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For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions

• e40 2y ago
  The reason these questions are not front and center is that the people with money don’t want to talk about them. And, the ensure we are kept busy with cheap gadgets, entertaining tv and movies and enough controversies that don’t matter to last a lifetime. Alsr, the population is less educated and able to actually think critically about these issues than they used to be.
  • noirbot 2y ago
    Citation on that last point? The amount of people I know who were the first in their family to attend college, and sometimes even graduate high school, makes me question that people are measurably less educated.
    • lordnacho 2y ago
      Education + thinking critically and having educational credentials are not the same thing. At least, there needs to be some justification that they are related.
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > (Education + thinking critically and having educational credentials are not the same thing. At least, there needs to be some justification that they are related It's ironic how often people criticise the lack of critical thinking in higher education while simultaneously not bothering to examine the hypothesis. Cognitive development is associated with critical thinking [1], and the "number of years of formal education completed by individuals is positively correlated with their cognitive function throughout adulthood and predicts lower risk of dementia late in life" [2]. So yes, voters with educational credentials are more likely to be better critical thinkers as well, as a bonus, not suffering dementia in their later-voting years. (Whether this is a selection effect or product of education is unclear. And it doesn't suggest everyone in academia is an excellent critical thinker.) [1] https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/114/ https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/114/ [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7425377/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7425377/
        • megous 2y ago
          This is not a valid argument. In a complex system (like the human body), you can't go from A related to B, B related to C, therfore A related to C. It may be true that there's some A-C relationsip, but having two separate studies for A-B and B-C does not prove there's any A-C relationship. > So yes, voters with educational credentials are more likely to be better critical thinkers as well Not based on your argument, no.
          • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
            > having two separate studies for A-B and B-C does not prove there's any A-C relationship You're making a claim about the world. The evidence points in the opposite direction. If you have a problem with cognitive function relating to critical thinking, put forward some evidence about it. Because the link between those seems much more intuitive than your unsubstantiated hypothesis.
  • TOMDM 2y ago
    You don't need their permission to have these conversations.
    • latexr 2y ago
      GP is not talking about permission. It doesn't matter that people can have these conversations if they won’t.
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > doesn't matter that people can have these conversations if they won’t People aren't having conversations about the federal deficit? Where?
        • latexr 2y ago
          That’s not the argument either. Read GP’s comment attentively, they’re making a general commentary on how the people with money manipulate the conversation by distracting everyone else. If you’ve ever read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, you’ll recognise the thought. Being pedantic about which particular conversation is or isn’t happening where and by how many people is counter-productive and only serves to exhaust everyone and exacerbate the issue.
          • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
            > Being pedantic about which particular conversation is or isn’t happening where and by how many people is counter-productive and only serves to exhaust everyone and exacerbate the issue I'm arguing there is no conspiracy. It would be lovely if rich people (namely, anyone) were coherently running the government. But the reason we're seeing chaos is because there are fundamental interests attached to each of those major spending lines that have wide voter support (and antagonism).
            • edmundsauto 2y ago
              I’m pretty sure the US government has a rich dude in the presidency, a rich dude pulling the strings via doge, and all the members of the presidents official inner circle are rich people. In congress, it’s very much a rich persons club. Maybe this is how it’s always been, but it feels even more obvious and extreme today.
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > reason these questions are not front and center is that the people with money don’t want to talk about them You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain why cutting benefits to old people is politically toxic.
• incognition 2y ago
  1. Yeah, they weren’t good at reigning in spending in the 70s either.
• qgin 2y ago
  Number 3 can’t be overstated. Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe. Global health insurance plans usually come in two flavors: 1. Global coverage 2. Global coverage excluding United States (for half the monthly premium of the first plan) The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even population health (ex. higher obesity rates)
  • firejake308 2y ago
    I know of at least one source arguing that in fact, population health (mainly obesity and gun violence) explain upwards of 70% of the difference in healthcare spending between the US and other developed nations.[1] To me, this seems like the most likely explanation because I believe we have pretty similar diagnostics and treatments to other developed countries, and I don't feel like a British doctor would give me any treatment that an American doctor wouldn't, and vice versa. As for the other 30%, I think it's probably due to inefficiencies in the insurance-based payment system and our patents lasting too long making drugs more expensive. [1] https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/#rcatoc-diminishing-returns-to-spending-and-worse-lifestyle-factors-explain-americas-mediocre-health-outcomes https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...
