unless I’m a seed investor with a vested interest. We all have a vested interest in the way government allocates or misallocates funds. That’s one difference.
The other, as someone else pointed out, is a matter of scale.
Most of the startups fail, I hope we don't want that in government things
in evolutionary biology, almost all cells die, but some of those that survived evolved to become humans
Strictly, no? No cell has been alive through that whole process. Rather, many laid the foundations that lead that direction.
Yes, this is very much a Ship of Theseus argument. But, I think that is very apropos?
The next logical steps to this is eugenetics, I'll pretend I didn't see this comment
BTW, we already tried that and it didn't work
absolutely startups can be inefficient but government projects are at a wholly different order of magnitude. Some startups will crush $20M and then die, and yet the best ones, such as facebook, return 100,000x ROI on that same $20 mil. Govt projects will crush $200M, deliver nothing and then go to recompete so another vendor can have a turn.
The problem is not the government being inefficient and wasteful but the contractors -- aka private companies -- being inefficient and wasteful.
Those sound like contractors, so a private company that's failing here? Or am I misreading?
Meta spent how many billions on Metaverse and has what to show for it? Some argue it was wasteful.
sell your stock then if you are a shareholder, it's up 225% on 5yr chart, 1525% since IPO, and has risen to a $1.7T mkt cap since the $13M Series A at $100M Post in 2005. That's a 100,000x ROI on the A if I did the math right, forgive me there are a lot of zeros to keep track of
You spent a few weeks somewhere and knew all that? Seems doubtful to me.
Bringing up Palantir is funny to me. I don’t know enough gossip on Musk and Thiel’s relationship, but if I did I would bet it would solely determine the outcome of a hypothetical DOGE investigation into Palantir contracts. It seems from a sibling comment I’m not alone. If we’re right, DOGE isn’t going to eliminate government waste and corruption, just move it around.
We’re not gaslit into thinking everything was fine with government spending, we’re angry that this is how they’re going to “fix” it.
I think for many people, this is the first exposure to audits and spending reduction in govt. So judging on an absolute scale, yeah DOGE is not doing a great job.
Judging on a relative scale to past attempts and the existing 5(!) agencies with the sole purpose of auditing and reducing spending, DOGE looks amazing and has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.
It is an immensely difficult undertaking and the bureaucracy will struggle, writhe, and set fire to everything around it before it can be put down. We should hope that DOGE is just getting started and picking up momentum rather than having settled.
So what you're saying is that "waste reduction" is such a holy goal that the means justify the ends? Not matter the consequences, no matter the outcomes, no matter the harm.
I think that's where we fundemtally disagree, not to mention your blindness to their stated ideological ulterior motives. Thr Project 2025 document explicitly states it's goal of ultimately replacing federal workers with its cadres that work towards to it's political project.
I'd like to be proven wrong but I have a feeling all of this will never provide any cost benefits to those that aren't the rich. Even if they somehow manage to reduce the taxes on the avg joe, a big if, the Joe will pay for it in other tangible ways. I.e. I don't think it's waste being eliminated but projects the administration disagrees or wants to privatize. Can you address these concerns?
> DOGE looks amazing and has gotten farther in 1 month
Burning down your house because of a leaky faucet I guess is a strategy, but not one I think we should be undertaking.
"You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same."
This x100. For all those lambasting the public sector, understand that its flaws are not because of the 'public' part, but because of the size of the organization.
Private sector organization's inefficiency, fraud and waste also scales directly with their size.
Could you help clarify something for me? When I looked into the federal workforce, just looking at raw numbers without much insight about the "inside", it doesn't seem particularly bloated or wasteful to me: it runs at ~5% of the federal budget and at 2mil people it is about 0.5% of the population.
It looks like you and some other commenters, however, are discussing government contracts, which are projects and programs paid for the government but implemented by third-party contractors. Is that correct?
Yes, they are correlated ; contracts are created with budget authority afforded to federal employees. Essentially the only way to get promoted is to amass reports and budget, and use it in some way.
So it’s basically like this: yes, the federal government creates jobs and the cost of those jobs directly is only 5% of the budget. However the real cost of those jobs is in spending, in terms of opportunities they champion, which essentially amounts to all discretionary spending conducted by the federal government — ~30% of the budget.
USGS seemed like it was mostly worthwhile stuff when I was there, just operating on outdated technologies and under budget cycles and patterns that incentivized goofy behaviors because saving money in even the simplest of ways could only lead to budgets being cut in unconstructive ways.
For example, imagine there's a budget of $5k and it's assuming that you'll replace a computer with part of it.
But you don't actually need to replace your computer until after the fiscal year.
But if you wait, the next budget will just think whatever you didn't spend can be cut, not that you deferred a cost for slightly longer.
Similarly, even if you have budget for something you need at the start of a fiscal year, everyone is afraid of blowing budget before the end of the fiscal year... So many expenses get deferred until things are close enough to the fiscal boundary that everyone starts worrying about not spending instead...
Yes, well documented phenomenon — the government spends more between July-September than the rest of the year combined. Conversely spends very little in December and January.
Not me but another contractor got a phone call the last day of the fiscal year and was told essentially “hey we have an extra 5M$ in the budget we need to spend, can you make something up and we will just give you the money for a random pilot.”
> I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!
Just to back up this point: This is 100% my experience when I was an employee for them (disclaimer: 3-4 year tenure, some number of years ago). Everything we built was marketed as this brilliant, cutting edge, leading AI ML tech, and what we were actually building was React CRUD apps with 0 users, with a heavy focus on "making the UI feel like Minority Report / feel futuristic", etc.
It's not Skynet, it's a contracting company with a great design and marketing team.
I think people would react viscerally if they knew Shyam blasphemed himself as Jesus, literally appointed 12 apostles, and held a last supper-like meeting with a long ass conference table.
Many such stories
Look, beyond unobjectionable facts that the government wastes money, that money isn't completely wasted: some percentage eventually becomes salaries for Americans (the rest in some rich person's pockets). For example, all the USAID jobs that are now gone.
There are now billions-USD-worth fewer jobs in the American economy.
There are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers.
Administrative spending is also not that high, the majority of savings are in contracts. This is related to jobs because every employee you lay off, is one less person who can spend millions of dollars.
So in practice, there are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers and being sent abroad. And only some millions-USD-worth fewer jobs.
This is not true, unless a tax cut is actually passed which lowers taxes for the poor. (And the poorest already aren’t paying that much in tax. And FICA wouldn’t get cut, since that money doesn’t fund what doge covers.)
Why are we setting the bar at the poor? 65% of americans live paycheck to paycheck yet pay 20-30% in income tax alone.
John Doe working in sales with three kids will lose his home if he misses a few paychecks. He drives a 2009 Toyota Camry and only buys things on clearance. Why should 20 cents of every dollar he makes go towards a bureaucratic machine that accomplishes very little? Why should 1 cent on every dollar he makes go towards funding mandatory charity and foreign aid, why should 5 cents of every dollar go towards a federal jobs program? It is easy to talk about things in isolation when we look at individual impact on budget or only look at the poor, but empathy based arguments fall flat when that same empathy is not extended towards the american workers funding this. Keep in mind we had an Industrial Revolution and fought two world wars without income tax on 90% of Americans!
FICA and payroll tax is the ultimate evil and should at the bare minimum be rolled into graduated income tax, but I digress.
Very nice examples, but why then doesn't DOGE go through every project? Why did Trump end all DEI contracts, why cause the disruption by freezing all outgoing money, why fire the Inspector Generals that are inspecting their agencies for waste, why fire all probationary workers, and why the fuck do they want to mess with the IRS, the one agency that brings money in at a very successful rate?
Clearly no one at Musk's DOGE has spent time in actual government bureaucracy.
These are good questions that are easy to answer once you’ve spent time in gov:
- it is very hard to go thru every project and generally not worth it, it seems like they are sorting by contract vehicle size. there are 120k+ contracts spit out by the government every fiscal year alone so this is a monumental effort
- the DEI programs are probably a PR thing, generally speaking though they accomplish essentially nothing; I would probably go further though and roll up any program staffed by less than 10 people, then furlough 20% of the workforce under the larger program
- not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this rumor got started, it’s very specific and generally just foreign aid. this is part of trump’s campaign promise so while I don’t agree with it and it is probably going to shatter US hegemony, it is also what people voted for. the government is still spending tons of money, we are still doing more in depth tracking but it seems like only a 3-4% decrease overall
- the OIGs deserve to be fired they have not been able to stem any underlying issues for years, the outrage here is all manufactured. let me ask you this, if you hired an accountant and for the last 10 years they can neither tell you how much money you are spending nor find savings, are you going to keep that accountant?
- the IRS is not really efficient! first of all a majority of their audits are on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. yes of course the top 20% are still overrepresented correctly, but they are actually losing money for every audit they conduct on the bottom 80%. estimates are around 0.96$ per dollar with ~6k$ per audit, so they’d save $240 per audit they skip on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. it’s true they recover 6$ on average for every dollar spent on the top 20% which cost averages out to a little over 3$ recovered per dollar; however this is actually not much money, around $30B a year total. for such a massive agency and mission they do a pretty terrible job, and is very warranting of disruption
People are being gaslit into thinking the government is efficient; in reality it is endlessly bloated.
DEI is not just a PR thing, it forces employers to look at places for candidates they haven't looked before. Not surprising that white women are those who benefit the most from DEI. Even one JD Vance, as a military veteran, profited from a DEI program at Yale https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/feb/19/ask-politifac...
If outgoing money isn't frozen, why do farmers not receive money for the binding contracts why fullfill for the government. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/usda-freezes-farmer-funding...
The IGs have be fired in a very specific way that involves informing Congress. It was not done correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_... Cardell Richardson was in office since only May, don't know about you, but I'd give a new IG a year to get his ship running smoother. But looking at his picture I see why he was fired...
Regarding the IRS, well then we can expect that from now on only the rich people will get audited?
Government contract vehicles are not binding, call orders are but can also be cancelled and provisions are made for doing so. You’re pointing to one hyper specific example of cuts as frozen spending; it is easy to confirm billions have been spent in the last week alone. There is also a case to be made for malicious compliance in many cases with cuts. It sucks these farmers aren’t getting paid, but this is not an uncommon occurrence and if they truly are owed money they will eventually be receipted or they will be able to sue under FAR provisions.
Firing IGs without notice isn’t great but if Congress has an issue with it they are free to take it up. I’m not sure why that is relevant to whether or not IGs should be fired.
Cardell was an IG for literally two decades. This is like saying a SWE at Facebook for 20 years who now works in Meta’s VR division has only been a SWE for 1 year.
OIG at Department of State especially, among all OIGs, deserves mass layoffs. The track record of that office is the absolute worst.
It is also typical for SES to get rotated out and replaced during any new administration. 1-2 years in office is totally fair game as not many make it past 3.
Regarding the IRS, that’s a campaign promise Trump made and seems to be keen on with his ERS plans. However I doubt it will come to fruition or have meaningful impact, the IRS is hard to disrupt due to longstanding relationships with Congress.
You really think that reducing IRS funding will reduce audits on the bottom 80%, and not the top 20%? If you're going to go around telling people they've been gaslit (using a straw man, I might add), you might want to check your own biases first.
Yes! The IRS budget has nearly doubled in the last decade, primarily to increase their workforce and use manpower to focus on shotgunning low-yield audits.
High-income audits are difficult to conduct. To increase receipts, it is far easier to just conduct more easy, low-yield audits. This is the optimization they are making, and in service of their mission (maximizing revenue) it is technically correct.
Instead of picking your favorite logical fallacy to throw at me, you can go look this stuff up yourself to confirm.
Your claims seem to be directly contradicted by the data here: https://www.irs.gov/statistics/irs-budget-and-workforce
According to this, FTEs are down, and operating costs are only up ~30% compared to 2010. Average cost of collection is down.
And consider the decline in audit rate for millionaires from 2010-2019 described here: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-need-to-rebuil...
I guess the onus is now on you to provide support for your claims.
The IRS was in the middle of a hiring spree: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2023/04/irs-hire-30000-emp...
Those 15k they fired may just be forcing them back to how they were a year ago.
Absolutely delusional to believe any of this based on the history of these people.
> not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this rumor got started, it’s very specific and generally just foreign aid
No, that's absolutely not true. My partner is the accounting manager for a university. All their access to federal funding was turned off for a couple of days, and several grants (which they could draw from and get overnight) have not shown up in several weeks (specifically there are some that even remotely hint at DEI, that the university now expects will never be fulfilled).
It's not just "foreign aid".
I said `generally` not `exclusively` and you are selecting one very specific application of funding to generalize against all federal funding.
I literally analyze this stuff for work, there is barely a 3-5% contraction in spending.
This is such an insane rumor too because it takes 10 seconds to disprove it: https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=8980ee6820c47f96a19...
It’s absurd to say anything is “what people voted for” in a system where only the votes of about 5 out of 50 states matter.
That isn't how elections work. You can't assume that all voters in non-swing states would never change their vote.
You could say the same thing about a popular vote where a candidate wins by 10 votes - "oh, our entire system is decided by 10 voters? how unfair"
For the US election, votes in other states resulted in a situation where only 5 were swing states. If those voters in non-swing states voted differently in enough numbers, then there wouldn't be just 5 swing states.
Look at any of the elections in the past 40-50 years and you can clearly see that which states are "swing states" and which aren't changes over time.
Something like 130,000 voters voting the other way would have changed the election.
However unlike in 2016, a strong plurality voted Trump - 2 million more than voted for Harris. Had Harris won the popular vote that argument might have meant something.
Not sure how true this is and I guess it is moot at this point (except as far as thinking how to ensure all legal votes are counted in the future): https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/ "Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes. And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million."
In either situation it didn’t change the numbers dramatically. About half of voters actually want what is happening to the country.
Which makes it insane that such massive disruption can happen as a result. When the result is balanced on a knife edge, the outcome ought to reflect that, instead of swinging dramatically one way or the other. I don’t know how you design a system like that, but this is nuts.
Trimming down a bureaucracy is a good example of Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."
The usual reason for this is simply dependencies. At some point in time, somebody took a working system, had some extra budget, and then invented a process that took the existing system as an input and produced some marginally useful work. But then next year, the new process was part of the working system, and they had more budget, and they added more roles and processes based on its output. Now you can't take it away: regardless of how marginally useful it was last year, everything built on top of it will fail. That $10M contract with one user might have just one user, but that one user might be the crucial communication link that determines the budget for a 1000-person department. You might even have a contract with zero users, but without auditing the inner workings of the whole department, how do you know it has zero users and won't just break everything when you terminate it?
It's only cuttable because DEI is not the actual budget line item. Think of it like this 'program gets a budget of $10M' and the people that run it decide the best way to implement that program includes $8M of DEI training. They can instead decide to spend $0 on DEI and the full budget on payroll. This is simply changing the priority of what was effectively an HR function to actual productivity functions.
All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem. I'm pretty sure everyone could come with many anecdotes of waste in the private sector. I also worked in the public sector (not in the US) and frankly, I think it was pretty efficient. Most employees were competent and weren't paid very well.
The problem with reducing costs with a heavy hand is that you will cut things which are actually useful. And probably, the saving will be very little compared to the overall budget. I think DOGE is primarily a demagogical operation.
>>All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem.
The difference is that businesses that are inefficient are wasting revenue, and eventually go bust. There is no self-correcting mechanism for government.
There technically is because the interest on the deficit alone is about to exceed total defense spending, over time we will eventually just become a debt slave society paying to other economies.
But practically the self correcting mechanism is democracy, our elected officials have been failing us. Like it or hate it, DOGE has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else conbined incl 5 other agencies over the last 20 years. The reaction from the bureaucracy and political machine should tell you everything you need to know about our prospects in the absence of DOGE.
> over time we will eventually just become a debt slave society paying to other economies.
This is categorically false. 70% of our debt is held by US entities.
I see this take a lot in this thread, I think people do not comprehend the scale.
Your company sends people in business class needlessly, ok. The government sends people in private jets needlessly -- there are dozens of separate aviation programs just within Dept. of State each with their own planes and contracts to staff and supply those planes. We have hundreds of posts around the world, many people are getting to those mainly on charters, private legs, or in the contractor case, business class tickets billed at 2x rate under T&L.
