5 ms·
What if we stopped spending $3.8 trillion on ineffective healthcare, or $1.2 trillion on welfare instead? Or just reduced our spending on those proportionally
by corey_moncure 5y ago
What if we stopped spending $3.8 trillion on ineffective healthcare, or $1.2 trillion on welfare instead? Or just reduced our spending on those proportionally to save the $1 trillion?
- jzebedee 5y agoIgnoring the ghoulish suggestion entirely, this misses the point of the debt ceiling crisis. The debt ceiling has zero effect on spending, it's servicing the debt for spending that already happened. You don't fix what you spend on your credit card by not paying the bill.
- da_big_ghey 5y agoSpend less now so we can use the saved money for paying off old spending?
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoThat is in fact how household budgets work. That is not how government budgets work, at all. For starters, payment within a household budget are not typically to other members of the same household. The house's mortgage debt isn't to another person resident there, the groceries aren't bought from an household member. Payments within a country are. It's circulation of money within the entity, not income and outgo. And a household does not own their own bank to manage the circulation. https://theconversation.com/why-the-federal-budget-is-not-like-a-household-budget-35498 https://theconversation.com/why-the-federal-budget-is-not-li... https://positivemoney.org/2018/10/a-government-is-not-a-household/ https://positivemoney.org/2018/10/a-government-is-not-a-hous... https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/04/30/governments-are-nothing-like-households/?sh=58e536cc54f8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/04/30/gover...
- PhileinSophia 5y agoDid you learn this in your AP econ class? Logic doesn't go out the window once you get to government scale.
- wongarsu 5y agoI'm sure there is a way to spend a trillion less on healthcare and get better results. At least other countries seem to manage that. But just cutting spending is not the way to achieve that, you need far reaching reforms that will be heavily resisted by parts of the healthcare industry.
- tut-urut-utut 5y agoIf you want to reduce spending, please start with cutting the budget for the organization whose main purpose is killing people around the world. Your government will have more money to spend usefully, and the world would be a better and safer place.
- da_big_ghey 5y agoMilitary entire budget is less than 1 trillion though, it is these entitlement spending that consume most dollars at the federal level.
- cheeseomlit 5y agoThe US could utterly abolish its military and we'd still be running a significant deficit- Ignoring the fact that our military hegemony is the only thing holding up the USD as the reserve currency
- ryathal 5y agoIt would also abolish one of the most effective jobs programs to ever exist.
- mason55 5y agoThe money has already been approved and spent. This whole stupid debate is about whether or not we should pay back what we already borrowed.
- coding123 5y agoif we are prepared to not pay it back, we might want to double or triple the military.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eli_gottlieb 5y agoWhat if we stopped subsidizing rich people, polluting extractive industries, companies that ship jobs overseas, and NIMBY homeowners instead?
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoClearly someone who is either trolling or has made the conscious decision to have no idea what they are talking about
- retrac 5y agoTaxes could also be raised. Government expenditure in the USA isn't unreasonable in itself, being lower than most other liberal democracies and even the levels in the USA in prior decades. Either jacking up taxes or cutting government spending by like 20% total in the middle of such an economically precarious time seems far too risky, anyway. Times like these are what deficits are for! It's a shame the country was in a bull economy and yet still entered the pandemic already fiscally stretched to breaking point.