    • silvestrov 2y ago
      It is very expensive to run the insurance companies, plus all the time the hospitals need to spend to talk/plead with the insurance companies. When you have the state as a single payer then all those expenses just vanishes.
      • yadaeno 2y ago
        Even the various single payer models in Europe and asia still have insurance companies. The difference is that in these systems the government has some stake — whether it’s providing the public insurance fund, or owning the company itself — so that the government is financially incentivized to reduce costs. In the US case everything is private so all parties are incentivized to increase costs as much as possible. We really should to copy the Bismarck model. Public owned “public fund”, heavily regulated private insurance and care.
• newzisgud 2y ago
  The core question is less about the cuts themselves and more about if we the people are getting what we're paying for. 1) It kinda doesn't matter if it was caused by the pandemic or not, what matters is it needs to be fixed. Cherry-picking "since the 1970s" keeps us in difficult times energy-wise which we've attempted to correct for with more spending. If you go further back, our current ratio is what it was during WWII. Do you currently see federal government production as similar to during WWII, or are we not getting value out of what we're spending? 2) Assuming we all agree with those percentages, there's still an obvious 9% to look into. At these levels, that's real money. Also, certain initiatives are way more destructive than the spending would suggest, e.g. just about everything found out about USAID impacts hearts and minds, which impacts further negatively productive efforts outside the federal government. 3) Of course healthcare is on the list. Single-payer systems have their problems, free market systems have their problems, our current hybrid gets the worst of both. So it needs to be addressed, but perhaps not "first" because the answer here is a total rework, whereas there's plenty of other savings available right now as low hanging fruit. 4) Corporations do not pay corporate tax, their customers and employees do. Why should we burden our productive populous with tax on their income, tax on their workplace before they even get paid, inflation due to government spending, etc? If the argument is that tariffs are passed on to the customer, then corporate tax is definitely passed on to the customer and the employee. Additionally, corporations are not currently benefiting from a healthy workforce (look around), or an educated workforce (steady decline since the DoE was established), or a safe environment (go to SF), or a working transportation system in many cases. Again, are we getting what we're paying for?
  • sxyuan 2y ago
    Thank you for responding. I'm glad we agreed in principle on #3. I'm afraid we'll have to disagree on the other points though: 1. The claim that spending / GDP is at WWII levels is simply wrong: please take a look at the link in my original comment. 2. 9% isn't nothing, agreed. It does, however, pay for: scientific and other research (mostly medical, then much smaller slice for general science, then a much much smaller slice for everything else); keeping national parks running smoothly; keeping planes in the air; shutting down financial scams; and other wonderful things like that. Like you said, it comes down to what we get for that spending. I think there's bound to be some waste here and there, but I rather like all these things our tax dollars are paying for. Oh, and funny you mention USAID - I rather like the idea of feeding starving children around the world too, with a triple whammy of moral impact, winning hearts and minds in other countries, and putting money into the pockets of US farmers. Would love to hear properly sourced arguments on why USAID is as terrible as you seem to think it is. 4. You forgot about the shareholders. Corporations mostly get taxed on profits, not revenues, so it's hard to see how consumers are part of the equation. (We're not talking about consumption taxes, which tend to be state level anyway.) And employees pay income tax - the only part that the corporation covers is the employer end of payroll taxes. Wikipedia has a nice breakdown and comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax (Yay, thanks to whoever saved the parent post so my thumb exercise wasn't entirely wasted.)