This is just one specific example; it applies across the board, when the government spends it is on an exponentially different scale to commercial. A single database will easily cost them 5M$ -- that is ~10x the cash moved on the floor of a major casino during a busy night.
> I also worked in the public sector (not in the US)
Yes, key phrase not in the US. As a comparison, the largest spending item in our budget is Medicaid -- ineffective healthcare that applies to less than 20% of our population. We spend 4x more on Medicaid somehow than the UK spends on the entirety of the NHS.
How does that compare to the scale of the federal government as a whole?
Federal revenue in one year is more than the market cap of the most valuable US company. It’s an enormous organization. If waste is as a similar level proportionally, it’ll be similarly enormous. Is it actually more than that?
Large private sector companies operate on a 30% profit margin and have exponentially lower capex and opex compared to the federal government.
The federal government with exponentially higher revenue that exceeds the entire market cap of these valuable companies actually runs a deficit while predominantly providing inferior services in competing categories; while having insanely high opex and capex.
This inefficiency passes everywhere, including to their contractors — because of all the random shit, compliance, regulations in government contracting, the average margin is somehow only 10-30%. They charge often 3-100x the price of a good or service when provided to the private sector yet make 3x >less< profit.
The scope of the inefficiency is unimaginable, something we must absolutely not accept under any circumstances if we want to have a future as a country that does not involve being a permanent debtor to other economies.
Well do remember that you have 5x the population of the UK, and the NHS is effectively limited to about 20% of our population given that our "ambitious" target is to get the delay between referral and treatment down "only" 18 weeks in most cases. About 10% of the population is on an NHS waiting list as we speak, which should be pretty much everyone that needs it.
Medicaid applies blanket to less than 20% of the population while providing less coverage and having worse outcomes than the NHS.
I picked the NHS because it serves the same size population (70M) while having more coverage and better outcomes.
Having lived in the UK yeah the waiting times suck, I went to a doctor actively bleeding out with an infection and they gave me a dressing and said to wait 3 months for a surgeon. That’s insane but the same outcome people on Medicaid will get in the US.
In the above anecdote I just flew back to the US the next day and was treated and “cured” 4 hours after landing. But, I did that on private insurance, not Medicaid. When americans shit on the NHS they are comparing it to their private insurance, not to the state funded healthcare options (Medicaid/Medicare).
Doing consultancy for the government, I agree with your assessment. Yet, it is fairly unrelated to what DOGE is doing.
1. Streamlining and simplification is good. Trimming can come with harsh cuts. But what we witness is arbitrary destruction. Otherwise Musk wouldn't try to reinstate nuclear inspectors they just fired.
2. Efficiency is not the goal. Neutralization of governmental power is. And with less governmental power, corporate power will fill the gaps.
3. Ideology is the driving engine. Talking points of "Anti Woke/DEI" or "no work from home" sounds appealing one half of the people, but carries no substance beyond it. In fact, these terms are misused and retooled as weapons (such as getting rid of "woke" generals).
4. If you want more efficiency, you must make investments. No company or state entity has ever become more efficient just by cutting cost. Slashing budgets only cost you more money in the medium/long run.
5. Transparency is good. It holds people accountable and allows for better decisions. But one of the few purposes of these acts seem to bring are to bring chaos. In chaos, the stronger will win. It is the opposite of transparency.
I worked with the government as a contractor for a while and saw a lot of waste and inefficiency. My brother in law works for a bank and what he describes sounds a lot like what I saw at the government: crazy amounts spent on contractors to do stupid or trivial things, massive hardware and software purchases never used, LOTS of consultants consultants consultants, lots of unnecessary travel, people hired to do no work, failed IT projects, wasteful disposal of working equipment, etc. It all sounds exactly the same.
I've talked to a lot of people who have worked for other huge companies and the stories are similar. When I worked for the Fed there were people there who had worked for GM, Boeing, etc. and a few said the Fed was actually more efficient than some of those.
Has anyone ever worked for a very large (several billion annual spend or more) entity that was anywhere near as efficient as a startup or SMB?
This is why small startups can beat enormous companies. From what I've seen, comparatively, startups can at times be thousands of times as cost-efficient. But as startups grow they become less efficient. I've seen this too. It's incredibly hard to maintain efficiency as things scale for a very long list of reasons.
> it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
It's equally insane to me that people think the private sector is somehow efficient. The amount of resources used to feed profit alone are a huge waste.
Private is not 100% efficient but it is much more efficient because if you don't make a profit you no longer exist. A government program can't go broke. Government programs simply get money with zero effect on their budget or revenue if they execute poorly or well. That's why removing an 'optional' HR role like DEI that does not actual produce anything measurable is slow hanging fruit. You are reducing cost and the result will not actually effect the outcome. It's an unnecessary ideological add-on, not a function. It's like removing the training on how to use a coffee machine in an office that doesn't drink coffee.
Hmmm, A few corporations come to mind that are considered too big to fail (banks a decade and half ago, intel atm,...). Seems like they have aquired government-like powers :D
Second point. Nuclear safety inspectors don't produce anything, they just cost us. Lets call them red tape. Simply fire all of them, energy costs will go down and nothing will happen in short term. But somewhere down the line a president will be asked how the hell they thought that running nuclear reactors without safety inspectors was a good idea.
Now, I honestly don't know if DEI is useful in the long run or not, but because you see it as ideological add-on makes me think that you know even less. People can make anything seem like its ideological (vaccines, wearing masks, climate change,...), but usually that just mean they don't know what they are talking about.
Wild red herring fallacy, I’ll bite.
The private sector is indeed filled with lots of inefficiencies, but due to the profit motive and presence of competition, there’s massive incentives to correct those inefficiencies slowly over time. You'll make more profit doing so!
Hence, the private sector is constantly self correcting itself and becoming more efficient via creative destruction. You can just look at the numbers, even the Chinese Communist Party understand this. Turns out the profit motive combined with competitive instincts of humans results in a consistently greater good.
Not sure you’re aware, but the government doesn’t do that. Hence why the US is massively indebted. Unfortunately the US debtors aren’t doing so great these days so it can’t continue even at current rates. Instead of DOGE they should have named it “The department of not finding the level of US debt that leads to currency debasement and collapse.”
I never thought I’d need to explain the elementary school 101 of why communism is bad and why debt is not endless on HN but apparently this place is turning into Reddit.
>>The private sector is indeed filled with lots of inefficiencies, but due to the profit motive and presence of competition, there’s massive incentives to correct those inefficiencies slowly over time. You'll make more profit doing so!
Instead of correcting inefficiencies it's more profitable for private sector to: 1. merge/acquire competition, create monopoly, 2. lobby government for monopoly status (ISPs)/protection from competition with tarrifs (automakers)/... 3. sue competition out of business 4. aggressively use patents,...
Also found it funny that someone starts post with 'red herring' and ends with 'educating' parent post about communism :D
When stating "all profit is waste" you've officially changed the topic of discussion to communism.
Basic logic would dictate a response addressing that head-on is not a red herring.
I did not understand his post as 'all profit is waste', this is what he said: >>The amount of resources used to feed profit alone are a huge waste.
I believe that this can sometimes be true. For example, lets say that CEO want to raise profits by 20% by end of fiscal year and uses 50% more resources for that compared to current resource/profit use. This might be good idea for CEO, if his bonus is tied to profit, but for company it might be better to develop business that is going to bring more profit / resource spent a few years down the line.
I think both government and private sector have waste. It's just that reason for waste is different, and it doesn't make sense to compere them directly. Also, combating waste should be done differently in private vs public sector.
Do you expect that contracts with Palantir will be under any scrutiny? Do you really think Peter Thiel would have supported this administration if that was at all a risk?
Lots of Americans think the government needs to be more efficient. Very few Americans think the way to do that is closing national parks, cutting veteran healthcare, and firing the nuclear security workforce. It is easy to be pro spending reform but still be unhappy with DOGE's body of work thus far.
You are falling for Washington Monument Syndrome!
I don’t know that Palantir will be under scrutiny but they are a really tiny government contractor. I would love to see the defense primes + big consulting firms like Accenture be on the chopping board.
On an absolute scale, DOGE is not performing well and it makes sense so many are upset with their performance. On a relative scale to past attempts and the 5 existing agencies that exist to audit and reduce spending, DOGE is like a unicorn and that’s why many with experience are silently cheering them on.
They have not gotten far but have gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.
Great info thanks! Frustrating that we don't see anyone declaring victory by cutting off Palantir contracts.
It’s probably a lot of things causing that:
- new age defense tech companies band together pretty tightly
- you can cut 10 Palantir contracts and save $200M but then you’re stuck with the existing tools (Sharepoint+PowerBI or Salesforce+Accenture) that are usually super shitty and 1-2B$ contracts vehicles for SI
- Palantir actually has really low revenue, as recent as 4 years ago they would have often qualified as a Small Business
- if you cut down entire lines of effort, sweep out the legs from under an entire program, lay off bureaucrats, etc. you can stop more stab wounds and stem bleeding; this is an okay step 1
Ironically the easiest way to quickly fix the deficit is actually to spend money. Most government employees are contractors because a GS-15 can earn maybe 150k while a contractor translating to only a GS-13 can earn 200k while their agency charges the government 600k a head. So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed. Then you can cancel all the PWS contracts. By napkin math this would account for a cool ~$1T over 4 years.
> So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed.
Why on Earth would anyone go work for an organization that thinks it's ok to "layoff 90%" under the assumption that they're all under-performing? And you're making a huge assumption by saying there's zero risk. Laying off 90% of the original air traffic controllers presents zero risk? The intelligence services? Law enforcement? The military? Payroll accounts for around 3% of the Federal budget. Layoffs aren't going to fix our spending problem.
And this completely ignores the fact that's it's illegal to fire most of these people without cause. They're going to sue and they're going to win. And we'll end up paying them salaries to have not worked for however long those lawsuits take.
That didn’t happen. Palantir Has not currently lost any contracts. They lost stock value.
"Your margin is my opportunity"
Imagine you know you are sick.
Doge is the one recommending bloodletting and brushing with burning straw.
The issue is rarely that neither side can name the problem but what is claimed to be the reason and therefore the solution.
I will raise you a more direct analogy, let's imagine you have a deep wound in your arm and are actively bleeding out.
There are 5 doctors who you have paid to treat you; they came, performed some tests, confirmed you are wounded, but don't know how to patch you up.
DOGE comes along and says well, what if we amputate the arm and cauterize it?
This will stop the bleeding, but you will lose an arm. That sucks, there is probably a method to treat you to stop the bleeding and prevent the loss of an arm, but nobody has figured it out and you are going to run out of blood.
Do you amputate or choose to bleed to death?
That analogy doesn't work because there is no "to death" for governments unless they go fully bankrupt. For the US government, that's practically unthinkable at this stage.
If we're going with the medical analogy, we've been rubbing all kinds of creams and taking all kinds of pills for a funky looking mold on our arm. There's some malignant growth, but operating may damage one's ability to use their hand, so treatments are used to keep the growth in check. Treatments aren't cheap, sometimes they don't work or cause side effects and need changing, and often you end up driving an hour for a five minute check-up.
There are risky solutions, such as operating and hoping you can still use your hand afterwards, that will cost time and effort and hopefully reduce the illness in your body afterwards, but the risks have as of yet been deemed higher than the reward.
DOGE is cutting off the arm, slicing it up in parts, and checking for every individual clump of cells if they're necessary or not, before trying to put them back. You're losing a lot of blood and you may need decades of surgery to get your functioning hand back, but all of the bad parts have been removed at least.
DOGE amputates your arms and your legs but you have internal bleedings.
At the end you can’t move but still bleed.
You have to add in that you've been told for 20 years that you are bleeding to death and you need to take drastic measures, and the guy who is telling you to cut off your arm now plans to sell you a replacement for a profit.
The main problem is that taxes are too low. But even Democrats are afraid to say it now.
Even if you’re 100% correct, these aren’t the right people and these aren’t the right methods. Completely the opposite actually.
There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution? We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, and the last person to make headway here was Bill Clinton -- who proposed an even more callous approach to cuts.
Bill Clinton had the "line item veto" which allowed presidents to get rid of things in bills (spending) they didn't like. Ultimately this power was rejected by the courts as unconstitutional. Congress is supposed to allocate and deal with spending.
This line item veto was supposed to stop congress people from attaching things into bills that just benefited their constituents (to get their vote).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
"Congress granted this power to the president by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 to control "pork barrel spending", but in 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the act to be unconstitutional in 6–3 decision in Clinton v. City of New York.
The court found that exercise of the line-item veto is tantamount to a unilateral amendment or repeal by the executive of only parts of statutes authorizing federal spending, and therefore violated the Presentment Clause of the United States Constitution. Thus a federal line-item veto, at least in this particular formulation, would only be possible through a constitutional amendment. Prior to that ruling, President Clinton applied the line-item veto to the federal budget 82 times."
Lets talk about Clinton's cuts to the federal workforce and compare them to what's happening now.
- 3/4 of those cut were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended
- large swaths of gov employees weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing (the long-term effects of which are yet to be felt)
- it was a more thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.
- there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned
- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut primarily benefiting the wealthy
There's really no comparison with what is happening now.
Wait, you’re alleging Bill Clinton downsized the government by measures more callous than randomly firing workers, forcing them to en masse justify their positions to an unelected billionaire? I was alive then and I don’t remember any of that. Citation needed.
And he actually did manage to balance the budget. Too bad that didn’t last long under Bush.
>It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution?
For starters, these people are in fact idiots. They randomly fired people at NNSA with virtually no warning. What the fuck? [0]
In response to your point: Why throw USDS in the trash? That was a great example of an effective, agile non-partisan tech workforce. [1]
Now federal workers are having to submit to political loyalty tests. [2]
Perhaps their true intentions here aren't really cost savings, if that isn't blatantly obvious already.
>We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, ...
That's like trying to cure cancer with cancer, but on the face of it and not in some clever cutting-edge way.
Actual solutions? Take highly effective organizations and copy them. USDS and JSOC come to mind.
I don't buy it. Shucks, we've exhausted every other method—therefore, the solution here is to hand over the reigns to immature, extremely low caliber people with conflicts of interest that are absolutely massive [3], and whose motivations are questionable at best?
Yeah, no thanks. I dislike government waste and inefficiency as much as the next person, but using the guise of cost cutting to rapidly install loyalists at critical power junctures isn't a good thing. Never mind the flagrant disregard for the law that's taking place as this is all unfolding.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298190/nuclear-agency-...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/doge-engineering-director-resign...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/trump-loyalty-white-house-maga-ve...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/elon-musk-com...
Didn’t he fire something like 200,000 people?
Yes, however:
- they weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing
- it was a measured, thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.
- most importantly, 3/4 of those were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended.
- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut to the rich
- lastly, there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned
So basically night and day compared to what is happening now.
Yes, DOGE is being raked over the coals but only 77k federal employees have taken their severance package. Clinton also famously proposed majority cuts to the federal workforce.
Trump is getting flack for breaking the law. Clinton’s layoffs were done with Congress which avoided all of the concerns about impoundment or other unapproved changes to their directed spending, they spent months planning first to avoid doing the cycle we’re seeing now where they ask people to come back after telling them they were fired, and they worked with the unions.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/feb/06/yes-bill-clin...
> None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
Citation needed. They do their jobs, problem is politians also do theirs. Making sure military doesnt cut spending in their district even if military leaders think a base or tank factory is not needed.
Its easy to say this is wrong and these people are idiots because thats the case. Actually I wont even say theyre all idiots theyre just malicous and dont care about the damagr they cause. This isnt some sort of careful attempt to make goverment work better. Its axing random groups because they once said something positive about minorities or necause they prosecute political corruption or because they can install their own cronies or outsource it to their company
> There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
Provide proof of this claim please.
GAO, OMB, CBO, GSA, OIGs (civil agency-specific, DoD OIG, Treasury OIG)
People are acting like I'm making outlandish claims, you can literally just google this! If you are going to go down a rabbit hole I recommend USASpending, which consumes ATOM from FPDS and so is very close to source-of-truth.
