No, the underlying problem is that not enough people all care about cutting the same government spending. If I want to cut my personal spending by 20% next yea

No, the underlying problem is that not enough people all care about cutting the same government spending. If I want to cut my personal spending by 20% next year I can't just wake up on January 1 and do it in one step. I need to figure out what exactly it is I'm going to not buy or pay less for next year. Likewise, Congress can't just pass a law to spend 20% less without identifying exactly what it is going to spend less on and how. Getting people to agree on those particulars is the problem. What makes it worse is that the things you might get wide agreement on cutting generally are things that would save negligible amounts of money. Also, even people who care a lot about the government (one way or the other) generally aren't willing spend time learning all the details of what the government is spending money on. Its really complicated and boring and I think people (especially us hn readers) would rather think of the problem at a higher level of abstraction (and in greatly simplified terms). Unfortunatley that just isn't helpful at this point