• rKarpinski 2y ago
  > 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1] That might not be the best metric. Sure it's only "~13%" higher than the running average, but in that 55 year period only 4 years (2008, 2020,2021,2022) had a higher spending to GDP ratio than 2024. Also those years all had ZIRP
  • cassepipe 2y ago
    ZIRP ? Ok, Zero Interest Rate Policy
• largbae 2y ago
  I think these are good reasons why our fiscal picture is not hopeless, but not good arguments agains improving our efficiency: 1. Thank you for linking that graph, it seems to show that our spending is 25% higher than it was in the 1970s as a % of GDP (23 vs 18). But our level of _debt_ is approx 375% higher (as a % of GDP) than it was in the 70s (120% now vs 32% then). That doesn't sound like we are sustaining it well, and tht interest is compounding as we borrow to pay it. 2. The underlying assumption that makes this argument compelling is that every dollar being spent on these noble categories is being done efficiently. What if fixing healthcare costs cut them in half for the same effect? What if there is fraud to cut in the programs for the elderly? We should tighten these and prepare to pay more as we age. 3. Strongly agree and hope to see some action. It seems that fixing the incentives and inefficiencies of the healthcare system is the core mission of RFK Jr., despite all the vaccine FUD. 4. Strongly agree. I wonder if a VAT would be effective for this. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
  • JoshTko 2y ago
    We all know what efficient healthcare systems should look like, there are a dozen countries with lower overall healthcare spend per capita than US with better outcomes. What specific skillset of RFK do you find as compelling evidence they they will be extract higher efficiency similar to these other nations?
    • largbae 2y ago
      I'm not sure I meant to take a mantle as RFK's personal champion, but my _hope_ comes from hearing his points on prevention and improving the quality of the food supply. The incentives of both the healthcare and food industries in the US seem to be misaligned with a healthy population, much moreso in the US than in other countries in the West.
      • sumeno 2y ago
        Being antivax is not a very effective way to prevent diseases. RFK is a national disaster waiting to happen
• generalizations 2y ago
  It doesn't look good for the quality of discussion here if the most substantive response to your questions was flagged & killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143579
  • sxyuan 2y ago
    I agree. I actually typed up a whole response to that post (which I vehemently disagreed with, but appreciated nonetheless) but by the time I hit submit it was already dead. Vouching wasn't enough to bring it back. I understand the temperature is running hot, but I hope that at least on HN we can strive to have civil discussions about these issues. I say this even though I am personally quite distraught about the current state of affairs.
    • cassepipe 2y ago
      Since it's still accessible to read, I'd be eager to read your response EDIT: The response was saved from the dead, yay
  • istjohn 2y ago
    Long doesn't equate to substantive. Edit: I didn't flag it, to be clear.
    • cassepipe 2y ago
      Sure but parent said "substantive" so since you're implying it's not (but rather just long), I'd like to read why you think it wasn't
• sxyuan 2y ago
  Y'all, original poster here - please don't downvote or flag kill responses to this that are good-faith attempts to discuss the issue, even if the response seems misinformed to you. I don't think anyone will change their minds when that happens.
  • rhubarbtree 2y ago
    Thanks for making a sensible comment. I’m very concerned about the fate of America right now, and particularly the sudden hard-right swing of the tech community. It’s comforting to see a factual post on HN and see many others responding reasonably. In many ways I love the US and its citizens, highly diverse and fascinating folks that you are, but recent events have been crushing that view. Us Europeans have always felt our differences but also an acknowledgement that we are essentially “on the same side”. DOGE’s apparent violation of the constitution has eroded that bond, as America turns away from democracy. I understand the anger that fuels Trump voters, but it is a misdirected anger and I hope that America can recover its path and also reform itself to address the genuine concerns of trump supporters.
  • kelnos 2y ago
    I'm a bit torn on this request of yours: I don't think people should be penalized for good-faith responses that contain wrong information (so, no flagging), but unless we're all going to spend the time to reply to and refute the wrong information, we should be downvoting those so the stuff with correct information has a better chance of floating to the top. HN mods (or perhaps pg) have said in the past that "I disagree" is a perfectly reasonable use of the downvote button.
• int_19h 2y ago
  FWIW many people who believe that federal spending is out of control would say the same about 1970s.