I’m confused. USASpending looks to be source-of-truth as you say, so how has the US federal government failed in tracking spending when said source-of-truth is supplied by them?
Skimming OiG audit reports, they appear comprehensive and detailed. How has the government failed in auditing if these audits exist?
Where is the 20 years of failure to audit and track spending you mentioned? I’m not sure what you expect me to google.
It isn't particularly correct to say that these agencies have the same purpose. They do similar things, but each has its own remit.
You could maybe instead say that they should be under the same roof, rather than being independent entities. But I don't think this is itself evidence that any of them have been ineffective. Having read some of their reports, OMB and CBO are not ineffective on face value.
(I also don't think any of this is really about curbing government spending.)
> None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
That's nonsense.
GAO, civil OIG's, OMB, CBO, GSA, DoD OIG, Treasury OIG -- none have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years. This was a bipartisan, consensus take 3 months ago.
Thats not a consensus take. These groups put out incredibly useful reports. Which politicians often ignore.
The current administration doesnt care about waste or corruption. I can think of few things more wasteful or corrupt then "The Wall"
When we are all debt slaves to foreign economies I will be sure to reassure my fellow citizens with our treasure troves of useful reports!
Simply audit defense spending. It's the vast majority of government spending and hasn't been auditable in ages.
The problem with the military spending is on Congress, because they set the defense budget, not the White House (and certainly not DOGE).
But defense doesn't get cut because it props up a huge infrastructure across many states. No senator wants to be the ones to vote to cut that in their state.
The US economy is built, to some degree, on the military-industry complex, especially since we offshored all the other manufacturing.
Defense spending gets audited frequently, the audits just end in failure. This is primarily due to massive lines in their budget that are totally classified, but also they do lose track of resources. Until recently they did not even know how many warfighters they had!
That being said, at the very least basically everything they do moves towards some outcome. Most folks in the military are incredibly mission-driven. Plus, all their big contracts (50M$+) get regular hearings from Congress.
The same cannot be said for civil at all, they have little to no oversight, everyone is buddy-buddy so internal audits often border on fraud, there are many billion dollar contracts that have never gone thru Congressional approval.
If you want to really lose your shit, you should look up how OTA contract vehicles function. Literally just "trust me bro" spending, and for some reason rampant in civil.
Defense isn't auditable and they spend the most by far.
I'm not concerned with government spending. The only reason we have a deficit is because GOP keeps cutting taxes for millionaires.
Defense is not only auditable but is regularly audited; publicly by GAO and CBO, and internally by their OIG: https://www.dodig.mil
> they spend the most by far
This is not true and for some reason a common myth that is easily disproven; defense spending is only 13% of the budget, the 54% number people keep throwing around is discretionary spending and not relevant as we should be looking at the entire budget.
DOGE is literally just sorting by percent of budget; Medicaid is 22%, SSA is 20%, interest on our deficit by itself is 11% and on track to exceed our entire defense budget.
> The only reason we have a deficit is because GOP keeps cutting taxes for millionaires.
I mean, the math does not check out at all. We can expect losses of revenue from cuts to be around the same as receipts from audits done by the IRS; we know this number to be only around ~50B$ a year. You are being gaslit into thinking the problem is your fellow citizens not paying more in taxes, when anyone going into government can tell you they are reckless with spending.
Just to put things in perspective, Medicaid is hardly an actual healthcare program as it applies to less than 20% of our population. However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.
>Just to put things in perspective, Medicaid is hardly an actual healthcare program as it applies to less than 20% of our population.
That's still a cool 70 million people.
>However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.
Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.
> That's still a cool 70 million people.
Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.
> Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.
The opposite right now! The US government is SO bad at managing healthcare, that they are somehow making the NHS look great.
We need to get our bureaucracy and spending under control. Then definitely yes, government funded healthcare, we can have a system closer to Australia in efficacy.
This is a tangent to this thread but I think in practice we will probably end up with something closer to the Swiss hybrid system.
> Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.
They might both cover ~70M, but the NHS population has a median age of ~41, for Medicare it's ~71. The US health system is expensive, but NHS vs Medicare cost is not really a valid comparison with such drastically different demographics.
Doesn’t help the situation when you the very senators entrusted to run the legislative branch of government were the ones in charge of organizations that defrauded Medicaid and Medicare for billions of dollars. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott
Perhaps we should be barking up the tree of the private medical-insurance complex which is the real problem when it comes to healthcare costs.
Yes Congress cannot be trusted, that is why I am not complaining like many in this thread about the methods of achieving cuts or executive overreach — this is the best chance we have had in years to get anything done.
The only real way you can reform the government purely from the confines of the system is turning over around 70% of the legislative branch, I do not see that happening in any future.
Australia or Switzerland? Can't argue with that.
I wish I was optimistic as you. Only problem is, I highly doubt any savings realized from spending cuts will materialize in the form of better healthcare.
Regulatory capture is rampant, and then there's that whole pesky issue of growing unchecked authoritarianism that has a good chance of not aligning with the will of the people.
Yeah I can understand the sentiment. I’m being optimistic primarily because the alternative is to accept that our economy is going to eventually go bust and turn us into a debtor society to foreign economies.
The building is on fire, closing your eyes or clinging to a bottle of water are both valid reactions!
Recently medicaid overtook defense. You're right, but medicaid shouldn't exist and is a symptom of the larger forced government inefficiency that is the health insurance system.
People also claim that social security is a great portion of spending, but it's fully funded through income tax and even more solvent since covid killed so many of it's recipients.
Exactly. They exploit people like the one you’re responding to as mouthpieces for their broader campaign against the institutions that regulate their businesses. As long as they can claim they’ve stopped some money from being “wasted,” these people will look the other way and let them operate unchecked.
Trump and Musk are both petty, vindictive, greedy, and narcissistic billionaires, known for grifting, deception, abuse, and ruthless behavior. How can anyone trust them?
None of the existing cuts target deregulating SpaceX/Tesla, and the proposed regulatory cuts affect everything across the board and not just Musk's companies.
When it comes to deregulation, we can pretend like this is new, or we can have an honest discussion and acknowledge deregulation in various forms has been a key component of the Conservative, Libertarian, and Liberal platforms for decades. Recently even the Socialist platform has adopted deregulation for key industries like housing and infrastructure.
You can both hate Musk and Trump (as both are demonstrably all of the things you said above) and acknowledge that ultimately what they are doing is the best progress we have had on this front in 20+ years. Regardless of how many bureaucrats parade on media claiming otherwise, we must not forget that the government is and has historically been incredibly inefficient, reckless with spending, and filled with endless waste. This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!
We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_. It is not perfect, nor is it optimal, but it is far better than the last 5 attempts.
> This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!
No it wasn’t.
> We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_.
This is like an arsonist setting fire to your house and saying we finally have a chance to renovate.
The only thing that seems to bind you and Musk is your disgust for bureaucracy. How you can conclude the many conflicts of interests Musk has will not benefit him or his companies is beyond me. He did nothing to gain our trust. Most people wouldn’t even let him watch their kids, and you trust him with your whole country.
So who and which would be? Given SpaceX, Trump could have chosen worse.
SpaceX is a government contractor, immediately presenting a conflict of interest.
By the same logic the GAO, OIG's, OMB, and GSA are all government employees, presenting an even more immediate and direct conflict of interest.
BTW SpaceX is a fairly tiny government contractor -- big ones like Accenture and other consulting firms have previously audited spending including their own contracts.
Almost all of it would be related to military contracts and spending
As large as social security is, I'm sure there's some efficiencies to be gained too, but the military industrial complex is THE defacto leader in greed and wastefulness
But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them. You can't tell me they're competent after that big of a screw up.
If you look seriously you will find military contracts and spending usually achieves something and is in many cases very difficult to decrease.
It has become somewhat of a pattern for politicians to yell about defense spending, get elected, look under the covers and do an immediate 180 in favor of defense spending.
On the other hand you can cut around 70% of the civil government immediately with no impact on our country. Social Security would not be my first choice though!
> But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them
They did not -- this is simple malicious compliance. This is a really well documented phenomenon and I am hoping this situation draws more public attention to it! Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts -- the common saying is "firemen and teachers first" and this is often referred to as "Washington Monument Syndrome."
Blame the victims much?
Except in this case the victims happened to be essential to maintaining the security of the United States' nuclear weapons stockpile.
Surely their evil, bureaucratic bosses just did it for show to score political points though, right?
>Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts
Cite one credible source saying this is in fact what happened recently with NNSA and I might believe you.
The preponderance of evidence recently does not support this, what with it being widely reported that ill-suited unqualified personnel have been presiding over these cuts across all agencies, at a scale and speed which is unprecedented.
I don’t know, maybe not the richest man on earth who also happens to have massive conflicts of interest, calls respected people he disagrees with “retards” and is clearly losing his grip on his sanity. I mean that’s just my dumb take, though. What do you think?
> clearly losing his grip on his sanity.
And sobriety if the CPAC video was anything to go by.
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Analyzing this is my job and one of the main functions of the startup I founded!
Two points that are often missed:
1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least from an overall value perspective.
2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in with a hatchet and no plan to build gets cheered instead of booed by a large percentage of the populace.
The problem Americans have with the political system has roots on Webers concept of politics as a vocation.
"We spend too much" is a political opinion, rather than a statement of fact. Only Congress can change the amount of money spent by the government, so the executive branch's actions are unconstitutional, no matter how large the crowd cheering it on. This is exactly the sort of mob rule that the Founders wanted to prevent.
I keep harping on this - but two points:
1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.
2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.
I feel funny to say it, but I think we have an income problem, not an expense problem. Republicans just spend money and then cut taxes.
If people believe we need what we are spending on, we need to tax the difference. It sucks to pay taxes but we need to do it
I read about a guy in Turkmenistan who would as a punishment be taxed 20%, and I thought, living in Western Europe or North America is kind of a financial punishment .
Mind you, taxed 20%, not 20% extra. Source: https://www.jw.org/en/news/region/turkmenistan/Turkmenistan-...
How much tax is enough? The government would, without playing a deduction game, would love to take 20-30% of my income, while having devalued my dollar by 50-100% in the last 5 years. My salary goes half as far.
Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?
Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.
It's telling that you didn't even consider that the taxes would come from businesses. The businesses that created the majority of inflation by gouging consumers out and bleeding them dry every tiniest opportunity they legally could.
The military is over half of all Fed discretionary spending.
Another huge expense is servicing our debt.
Those are what we should be addressing, not cutting NIH research.
By the way, we do have the ability to issue more debt -- because thankfully our debt is USD denominated and we can simply print more dollars. It's the only way we've survived this long as the world's largest debtor nation.
> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money.
All spending is authorised by Congress, isn't it? So how is the debt ceiling any different? No federal programs "have money" short of Congress deciding it.
Right but until Congress raises the debt ceiling, the Executive Branch has an empty wallet and maxed out credit card. Funding doesn’t go out all at once either. Some programs don’t start until later in the year for example. They typically aim to distribute 1/12th of the yearly allowance per month. Sometimes agencies will over spend early and have to be austere later (like FEMA last year).
Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an agency will get over the fiscal year.
Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when and how those funds are made available.
They are two distinct things.
None of that has anything whatsoever to do with what DOGE is doing.
I went to search, the us gov has a nice website about the dev. Til.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
The debt graph caught my eye. I did not expect it to be that stable for so long. I wonder what happened in 1981, impossible to say.
> I wonder what happened in 1981, impossible to say.
Total federal income was flat after the early 80's recession, then grew by 60%+ over the next decade, despite the Reagan tax cuts, increasing $400B.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFR
Federal spending continued to grow.
That's what happened.
> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment
One, DOGE isn't doing anything to cut spending. Every dollar Musk "cuts" that doesn't get Congressional authorisation is just being borrowed from future litigation plus all the time and expense that will eat up.
Two, if DOGE can supercede the Congress than so can the Treasury in issuing new debt. Trump has said he wants to kill the debt limit. He could just try that with an executive order. DOGE is already shredding contracts and blocking lawful payments--we're already jeopardising the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. (Ironically, in a manner similar to how South Africa trashed itself in modern history.)
So raise the debt ceiling?
The debt ceiling is entirely artificial, and ought to be unconstitutional. Congress decides how much to spend. Issuing debt when necessary to pay for those allocations is implied.
Everyone is missing the most obvious way to raise revenue: raise taxes.
It’s quite debatable what the founders intended here. Congress has the power to appropriate funds, it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.
Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires rescission notification once it’s clear that the executive won’t use all the money appropriated for a “program.” When Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won’t use all $3 billion.
This is tantamount to saying that the executive not only has a line-item veto, but that it's non-overridable. Seems wrong.
This planet money article lays out the arguments for both with lots of interesting links to follow. https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/02/18/g-s1-49...
Cutting matters not one bit if Congress doesn't pass tax cuts. Voters don't care about the national debt if they don't see more money coming to them.
I actually think that they would still care. It weirdly feels cathartic to know that we are no longer spending federal taxpayer dollars on “zombie apocalypse preparation classes” no matter how insignificant it is to the budget. What is the best way to eat an elephant?
I don't see how an informed person who cares about the rule of law feels cathartic about what is happening.
I think you're both right. The don't care (without a tax cut) until the most ridiculous line items are made public.
Problem is the ridiculous line items wouldn't make a shadow of a dent in the federal budget. Certainly won't lower your tax bill.
Agree .. but my point is that people will still care, on principle. Throw in any kind of cut, or esp. a helicopter payment, and the effect would be shock and awe
Bad metaphor. What's the best way to lose weight? Elon thinks it's cutting your arm off.
Voters generally speaking don't pay federal income tax, or pay so little that it won't make a difference.
Forget the Impoundment Act -- this is a Constitutional issue. The Supreme Court ruled in 1975 that the President is required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which budget authority is provided by the United States Congress. Shuttering USAID, as Trump and Musk have done, goes way beyond mere line item impoundments.
However, they claim that USAID was spending far too much on projects that were not in line with their objectives. Not even Congress can create an agency that is fully autonomous with zero oversight from anyone within the government.
Whether that argument would hold up in court remains to be seen, of course.
Can you clarify what USAIDs objectives are and which programs are "far outside those objectives".
Most of what I see being complained about can easily fall under socioeconomic development, which is ostensibly one of the objectives.
The biggest allegations, the ones that I suspect really lead to USAID coming under the cross hairs of DOGE, were that hundreds of millions of dollars went to Hamas and related organizations that promoted violence against not just Israel but all Jews and the West.
IMHO, in situations like this, the State department absolutely should have been able to step in and say "hold on, let's make sure this isn't being treated as a slush fund by anti American terrorists", but that's not really possible under the current structure.
Yeah this was totally debunked, I believe the programs that were said to be "going to terrorists" were actually promoting women's literacy in Afghanistan.
https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/usg-funding-to-gaza-and-wb-i...
There's more going on than what's in the latest news cycle.
Of course, that particular source is vested in the story, but to call the entire thing "totally debunked" is just willful ignorance.
> Of course, that particular source is vested in the story
Their financial statements being given in New Israeli Shekels is a bit of a giveaway.
"Condoms for Hamas" was debunked.
That's just one example. Hamas has been receiving funding for years, despite their less than decent track record of using the money for it's intended purpose.
https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/usg-funding-to-gaza-and-wb-i...
As an example.
All of this is about actual oversight verification and oversight performed in 2024 and earlier.
This is pre-doge, so of course none of their garbage lies show up. Only the actual oversight by regulators that doge is fking up.
All of these agencies had multiple levels of oversight both within the executive and through congress. Trump eliminated inspectors general positions providing oversight.
The executive branch doesn't get to interpret what spending is in line with the laws passed by Congress.
Trump is taking a shit on the US Constitution.
The current SCOTUS majority isn't afraid to overturn 50 year old precedents. Given they overturned Roe v Wade, why not Train v City of New York too?
But they don't strictly speaking have to overturn it, just limit its scope of application somehow. For example, Train was about grants to the states – SCOTUS might rule the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 unconstitutional, and decide that the President has the right in general to impound appropriated funds, but they also might follow Train in carving out an exception to that general right for grants to the states.
