3 ms·

Well, first off, the number of Federal employees hasn't changed much since the 1960s. It's payments to contractors which are more of a problem. Second, only de

Well, first off, the number of Federal employees hasn't changed much since the 1960s. It's payments to contractors which are more of a problem. Second, only defense and entitlements really matter. Here's the top level breakdown of the Federal budget.[1] Entitlements, such as Social Security, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, account for about 65% of the budget. Defense, 14%. Interest paid, 13%. Everything else, about 9%. Most of the noise about cuts focuses on that 9%, but that's not where the money goes. About half the federal budget goes to old people. [1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

alexey-salmin 2y ago
This is a good take, but I wonder if there's a difference between "goes to old people" vs "is spent on things concerning old people" as in how much of that money actually reaches old people directly or indirectly. Given that "half a budget" is around 3 trillion and there are 60 million old people in the US this gives $100k for a household of 2 people which I doubt they receive. Quite possibly there's a big room for optimization too.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Given healthcare costs that doesn’t seem wildly high after accounting for the administrative burden you’d expect for administering that amount of money.
- matwood 2y ago
  End of life care is crazy expensive [1]. Things like assisted living, hospice, and medical care for end of life is where a vast majority of the costs end up. Could the actual care be made more efficient? Maybe. The irony is the GOP spread lies about death panels when the ACA was being debated, and we may end up with them here if we go down a path of deciding who gets what EoL care in the name of efficiency. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(22)00176-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...
  - fastball 2y ago
    Maybe the federal government shouldn't be in the business of EoL care at all?
    - matwood 2y ago
      Ok, I'll bite. How do you fund EoL care w/o the federal government involved?
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        you don't. You let people die in a manner according to their own means without blowing through several hundred thousand of public funds on their way out. If given the choice of 100k EoL care, or 100k for their grandchildren, most people would choose the latter. Add a layer between and it becomes a prisoners dilemma problem. If you forgo treatment, your children still get billed 99.9k instead of 100k.
        matwood 2y ago
        So no plan. Simply let people die in the street. Got it.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        You don't need to be so extreme. You can let people die in their own home with palliative care without providing every drug and surgery imaginable.
        fastball 2y ago
        Homelessness does not seem particularly related to EoL care.
- astura 2y ago
  Social Security also goes to disabled people as well as "disabled" people. That population is almost 10 million people.
matwood 2y ago
Correct. DOGE is a joke. Musk will DOX some people and their job titles showing he has no clue what he's talking about (throw in some pedo accusations while he's at it). Then maybe he'll save a few million (out of a 6-7T), but shout it from the roof top like he's a genius and keep saying more will happen next year like he's done with FSD.
regularization 2y ago
The US military budget is only 14% under a very narrow definition. If a US Navy sailor is off the coast of Yemen, in "defense" of the US bombing Yemen so as to support the offensive in Gaza, and the sailor is maimed and flown back to the US - their medical bills are no longer coming out of the "defense" budget but out of the "entitlement" budget (or if not then the everything else budget). Also interest did not come out of nowhere, we're paying interest on past military etc. spending, and have a deficit to overextend current military spending which we will be paying interest on. So if we narrowly define "defense" spending and hand wave spending on veteran's benefits, interest on past military spending etc. it is shrunk to 14% of spending, but it is not 14% of spending. I know this is how the government presents its spending numbers but it is done so to hide the true cost of the "defense" budget.
- nradov 2y ago
  Nonsense. Healthcare for active duty military personnel is covered in the military budget regardless of whether they are deployed. Healthcare for retired military (including those medically retired) is primarily paid by the Veterans Administration which is classified as part of discretionary spending, not an entitlement. There is only a small overlap with Medicare. If you're going to complain about defense spending then at least get your facts straight.
- matwood 2y ago
  As the other poster said you are mistaken with how the money is allocated. With that said, the military is not a terrible place to spend money. You know when we say the dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government? What that means is the US can park an aircraft carrier strike group off the coast of any country in the world and project that full faith and credit. It's also an amazing jobs program for the working class. I know a number of people who were only able to attend college because of the GI Bill. I'm sure there is some waste, but that's true of any large organization.
taeric 2y ago
More frustrating, to me, is that some parts of the 9% include enforcement officers and mechanisms on payments and oversight of the rest of the budget. And, for some reason I can't really understand too well, it is a very popular thing to cut spending/funds for the likes of the IRS. For my part, I've grown rather distrustful of any effort to make things more efficient. Generally, in all things, but particularly with the government. I don't necessarily want efficient; rather, I would prioritize completed. At the least, progressed. You see this in corporations that have labeled some organizations "cost centers" versus the rest of the company. The spreadsheet workers love lowering the spend in cost centers. And then are rather flat footed when it comes to why places had those cost centers in the first place.
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  An aspect of spending on financial enforcement that most people don't understand but is well-understood by government auditors is that too much enforcement has a negative ROI to the government separate from the cost it imposes on the economy. Most financial recoveries via enforcement is not waste or corruption in the traditional sense, it is from insufficient financial compliance processes. The requirements for these processes are fuzzy, so you can always squeeze a little blood from this stone if auditors try hard enough. People react to this pressure by engaging in ever more compliance activity, without much concern about its effectiveness for its nominal purpose. So far so good. The government realized many decades ago, as an organization that buys trillions of dollars in goods and services from the private sector, that these compliance costs it was creating were effectively being billed back to the government, in many cases in excess of any value created by the compliance processes. In most cases, we are already way past the point where spending more money on enforcement is productive but it is politically popular so it happens anyway. The optimal amount of fraud and waste is not zero, and to the extent things look like waste it is usually because compliance processes have required it to look that way to avoid enforcement actions. A much better approach would be to revisit the effectiveness and utility of the compliance processes the government creates through enforcement actions, which currently has few if any limiting principles in practice. These are not free, either to the economy or to the government which has to pay for those compliance costs when it buys things.