  • bobmcnamara 2y ago
    Where I grew up, federal spending has been out of control since the Spanish American War.
  • ncallaway 2y ago
    Can someone who says federal spending has been out of control for the last 50 years point to a time period when it was _in_ control?
    • ty6853 2y ago
      Non war times pre 1913, federal spending was such a low percent of gdp as to barely be noticeable, generally far below 5%. The 15%+ I pay now is painful, 2% would barely be noticed. Especially in the context I have to pay (state) taxes on all the new federally required stuff like air bags and emissions controls.
      • crooked-v 2y ago
        Sure, and to return to that the first thing we would need to do is shut down Medicare and Social Security and also sell off most US military equipment for scrap.
        • ty6853 2y ago
          Absolutely, that's my goal.
          • micromacrofoot 2y ago
            but why?
      • ncallaway 2y ago
• xdavidliu 2y ago
  > Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block? I don't understand this question: how can the private companies in the industry be placed on the chopping block? By outlawing them?
  • sroussey 2y ago
    Medicare?
  • marnett 2y ago
    In the context of government it would mean nationalizing them.
  • jedberg 2y ago
    By having a national health care system that would obviate the need for private insurance.
    • tiahura 2y ago
      Pay your own bills.
      • jedberg 2y ago
        I do. I also pay the bills of millions of others who are in my insurance pool. But it would be less for all of us if we were all in the same insurance pool.
  • ncallaway 2y ago
    If the government offered a public option for medicare at rates that were sustainable for the government, but significantly below market prices for health insurance companies, that could be a real danger to health insurance companies. So that's what I'd like to see happen.
• nobodyandproud 2y ago
  The private industry fraud and overcharging that targets Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense has been long term problem. There are also outlier issues like being unvaccinated and unhealthy-lifestyles that tax payers are forced to pay for. I highly doubt DOGE is actually targeting these types of fraud, however.
• jimmar 2y ago
  1. US GDP estimated GDP in 2024 is $29 trillion. According to your first source, U.S. Federal Spending was 23% of GDP. If that were reduced to the 2014-2019 average of 20%, that would trim $870 billion from federal spending. That seems like good progress toward avoiding a potential debt crisis. 2. Reduce defense overall and make the process of getting money to the needy more efficient. 3. No comment. Healthcare is mess. 4. Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers. I'm in favor of tax reform, but thinking that taxing corporations is a way to stick it to rich people is shortsighted, IMO.
  • sxyuan 2y ago
    1. I actually mostly agree with you (and the other reply that said something along the same lines). IMO, the debt situation isn't great, and it's getting worse. Bringing down spending as a percentage of GDP doesn't necessarily require trimming the budget, though - it could also be done by keeping the budget flat and letting GDP growth catch up. 2. Personally, I'm not opposed to trimming defense spending. However, how do we square that with the current security environment (an increasingly antagonistic Russia, China, etc.) and the fact that defense spending is also essentially a domestic jobs program? 4. The share that corporations have been paying has been falling over time. I'm not saying we should stick it to rich people - but what about making corporate taxes more in line with what they've paid in the past, instead of having employees (those same consumers you're talking about) pick up the slack?
    • skeeter2020 2y ago
      Don't worry about #2, Canada is taking care of this for you, to prevent fentanyl and illegals from pouring in over the top border (assume because of gravity...)
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > it could also be done by keeping the budget flat and letting GDP growth catch up This in practice requires real cuts due to inflation.
  • hnmullany 2y ago
• everdrive 2y ago
  It's also the case that even if you wanted to make the remaining few percent more efficient via spending cuts, randomly grepping through database entries and claiming success without any real understanding of what you're cutting is complete bullshit.
• balderdash 2y ago
  The social security administration estimates ~$60b a year in fraud on ~$400b budget! [1] [2]. People can have a rational discussion as to where and how fraud and abuse are rooted out, but I have trouble understanding how people don’t think it’s an issue? [1] https://blog.ssa.gov/medicare-fraud-prevention-week/ https://blog.ssa.gov/medicare-fraud-prevention-week/ [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
  • pstuart 2y ago
    It is an issue and should be addressed. But it should be fixed, not burnt to the ground.