From your source:
> Although one commentator characterizes the case's implications as meaning "[t]he president cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment,"[2] the Court majority itself made no categorical constitutional pronouncement about impoundment power but focused on the statute's language and legislative history.
>cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession
This is not correct.
The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds. Congress can then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever conditions Congress set.
The argument could be made that this is a new administration with different priorities, so does not intend to use the previously appropriated funds. But, even then, the spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the new administration would engage in the recission process as if the funds had just been appropriated. So, they would submit a recission notice before taking action.
That is, they would not just do whatever they wanted and inform Congress afterwards.
> The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds.
That’s not what the statute says. 2 U.S.C. 683(a) says:
> Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including the termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation for such fiscal year, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message specifying
There must be a determination and it must be with respect to a program. So for example Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations as a single line item. The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process. Then at some point the executive can make a determination how much of the total “program” amount will actually be needed and how much won’t be needed. Only at that point is the recessionary notice required.
Your conclusion directly contradicts the Code you quoted.
From the Code:
>Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required...or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress...
The operative phrase is "Whenever the President determines".
However, your conclusion adds:
>The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process.
The Code says nothing like this, instead, explicitly stating "on determination", not "after action".
This "prior notification" requirement is also both within the letter of the original appropriations process, and the intent of the law overall.
The Impoundment Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the house and unanimous support in the senate. It was a direct rebuke to Nixon deciding he had the presidential authority to not fund programs he didn't like.
It unambiguously affirmed Congress's sole authority over federal spending.
The Constitution clearly gives Congress the authority over federal taxation and spending, and this power is a key check on executive power. If the executive branch could ignore congressional spending decisions, it would effectively render Congress’s "power of the purse" irrelevant.
It's called the Spending Clause, not the Appropriation Clause, for a reason.
As to the rest of your argument: not spending the full $100M congress specifies in 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because Mars wasn't able to deliver the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as "One person decided Mars Bars are Woke so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."
> it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.
It seemed pretty clear to (now-Supreme Court justice, nominated by Trump) Brett Kavanaugh:
"Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill."
https://casetext.com/case/in-re-aiken-cnty-2
Though to be fair he wrote this in 2013 when a black Democrat was President so maybe now he feels like things are a little bit less clear for... reasons.
Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.
Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.
The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.
> Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.
It's really not that hard to have that combination, i.e., "authoritarian populism".
You'll note that I used the word despot, and not authoritarian. This was not an accident.
> Congress needs to find their balls
Some of the GOP tried to do that a few years ago, and went against Trump.
They were all destroyed.
There's no longer an escape hatch from this.
They should have convicted him when they had the chance, either time they had the chance to do it. But party over country seems to be the motto.
To misquote Death of Stalin, they had they choice between his conviction and his revenge. They picked poorly.
Depends on the lens. Depending on your tolerance for debt, we can argue that we objectively spend too much. Another lens can be that we don't collect enough taxes and therefore we don't have enough to spend.
Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.
This is a silly charade. To actually cut the debt, it requires congress. Not just saving a couple millions dollars and posting on twitter about it. We’ll need to cut Medicare, Medicaid, social security, the military, etc. All the popular stuff that was never easy and will never be easy to cut. We’re not spending 2 trillion per year on condoms.
Won’t wiping all this stuff just lead us into a Great Depression anyway ? I’m not an expert on the topic but my basic understanding was that we (government) just decided we didn’t have any money, so everything just stopped.
Like shutting all this stuff down or radically cutting it back will surely have some dire economic impacts?
Yup. I’ve seen 2 grand disasters like this each worse than the last. Demonitization in India, Brexit, and now this.
None of those other events had the same depth of damage going on here. America is dead, and doesn’t know it yet.
The only reason people aren’t saying this everywhere, is because this is unbelievable.
Firing this many government employees, canceling grants, and imposing tariffs guarantees at least a recession.
The government can just print money. So much so that inflation goes crazy and the national debt is pennies. Same with your savings. We have a lot of savers that are old. Wait until they are gone.
Yes. These cuts will set our nation back by decades. Institutions are being destroyed, and with them cultural and institutional knowledge that will never come back.
or raise taxes.
They are raising taxes.
Income tax on everyone earning g less than 360K is going up, plus tariffs which are regressive.
They're also cutting taxes for those earning more than that, the top 5%
https://itep.org/a-distributional-analysis-of-donald-trumps-...
Which would probably raise less than a modest wealth tax on billionaires, but we know that will never get traction (even though its an extremely popular policy)
What I don't understand is why they want to cut the debt or the budget. Previous terms have shown that increasing spending and racking up debts isn't leading to loss of polls. Why are Trump and Elon going on this cutting spree instead of doling out tax cuts and increasing pork to their constituents on borrowed money?
Because the Project 2025 plan includes de facto destroying as much of the government as possible to make it easier to replace people with pure cronies.
2 is not a fact in the slightest. The American government is guilty of under-investment in perhaps every area outside of military. The notion of bipartisan climbing public debt is also false. Bill Clinton brought the government into running and Democrats have had consistently better budget responsibility than Republicans, though the reason for this is more that the Dems fund government through taxes where the Republicans fund government through debt to give out tax cuts. The actual levels of spending are not so much changed because it turns out that most of the money spent by government is quite important and you can't just get rid of it.
So why are the Republicans now trying to reign-in the spending? It worked well for them in the past to rely on debt. Why should they care now?
Is it about funneling this money into their tax cut? Why not just run up more debt?
They aren’t
There are practical limits to the amount of debt a government can take on. Additionally, the government usually collects debt from the wealthy, who then make money back through interest payments. The "fiscal responsibility" of the Democrats is how private individuals actually extract value out of the government. Republicans issue debt, Dems use tax money to pay the interest. I think the wealthy have become more sceptical about the ability of of government to pay back these loans.
There are reasons why both parties allowed the system to remain as it was. I find it's increasingly true that new politicians don't understand the value of the systems they are meant to control. They see Chesterton's Fence and tear it down with abandon. Someone like Trump has no clue why politicians act the way they do. He lies and bullshits and does whatever he wants, and it works in the short term, but the long term effect is disastrous. These people are taking a private equity approach to government. Buy it cheap and load it up with debt, then sell as much as you can and let it crash to zero. This is more looting than governing.
Do we spend too much? Or do we not take in sufficient revenue?
All these things BTW do have some limited ability to be controlled by the executive (Clinton did layoffs in the 90s, but kept supporting the same federal services). But ultimately most of this stuff is the mandate of congress and can’t just be canceled by executive order.
It is more we believe in magic. We hand out tax breaks like they are candy, cripple the government, and believe some DOGE waving a chainsaw will fix the budget. Extending the Trump tax cuts is estimated to cost $4.6 trillion over ten years.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tax-cuts-extension-republ...
The estimate should at least be within an order of magnitude; otherwise, the estimate is pointless.
Also, I am booing them because all of the doge line items on their website are in the millions, and our debt is trillions.
GOP has made it it's mission to ensure the federal government doesn't function my entire adult life. They've been working to destroy the middle class since long before I was born. They continue with this mission now and have really turned up the heat. They're currently working to cut taxes for those who make >$360k/year and also eliminate medicaid while INCREASING the deficit by $4.3 trillion.
The people coming in with a hatchet are not planning to reduce spending. They’re planning to use any money saved to fund an enormous tax cut that will primarily benefit the very rich. https://www.courant.com/2025/02/12/congress-budget-tax-cuts/
They didn't need to cut so aggressively the first time around when they did the previous tax cuts, didn't they?
Americans cheered for the gutting of USAID because they thought that spending 25% of the federal budget was too much, and should be around 10% instead.
The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.
Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.
I agree but condemning government budget cuts because USAID seems reactionary. I think the spirit of cutting budget is still overall popular, and is impossible to do painlessly.
Also in the context of federal budget, 1% is a huge number since most of the budget (like social security, interest payments, and Medicaid) is non negotiable.
~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.
> ~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.
if only that's what they would spend it on. Instead, it's going to go to the military.
I don't understand why the US is forgetting that it isn't alone in the world. Spending a little money on international aid has been exerting American soft power for decades and likely flowed back multiple times in additional trade.
Should China be left alone on the world stage to take over?
That’s for _Congress_ to decide, not the executive. That’s the issue here.
People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first"
The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.
They didn't seem to reckon that against representatives who are sent to reflect the will of that same general public. They are not incentivized to contradict their constituents. In particular they do not have the responsibility to represent the demographic of their losing opponent, and in many ways are encouraged to do exactly the opposite.
It may be the best of all bad plans. But it clearly does not succeed in producing compromises. At the very least it relies on some kind of good will between constituents. When you lose that you no longer have a nation.
> We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.
Maybe - maybe - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners born hundreds of years before solar power and social media don't know how best to run a modern government.
And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to make billions from crippling and predatory student loans. "I love the uneducated", etc.
What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past? I don't think there are any, the frenzy of the masses has never ended well, and ironically just ended up in actual dictators taking power in the end. Social media just inflates the problem even more.
> What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past?
I made no such claim, but since you mention it, populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people. You can look up any number of stats on that yourself; they're quite clear that we are in a historic low [0].
What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals. I would even say that the more accurate term for them would be the 'colonizing great great great etc grandfathers', which puts things back into perspective a little.
And even so; they explicitly warned that their system wouldn't hold up forever, needed continuous adjustment, and would need some rather extreme 'refreshing' from time to time.
We have this myth of the founding fathers as wisened, street smart old men. In reality, many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.
Past a certain point, age has little to do with prudence. There are rational and knowledgable teenagers just as there are middle-aged dullards.
One must also keep in mind that the man of the 18th century achieved the necessary milestones to become a self-sufficient adult by his late teens. He will have already lived a full life at the age his 21st century counterpart crosses the starting line.
Of course. Although being self-sufficient does not mean that you have a fully developed brain and cognition, either.
And absolutely, rational and knowledgeable is certain. But we seem to treat their edicts as the height of infallible perfection in government, and view it as anathema to even suggest ideas that don't precisely align with their statements.
many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.
really? i tried sourcing this and I can see there were only two in their 20s (26 each) out of 56. no teenage. 2 in 20s, 17 in 30s, 12 in 40s, 9 in 50s, 6 in 60s, and 1 in 70s (well, 70 exact - Benjamin Franklin).
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/08/how-old-were-the...
"As it turns out, many Founding Fathers were younger than 40 years old in 1776 ... more than a dozen of them were 35 or younger."
Peter Salem was the youngest signatory at 16.
Alexander Hamilton, 21. Thomas Lynch, Jr, and Edward Rutledge, 26. George Walton, 27, and Thomas Heyward, Jr, 29.
Are we talking about signers of the Declaration of Independence or more broadly.. not sure what Salem has with Declaration or if he's counted as a Founding Father. I'll give you Hamilton though since he was involved and neither did George Washington nor James Madison sign the Declaration but are still counted as Founding Fathers - https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/signers-factsheet
I was going off of this: "An asterisk signifies that the individual was a signer of the Declaration of Independence" in my source.
That being said, I take the National Archives as a more authoritative source than a Slate article!
“Soft power” and “hegemony” are fake concepts invented by credentialed elites. Americans are properly distrustful of those ideas.
The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.
How is soft power is a fake concept?
At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably the most important tool you need to learn if you want to be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully wield soft power. The least effective managers I've worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of authority and/or bullying to achieve results.
Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off others.
It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic works at larger scales also.
“Soft power” as a term of art used by liberal internationalists is bullshit. It’s just a way to proselytize foreign countries in a way that makes them resentful.
E.g. Biden’s “human rights” push in Bangladesh. How did it help America to undermine the government’s ability to kill Islamists? It didn’t. It simply was ideologically captured Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so.
> Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so
This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.
Your argument is all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?
If you think "soft power" is a fake concept, you have very little understanding of how American foreign policy actually works in other countries.
For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.
This is the same way to say that friendship is a fake concept just because it is intangible.
Soft power and hegemony absolutely played vital roles since the end of WW2. We seem to have forgotten how much everything relied on them.
Is this comment satire?
It's the most unhinged thing I have read all week, and that's saying something these days.
I don't know even where to begin. I hope it's trolling.
No, this is the type of thing that MAGA folks have been fed on their media and social media feeds. They’ve been taught that everything complex in government and in politics and in geopolitics are deep state conspiracies and lies in order for the left to maintain power. They think that what’s going on now is a turn to normalcy and that America was hindered by the policies of the left. They truly believe this stuff. It’s insane how different their world is, they don’t live in the same reality as the “other side”. I’m not sure how to fix this, how do you convince someone of reality when they insist on some hallucinations being real?
It'd be fantastic if surveys would allow those surveyed to do a minute or two of research before answering or correcting their answer.
They are voting based on their opinions without doing additional research. Getting at that opinion via a poll is informative, and letting them research it would actually be counterproductive.
USAID is not "international aid". It's an arm of the CIA that uses "international development" as a cover for it's activities.
Look at the role of USAID during the Vietnam War under CORDS. It funded the "strategic hamlet" program which uprooted rural civilians into barb wire enclosures and provided arms and training to militia.
That doesn't sound like international aid.
Look at the Phoenix Program during the same war. It was an intelligence program which sough to identify "VC infrastructure" within rural villages and "capture or kill".
One can argue that such activities are beneficial to the US, but claiming it's soft and cuddly "international aid" for countries in need is just not accurate.
That's one way to frame it. Alternatively, one could argue we don't tax enough, and that's due to large tax cuts, first under Bush and then under Trump. Now Trump wants more tax cuts.
The booing will start when Americans realize what a delicate web of interconnects they live in. It hasn't really sunk in yet, but these "waste" jobs tend to be there for a reason, and this whole project is the ultimate exercise in flattening Chesterton's Fences and seeing what happens.
(I'm reminded of the Golgafrinchans from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They sent their "useless" third of society into space... The folks who did jobs like telephone cleaner or insurance salesman. The remaining two-thirds of the population died from a plague sourced from a dirty telephone.)
if you take a dollar from government spending, then 60 or 70 cents of that is coming from the bank accounts of retirees, disabled people, and the poor. If you return that dollar as tax cuts, as Trump has proposed, then something like 80 cents go into the bank accounts of the rich.
The discourse of "wasteful government spending" is a smokescreen. It mystifies the basic operation of taking a dollar from a worker, retiree or poor person and giving it to a rich person.
Strong points in the face of this inaccurate, politically biased ledger that has revealed zero fraud, corruption or waste.
I am maybe cynical, but I sincerely doubt there's no fraud or corruption in the government spend. Among trillions of dollars of money being spent by people who can easily siphon some off, etc.
Intuitively, there _must_ be some corruption.
I have zero faith that Musk is interested in finding real corruption. He seems to be more interested in changing budget allocations and calling the removed regulations / "woke" things corrupt.
I also think that corruption was within my acceptance tolerance of wastage. _Think_ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but maybe that's all that really matters when it comes to something like this.
It's also a very hard line to draw, in some cases, since you can have the right things happening for the wrong reasons.
If a bill contains funding to help fix a main street in a city that was destroyed by a natural disaster, is that corruption?
What if there's 500 other destroyed main streets and that one got picked?
What if it was destroyed by decades of the local gov't neglecting it?
What if it was included because you directly bribed the person writing the bill?
What if it was included because you did some horse trading and gave them something they wanted in another bill you wrote?
The intent there is not to argue that defining corruption is impossible or futile, but that some people might reasonably argue different sides of whether something was corruption without either side obviously being morally bankrupt.
his cuts are max 0.1% of government outlays, yet the MAGAs are acting like it's slash and burn and worshipping at the idol of their cult of personality(ies?) . Anyway it's so obvious to anyway who steps back and turns off the political blinders. Just look at the sheer number of lies coming from Musk and Trump about the "savings" ,about millions of people over 100 getting social security checks, that the few million of probably waste of money USAID was spending is evidence to cut without any other proof the entire USAID organization, even though it's a $50 billion dollar outlay. It's so effing sad that people fall for this, and that our education system is such a failure on probably the most necessary modern skill other than literacy--critical thinking.
The insane thing of all this is that the 1% being cut is almost entirely in investments: money for research that drives economic growth, money for the USAID that provides the US influence around the world, cuts to CDC staff that could help mitigate expensive pandemics…the list goes on.