alexey-salmin 2y ago

This is a good take, but I wonder if there's a difference between "goes to old people" vs "is spent on things concerning old people" as in how much of that money actually reaches old people directly or indirectly. Given that "half a budget" is around 3 trillion and there are 60 million old people in the US this gives $100k for a household of 2 people which I doubt they receive. Quite possibly there's a big room for optimization too.

llamaimperative 2y ago
Given healthcare costs that doesn’t seem wildly high after accounting for the administrative burden you’d expect for administering that amount of money.
matwood 2y ago
End of life care is crazy expensive [1]. Things like assisted living, hospice, and medical care for end of life is where a vast majority of the costs end up. Could the actual care be made more efficient? Maybe. The irony is the GOP spread lies about death panels when the ACA was being debated, and we may end up with them here if we go down a path of deciding who gets what EoL care in the name of efficiency. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(22)00176-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...
- fastball 2y ago
  Maybe the federal government shouldn't be in the business of EoL care at all?
  - matwood 2y ago
    Ok, I'll bite. How do you fund EoL care w/o the federal government involved?
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      you don't. You let people die in a manner according to their own means without blowing through several hundred thousand of public funds on their way out. If given the choice of 100k EoL care, or 100k for their grandchildren, most people would choose the latter. Add a layer between and it becomes a prisoners dilemma problem. If you forgo treatment, your children still get billed 99.9k instead of 100k.
      - matwood 2y ago
        So no plan. Simply let people die in the street. Got it.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        You don't need to be so extreme. You can let people die in their own home with palliative care without providing every drug and surgery imaginable.
        fastball 2y ago
        Homelessness does not seem particularly related to EoL care.
astura 2y ago
Social Security also goes to disabled people as well as "disabled" people. That population is almost 10 million people.

matwood 2y ago

Correct. DOGE is a joke. Musk will DOX some people and their job titles showing he has no clue what he's talking about (throw in some pedo accusations while he's at it). Then maybe he'll save a few million (out of a 6-7T), but shout it from the roof top like he's a genius and keep saying more will happen next year like he's done with FSD.

regularization 2y ago

The US military budget is only 14% under a very narrow definition. If a US Navy sailor is off the coast of Yemen, in "defense" of the US bombing Yemen so as to support the offensive in Gaza, and the sailor is maimed and flown back to the US - their medical bills are no longer coming out of the "defense" budget but out of the "entitlement" budget (or if not then the everything else budget). Also interest did not come out of nowhere, we're paying interest on past military etc. spending, and have a deficit to overextend current military spending which we will be paying interest on. So if we narrowly define "defense" spending and hand wave spending on veteran's benefits, interest on past military spending etc. it is shrunk to 14% of spending, but it is not 14% of spending. I know this is how the government presents its spending numbers but it is done so to hide the true cost of the "defense" budget.

nradov 2y ago
Nonsense. Healthcare for active duty military personnel is covered in the military budget regardless of whether they are deployed. Healthcare for retired military (including those medically retired) is primarily paid by the Veterans Administration which is classified as part of discretionary spending, not an entitlement. There is only a small overlap with Medicare. If you're going to complain about defense spending then at least get your facts straight.
matwood 2y ago
As the other poster said you are mistaken with how the money is allocated. With that said, the military is not a terrible place to spend money. You know when we say the dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government? What that means is the US can park an aircraft carrier strike group off the coast of any country in the world and project that full faith and credit. It's also an amazing jobs program for the working class. I know a number of people who were only able to attend college because of the GI Bill. I'm sure there is some waste, but that's true of any large organization.

taeric 2y ago

More frustrating, to me, is that some parts of the 9% include enforcement officers and mechanisms on payments and oversight of the rest of the budget. And, for some reason I can't really understand too well, it is a very popular thing to cut spending/funds for the likes of the IRS. For my part, I've grown rather distrustful of any effort to make things more efficient. Generally, in all things, but particularly with the government. I don't necessarily want efficient; rather, I would prioritize completed. At the least, progressed. You see this in corporations that have labeled some organizations "cost centers" versus the rest of the company. The spreadsheet workers love lowering the spend in cost centers. And then are rather flat footed when it comes to why places had those cost centers in the first place.

jandrewrogers 2y ago
An aspect of spending on financial enforcement that most people don't understand but is well-understood by government auditors is that too much enforcement has a negative ROI to the government separate from the cost it imposes on the economy. Most financial recoveries via enforcement is not waste or corruption in the traditional sense, it is from insufficient financial compliance processes. The requirements for these processes are fuzzy, so you can always squeeze a little blood from this stone if auditors try hard enough. People react to this pressure by engaging in ever more compliance activity, without much concern about its effectiveness for its nominal purpose. So far so good. The government realized many decades ago, as an organization that buys trillions of dollars in goods and services from the private sector, that these compliance costs it was creating were effectively being billed back to the government, in many cases in excess of any value created by the compliance processes. In most cases, we are already way past the point where spending more money on enforcement is productive but it is politically popular so it happens anyway. The optimal amount of fraud and waste is not zero, and to the extent things look like waste it is usually because compliance processes have required it to look that way to avoid enforcement actions. A much better approach would be to revisit the effectiveness and utility of the compliance processes the government creates through enforcement actions, which currently has few if any limiting principles in practice. These are not free, either to the economy or to the government which has to pay for those compliance costs when it buys things.