6 ms·

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be exp

• maxerickson 6y ago
  Where did the other 40 million people go? Also, the Federal Reserve spending is not backed by taxes.
• nikodunk 6y ago
  Very interesting proposition. Small side note - a lot of this $300/year/tax-payer is flowing back into paying US salaries in various states... which is probably recursively why the ticket price is so high in the first place (cost-plus, politicians and all). Also, the $60,000/tax-payer Covid ticket price (though I find that source questionable) is missing averaging out over multiple years as you said yourself. Needs to be consistent with the other number.
  • runarberg 6y ago
    I take issue with comparing a single project to a generic relief. A fair comparison would be to only compare a single stimulus effort (say the $1000 one). Or if you want to compare the total covid effort, compare it with the total military budget. This type of comparison reminds me of how people abuse statistics by comparing a city (or even a neighborhood) to another state (or even a country); say the average New Yorker vs. the average Swede.
• sebmellen 6y ago
  I've always wished for (and wanted to develop) a calculator which would take in your taxes paid, and calculate exactly how many dollars and cents of your tax bill went to which programs. I'm sure the results would shock most Americans.
  • toomanybeersies 6y ago
    Here in Australia, after my tax return is lodged, I receive an income tax receipt with a breakdown of where my tax dollars went. It's only broken down by category though (e.g. Health, Defence, Education), except for Welfare, which has subcategories (e.g. Aged, Disability, etc). There's an example and further explanation here on the ATO website: https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-return/In-detail/Tax-receipt/ https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-return/I... There's a certain sense of satisfaction in being able to see in slightly more real terms what my tax is being spent on.
    • KingOfCoders 6y ago
      What a nice idea, wish we had something like this in Germany - not digging on websites but a tax receipt.
      • shakezula 6y ago
        I’ve gotten this before in the mail as a US resident. It’s quite interesting regardless of your thoughts on the budget
    • goatinaboat 6y ago
      There's a certain sense of satisfaction in being able to see in slightly more real terms what my tax is being spent on. But it's misleading, perhaps deliberately so. The money is not being spent on "Health" but on the "Health department". What percentage of that money actually delivers health, and what merely funds the bureaucracy? Here in the UK only about a third of defence spending goes on the armed forces themselves. Another third goes on service pensions, which is fine, but running the MoD itself is a full third of the budget! It wouldn’t surprise me if the same was true of the NHS.
• bananabreakfast 6y ago
  That's a flawed way of looking at tax statistics. Sure, it's $60k per tax payer by just dividing the total paid by the tax payer cardinality. And in that sense, that much of the federal budget that you have a voice for was allocated in that way. However, comparing that number to how much tax you're paying in a given year is wildly inaccurate. The mean income tax paid in the US last year was ~$15k, but the median is closer to ~$5k [0] The ultra wealthy pay very disproportionately more of the total income tax and skew the mean upward significantly. Therefore, the average US tax payer would have contributed likely far less than $300/year at something more like <$100/year. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-federal-income-tax-payment-by-income https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-fed...
• georgeecollins 6y ago
  I think the stats for COVID site are very misleading, particularly when you compare them to defense spending. The majority of "COVID bailout" according to that website is "Federal Reserve Actions"-- just the vagueness of that statement should give you pause. I am not saying Federal Reserve actions don't have a cost, but comparing that to defense spending is apples to oranges. The federal reserve buys securities and created SPVs. You could say that is a cost but by some measures the money the Federal Reserve "spent" made money in the 2009 crises. If that were true this time your cost per tax payer is way, way off. Or to put it in more plain language, you are comparing the cost to tax payers if the US government bought $60,000 of Lockheed martin stock as opposed to paying Lockheed Martin $15,000 for a fighter that doesn't seem to work well. It's more complicated than that even, but still it is a terrible and biased comparison that you are making.
• toomanybeersies 6y ago
  Income tax is only half of federal government income though, the other half is mostly taxes levied on corporations.