So not only is the DOGE affair not reducing the debt, it is setting the country up for less wealth and more expenses in the future.
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First, what was done with the money:
> The $2 billion was used for the "decarbonization of homes" in low-income communities and paid for new household appliances, such as water heaters, induction stoves, solar panels, EV chargers, and weatherization, according to an April 2024 press release from Power Forward Communities.
Second, the claim that it was given to Stacey Abrams, from the LinkedIn post cited in the article:
> The coalition includes Rewiring America, Enterprise Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), United Way, and Habitat for Humanity International and today, we've applied for $9.5 billion — part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act — to directly fund residential decarbonization and electrification... The application is already supported by 321 partners who have pledged to decarbonize housing units across 46 states and every EPA region. It also includes 156 communities pledging to decarbonize housing units, particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities, and rural and Tribal communities.
It appears that Stacey Abrams was in some way involved in organizing a coalition of existing nonprofits to apply for congressionally authorized grant money. There is no evidence I can see that she received any of the money or that any other impropriety was involved.
"$2 billion to Stacey Abrams" is a falsehood, even based on the content of the inflammatory Fox News article.
2) is questionable. Most of the budget is spent maintaining global hegemony through military dominance.
Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly irrelevant.
You should look at the CBO's reports on this. Most of the budget is spent maintaining Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. The sleight of hand involved in the idea that the military budget is "most" of the spending is by calling large parts of the government's spending (but none of its military spending) "mandatory," and then slicing up the "discretionary" portion only, most of which is the military.
However, the discretionary part of the budget is less than half the size of the mandatory part of the budget. If the entire discretionary budget were cut to $0, between mandatory spending and interest, there would still be a government deficit.
That sleight-of-hand is how $900 billion of military spending becomes "most of the budget" when the full budget is $4.4 trillion.
That's because the SS/Medicare are not discretionary which means that those are basically predetermined and not set by Congress every year.
So when we talk about the "budget", what really matters as far as politicians are concerned, is the discretionary part, which they can control (and which in theory voters have some control over through their election of congressmen), and defense takes up at least half of that.
The full budget is $6.9 trillion, not $4.4 trillion.
I am bad at addition, but I was going from 2023's numbers, which were indeed close to $6.4 trillion, not $4.4 trillion. Mandatory spending alone was $3.8 trillion.
Because people have been gasslit into believing that social security and medicare are funded by the same-named payroll withholding contributions.
I think many who are okay with our civil spend may take issue with our military spend.
I have rarely encountered anyone who thinks the government isn't overspending. And nobody ever agrees on how we should be spending the money.
I realize the comment above paints me as a conservative, I assure you I am not.
However, I guess I can at least sympathize with how we got here (DOGE being acceptable).
And from that I blame almost everyone in politics and every person tangentially related to those in politics.
A lot of people think they government isn't overspending. They're the bond buyers, who loan the US government money at remarkably low interest rates. That's a true market signal, regardless of what people tell pollsters.
Everyone would love to spend less money on other people's priorities. But as a whole, the bond market thinks the spending is ok, even if no individual will say so.
I think you're on a reasonable track, but this isn't the whole picture. Most international treasury demand is the direct result of trade deficits in dollars.
If you are a bank (or in aggregate a country full of banks) that takes in a bunch of $USD from your business customers selling products internationally in that currency, then you will receive a bunch of dollar deposits. These deposits can't be magically converted into the local currency, they have to be used as dollars somewhere else or traded with someone else who has a currency or commodity that you want for them. Long-term if there is a net surplus(from the other country point of view) of exports to imports, there will be a net surplus of USD as well.
So what to do with those USD? Make some more! Whatever the going rate for T-bills is is likely better than nothing. Treasury bonds are considered a "risk free rate" in the sense that they are approximately as safe as cash under the mattress.
Inflation is a more accurate measure than treasury sales of the reducing trust in our fiscal future. And that signal is lit.
Inflation is about 3%. That's higher than optimal but hardly a crisis. It does not suggest a broad negative judgement.
Those dollars instead seem to be going into the stock market. Too many, I would say, and I think the Fed is making a mistake in trying to lower interest rates. But it does suggest that investors do not anticipate a sudden crisis of the government.
Of course it's worth noting that the bond market has massively sold off since inflation hit. The counterpoint is that it's arguably just going back to the mean, but nonetheless, it's a fairly historic move.
US yields at the long end (the part of the curve that is sensitive to long-term stagflation and inflation) don't necessarily indicate that participants believe that the spending isn't a problem either. Once yield started to rise, the U.S. massively twisted issuance back to T-Bills, which are short duration and essentially risk-free. Fragility on the long end is being carefully managed.
To some extent, you are seeing some financial repression, ie the shape of the yield curve is being actively managed. This expectation is built into the bond prices as well. If the long end starts to break down, nobody expects the treasury to start issuing even more long bonds. They naturally would expect them to pull back and start issuing more T-Bills and only term out the debt once the market/liquidity can handle it. There is some conversation right now about leverage limits in the banking system/SLR being expanded, so there is more capacity to warehouse the debt on the banking side. That's pushing in the direction of financial repression (where the banks are "incentivized" to shape the curve in a desired way).
0% interest rates were leveraged against the Fed Put, and it's arguable that there is a Treasury Issuance Put that is currently baked in.
I think that the issue is broader than this though. It's about much more than just the inflationary effects of spending. It's an ideological battle as well. As for bonds, there's also the fact that US bonds are a "there is no alternative" asset to some degree. Remember that bond investors got their faces ripped off in the initial rate hike cycle. There's a good parallel to commodity futures prices here, in that prices of commodity futures are terrible indicators of the actual price in the future. There is a distinction between where a market clears and a bet on future prices. It is a somewhat subtle distinction, but it is grossly underappreciated. That said, of course you can isolate the inflation expectation aspect of the bond market and you are probably correct that this indicator does not red flag inflation driven by excess spending. Of course, growth expectations are also fairly healthy. So it's hard to say what it would look like if inflation expectations stayed high and growth expectations started to fall. Then the bond market might look quite a bit different. We haven't seen a true stagflationary market in 50 years.
Without looking it up, what do you think is the military budget in comparison to the whole budget.
Europe has a problem trying to spend a minimum 2% of GDP. We easily to 10x that.
So do you think that the US GDP is $4.21 trillion, or do you think that the US spends $5.83 trillion on the military?
We are at 3.37%.
1. I can't agree with this. We have AI to raise flags and we have computers to make payment and bookkeeping trivial.
2. we may or may not spend enough. what we don't do is collect enough taxes to pay for it, that is the failure.
>We have AI to raise flags
That it would like get wrong more often than not. No thanks.
This was basically the same shtick he did with Twitter. He "open sourced" the "algorithm" but it was basically a git repo of BS that rarely gets updated and doesn't seem to match what actually happens.
Even if government were like a tech startup, you shouldn’t run it like a stupid one.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
This "wall-of-receipt" data does not meet the standards of the government's data communication requirements. It is not transparent, inaccurate and many difficulties are added to make it available to the public.
Anyone thought of a petition to request and meet the standards?
Rule of law is what allows us to grow. Acemoglu won a nobel prize showing that institutions cause growth. Destroy institutions and you'll undershoot potential.
The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades at many American institutions, such as for-profit companies. Openly selling the country short for personal benefit is just one small step after many hundreds of them to get where we are.
>The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades
...in American culture
When have the corporations ever not had a short-termist "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality in America?
Ever heard of Bell Labs?
Bell Labs was cool, but it was more or less just a part of AT&T wasn't it? The company that spent about a century with a near-monopoly on all telecommunications at great expense to basically everyone in America, and even eventually led to them being broken up into a few dozen separate companies.
Pet peeve: there is no Nobel prize of economics, Alfred Nobel didn't include "economy" in his will. Instead there is a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences" whose purpose is to give credibility to the unscientific field of economics. The prize itself is mostly awarded to neoliberalists economists and does not often represent the majority views in the field.
You can look at the economic experts panel to find the majority view of the field: https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/us-economic-experts-panel/
and most nobel prize winners have majority support. If you have objections to acemoglu, please show me the majority of economists that object to him?
> there is no Nobel prize of economics
It's commonly called the Nobel prize of economics. That it's not a classic Nobel prize is mostly finance jargon.
> prize itself is mostly awarded to neoliberalists economists
Source? The period in which neoliberal economics won the prize was when neoliberal economics was in vogue (and most successful and producing useful theories).
YATP: Yet Another Tool of Patronage.
The price is awarded exclusively to neoclassical economists, because it's effectively a marketing tool for neoclassical economics, which is the economic theory base of neoliberal shareholder capitalism.
Have these changes been analyzed prior to implementation?
Laying off electrical line workers during snow season in Paific Northwest is really not a good idea. As an example.
People aren't voting for what benefits them which means we are now in post policy politics. That means that what matters is the messaging and not the actual things done or the impact of those things on people. This leads to doing things that you have the ability to message the way you want and not doing things that help people. The MAGA crowd figured this out and figured out that angry yelling is the easiest message out there.
This is why democrats lost. They kept trying to have policy discussions about how to run the country along with ways to implement policy tied to impact on people, but that is hard to message. The MAGA crowd just finds things they can yell about. By the time impact happens they just yell about something else, louder and the people being hurt are just ignored.
The discussion about how much money is being saved/spent/etc is basically meaningless in post policy politics. The average person can have a massive drop in life expectancy and quality of life and it won't impact their voting so why does it matter how and where government spending happens? The sound bite is all that people are looking at and because of that DOGE is a huge success for those using it to get what they want.
"Limbic Governing System", is the term I learned recently. We are governed by posts on 'the socials' designed to trigger kneejerk responses from our limbic system. By undercutting education, (real) social interactions, and science in general people are falling back to their animal instincts more and more.
That ties in well with my experience of news and social media spewing out "Amygdala-bait". Anything to short circuit your rational thought processes and get you angry, indignant, fearful, smug, shocked, etc.
I don't know if that's purely due to chasing advertising revenue via "engagement". We certainly saw something like it in the 90s with 24/7 news channels.
And with some people being just fine with obviously fake AI slop images and stories, it feels like they're just fine with no longer having to think complex thoughts.
Has this happened before in history? Is it part of a natural cycle in society? I am very doomer when it comes to climate change, so I wonder if people subconsciously feel like "there's no future so why bother thinking?"
> People aren't voting for what benefits them
Is this actually desirable? I want informed people who vote for what they think is best for the country.
I'd prefer it if everyone else abstained.
I don’t really see a remedy for this behaviour too. It’s quite horrifying. Like being strapped into a plane heading for the ground.
Discussing the correctness in the immoral use of public money is the wrong discussion to have. You don't try play chess with a parasite. You deparasitize a patient and then do any next thing you need to do.
Our system is based on laws, not morals.
Why aren’t people seeing through the facade?!
The point of DOGE isn’t to save money, it’s to shut government programs that don’t align to Project 2025’s agenda.
Yep. Reward friends and punish enemies. At long last the right has learned to play the game that the left has played for decades
>the game that the left has played for decades
Can you give some examples, please?
If anyone has been involved in any sort of internal data analytics this is basically what is expected to happen. Data that is used in a new way tends to turn up all sorts of limitations and soft points. Trump, Musk, etc should have been (read: probably were) well aware this was coming; for what it is worth they've surely seen it a few times in business life.
That being said, I doubt it is much of a factor. The strategy of hitting fast & hard is to bypass the unreliable data by triggering screams from the areas that are most important. In some sense, anticipating this revelation is why the strategy is chosen in the first place. Trying to do massive cuts slowly and carefully gets a few months in to the project then crumbles under the weight of unreliable data and analysis paralysis.
Hitting fast & hard is not the legal way to do it. Congress has allocated the money and the President can't just stop spending it. You also ignore the human aspect, firing people in the most disrespectful way, with just single sentences, will hurt the trust in the government as a workplace for a long time. Good government needs good workers who trust the government.
> hitting fast & hard is to bypass the unreliable data by triggering screams from the areas that are most important
This works for companies which can risk some debt and restructure and maybe getting better. Worst case they'll go bankrupt. In this case the screams after mistakes will be literal screams of people dying.
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Please don't cross into personal attack.
Frankly, this doesn’t matter. What matters is that an unofficial agency of the executive branch is deciding unilaterally - with no oversight - to stop payments that were voted on by Congress. Even if Musk and team were geniuses and doing brilliant work, it would be outside the rule of law.
It still matters. In addition to just being criminals, now we know that they are also incompetent.
People already knew Trump was incompetent, other people just called it "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
People already knew Musk was incompetent, other people just called it "Musk Derangement Syndrome"
People were saying DOGE was full of incompetents prior to this, simply judging by their methods (or lack thereof.) They were dismissed as partisans, or using whatever thought-terminating cliche they have on hand.
Knowing this doesn't mean a thing, no one is doing anything about it.
> While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.
Billions. I understand that it may be far from sufficient to prevent the US from entering a debt spiral if/when interest rates increase (or stagflation if/when yield curve control is enacted to prevent a debt spiral), but it's still a lot of money. No doubt mistakes have been made, but it's very unlikely that DOGE critics will be able to convince most tax papers that the pain wasn't worth it.
I absolutely expect that the slapdash firing and cutting is going to cost the country much more than it saves over the next ten years.
I'd be interested in whether they are fixing mistakes that are reported to them. If they won't then there is an issue. If they do then maybe this is just another nitpicking attack on DOGE.
From the article: "... but did not respond to numerous questions about other aspects of the group’s accounting."
It's not "nitpicking" when the reports of where/how much they are saving money -- their purported goal -- is _fundamentally_ inaccurate in many circumstances that can be verified. And even worse for what that implies about everything else that can't be verified.
> just another nitpicking attack on DOGE I'm not sure that pointing out that DOGE is unconstitutional, a massive security threat, and not designed to save money but to consolidate power and punish enemies is nitpicking...
Nitpicking?
They are in a role of "auditor". The most important requirement of an auditor -- a mandatory requirement -- is accuracy and correctness. It isn't nitpicking to point out that they are either intentionally lying, or are profoundly incompetent at the role they anointed themselves with.
I believe Musk and Trump have doubled and even tripled down on the ridiculously implausible $50 million in condoms for Hamas claim.
Correcting mistakes isn't their goal. Maintaining the narrative is their goal, seemingly at any cost.
If we look at one example of the errors the article calls out:
"The contracting company, D&G Solutions, confirmed to CBS News that this was originally the result of an accounting error and that $3.8 million of the contract had already been expended."
So DOGE reported $8B because the receipt indicated $8B? So DOGE reported the saving because the system said it was spending $8B? That is an error, but one that originated with the data?
The FAQ of the FPDS database explains this is not the system of record. It is not the real accounting database for federal contracts. Instead, after a contract is signed, contracting officers are supposed to report it to FPDS. It is like (incorrectly) manually filling out a timesheet. There was no $8B contract.
https://www.fpds.gov/wiki/index.php/FPDS_FAQ
“What is FPDS not designed to collect? The following data elements will not be found in FPDS. Contracting officers can’t put this information in FPDS even if they want to. Most of this data resides at the individual contracting office.”
Focusing on what’s being cut and whether the cuts are “right” misses the point. The richest man in the world bought himself a department in the US government and now has free will to run amok. Our country has been an oligarchy for a while now, but it was behind the scenes and there was some hope of dialing it back, however slim. Now it’s nakedly out in the open. What if this kind of shit becomes the new normal? We’ve been worried that Trump will become a dictator, but this almost seems worse.
Debt will skyrocket. They will slash billions of dollars from federal spending under the guise of "efficiency," while simultaneously cutting taxes for corporations and millionaires. The result: the first trillionaires will emerge, and they won't be the oil sheikhs you expect.
it’s easy to be a trillionaire with four years of bad inflation when you start with 50B.
DOGE = austerity measures
Without saying austerity
Nah austerity is the excuse, it’s just an ideological purge.
Both austerity and purge are good.