    • unclebucknasty 2y ago
      Indeed. In fact, one couldn't be blamed for thinking that perhaps all of this is about something else entirely.
      • pstuart 2y ago
        > In fact, one couldn't be blamed for thinking that perhaps all of this is about something else entirely. Indeed. They've been quite explicit in their goals.
  • sxyuan 2y ago
    See my third point. :) Article from 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/upshot/medicare-advantage-fraud-allegations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.y04.7LaX.mNhHcjdS82ok&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/upshot/medicare-advantage... In short, yes there's fraud, yes it's a problem, and the biggest offenders are probably insurance companies. This shouldn't surprise anyone who has dealt with the US health insurance scam, er, I mean system. P.S. To clarify for others who may not bother to click into the links, the parent post mentions the social security administration but the numbers and sources are specifically referring to Medicare, which is what I'm responding to.
  • heartbreak 2y ago
• apercu 2y ago
  > 3. The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if you include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block? Because late stage Capitalism. Greed.
• forrestthewoods 2y ago
  1. But debt as percent of GDP has been growing. Can't do that forever. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S 2/3. If the US pays more for health care and gets worse results why should we give them more money? I don't think health insurance companies should be abolished by royal decree. I think the government should offer an alternative and when that alternative is 4x as dollar efficient the health insurance companies will die a natural death. 4. Your chart shows corporate tax rates have been flat for 50 years. Seems fine? As an aside, I dislike the overemphasis on Federal spending and Federal income tax. The real question is federal+state+local spending and revenue. I wish as a society we could work backwards. What services do we want to provide? How much will that cost? How do we pay for it? We've turned into a culture where some people thinking spending is good solely for the sake of spending. When politicians trumpet how much money they're going to spend rather than the benefits they're going to be provide I get very sad!
  • sxyuan 2y ago
    1. Agreed. 2/3. Then perhaps the US should elect representatives who will expand Medicare to more people. (Or go back in time and get the public option added back to Obamacare.) Unfortunately, instead we have an increasing number of people using Medicare Advantage, essentially a private wrapper around a public insurance plan, which costs taxpayers 22% more per participant. 4. Are we looking at the same graph? The ratio is almost half of what it was in the '70s. The economy has grown substantially; corporate tax contributions, not so much. I agree with your sentiment that we should talk about what spending achieves and not just the dollar amounts. Hopefully, now that a lot of things are being cut, more people will appreciate what the government has been quietly providing for us all this time. I just hope that the rebuilding won't be as slow and painful as I fear it will be.
    • forrestthewoods 2y ago
      4. Sorry, been flat for 40 years not 50 years. > The economy has grown substantially; corporate tax contributions, not so much. Hey wait a second. Why should the PERCENT of corporate tax contributions increase as the economy grows? That doesn't make any sense. Corporate tax percent has been basically flat for 40 years. The absolute value of corporate contribution has, of course, increase substantially alongside GDP. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FCTAX https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FCTAX Personally I find the whole "tax the rich / tax the corpos" philosophy to be misguided. That's not how countries like Sweden and France pay for robust social services! They do so with extremely regressive taxes (20% or 25% VAT) and very high tax rates (40%+) at relatively low income rates (50k to 80k depending on country). If we want to decrease inequality and increase social services then the average blue collar worker is going to have to pay for it. Taxing the rich is populism that cares more about being punitive than useful. But I digress.