• kumarvvr 6y ago
  > How much of your $60,000 did you see? For that, you need to calculate the cost of every US govt program and calculate usage costs. Very complicated. However, this statement is confusing to me. Do you agree to a bailout, as a society, to eventually get all of it back? And, I also take issue with 100M tax payers. Are these Individual Income Tax payers? If so, what about all the non income tax payers and companiss that pay taxes? For every item you buy, some amount goes to the government in the form of sales tax. And ultimately, what does the govt spend money on? You and your fellow citizens. Sure, now you are in a position to say you pay more taxes than the govt provides services, but if your kid turns out to be poor and homeless, the govt ought to take care of them, and they pay no taxes while enjoying govt services. So if you compute what you get back, would it be fair to say you have to take multi generational values?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • jjeaff 6y ago
    For the most part, sales tax is a state and local tax and so doesn't affect federal receipts.
  • CoffeeDregs 6y ago
    I agree that it could get fairly complicated but these seem like the two propositions to me: Un-normalized: $6T + interpretation + understanding + doubt that it's really $6T. Normalized: $60k (get the GAO to provide a standardized number) + interpretation + understanding. I get that it's imperfect but I have a hard time understanding how the "un-normalized" version is more-perfect or more comprehensible than the "normalized" version. I suspect politicians would hate my suggestion: they've acclimated us to nonsense numbers. Per Dirksen (maybe): “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Again, I'm not pro/con high-speed rail but: CA probably has 15M taxpayers; estimates of high-speed rail ranged from $30,000M-$100,000M; how in the world was a CA taxpayer to recoup $3,000-$10,000 of cost? Put in those terms, it's a lot easier for me to think about the proposition. I definitely think a Covid bailout was necessary. I do have some questions about where my $60k went...
• trentnix 6y ago
  Pretty clearly unsustainable, isn't it?
  • eclipxe 6y ago
    No, why?
  • neltnerb 6y ago
    Money stays in the system... of course with a bit of a bias in what direction it goes.
• cma 6y ago
  You need to baseline with the cost of no COVID bailout: economic collapse, breadlines, etc.
• JoeyBananas 6y ago
  how much is not getting your throat slit by our enemies worth?
• maximente 6y ago
  yeah, but you're cleverly (or nefariously) pitching this as both a neutral unit of measure - say, $/square meter in the US - then right away using it as a non-neutral measurement based on the individual (/your/ $60k - as if it was "ours" to begin with). that's not really appropriate.
• thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
  but why in the world does it need to cost that much? what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.
  • Kranar 6y ago
    Because the U.S. military basically runs a massive socialized jobs program and every politician works to get a piece of it for their state. No politician wants to be the one to make the case to shut down the factories that produce these things, even when the military has advised Congress to do so [1]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-the-tank-the-army-says-it-doesnt-need-it-but-industry-wants-to-keep-building-it/2014/01/31/c11e5ee0-60f0-11e3-94ad-004fefa61ee6_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...
    • bluejekyll 6y ago
      What I’ve always found strange about this is that there would be far better areas to spend money that would directly benefit society. Education, rail, manufacturing modernization, health. Instead we have jets we don’t need, and tanks sitting in a desert unused.
      • imtringued 6y ago
        Additional housing would even pay itself back on its own. Yes the government would take on debt but it would also receive rent payments that pay the debt off. The economic benefit of more housing in large cities is undeniable. Lots of people move to the city to work there, the end result is that you have employed both the construction industry and the future resident. There would be a net tax gain even though its a jobs stimulus program.