I think what doge is doing should always be happening. According to the article the website doesn't have the rigor they're expecting. But then again, I never interpreted it as a double entry ledger for the public to review. They're moving fast and put in a position able to make the changes that many know should be made, but lacked the power to make the changes. As long as it's all legal, we should all be glad that there is opportunity for things to come to light. The article even confirms billions have been saved already. Sounds good to me, considering what some of the expenses were.
The fact that workers, in many cases new or probationary, sued for irreparable hardship, when many organizations go through layoffs every few years is exemplary of a sense of entitlement that has been calloused.
Right in line with Umberto Eco's item 3 in his list of common features of fascism:
"3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the...
Ok, but while I disagree with Musks actions, more than half of the 14 items don’t fit what’s currently happening.
Only meets HALF of the fascism warning signs you say? Nevermind then. Nothing to see here.
The point I think is that at least half could apply to nearly an government or group, I don't know who this guy is or why his rules are important and merit any discussion, but generally generic rules written generically that can be interpreted any which way aren't super helpful in any discussion.
Surely there is some critical threshold that indicates that we can reject the hypothesis that fascism isn't happening?
No. Because If you say it's happening you violate #4.
In his essay, Eco says no instance of fascism will present itself with all items. He starts out by saying that fascism is very hard to define, so the 14 item list is meant to be a soft guide more than an absolute rule book.
I am starting to accept that this is a conversation we are going to be having over and over again, even after Elon and Trump. We are rightly traumatised by the excesses of the past, so it's very easy to imagine that any slight will inevitably lead to full on fascism.
This last qualification of fascism could be key, it differentiates 20th century fascism to what we are seeing today. We don't yet know whether this new form of fascism is just as harmful. For instance, when debating about whether Elon—who meets many of the elements in Eco's list—is a nazi or not, people are having very different conversations. There is no nazi party Elon can be a member of so that's not what I've been interested in. For me it has been more about the possibility of Elon advocating the same extreme policies fascist parties did. We could say he shares some of the worldview as the white supremacists, but would he go as far as implementing a 'final solution' to remedy the diagnosis?
Every fascist leanings gets compared to Germany where it's more akin to Italy, East European or South American models of strong man and/or militaristic.
Everyone compares everyone to the worse so anything short of that gets way too much acceptance. I don't think Elon or the movement he's part of is full on Nazi not will become one. It's still bad and shameful.
Which ones don’t fit? Seems to me they’re all happening now.
I see all 14
I counted 3 that I would not apply, 2 can be argued. The rest is applicable just fine to what I see from the rethoric coming out of the US government.
To be fair, they are drawing from bad data so it shouldn't be a surprise.
Roughly 40 years of hard work of some entities, finally getting somewhere. Worrying and hope it doesn’t further spread to Europe.
Keeping Musk’s interests in mind helps clarify what’s going on. Scorching earth and constantly lying is the playbook for dismantling agencies with oversight into the companies he runs and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors (e.g. pulling the ladder up behind him after the DoE’s Tesla loan). The Canada/China tariffs will cripple other automakers who depend on trade while Tesla’s integrated manufacturing chain will leave them immune and provide a massive advantage. I don’t see any reason to put any stock into any motivation DOGE may have toward increasing governmental efficiency, it is a purposeful distraction.
Is there a specific thing DOGE did or said they'd do which has those effects or are you just making it up?
DOGE has destroyed several agencies that were investigating his companies including FAA (starlink), FDA(neurolink), NHTSA(tesla). I'm sure there are many more, but these instantly come to mind.
What do you mean destroyed? As far as I know they still exist?
Cut a lot of the funding and staff. In other words, we've exceeded regulatory capture and now the regulators (who are already captured) are being managed by DOGE. Regulatory capture now regulated by DOGE. It's unbelievable.
Existing is irrelevant. NATO still exists too.
Yup, that's basic class consciousness on Musk's part. The American people simply forgot that billionaires' interests are diametrically opposed to theirs, a fact they knew well in FDR's time. Hopefully this situation will act as a booster shot, and not slip into full-blow oligarchy.
He doesn't have "class consciousness." He has consciousness of his own interests. That is what pretty much everyone has.
Well no, why did the working class people vote for Trump then? Clearly they don't stand to benefit from any of this nonsense.
I have an Eastern European friend who has said that sometimes, in his country, they elect a madman to remind the political class who is actually in charge if they get too corrupt or stop serving the people. My best guess is that Trump is that madman.
I am not convinced this is a good strategy, but it is at least a strategy.
It’s Eastern Europe, not a region I want to share much in common with, including the need to elect insane people because their governments are that broken. If that’s where we are, I guess Putin got what he wanted.
Trump is the political class. He is the elite. What are you even talking about? His government has the most billionaire representation of any government ever, a group that is otherwise an extreme minority. He is the most self-serving politician I know.
You believing otherwise has me flabbergasted.
These criminals don't care, their goal is to spread FUD then rob the tax payers.
I for am shocked that something associated with Elon Musk would be riddled with mistakes.
Doesn't matter. It's a propaganda tool. Go look at Twitter: It's full of right-wingers latching onto obviously false information "proving" some sort of Trump/Musk narrative. Which then gets sanitized into news articles and media pieces. Which then becomes the reason why people who live in information deserts vote against their own interests, their communities interests, and general common sense.
“mistakes”
Except, these are not mistakes. This is every single Musk's company modus operandi.
Completely made up or inflated numbers, unrealistic timelines etc. Customers or investors buying into it, but if you look under the hood, outside of government subsides and contract, there is pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses.
He's just using the same playbook now, except when people will realize that the 5000$ DOGE checks are bullshit (btw, 5000 x ~150M taxpayers = 750 Billion $...) they may finally wake up.
> but if you look under the hood .. there is pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses.
There are many valid criticisms of Musk. Saying that he has not added any real value in his ventures, or that he doesn't really know how to make money, just destroys your credibility.
How so ?
Which company is making money ? Especially if you exclude government subsides and contracts ?
Tesla lost tons of money, and only recently (and probably for a very brief period of time) was profitable - mostly from various government subsides and help (through carbon credits, IRA for Tesla buyers etc). SpaceX so far did not make any profit (or more specifically they said they achieved profitability last year, but you would need to trust Musk with his word on that...) and is 90% dependent on government contracts. Twitter is a money furnace, so is Neuralink, Boring Company and xAI.
I didn't say he did not add 'real value'. Obviously these companies would not exist without him. I'm just saying that profitability wise, so far (and it's been a long time for most of them) they are not or barely profitable.
They won't be able to cut checks unless congress approves. They'll say they will cut checks, get sued and lose. They'll blame the judicial system and it will probably be a pretense to undermine that branch of government.
So far they have found pretty much no resistance. The few judges raising their voices are threatened with jail to make examples. Do not put too much faith in the strength of your institutions.
Why is this flagged? Even if the comment section isn't up to standards, the article should be relevant to everybody.
I've been posting a lot about this lately. Here are some recent posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130063
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051836
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
If you (or anyone) will read some of those and follow some of the links in them, you should get answers to all the common questions about this. If, after that, you have a question that hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
(Plus I'd like to know what it is! It's been a while since I've heard a new one.)
This is starting to look like a lost battle. Can we have a "US Politics" filter at least? Thanks.
If past experience is any guide, then (1) it's a fluctuation, albeit a large one, (2) it will pass, and (3) it would be a mistake to change the design of the site at one of these moments.
I'd be glad if you'd do something about the influx of trolls, like maybe requiring a few submissions before allowing comments. Right now it's easy to create an account and then just post slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting shadow banned (and those of us who have showdead turned on still get to see it).
Who posted slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting banned?
If you're talking about the account you mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143257, that account was banned from the day they started posting, and not one of their comments was ever publicly visible.
Yes, 'showdead' means you're signing up to see, among other things, the worst that the internet has to offer. I explained that in my other reply to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143611.
Can you not with these 'give me examples and we'll take a look at it' responses? You know as well as I do that there's a lot of driveby abuse accounts - anyone with Showdead turned on can see as much. Perhaps you could speak to the remedy I proposed instead.
I seem not to have made my point clearly, so I will try again. I'm not asking you for examples so I can "take a look at it". I'm saying that your claim is false.
> Right now it's easy to create an account and then just post slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting shadow banned
Between community moderation, mods, and software, I believe the vast majority of accounts posting slurs get banned quickly. However, if I'm mistaken and you're right, then HN must be replete with slurs (we are, after all, "doing nothing" about them in your view), and in that case it should be easy to find plenty of examples.
That's what I was asking you for. Let's see all these accounts that are "posting slurs on 30 or 40 threads without getting banned". If it's that easy, there ought to be plenty, no?
I'd be surprised if you could find even one. I'm aware of only one in the last few months, and that was a borderline case because its comments were getting killed for other reasons.
So far, the only account you've mentioned [1] is one that we banned on the day it started posting, none of whose comments ever made it out of the [dead] state. In other words, a counterexample. If you're going to make huge claims, I imagine most readers would want to see examples that illustrate your claim, not ones that contradict it.
I am not making a huge claim, the omnipresence of abusive trolls is obvious to anyone who uses HN regularly. I don't plan on wasting hours doing firebase API calls to build a case you will handwave away.
It'd be nice if you responded to the suggestion that imposing more friction would shift some of the burden onto the trolls instead of the regular users. Currently they are able to keep posting even after being 'banned'. You're not even forcing them to go through the minimal effort of creating another account.
I have 'showdead' enabled because people often make valuable contributions that get flagged or hidden, and which I would miss otherwise. Since I have it on, I also see that abusive trolling from brand new accounts is very common. If you were actually banning them, then they wouldn't be able to keep posting and would be forced to set up new accounts.
> I'd be glad if you'd do something about the influx of trolls
Mate, with all due respect, but the first few pages of your recent comments are mostly in US politics threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=anigbrowl
I understand you must be upset. But a bunch of us don't care anymore about another country's internal stuff. It's not even worth the schadenfreude. For us it's been a clown show for a very, very long time. Remember weapons of mass destruction? Remember when one side raised the alarm on electronic voting and then 15 years later it was the other side, and then 4 years later back to the first side? Remember the massive bailouts, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street? Remember Epstein? Borderline fascist pro-American exceptionalism Hollywood? Then ultra-woke self hating Hollywood? It's like a bad soap opera where the audience is numb to any further plot twist. Whatever happens, happens. Good luck. But please let us have this last forum not tainted with US politics. I'm sure there's plenty of welcoming threads on reddit, Facebook, X/BlueSky, and even YouTube comments.
Mate, with all due respect, but the first few pages of your recent comments are mostly in US politics threads.
Simply not true.
[flagged]
Either that or, you know, we want to keep Hacker News about tech. Lots of us don't want /r/politics here.
Posts about this from yesterday, with lots of additional links, if anyone wants to read about how we approach politics on HN:
Why is everything about their data access for example also being flagged? Sometimes there is a crossover between tech and politics so there needs to be some slack.
Not all—for example, there was this megathread a couple days ago:
DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43112084 - Feb 2025 (1644 comments)
Why not more? The short answer is that avoiding too much repetition is core to HN. For a longer answer, follow the links I posted elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645 - they'll give you more material on this than you could possibly want to read.
> Sometimes there is a crossover between tech and politics so there needs to be some slack.
That's how we look at it too. For more, see the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142682. These also point to years' worth of explanations (which you may or may not want), but all the common questions have been answered many times there.
HN isn't just about tech, it's also about hacking. And this article is definitely about hacking.
I wonder, at the risk of turning HN to a Reddit clone, wouldn't it make sense to at least a have a few simple categories/tags here?
Seems to me most people want to filter HN on "purely tech", "tech-adjacent news" (incl. politics) and "startups/business". Maybe if we had something like 3-5 folders to put content here, everyone would be happier.
Hacker News is not just about tech. There's plenty of discussion about philosophy, science, economics, health, hobbies and trivia.
I doubt we would have much to talk about here if Elon was not deeply involved in this storyline. There's plenty of government stuff that goes on without much to comment on that is Hacker News material.
So would you say a story like this one, ( it's not even worthwhile to post as it would be flagged...)
"NOAA scientists refuse to link warming weather to climate change" - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2469442-noaa-scientists...
Is this about Science OR politics OR politics changing science? And can you elaborate why it should not belong here?
Hacker News isn't about tech isn't about hackers. Right there in the name. Other systems besides tech systems can be hacked. What's happening with DOGE can be viewed as a hack of one of the biggest systems of all time. And it's ongoing. This article is chronicling part of that hack, and I can't believe the tech minds at HN aren't more interested in it.
That is who all the pro homeschool posts stayed. Or pro Musk posts.
then why is it always the same handful of people saying that
Oh that doge. Thought this would be about the cryptocurrency.
I would not be surprised at all if the two somehow became even more related in the near future.
Why is this flagged?
I answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645.
If you take a look at the links there, and still have a question that hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
[flagged]
Since I just recently asked you to stop posting unsubstantive flamebait and you've continued to do it non-stop, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. I suppose I'd better add that (1) no, this has nothing to do with your political views, and (2) yes, we ban accounts who are doing the same thing with different politics. Oh and (3) yes, if other accounts keep doing this after we ask them to stop, we'll end up banning them as well.
Macro trends notwithstanding (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), the amount of low-quality nastiness that HN has been hosting lately is a serious problem and we're not going to let it continue.
Most of that user's comments seem substantive to me, even if they're not always agreeable.
Maybe you should be focusing more effort on users like this one, who has been posing nothing but abuse for a month: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=13_9_7_7_5_18
Sure their posts are hidden now, but why are they able to post at all? Why is anyone able to post like this? It's not good for the site, but it's endemic. Equating opinionated and acerbic comments like the one above with flamebait while saying and doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior makes no sense, and is not good for HN.
> Maybe you should be focusing more effort on users like this one, who has been posing nothing but abuse for a month
That account has been banned since the day it was created. Its comments have never been anything but [dead]. That's the maximum penalty that exists on HN. Several accounts related to that one are also banned. This is standard.
(For readers who don't have "showdead" turned on in their profile: the account anigbrowl mentioned has been posting things like "Shut up, $SLUR", "Fuck off, $SLUR", and worse. They are banned and all their comments are killed automatically. This means that no one sees them unless they turn the 'showdead' setting on in their profile. Any user is welcome to turn that setting on, but please don't forget that if you do, you're signing up to see the worst that the internet has to offer on HN.)
Banned accounts can continue to post, but their comments are killed by default. Why? Because otherwise they'd just create new accounts and pick up where they left off. Since new accounts are unbanned at first, there would be a time lag before we could catch those and ban them again. In the meantime, more abusive posts would get through.
In other words, allowing banned accounts to post (but making their posts default-invisible) is the way to minimize their effect on a large open forum like HN, where there's no barrier to creating accounts. Attempting to restrict them further would just end up exposing more people to the abusive posts.
HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were "doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I was a little taken aback at your assumption there.
I agree, of course, that 13_9_7_7_5_18's posts were worse than computerthings's. That's why the former was banned immediately and the latter only after we warned them (many warnings, actually, if you count previous accounts that we banned) and only after they'd broken the site guidelines many times.
> Banned accounts can continue to post, but their comments are killed by default. Why? Because otherwise they'd just create new accounts and pick up where they left off. Since new accounts are unbanned at first, there would be a time lag before we could catch those and ban them again. In the meantime, more abusive posts would get through.
I had no idea this is how bans work on HN and it is a pretty clever moderation strategy -- although it somewhat reminds me of a black mirror episode O_o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)
In other words, allowing banned accounts to post (but making their posts default-invisible) is the way to minimize their effect on a large open forum like HN, where there's no barrier to creating accounts. Attempting to restrict them further would just end up exposing more people to the abusive posts.
But maybe there should be some friction to creating accounts, like requiring a few worthwhile submissions before granting commenting privileges (which is already how it works with downvoting and flagging), or revealing the email addresses of persistently abusive accounts. Just wiping he accounts and forcing them to create new ones increases the friction, which lowers the incentive to keep doing it.
HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were "doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I'm a little taken aback at your assumption that we were doing nothing about these.
But you're not, really. Shadowbanning abuse accounts with a keyword filter is the weakest possible response, and that's why there's an endless influx of them. Since you can't really impose consequences (because usage is anonymous, any email address will do and VPNs make it impossible to track abusers), there should be some more friction to make casual abuse a less attractive pastime.