• canadiantim 2y ago
  1. The federal government has been bloated for a long time, as you mention. Getting back closer to 10% of GDP is a better target. 2. As we've seen with DOGE, there's clearly a lot of waste and inefficiencies. So first cutting out all of that, plus the grift, etc. would go a looong way, as we're seeing with DOGE currently. Also obviously the healthcare system has a lot of grift and inefficinecies on a massive scale that can drastically reduce the spent on healthcare, but this applies to so many systems that government is involved in, again DOGE is clearly proving this to be the case. 3. Yes definitely healthcare needs DOGE 4. Corporations should and do, but corporations are also made of people who also already pay their fair share of keeping national debt in check
• ctrlp 2y ago
  This framing is a bit far from the actual motivating issue underlying the federal "budget" itself. I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country. If you frame it as simply whether to spend money on this or that or if you're getting comparable value to other countries, then it is inevitable for the sides to talk past one another. I think it is more productive to understand the "federal budget is out of control" argument in its spirit and motivational effectiveness. The simple fact is that many people are unhappy about HOW the money is spent and would rather reserve the choices on how to spend that money to the households. To respond to your specific callouts, the growth of federal programs in the post WWII era is a fundamental point of contention. Averages going back to the 1970s (pegged to GDP of all things) are somewhat beside the political point. The federal bureaucracy is enormous. The ancillary industries that service the federal budget is prone to grift, graft, and corruption. Anyone who has worked in or near Washington DC knows this. I believe you are talking about Social Security, which is a bit different from "taking care of the elderly." It is more like a public pension. Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary. Your framing is already misleading but let's go on. Combining "defense and veterans" is also misleading. I believe somewhere south of 5% goes to Veterans Affairs (if that much). If you think the US government should spend 15% of its budget on its war machine and the inevitable foreign wars that feed the military industrial complex, we can have that discussion. I don't think 15% of budget is an absurd amount to maintain a global empire, but I assure you it won't be cut all that much. "Taking care of the poor and disabled" is also a misleading number. Much of that is towards the "welfare state" which is a very gameable and corrupt program. Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote. And if you think the corruption only helps the poor, you are ignoring the many services that benefit from a large pool of welfare recipients. Health care costs in the US are too high, but there are many perverse incentives at work leading to those costs that would be tedious to go into here. You cannot begin to fix them without removing the main sources of cost. One is that the population is unhealthy, but also over-medicalized. If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day. You don't charge that kind of money unless you have someone by the short and curlies. Corporations are the employers of the workforce. Many are also owned by you and me as common stockholders in our 401k and other savings. You say they are declining as a percentage, but that says nothing about what the optimal percentage is. Too high and you will choke off dynamism and job creation, and drive industry overseas. Who does that benefit? But all this penny-counting is a distraction. The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie. As the recent political realignment suggests, most people don't want to be governed by this a federal bureaucracy (or civl service, if you prefer) that has its own political interests at odds with the rest of the population. Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption. It's useful to point out "waste" in terms of inefficiency, but more revealing to point out spending at odds with the values of the majority of the population. People may not want their tax dollars spent on projects they find diametrically opposed to what they value. They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network that extends well beyond any benefits that come back to them. It is at those moments that people start to think that the government isn't working for them. Is that so hard to understand?
• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how? Old people [1], veterans [2], high earners and homeowners [3] turn out to vote. The only demographic we can cut benefits to are the poor. That's what's happening. (Given partisan polarisation, my guess is Democrats will take an axe to veteran benefits next cycle.) > Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block? Health insurance is orthogonal to federal spending. The correct question is why Medicare shouldn't be allowed to directly negotiate pricing with providers on more items. > Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check? The term "fair share" is always loaded in tax discussions. Be honest and say why shouldn't corporations pay more. The answer to that is it's an inefficient way of taxing the wealthy since absent a progressive corporate tax structure, which nobody seems to be proposing, you wind up taxing a lot of small and medium-sized businesses. Better: add tax brackets at the $1mm, $10mm and $100mm thresholds. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnou... [2] https://ivmf.syracuse.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2024_Research_20Review_271_FINAL-1.pdf https://ivmf.syracuse.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2024_Re... [3] https://nlihc.org/resource/new-census-data-reveal-voter-turnout-disparities-2022-midterm-elections https://nlihc.org/resource/new-census-data-reveal-voter-turn...