  • cabalamat 6y ago
    > what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. The problems with the F-15/F-16/F-18 is that Chinese and Russian missiles might be able to shoot them down more easily than the F-22 or F-35, since the F-22 and F-35 are stealthed. The problem with the F-22 and F-35 is high unit cost, so they can't have as many as they'd like. It's also possible that their stealth might not work so well on future Russian/Chinese radars, for example they might use different frequencies. You can be sure both those countries are working on countermeasures to stealth aircraft. Possibly the solution will be an unmanned aircraft. This would be able to pull >10g manouvers, which aircraft with a pilot in can't.
• frotak 6y ago
  > Do you expect to receive $15,000 of value from the F35 program? I'm not sure I won't: perhaps it'll keep oil/energy prices stable and I spent well more than $300/year on energy... But from the article > The Air Force alone wanted nearly 1,800 F-35s to replace aging F-16s and A-10s and constitute the low end of a low-high fighter mix, with 180 twin-engine F-22s making up the high end. > Fifteen years after the F-35’s first flight, the Air Force has just 250 of the jets. I'd say it's just as valid of an argument to make in this case that I'm not sure I won't see more than $60,000 of value out of efforts to prevent the economic infrastructure of the U.S. from crumbling, especially amortized over 50 years ($1,200/yr in preserved income or purchasing power). I don't disagree that it's a decent frame of reference to use when looking at government programs...but it's important to apply the same level of rigor to measuring output value.
  • paulie_a 6y ago
    An excessively over powered military with a bloated budget can definitely use some crumbling
• Aperocky 6y ago
  For the COVID bailout one, depends on how much 401k you have. If you have a decent amount, then yeah, the asset price inflation came from a fire hose none other.
• crazypyro 6y ago
  I'll pay $300/year for global security any day of the week. Honestly, I don't give a shit if it costs $10,000/year, I want the U.S. being the global police because I am most comfortable with the status quo. Simple as that.
  • shakezula 6y ago
    As a hardcore leftist, even I have to admit there are benefits of neoliberal policy to a strong internationally present military that at least pretends to uphold human rights and has a bunch of other countries that also pretend the same. It’s better than the alternative.
    • yunohn 6y ago
      The alternative being... the same invasion of sovereign nations to keep the industry-military complex going, just without the pretense of caring for human rights?
    • pasabagi 6y ago
      I think the war in Yemen is a good case study of the downsides of the US as global police. It is a war that was only possible through the US and UK supplying arms, and was prosecuted by a nation that doesn't even pretend to uphold human rights. This is also pretty typical - while many western nations 'care' about human rights, they don't see any problem with arming client regimes who are often gratuitously sadistic, genocidal, etc. I'm also not sure where human rights come into the picture when you consider the various US wars in the last century. All of them (especially the Korean war) were extremely brutal to civilian populations, and the prosecution of all of them (except maybe the 1990 gulf war?) skirted very close to the line on war crimes, or crossed that line entirely. I don't think there was even lip service paid to human rights in this period.
      • runarberg 6y ago
        The human rights track record of the USA military should for sure include: * Arming the Saudi regime with intent to sustain the horrors in Yemen * Extrajudicial killings with drones in various sovereign non-warring nations such as Pakistan and Libya often with far more civilian casualties then combatant. * Illegal indefinite detention and torture in offshore prison such as Guantanamo. Those are the human rights horrors which the USA military is currently engaging in. History shows us that it is capable of far worse and there is no reason to believe it won’t engage in in the near future. As far as security goes there is little reason to believe that it extends any further then to secure the interest of private companies engaging in foreign affairs. It seems to me that the human rights narrative of GPs is entirely fiction.
• esoterica 6y ago
  > The Covid bailout last year was about $60,000 per tax payer (https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/ https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/). How much of your $60,000 did you see? My stonks went up by way more than $60k (that figure is completely wrong and inflated anyway), so I saw plenty of it. I'm sorry, were you fishing for a different answer?
  • somjeed 6y ago
    your stonks liquidity is dependent on constant injection, so your "making" more than $60k may be temporary
    • esoterica 6y ago
      That’s not how liquidity works.
      • somjeed 6y ago
        yes it is.