Can I add: being disagreeable is a bigger problem on threads like these than it is on threads with less volatile subjects.
I hope all this is not taking a toll on you. Stay healthy, Dang. You are doing a very good job. You can't make everybody happy.
This whole place only stands up because of dang. Someday (too) soon, AI moderators will be all we have to keep the peace in our forums... and dang is our most precious training resource. I'm grateful he's so transparent in explaining his process.
You also said this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113282 breaks site guidelines. You just call things "flamebait" and that's that.
> no, this has nothing to do with your political views
Who believes that at this point? Speak up.
> Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
If you want to order me to tolerate the fascism apologists has been having a field day on this site since over a month, you have to say that to my face. You do not have the personal capital or credibility to say "please". You made your bed, you sided with the anonymous, hooded executioners; we heard it the first time, now STFU already! And I'll speak my mind throttled to the showdead crowd, and if you make that impossible, of course I'll make new accounts. I'll make fake websites to have fake emails at JUST to not take orders from you.
It's criticizing the self-proclamed god elon musk. It's unofficially forbidden here to criticize a few people (elon musk, sam altman, etc), and asslickers are flagging such threads.
This topic is by far the most-discussed right now, and the opinions you favor (to judge by this post at least) are by far the most-expressed. Yet somehow it still ends up feeling as if they are forbidden! I call this the "nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded" theory of HN threads (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
The phenomenon isn't as paradoxical as it seems (it has a fairly simple explanation), but it's striking to encounter.
destroying institutions is the plan. it's a cynical party. the only time "build" is mentioned is border walls. unfortunately "great" countries aren't BUILT on fear and cynicism.
The plan is not destroying, but taking over. Once the cut narrative is fulfilled, these institutions will regrow with Don King's own people.
Despite DDoS on the wave length, DOGE will not really gain much in the end, the real matter to balance the sheet will come from selling Ukraine which obviously takes some time to materialize.
You missed the part where they're deleting a ton of scientific papers from government sites.
it takes time and resources to review them one by one, so once the King restaffed these institutions, some of these papers will be back, as long as they are not inconvenient for the King.
"U.S. Government Removing EV Chargers From All Federal Buildings Because They Are ‘Not Mission-Critical" - https://electrek.co/2025/02/21/trump-to-shut-down-all-8000-e...
Well seems like a great opportunity to use Tesla chargers and directly increase Tesla revenue using public money.
Nope. King Trump has also ordered all of the government's electric vehicles to be sold/scrapped.
That's how you make government more efficient: Scrap the brand new fleet you have and buy another brand new fleet.
EVs are also literally 4x as efficient as ICE.
I posted that article yesterday and it was flagged almost immediately
Just read that the Justice Department deleted the database tracking federal police misconduct. Good luck USA.
I'm still not sold on this. I can't yet distinguish if the plan is to get rid of institutions or to gut what's their and rebuild it how the want it.
We may not end up with a smaller government, just a different one.
The Republican plan for the federal government for decades has been to try to kneecap various agencies and departments so fully that they can't function well, go "look how poorly they operate! Time to close it down and let private sector handle it!"
That wouldn't be the goal though, just the means to their end. The goal would have to be shrinking the government, for example, or to move authority out to the private sector.
The entire party is psychos wanting to kneecap departments just to watch them bleed.
It's called Starve The Beast
All you have to do is read project 2025 and you will know all their plans and reasoning for Stage 1 of fascism
That's the Heritage Foundation christo-fascist plan. Unfortunately they've teamed up with the mad Libertarian wing of the Republicans who turn up in places like HN and complain that all taxation is theft and are ready to burn the country to the ground because they've been so well programmed by propaganda that originally just wanted to build support for a tax cut for the already rich but metastasized into a superpower destroying cult of insanity.
Their stated goals are lower taxes, less regulation, less government presence. What they want bigger is private riches through industry and church. They all believe this, voter and representative.
What part do you think gets built back? Maybe the FBI, when they’re sure it can be weaponized against their enemies.
> What part do you think gets built back?
I wouldn't even begin to guess. This has all moved so quickly that I've yet to find what seems to be a reliable source on what is actually changing.
My point, though, was only that we've so far seen moves to reduce headcount and pause programs. That could be the first step to closing down departments entirely, but it could also be the first step to rebuilding their own version of that department.
They’ve moved quickly, but this has all been in planning for decades. Their beliefs and motivations are all out there for everyone to see.
There’s nothing to suggest they want to rebuild.
Interesting, that hasn't been my experience of the Republican party over the last few decades.
I grew up over that time in a very red part of the country.
In the 90s I always heard of the republican party as the party of small government and individual freedoms.
Starting at least with Bush/Cheney that didn't line up. The party seemed to want a larger military budget, increased federal powers, and a stronger executive branch.
Republican voters I knew largely followed that pattern. They didn't want to see departments closed or authority removed from the government. They just wanted their views written into law. Abortion is a great example, the republican party strongly pushed for regulating what individuals could or could not do, very few were arguing that abortion rights were outside the federal government's authority.
GOP hasn't been that since Nixon, but they pretend to be.
https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santa...
Yes but these aren’t “spend more money on the department of X” laws or ideas. Other than military and law enforcement, which I already mentioned. Bush consolidating power under DHS and expanding wiretaps is of course Republican party values.
Bush cut funding for education and pushed it to private schools. He cut antipoverty initiatives and pushed funding to church groups. Cut funding for stem cell research. And of course cut taxes for the rich.
The antiabortion response is to cut funds to anything touching abortion (not, say, provide more support to mothers.) And make way for expanded power over reproductive rights at the state level.
> The antiabortion response is to cut funds to anything touching abortion
The voters I know who vote primarily on this issue want a law on the books banning abortions, they don't want to just defund programs.
By no means does that mean I can extend that view to other voters, but I have yet to hear anyone who feels strongly pro-life argue only for defunding.
That is also not a “spend more money on a department of prolife”type of idea.
The question was will they build back, remember? A ban isn’t rebuilding anything.
A ban on abortions, in this example, would be codifying the government's legal authority to make such a decision.
That's first order building, there is no need for rebuilding in that scenario.
With regards to the broader DOGE topic, they aren't banning anything yet that I've seen outside of the authority that we already granted the executive branch. I don't necessarily agree with what they're doing, but from the bits and pieces I can pull out of largely political reporting it does seem like they're staying within the bounds of what the executive branch is technically allowed to do.
There will be a legal debate whether there are within the rules to not spend money budgeted by congress. That will come down to an opinion whether the argument that departments are not acting in good faith or reasonably executing their mandate is found by the courts to be reasonable.
Personal freedom, except for things they don't like and except for people they don't like. It was always like that.
That being said, right now there was enough written over years by hard core conservatives and specifically by heritage foundation and in project 2025 to know what they want.
The same people were not to remove abortion protection either, I still remember how everyone and his brother framed that worry as paranoid ... two years before the exact same people did it.
To be fair, we never really had abortion protections. A supreme court ruling isn't law, its precedent. Precedent can be challenged much easier and can be superseded by legislation.
For sure, when they say they want to close down departments, I'm sure they don't mean it. I see the insanity of their actions and, I too, find comfort in pretending that there is going to be something stable left afterwards /s/
> Their stated goals are lower taxes, less regulation, less government presence.
And if you believe Project 2025, which I do, however the Trump campaign tried to halfheartedly distance itself from them, lower education:
Project 2025 talks of how children finishing school should be looking more to "buying a house and starting a family" than college. Of course, how the average 18 year old with a high school education and single income (because homeschooling is also a very big goal of Project 2025) is meant to buy this house is left as an exercise for the (uneducated) reader. The important thing is less education and more future "Warriors for Christ" (as someone I know on my FB feed calls their children).
I haven't read 2025 so I'm going only off what you have here.
I think a strong argument could be made that an 18 year old with a strong work ethic should be able to get a job that allows them to afford a house in a reasonable timeline.
I don't have any expectation that's actually what 2025 argues, but it would be a good ideal. Why shouldn't a kid out of high school willing to work hard be able to save up for a house and a family in a reasonable amount of time? Should we gate keep that behind college degrees or similar?
I would agree. Just as I believe minimum wage isn't "only applicable to teenagers working part time after school".
But yes, P2025's goal has nothing to do with the wellbeing of said school leaver. They specifically want people to be less educated (easier to manipulate and persuade), and are all about raising as many Christian children as possible to "stack the vote".
It is not to have a larger/smaller government. The plan is to privatize as much as possible. I mentioned this in another comment: 'Elon has already tweeted "The safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter. SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer"'
I believe the number of air incidents has been 2 a week in the last month. Any time now the government just will be ready to declare FAA as a disaster of the previous regimes and that Tech industries will be better at running the admin for the aviation sector.
I can't recall when government was so enthusiastic about rooting out fraud. I kind of like this, and I want the government to actively pursue fraud and mismanagement. Feels like it always gets buried in some bureaucratic report.
Unless there's a detailed report about the specific fraud being stopped, there's nothing. So far it seems people are happy to stop "fraud" as in "things they don't like and won't justify". Tweets don't count.
It seems like a reasonable opinion for a voter to agree with things they don't like to be stopped though.
Maybe the voter doesn't actually care about fraud, but why shouldn't they appreciate having fewer of their tax dollars being spent on things they don't even agree with?
It's a short term strategy though. If you go with "doesn't matter if it's true if it benefits me", the next "fraud" to be removed may be yours/you. And someone else will like it too.
Politics is full of short term strategies.
I agree that's a bad approach in almost every situation, but it is par for the course. That isn't to say its okay, but there are worse examples of short term strategies to take issue with if that's the concern.
> why shouldn't they appreciate having fewer of their tax dollars being spent on things they don't even agree with?
Democracy doesn’t mean we all agree.
Of course. Democracy does mean we make our bed and then have to sleep in it though.
Assuming we do have a democracy today (I'd argue that's questionable for many reasons), a majority of voters and electoral college representatives voted for Trump.
Trump so far is doing many of the things he said he would do. For better or worse our democracy picked this. If it goes poorly we can only blame ourselves.
> Assuming we do have a democracy today (I'd argue that's questionable for many reasons), a majority of voters and electoral college representatives voted for Trump.
It's not a winner take all system. If a bunch of racists get elected to office, they can't just claim a "mandate" and declare the Civil Right Act null and void by refusing to enforce it. The President enforces all the laws, even the ones his voters don't support. If he wants to change them, he can sign a bill into law, he can veto a bill, but he can't pick and choose to enforce just Republican passed laws.
If a bunch of racists run on such ideas and say that's what they will do, and they win an election what are we supposed to do?
We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.
If that's true why have a constitution and laws limiting the power of the government? Using your logic, every decision made by the government is fine.
If the majority runs on cancelling democracy itself (e.g. that if they're elected there will be no more elections and they will stay in power), and they gain a small majority, is it fine for them to now cancel all elections in the future?
If a party runs on (say) taking the homes of those that voted for the opposition, do you think that it's fine if they do it if they get in power? Maybe put them in jails or camps?
Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
> If that's true why have a constitution and laws limiting the power of the government? Using your logic, every decision made by the government is fine.
For sure, laws limiting power are extremely important. My point is simply that if a person or members of a party get elected in numbers to change that, and were clear of their intentions with voters, its totally within Democratic principles for the laws to be changed.
Abe Lincoln changed the laws with regards to slavery. He was elected by popular vote but that meant he went against a sizeable minority of voters and fundamentally changed laws limiting powers and rights. I don't see any problem with that. To be clear, I'm not drawing any comparison directly between Lincoln and any other politician today.
> Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
Democracy is a political model for how to elect those in charge. The ideals built into the US bill of rights are in addition to democracy, not part of it directly. You can democratically elect a bigot for example, but the election was still democratically held.
> My point is simply that if a person or members of a party get elected in numbers to change that, and were clear of their intentions with voters, its totally within Democratic principles for the laws to be changed.
Not, it's not. If members of a party get elected to remove the ability of their opposition or some of their opposition to vote or cancel the next democratic elections that's in fact undemocratic. Especially in a system like in the US where even without an actual majority of votes you can get the presidency or a majority in the legislative branch.
If a party runs on the platform of ending democracy, and they win a fair election, I don't know of any safety mechanisms in democracy itself that prevent that.
There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
Ignoring whether we should choose to defend democracy in that scenario (I would), what do you see as the mechanism built into democracy that stops it?
> If a party runs on the platform of ending democracy, and they win a fair election, I don't know of any safety mechanisms in democracy itself that prevent that.
Yes there are, laws requiring super majority, for example, to change, or counter. You even state so yourself:
> There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
These changes need "enough support", because there is protection built in the system - so a majority is not enough. Other examples of protection are the Judicial branch having the power to cancel illegal legislation, EOs and other government decisions, the President having the power to veto bills. All of these supposedly provide a checks and balances system, although it is of course imperfect, especially with gerrymandering or the way that the Supreme Court is built (in my opinion life tenure is a bad idea, the court itself needs more members, and the way the members are selected is too politically oriented).
> We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.
If you have a super-majority that supports extremes that's a whole different ball game. You originally talked about "majority", and how that's the be all end all of democracy. For example, in the US, to change the constitution you'd super majority on the Federal level, as well as (IIRC) majority in 75% of the states.
Nonetheless, everything I've stated is of course based on police/army that will listen to the law and act accordingly. If the people with guns/tanks/advanced weapons act in an illegal way and against the system, of course the law is worthless.
Sure, I was a bit loose in my use of the term "majority" earlier though we hadn't come to this level of detail.
My point remains, though. There is a point at which democracy has no guardrails to prevent a democratic overthrow of the system. Call it a majority, super majority, 60% vote, or whatever the system in place decides. With enough support a democratic system can be thrown out in an entirely democratic election.
> We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system
We did not, in fact, pick unlimited democracy, largely because never in the history of the country has there been a trust that giving unlimited power to an unchecked, potentially transitory, majority was a good idea. It's why we have Constitutional limits on government. Its why we have dual sovereignty. It's why we have separation of powers in the federal government. It's why we have staggered elections to the Senate. It's why we tend to add additional Constitutional limits on government over time, not fewer.
The history of American involves a fairly intense, often quite violent, debate about these issues. There is no simple settled comprehensive position on what should be within the scope of majoritarian control and what needs to be kept outside of it (and which method should be used to do that.)
Pretending that there is a simple consensus around unchecked majoritarianism, or that the choice is between unchecked majoritarianism and something radically different from the Constitutionally-limited representative democracy the US has had, misguided if not actually dishonest.
Constitutional limits and our system of checks and balances have nothing directly to do with democracy.
Democracy is a process of how leaders are elected, that's it. How our government is structured, our three branches, etc is not part of democracy - those are details of how we implemented a government of democratically elected officials (well, as democratically as it can be considered in a democratic republic with our electoral college system).
> Constitutional limits and our system of checks and balances have nothing directly to do with democracy.
They have to do with the actual system of government we've chosen in the United States, which is not naive majoritarianism; either that system is a form of democracy (which it would be by the definitions usually used in modern discussions of real political systems), in which case it disproves the premise "We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules", or it is not, and it makes the full argument, "We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system" irrelevant because, in that case, we have already chosen a different system, and wouldn't need to go back to the drawing board simply because we had a problem with naive majoritarianism -- since rejection of that was baked in from the start.
It sounds like we're making the same argument at this point. We aren't really a democracy and we don't want one, in part because from the beginning those in charge have worried about "the mob" and didn't want to actually allow us to vote and have the majority opinion win unchecked.
Democracy does not mean majority does whatever they want. The Constitution says the majority has to follow the law, even if the law was passed by the people currently in the minority. If they want to change the law they have that power, but they can't just break the law.
Of course, existing laws do limit what that group would do. If they won in sufficient numbers though, laws on the books would allow them to change the laws restricting them.
I'm not saying its a good thing, just how it works. True democracy is a leap of faith, you need to trust that most people are generally good and are generally well intended.
I would printout that they spent a lot of effort to deny they are racists. Even now as they are enacting long term plans their supporters claim it is something else.
Trump did not run on "I will anex canada, make inflation higher, order damm release and slash department of education".