  • Uehreka 2y ago
    > Given partisan polarisation, my guess is Democrats will take an axe to veteran benefits next cycle I highly doubt it. The Senate “Democrat” in charge of the VA is Bernie Sanders himself, and he’s been a stalwart supporter of improving veteran benefits his entire career. There’s also the whole “it would be political suicide” thing. Partisan polarization is a good way to predict a lot of things, but if you lean into it too much you will in fact be wrong.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > the whole “it would be political suicide” thing It was political suicide because the 18% of Americans who are veterans turn out to vote, are seen sympathetically by other voters [1] and were often swing voters. The last part was critical: veterans are already turning out, so offending them was less about turning out votes for your opponent than losing your own votes. But if they aren't voting for you [2], you aren't losing anything by them. Meanwhile, the resources they're getting could help you gain votes (or turnouts) with others. [1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1363-7.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1363-7.html [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/30/military-veterans-remain-a-republican-group-backing-trump-over-harris-by-wide-margin/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/30/military-...
• aaron695 2y ago
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• mlsu 2y ago
  Corporate income tax is a bad idea. It should be cut to zero. If you run a corporation, and a larger tax bill comes, you will keep your own salary (hence, wealth) and either pass the tax onto your employees or cut employee benefits/jobs to afford the tax. With corporate tax in effect what you are doing is handing the responsibility of allocating obligations to the owners/controllers of the corporation. They will definitely choose to pay the tax in a regressive manner. Instead what must be done is a progressive income tax, enforced evenly, even for owners of corporations. Unsurprisingly, what we are seeing today is an immense tax cut for high earners.
  • etchalon 2y ago
    Corporate income tax exists because S-corps have legally distinct income. If you set that rate to 0, there would be nothing stopping everyone from forming an S corp, transacting solely via that S corp, and evading massive amounts of tax.
  • kelnos 2y ago
    That's not how taxes work, though. By the time a corporation pays taxes, employees have already been paid, and that's a business expense that hasn't been taxed. Ironically, if you reduce employee salaries or benefits, then you will have lower expenses, and thus a larger amount of profits you have to pay taxes on (regardless of the tax rate). I do agree that corporate tax should be progressive, though, just like personal income taxes are. Corporate taxes used to be progressive, but Trump and the GOP changed that in 2017.
  • mdnahas 2y ago
    Former quant, current economist here. One policy economists of all stripes agree on is having 0 tax on corporations. We should tax the profits when they show up in the owner’s income. Otherwise, you are taxing owners who are poor. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-policies-economists-love-and-politicians-hate https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-...
• cwalv 2y ago
  > How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. > What do you think should be cut, and how? Given the complexity in the details, I don't think a 'serious discussion' about this is even possible in this forum. But if the question is 'do you think an effort should be made to look for things to cut', I'd say 'yes, of course.' > Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block? Absolutely, it should be looked at! I don't think it's a trivial problem to solve, but as RFK was confirmed as the secretary of HHS we should expect a lot of scrutiny on big pharma and insurers. > Why shouldn't corporations .. be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check? By definition of 'fair', they should. But again, tax receipts falling as a % of GDP isn't evidence that they're not.
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    > Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I GDP per se, maybe not, however we should still expect it to scale with the costs of services and goods that are correlated. Ex: If the dollar price of rent doubles, then dollar expenditures to keep the elderly from dying in ditches will likewise double, even with no change in population.
    • cwalv 2y ago
      GDP increases are generally measured in real (i.e. inflation adjusted) terms, so a doubling of rent costs don't imply a larger GDP. If we're talking nominal GDP, then I'd agree we should expect gov expense to increase as well.
      • jjk166 2y ago
        Inflation refers to the money supply and is one number applied to everything in the economy. It does not account for things getting legitimately more expensive. Rent can go up faster than inflation, indeed we'd expect it to as presumably buildings are built or improved to higher standards and the surrounding neighborhoods have improvements which make the local real estate more valuable. Likewise for many other goods and services.
• naasking 2y ago
  > 4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check? 1. Aren't shareholders already taxed? Maybe revise how they are directly taxed instead of indirectly taxing them again which they can compensate for (see point 2). 2. Aren't corporate taxes simply passed on as costs to customers and employees as lower pay and benefits? Maybe that's the opposite of what should happen, see point 1. One loop hole that I think is more important to close is taking loans against volatile assets. This lets the very wealthy live lavish lifestyles without apparent income on any balance sheet, and so no tax owed. ProPublica documented this a few years ago IIRC.
