5 ms·

I often see this being thrown out as something people desire, but I always wonder just what people would themselves cut. Like, do you want to get rid of social

by kromem 5y ago

I often see this being thrown out as something people desire, but I always wonder just what people would themselves cut. Like, do you want to get rid of social security and Medicare? That's a pretty big part of what's removed from a paycheck. Pay less towards defense spending? Whenever I look at where tax dollars actually go, while I do think there's a huge need for better accounting oversight and identifying inefficiencies in spending, it's not like the buckets themselves aren't worth investing in. Just like with any corporation, you need to invest in order to see a return. Optimizing that ROI is always a good thing, but simply taking all profit as dividends is a terrible investment strategy. Government is much like a giant corporation where everyone is a customer and (in theory) an equal shareholder. I don't want my money being spent inefficiently, but it's an incredible idea to be able to just contribute a portion of my money in order to reap returns in ways well beyond what I'd be able to accomplish as an individual investor or in ways I'd be even more fleeced by for profit alternatives. For example, Medicare pays less than any private insurance for the same treatments to providers, and because of the group size is nearly universally accepted. Everyone I know that's under the age where it kicks in but is close talks regularly about how much they hate their private insurance and how they can't wait to finally be on Medicare. I completely understand wanting better implementation of taxes, and fairer distribution of taxes based on means, but not so much the idea of not having them at all, or only thinking about their direct reduction. So I'm curious - when you look at the budget, what would you cut, by how much, and what would that proportionally save you per year?

missedthecue 5y ago
I'd love to be able to choose to opt-out of paying social security tax (and forfeit future benefits).
- willcipriano 5y ago
  Don't worry, you'll get the forfit part just not the not paying part.
- kromem 5y ago
  How do we as a society handle people who make that same gamble and fail to have any retirement savings by the time they age out of the workforce? Like if you forfeit the benefits, and then are suddenly destitute and old enough no one will hire you for work, what happens? Do your children need to forgo investing into their own retirement to support you? What if you don't have children willing to do that? I could forsee allowing people to back out of social security with some sort of escrow or trust as collateral against their future dependency on the state, but without that there's a high chance of people gambling and coming up short, and still landing on the government's dime without having contributed.
  - bagels 5y ago
    What already happens. You die destitute living under a bridge.
    - yoyohello13 5y ago
      What a great society we live in.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      That doesn't always happen because of filial responsibility laws. Children are obligated to take care of their indignant parents by law in 28 states in the US. If they get to skip out on their Social Security responsibility while they're working, their kids will have to pick up the slack when they can no longer work.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  We’d all love to forgo auto insurance as well, because it’s never us who is going to experience a car accident.
  - hermitdev 5y ago
    It's possible to self insure for auto insurance. It's just that the vast majority of us can't afford to do it. Also, the minimum auto insurance required is liability, which does nothing to help you repair your vehicle in the case of an accident you cause. It's to cover damages you cause to others.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Most people cannot afford to self insure for retirement, and living in poverty is a burden on the social fabric, “damage you cause to others” in your own words.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    I think the difference here is that the government isn't taking money out of my paycheck to pay for car insurance.
SllX 5y ago
There’s about 9 US Departments that can be axed, with any useful functions within them merged into the remainder. Which 9 is an exercise I’ll leave to the reader, because I don’t intend to get into a heated political discussion on this forum about FedGov reform, but I’ll just spoil that Defense is not one of them, and of the remaining Departments, you could get the most further savings with military procurement reforms; but every single remaining Department has entire Offices that could be eliminated. This also doesn’t go into a countless number of other independent agencies that could also mostly be axed, merged or spun off to the States, nor the numerous Offices or Councils that have sprung up directly under the umbrella of the Office of the White House.
- hermitdev 5y ago
  I mean, there's several obvious ones that could be considered easy targets: FBI, ATF, ICE, DHS are all ostensibly criminal enforcement and/or counterintelligence (even Secret Service under Treasury). In theory, a lot of that could be merged and get rid of cross agency inefficiencies and bureaucracy. FAA, NTSB, NHTSA, OSHA are serve similar functions around safety, but for different things. Why not have one "safety" org? Maybe FDA, USDA belong here, too. Simplify the tax code, or better yet, eliminate the federal income tax and replace it with a consumption tax that would be more fair and less paperwork. IRS could largely go away, too. CIA, NSA, NRO are all intelligence agencies with different mandates. Could probably merge them with more strict Congressional guidelines on budgeting. Part of the problem is there's very much a tribal mindset across most of the TLAs at the federal level, mostly because they're all chasing limited funding. I'm trying to not look at this with a political mindset, but purely a functional mindset. Put like agencies together. We don't need 3 or more agencies doing X for A, B and C, etc. We need one agency doing X for the whole government.
  - SllX 5y ago
    You’re mostly speaking my language, but my primary goal towards axing much of the FedGov would be around reducing the powers of the Presidency (which encompasses all of the Executive bureaucracy), focusing the objectives of the Presidency on fewer but more important domains and reducing the stakes of each election’s outcome. The more you have the FedGov do for you, the more intent you are on seeing that the “right” people win when there are very functions that the FedGov provides domestically that couldn’t be served by State governments that, as a side effect of not having their overlapping tax bases contributing so much towards a large Federal bureaucracy, don’t need to get their money back from Departments that serve as umbrella organizations for redistributing wealth between States. I don’t think there’s much gains to be had by trying to re-architect who does what and what we conceptualize them as as just moving offices under an appropriate enough Secretary and shutting down the superfluous ones. DHS is one I’ll give up as one I had in mind for shutting down, but most of the Offices and Agencies that make up DHS had prior homes until they were shuffled into the newly created DHS. We still need immigration and border control functions, we probably still need some form of airport security (which doesn’t have to be TSA). We still need the Coast Guard, but we don’t need DHS specifically with one more secretary with associated undersecretaries in the stew vying for funds straight from the Congressional teat. EDIT: Just as additional context, each US Department generally has several separate administrative function offices dedicated to providing that specific Department with resources, budgeting offices are pretty common, and handle the budgeting for all agencies under that Department. Axing an entire US Department is a quick and dirty way to reduce some of that overhead. The remaining Departments will increase the headcount of their own administrative offices to compensate any agencies they take in, but given that the big win here is massive reduction of the US Government’s headcount, that is a tradeoff I’m willing to make.