Some parts he run at - he promised to harm trans and he is delivering.
I could have sworn he, or those very closely circled around him, talked specifically about education and the need to reform DoE. I don't remember for sure now, honestly the campaigns feels like years ago already.
He didn't run on annexing Canada, he almost certainly doesn't want to though. Trump is a bully and just likes to play cheap games when negotiating. He raised the idea of making Canada a state while also pushing hard on border issues and tariffs. He was just fainting there to try to gain the upper hand.
Inflation is a joke with him. He's completely contradictory there, though that is pretty common. I don't think Trump understands or cares about inflation, it just polls well. He did run on tariffs though, and any voter didn't understand that leads to inflation can only blame themselves.
De-facto, he can until Congress impeaches and removes him for shirking his office.
Trump doesn't see that as a likely outcome.
They aren't rooting out fraud. They have published their intentions over and over.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
What fraud has this "rooted out"?
For you, is it the chart of 100+ aged in Social Security and the lies that Mosk et all push about Social Security?
There were the boring "bureaucratic reports" about this issue, which shows there was no fraud. https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-deceased...
Don't let reality bring you down tho!
There have been plenty of claims of specific waster and fraud found. The problem is knowing what is actually true and accurate right now. Things have been moving quickly and its become such a political firestorm that it's extremely difficult to find unbiased reporting.
Can you cite them? I reviewed their list and found none.
Therefore, claims of waste and fraud should be assumed false until proven otherwise, and confirmed by an unbiased third party.
I'd tweak that slightly. I think they should be considered unproven or unsubstantiated, that doesn't make them false.
Assuming they're false because they haven't been nearly immediately proven publicly makes it too easy for those concerns and allegations to be written off and ignored.
A guy with history of lies including false accusation of pedophilia working for a guy who lies constantly are not a duo to be trusted.
A potential fact coming from an untrustworthy person isn't immediately false. An untrustworthy person can be right and a trustworthy can be wrong.
The point is that we can't consider a claim true or false. We need evidence to prove it is true, and we can never really prove its false unless we can see all information that could possibly be related to the question.
I don't personally see the government release all information that could possibly be related to any question of fraud or abuse, so we're left either proving it true or considering it unsubstantiated or unproven.
> A potential fact coming from an untrustworthy person isn't immediately false. An untrustworthy person can be right and a trustworthy can be wrong.
An untrustworthy person is trying to convince you of something, and has access and control of all the information to substantiate everything he's saying. Why is anything left unproven? Because he's relying on information asymmetry to confound you. It's the same thing he did with the so-called "Twitter Files", where he selectively leaked one-sided information to spin a narrative. He's doing the same thing with Doge and people are falling for it. Probably the same ones who fell for the "Twitter files".
Proven liars rely on credulous people like yourself to continue operating once their lies are widely known. That's why when such a liar has power, the only rational stance is extreme skepticism until, like I said, an independent verification can be obtained. Otherwise you open yourself to be taken advantage of.
> I don't personally see the government release all information that could possibly be related to any question of fraud or abuse
We're not asking for that kind of a standard. I would be satisfied with releasing the necessary information that would be sufficient in proving specific questions of fraud raised by Musk to the public. Trusted third parties with appropriate clearances can handle sensitive information, and it can be appropriately redacted for public consumption.
> An untrustworthy person is trying to convince you of something, and has access and control of all the information to substantiate everything he's saying. Why is anything left unproven?
Not totally relevant here, but I find it interesting that this description is literally how our legal system works. The prosecutor is trying to convince the jury of something and the prosecutor holds all their potential evidence, deciding for themselves what to deem relevant or exculpatory.
> We're not asking for that kind of a standard. I would be satisfied with releasing the necessary information that would be sufficient in proving specific questions of fraud raised by Musk to the public.
Agreed, that was actually what I meant in the other option I gave - they can prove the claim true by making public limited facts. I only raised that all related information would have to be released if the goal is to prove the claim false, which it sounds like you don't want or expect.
I would fully expect them to eventually release proof of fraud claims, until then I consider them claims of fraud that are so far unproven.
> I would fully expect them to eventually release proof of fraud claims
How long would you wait for them to provide this evidence before deciding they are trying to hoodwink you by withholding it?
Musk et al have been caught lying several times here.
It's fair to treat everything they say in this realm as a lie until proven otherwise, or until they work to build a modicum of trust.
Doesn't that apply to all, or nearly all, politicians at the federal level?
Even the names they give major bills are technically a lie, any legislator that supports or votes for it is lying. Campaign speeches and promises are riddled with lies and omissions. Presidents lie while in office.
I don't mean to play whataboutism here. I'm all for calling out lying politicians here, but I'd extend that to everyone that fits the bill.
A government run by a convicted felon... It all sounds very shizophrenic.
I don't like trump and have never voted for him, but I would take someone convicted of financial or business ethics crimes over Andrew Jackson (not a felon, but damn he was a bad person).
The "convicted" piece carries a lot of weight here too. Plenty of presidents have done terrible things but were never convicted.
I also would be in favor of rooting out fraud and even closing many of the departments we have today (along with getting rid of the legal authority that allowed them).
When a strongman figure is in charge yelling one thing, though, I do always look in the other direction. Its like a magic show, look where they want to distract you from rather than what they're pointing at.
I'll be very interested to see where this ends up, and a little surprised if its an honest attempt to find fraud and shrink the government or balance the budget.
> I can't recall when government was so enthusiastic about rooting out fraud.
They’re very enthusiastic about rooting out. The fraud is still missing, however.
Do you expect that there isn't fraud in the $4.92T budget, or that it just hasn't been found or proven publicly yet?
There isn’t anything like the amount of it being promised, and gutting the auditing and staffing for programs is the last thing you’d do if that’s your concern.
For example, Musk lied about social security but the records he mentioned were reported by the SSA IG years before. They concluded there wasn’t much fraud because over 98% of the old records weren’t receiving money (and hadn’t made contributions in over 50 years) and it was noted that cleaning them up would cost significantly more than it could possibly save.
Oh, I’m certain there’s fraud. Now, is there a higher percentage of fraud in what he is cutting—or in what he is leaving behind? That is an open question.
If institutions can only be created and never destroyed, how many institutions per person would we end up with?
They can be dismantled. By Congress who created them in the first place and gave the president and his executive only a limited range of powers.
Sounds like waste, fraud, and abuse to me
and isn't annual budget $2,400 billion?
so basically without caution or care
or actually evaluating gains vs investments just slash and burn
scorched earth, destroying lives
to save 55 out of 2400 billion?
which might only really be 7 billion "saved" ?
How about the $10 million per month to go play golf?
Or $20 million to watch half the superbowl and leave?
That $20 million number does not pass the sniff test.
you should say, the $0.01 billion to play golf. switching to millions makes it look like more and is directly against your own point.
Now they're fact checking the government. About time.
Another thread getting flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138522
US debt is 124% of GDP. That's not as high as UK debt after WWII, 270%, which impoverished the country that had been at the top of the world. But combined with an aging population that has more people than ever hailing from the historically low-achievement global south, you can expect some standard of living adjustment to occur. Your grandparents had a house by your age, and the economic ability to raise a family. You get to slave for an apartment and a wife who works for another man. Historically, there were names for that economic arrangement and the class of people who were condemned to it.
That Trump I and Biden did not have an effort like DOGE (which does not have Congressional support and therefore should not yet be enough to give serious people hope) shows how fundamentally unserious both of those administrations were. I hope that Musk can find a way to make it successful somehow. But if he does, it will break 1000x the number of eggs that you've seen him breaking so far.
I love this reply. It's lots of serious words about the debt, and it ignores that Trump and the R party are currently trying to balloon the debt for their tax breaks.
Inflation and the US bond market will quickly sort this out. It is going to be beautiful and terrifying at the same time, the same way a cosmic collision is.
Quickly? Countries that get into really serious debt problems more often never seem to come out of the catastrophe. This is generation-ruining stuff.
In fact the reply specifically criticizes Trump I, the administration that passed those tax breaks.
Whether you consider yourself either a Democrat or a Republican, this is not a problem that continued party politics can solve.
I see one side curbing the debt and one side ballooning it... definitely a both sides issue!
> Whether you consider yourself either a Democrat or a Republican,
Facts don't bend to party lines, and I pity those who let political loyalty eclipse objective reasoning.
Could you please stop using HN primarily for political battle? You've been doing this a ton lately, as well as breaking the site guidelines in other ways. Regardless of how right you are or feel you are, this is not what HN is for, and we end up banning accounts that keep doing it (regardless of what their politics happen to be).
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43141858
> You've been doing this a ton lately, as well as breaking the site guidelines in other ways.
You can't throw an accusation like this with further substantiation. I come to respect your difficult work, but this comment is a huge disappointment.
> You can't throw an accusation like this with further substantiation
That's fair! But I don't know which part you mean—the "doing a ton of political battle" part, or the "breaking the site guidelines in other ways" part? I'm going to assume the latter because the former seems obvious.
If that's what you're asking about, these are the comments I was referring to:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138527
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43127613
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43127331
I wouldn't have made that claim without checking it first. Sometimes I include links like that in mod replies, but sometimes there just isn't time.
The main problem, however, is the part about using HN primarily for political battle. That's why I included https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
More importantly, I'm sorry that my comment left you feeling accused. I feel accused a lot as well and I know it doesn't feel good.
Almost every presidency has taken more or less responisble effors to minimize spending. But they werent aimed at people who had prosecuted those in power, targetted at regulation agencies for the president's oligarch cronies, racially targetted, or driven by outsiders with no experience:
Initiated under President Jimmy Carter in 1977, Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) required agencies to justify their budgets from scratch rather than just adjusting from the previous year.
President Ronald Reagan pushed for privatization, deregulation, and reduced federal spending.
The Grace Commission (1982-1984), led by businessman J. Peter Grace, was tasked with identifying inefficiencies in government.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton launched the National Performance Review (later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government), led by Vice President Al Gore.
The NPR aimed to make government "work better and cost less" by cutting red tape, streamlining bureaucracy, and increasing customer service.
Key successes included shifting more government services online, consolidating purchasing, and reducing federal workforce size.
Launched by President George W. Bush in 2001, the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) focused on:
Strategic management of human capital
Competitive sourcing (increasing private-sector competition for government contracts)
Financial performance improvements
E-Government expansion (improving federal websites and online services)
Budget and performance integration
2010s: DATA Act & Digital Transformation
President Barack Obama signed the DATA Act (2014), which aimed to improve transparency and accountability in government spending.
Obama also created the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and 18F, teams dedicated to modernizing government technology.
The Trump administration’s PMA (2018) emphasized IT modernization, data transparency, and a shift to "shared services", where multiple agencies use the same administrative systems.
The Biden administration has continued these efforts, focusing on AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation, as well as improving citizen-facing services like healthcare and tax processing.
And these are the people lying about self driving cars
With it's massive history of bias and credibility issues, I don't trust the source of this story. Sorry.
Tbf, saying they did cut “some billions” as a group of unpaid or low paid 20-somethings is fantastic returns
I like that the focus is on the issues with the disruptors that have been running for a few weeks, not the egregious spending for decades.
One could agree with the goals of reducing government spending and still argue that "the disruptors" are moving too fast and breaking too many things.
And illegally
Sure, where are the nytimes articles that praise and highlight the good cuts?
You wanna list those out? So far all I've seen is cutting of body parts to lose weight.
They don't always say negative things, there was positive article praising the success of Elon Musk in promoting Doge-scam:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/technology/dogecoin-bitco...
This disruption are not about spending though.
In their own words what it is about:
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
don't get fooled by the disruptor narrative, it might very well be just pretentious immaturity
Always was.
Gives me hope that I too one day can benefit from all my psychological flaws
What's wrong with evidence?
I personally wouldn't want my government run by unchecked people who get the value of something off by three orders of magnitude. In a meritocracy private company someone confusing 8M with 8B is at best put in a closet job. More likely getting fired, and probably getting sued. When Jerome Kerviel was off by 5B he went to prison.
By unchecked, do you mean appointed by the democratically elected president and under intense media scrutiny ?
Are you seeing evidence that scrutiny is making DOGE more accountable?
Unchecked means without oversight and without the checks and balances.
The various lawsuits against the actions in the last month alone show a blatant disregard for process and legal procedure.
The media coverage I have seen falls into these 2 categories. 1. Declaration of great success in short one liners. This comes without evidence every time. This comes as tweets or from the administration. 2. When evidence is looked into we see that the numbers fall short, the "alleged" corruption is not corruption at all or the entire claim is a falsehood.
People regularly discuss the debt, this is a strawman.
There is a dual point:
- many of the organizations cut certainly have done evil which the average American would not support.
- I do not expect Trump to do less evil. I expect him simply to command it more directly.
That egregious spending bears a family resemblance to the malfeasance that cost Trump the 2020 election and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
I bet back in the day you were the complaining about 200000$ toilet seats in Iraq. Now that’s it’s not on your side of politics it’s a fabrication
Both sides for the past decades have been terrible.
It's fun to put thoughts in other people's heads!
I'll try.
I bet back in the day you were eating babies.
Fun!
I don't doubt there is waste in the federal government. I also don't doubt it is largely in programs that tend tend to be lavishly funded, not squeezed to death, so agricultural subsidies, construction projects, and defense. These are programs conservatives love. DOGE is concentrating its "waste, fraud, and abuse cutting" to ideological enemies. In other words, it isn't about finding and cutting waste or fraud; it's about the ideological capture and remolding of government outside of any framework of accountability or democratic input.
A lovely example of their creative approach to their alleged project:
> In another case, DOGE claimed $232 million in savings on a contract providing information technology support to the Social Security Administration. But The Intercept reported that only a sliver of the contract was canceled — a program to let users mark their gender as “X” — bringing the actual savings closer to $560,000.
They lie about what they accomplished, and what they did accomplish was just performative cruelty with negligible effect on the budget.
And honestly it’s been both parties who have been more than happy to pay lip service to the problem but instead of paring things add additional oversight that has no enforcement power so they only add more weight to the bureaucracy with a few reports no one reads to show for. In the face of deficits, they don’t retrench as individuals and private entities have to.
Totally agree. I think the debt is at 100k per taxpayer. Either taxes or inflation will have to be used to pay that.
> Either taxes or inflation will have to be used to pay that.
Or the .01% class who own the debt could get burned. Sometimes that happens when you make a bad bet, you know?
Now we have the experts advocating for default... truly mindboggling stupidity.
Well I know this - if the 'smart' option is to have every American born into crippling generational debt, I want no part of it.
And I know that when inequality reaches these sorts of levels, heads have a tendency to roll.
One way or another, some form of jubilee is gonna be necessary for a sustainable future.
Debt goes up during republican goverment and down during democratic one, so anyone who cares for it would not vote for conservatives.
Nor for Trump whose lifetime history is to make debt go up and then fail upwards.
Biden added 1 trillion dollars every 100 days to the debt in the last year. Not in war or recession.
He used inflation to hide the issue in the price of everything else on top of that.
You have to be blindly partisan to be unable to recognize basic facts about the debt load and that republican governments are responsible for the vast majority of it.
both parties invoked in highly assymetrical situation is getting old.
Who in the Repubs doesn’t like spending? Like maybe three of them?
You forget they talk about responsible budgeting when Dems are in office. Talk talk talk. Then they balloon the debt when they're running the show. Sure did talk though...
The trashing of a (hopefully) dying octopus.
hopefully to be replaced by something less rotten
it won't be lol, this is the capitalist class stripping the copper out of the walls.
I would like to have a substitative discussion of how to validate the claims that DOGE is not saving as much as they claim.
Should I trust the Intercept's article [1] that New York times is referring to?
I guess a larger point is that NY Times wants to their readers to focus on particular instances where Doge, they believe, they miscalculated their impact on waste.
But, in my mind, does not change the overall intend of Doge's remit, the short term and long term benefits of improving organization efficiencies, reducing corruption, and reducing federal budget.
50 years from now, the next generation will be looking at these times, and these efforts -- as a rare example of positive, transformational polices, a bloodless revolution of the common sense defeating the monster of corruption, selective persecutions, identity politics and senseless wars.