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Serious question: At what point does the failure of government services warrant the partial withholding of taxes? This isn't sufficient of course but when the
by SamPatt 4y ago
Serious question: At what point does the failure of government services warrant the partial withholding of taxes?
This isn't sufficient of course but when the FAA repeatedly demonstrates incompetence, when do we eventually just tell them no, you can't have any more of my money, you're obviously wasting it and making us worse off?
- ck2 4y agoJust swap civil services budget with military budget. Imagine what NASA would do in ten years with Pentagon's budget swapped.
- drstewart 4y agoDone. NASA's budget is now $0 though, since the military budget all went to Medicare with nothing left to spare for anything else. Along with the FAA and every other government department.
- nerdponx 4y agoCitation needed?
- drstewart 4y agoYou need me to Google Medicare budget and defense budget for you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States) >In 2020, US federal government spending on Medicare was $776.2 billion.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De... >Annual budget US$721.5 billion (FY2020)[2] Hopefully, I won't need a citation that $776 > $721
- nerdponx 4y agoYour source doesn't support your assertion: > NASA's budget is now $0 though, since the military budget all went to Medicare with nothing left to spare for anything else. Along with the FAA and every other government department.
- vaidhy 4y agoSo, US spends approximately $12,000 per beneficiary per year. Given the cost of medical expenses, this does not seem too large..
- Tool_of_Society 4y agoWell the USA does spend the most per capita on health care. Meanwhile other first world nations pay about half that and get mostly better results...
- blululu 4y agoThis does not back up the original claim in the slightest which was obviously a grotesque exaggeration. Please refrain from hyperbole and sarcasm - it damages the quality of the conversation.
- ck2 4y agoIt's much worse than that. Defense budget is hidden by breaking it down to many many different divisions. "Homeland Security" is defense with massive budget but it's separate from Pentagon, DoD, etc. Anyone think the NSA budget for "defense" is included in Pentagon, DoD, Homeland Security? Anyone think the trillion dollars in weapons being sent to Ukraine for our proxy war with Russia is in any visible budget? Medicare meanwhile cannot hide all the spending, it's right there, even the fraud in the system is visible in the spending. But defense spending hides twice maybe even three times the spending.
- bulldog13 4y ago[flagged]
- dnadler 4y agoThat's basically the entire point of Congress
- mnd999 4y agoThat’s not how taxes work. You don’t get to choose how the money is spent (other than indirectly, via elections). If you did you’d be a consumer, not a taxpayer.
- agomez314 4y agoUntil the failure causes political embarrassment or change. It required the meltdown of healthcare.gov to kickstart the use of modern tooling and methodology in gov't IT.
- michaelmcdonald 4y agoIs it them wasting money, or do they have a constrained budget with an ever growing number of responsibilities and scope? Do you think there are fewer planes in the air now then 30 years ago? 10 years ago?
- drstewart 4y ago>Is it them wasting money, or do they have a constrained budget with an ever growing number of responsibilities and scope? Wow, it could be. Can you share the FAA's budget this year compared to 2019 so we can see how it's been constrained?
- SamPatt 4y agoI wish my budget was so constrained. Have you looked at the numbers?
- ceejayoz 4y ago> Have you looked at the numbers? Have you? https://theblogbyjavier.com/2020/01/02/aviation-safety-evolution-2019-update/ https://theblogbyjavier.com/2020/01/02/aviation-safety-evolu... See the chart labeled "Evolution of accidents per million flights". Millions more flights, and a steady march towards zero deaths. We haven't had a commercial airliner crash in the US for over a decade. The FAA's numbers look great.
- thatguy0900 4y agoFrom the governments point of view failure means they need more money, not less. Not paying taxes just means you get arrested, they don't have any incentive to fear you doing that.
- pc86 4y agoI don't think that's a serious question, but the serious answer is never, unless you're willing to go to jail or kill people to get away with it.
- shmatt 4y agoThis is the conservative playbook. Cut funding until the entity can't run properly, then yell JEEZ GUYS YOU REALLY SUCK wHY DON'T WE SHUT YOU DOWN The previous president significantly cut the FAA's budget, maybe we're just seeing now how that affects us in the long term
- pookha 4y agoLarge complex systems don't work.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThat's demonstrably untrue.
- brookst 4y agoAka the “I’m going to break all my toys to force mommy to buy me new ones I like better” mentality, projected into chronological adulthood.
- nerdponx 4y agoNot quite. This is more like breaking all the toys in the playpen because you don't like that other kids get to play with them.
- drstewart 4y agoPresidents don't pass budgets, Congress does. There's a neat trick people do nowadays where people claim anything that's unsuccessful (usually government related) was either "sabotaged" or "set up to fail" as a way of absolving them of any failures. Literally impossible to criticize. Finally, the FAA's budget was $23 billion this year and $28 billion last year due to pandemic / infra surpluses, nearly double what it was the last 4 years, where it remained flat (not cut as you say). So it's funny how 2 years of double funding can't get it back on track, but flat funding has caused it to fall apart in the same time period.
- SamPatt 4y ago
- ceejayoz 4y agoIf we didn't get to withhold for the decades of bipartisanly meandering Iraq and Afghan war strategies, we definitely don't get to do it for a brief outage of the FAA's weather reporting system. Especially when evaluating the FAA would need to include the absolutely stellar commercial aviation safety record they and the NTSB have created over the last few decades.
- SamPatt 4y agoI think we should have been able to withhold for unnecessary foreign wars.
- ceejayoz 4y agoHow do you imagine this withholding system would work? Does your tax burden stay the same, and they just make sure your dollars only go to the programs you support? Do they give you a list of every active program? Every single one? What happens with 800 page appropriations bills where you don't support one line-item? Can I opt not to fund the salaries of specific members of Congress? If my neighbor is a veteran, and they annoy me, can I disagree with their VA benefits?
- djbusby 4y agoWould love to designate which things to prioritize from my tax money. 50% family services and education, 30% infrastructure, 10% military, 10% general.
- ceejayoz 4y agoCool; we're now the nation of "every homeless person gets a puppy but no services". It sounds great on the individual level; it's entirely unworkable on a societal level.
- bee_rider 4y agoOthers have poked holes in the general line of thought here, so I won’t repeat their points. But also, the uptime for these services seems really quite good. I mean an outage is rare enough that it makes national news. Imagine if they’d hosted on any of the big corporate cloud services with billions of dollars to throw at infrastructure — they would have had multiple outages during our lifetimes just based on their provider doing down.
- advisedwang 4y agoHow does shutting down the FAA improve the situation? Then we would have no weather, NOTAM, ATC etc 24/7.