by kromem 5y ago

missedthecue 5y ago

I'd love to be able to choose to opt-out of paying social security tax (and forfeit future benefits).

willcipriano 5y ago
Don't worry, you'll get the forfit part just not the not paying part.
kromem 5y ago
How do we as a society handle people who make that same gamble and fail to have any retirement savings by the time they age out of the workforce? Like if you forfeit the benefits, and then are suddenly destitute and old enough no one will hire you for work, what happens? Do your children need to forgo investing into their own retirement to support you? What if you don't have children willing to do that? I could forsee allowing people to back out of social security with some sort of escrow or trust as collateral against their future dependency on the state, but without that there's a high chance of people gambling and coming up short, and still landing on the government's dime without having contributed.
- bagels 5y ago
  What already happens. You die destitute living under a bridge.
  - yoyohello13 5y ago
    What a great society we live in.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    That doesn't always happen because of filial responsibility laws. Children are obligated to take care of their indignant parents by law in 28 states in the US. If they get to skip out on their Social Security responsibility while they're working, their kids will have to pick up the slack when they can no longer work.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
We’d all love to forgo auto insurance as well, because it’s never us who is going to experience a car accident.
- hermitdev 5y ago
  It's possible to self insure for auto insurance. It's just that the vast majority of us can't afford to do it. Also, the minimum auto insurance required is liability, which does nothing to help you repair your vehicle in the case of an accident you cause. It's to cover damages you cause to others.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Most people cannot afford to self insure for retirement, and living in poverty is a burden on the social fabric, “damage you cause to others” in your own words.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I think the difference here is that the government isn't taking money out of my paycheck to pay for car insurance.

SllX 5y ago

There’s about 9 US Departments that can be axed, with any useful functions within them merged into the remainder. Which 9 is an exercise I’ll leave to the reader, because I don’t intend to get into a heated political discussion on this forum about FedGov reform, but I’ll just spoil that Defense is not one of them, and of the remaining Departments, you could get the most further savings with military procurement reforms; but every single remaining Department has entire Offices that could be eliminated. This also doesn’t go into a countless number of other independent agencies that could also mostly be axed, merged or spun off to the States, nor the numerous Offices or Councils that have sprung up directly under the umbrella of the Office of the White House.

hermitdev 5y ago
I mean, there's several obvious ones that could be considered easy targets: FBI, ATF, ICE, DHS are all ostensibly criminal enforcement and/or counterintelligence (even Secret Service under Treasury). In theory, a lot of that could be merged and get rid of cross agency inefficiencies and bureaucracy. FAA, NTSB, NHTSA, OSHA are serve similar functions around safety, but for different things. Why not have one "safety" org? Maybe FDA, USDA belong here, too. Simplify the tax code, or better yet, eliminate the federal income tax and replace it with a consumption tax that would be more fair and less paperwork. IRS could largely go away, too. CIA, NSA, NRO are all intelligence agencies with different mandates. Could probably merge them with more strict Congressional guidelines on budgeting. Part of the problem is there's very much a tribal mindset across most of the TLAs at the federal level, mostly because they're all chasing limited funding. I'm trying to not look at this with a political mindset, but purely a functional mindset. Put like agencies together. We don't need 3 or more agencies doing X for A, B and C, etc. We need one agency doing X for the whole government.
- SllX 5y ago
  You’re mostly speaking my language, but my primary goal towards axing much of the FedGov would be around reducing the powers of the Presidency (which encompasses all of the Executive bureaucracy), focusing the objectives of the Presidency on fewer but more important domains and reducing the stakes of each election’s outcome. The more you have the FedGov do for you, the more intent you are on seeing that the “right” people win when there are very functions that the FedGov provides domestically that couldn’t be served by State governments that, as a side effect of not having their overlapping tax bases contributing so much towards a large Federal bureaucracy, don’t need to get their money back from Departments that serve as umbrella organizations for redistributing wealth between States. I don’t think there’s much gains to be had by trying to re-architect who does what and what we conceptualize them as as just moving offices under an appropriate enough Secretary and shutting down the superfluous ones. DHS is one I’ll give up as one I had in mind for shutting down, but most of the Offices and Agencies that make up DHS had prior homes until they were shuffled into the newly created DHS. We still need immigration and border control functions, we probably still need some form of airport security (which doesn’t have to be TSA). We still need the Coast Guard, but we don’t need DHS specifically with one more secretary with associated undersecretaries in the stew vying for funds straight from the Congressional teat. EDIT: Just as additional context, each US Department generally has several separate administrative function offices dedicated to providing that specific Department with resources, budgeting offices are pretty common, and handle the budgeting for all agencies under that Department. Axing an entire US Department is a quick and dirty way to reduce some of that overhead. The remaining Departments will increase the headcount of their own administrative offices to compensate any agencies they take in, but given that the big win here is massive reduction of the US Government’s headcount, that is a tradeoff I’m willing to make.