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    > Aren't shareholders already taxed? Employee wages are "already taxed" too, for the same underlying reasons even if not the same mechanics.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• _DeadFred_ 2y ago
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  • xvector 2y ago
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    • _DeadFred_ 2y ago
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    • blago 2y ago
      Sixty percent is high. So high, that it almost seems impossible. Can you provide some details? What's the breakdown?
      • mckn1ght 2y ago
        I was curious so tried running my own numbers. TL;DR I find it’s about 34.5%-43.5% for a single person earning $100k-$300k in SF. So taxes would have to rise half again to hit that 60% claim. According to https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#QL3tlUFIae https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#QL3tlUFIae, it’s an effective tax rate of 28.3% for federal/state/local income tax for someone making $100k in SF. For $300k, effective tax rate is 38.13%. Then the total sales tax in Sf is 8.63% according to https://www.avalara.com/taxrates/en/state-rates/california/cities/san-francisco.html https://www.avalara.com/taxrates/en/state-rates/california/c.... So, for each gross dollar, you have 71.7¢ net after income tax, which gets taxed 8.63% on purchases, about another 6.19¢, bringing that original dollar’s purchasing power down to about 65.5¢ for a $100k/yr earner. At $300k, this goes to 61.87¢-5.34¢=56.53¢. Edit: I don’t think I’m calculating the sales tax burden correctly, but don’t see my error yet. Would I just subtract the 8.63¢/$? That’d make the combined tax rate 36.3%-46.76%.
        • xvector 2y ago
          $1.3M. Paying $600k in federal+state. Then sales tax is another ~10% on what's left. That brings me to earning 48c on every dollar, so not a 60% tax but a 52% tax which is still damn egregious given that I had better roads and most public services in Florida (0% income tax) than I have had here in California. I know people that have moved to other 0% states that feel similarly. BTW, I am not "rich." I still can't afford a house in CA. My income last year was a temporary fluke due to RSU inflation. So meanwhile billionaires get away, regular W-2s like me get squeezed by both the working class and the billionaires. Taxes are largely a waste and a scam. I have seen firsthand how government contractors overcharge absolutely scam the American people. Millions of dollars charged for a shitty Python script written in a day. Screws selling for $80 each. We do not need to pay as much as we do. Years of "small" increases have made people complacent to the point where losing half our income to some bureaucratic black hole is seen as acceptable.
• d_burfoot 2y ago
  1. Public debt 120% of GDP, higher than it has been since WWII [1] 2. I would support cuts in all of those categories. Pete Hegseth has ordered the DoD to begin budget cuts. [2] [1] https://www.capitalgroup.com/individual/insights/articles/us-debt-breaking-point.html https://www.capitalgroup.com/individual/insights/articles/us... [2] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/19/pete-hegseth-orders-pentagon-spending-cuts-00205073 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/19/pete-hegseth-orders...
  • ufo 2y ago
    As discussed in the reports above, these budget cuts are not for the sake of saving money, but for redirecting said money towards "border defense" and other priorities of the new administration
• EGreg 2y ago
  I'm not a "MAGA" guy at all. (Except my last name LOL) But I do think the government should constantly be using tech and putting systems in place to accomplish three things: 1. Become more efficient (use AI to solve Bloom's two sigma problem) 2. Become more transparent (data.gov, blockchain) 3. Become more useful and friendly (online, not on-line at the DMV) When DOGE first asked people to help, I applied the next day: https://magarshak.com/DOGE-CoverLetter.pdf https://magarshak.com/DOGE-CoverLetter.pdf Of course, I later learned that I was way too optimistic. They never even read these applications. They are just more of the same... a blunt government hammer that isn't actually solving much, just doing surgery. I hate that they are removing data.gov datasets and other scientific and health data. That's less transparency. It smells of sharpiegate all over again. I like that they are exposing a lot of waste and corruption. I really like that they will be going after the GOP's sacred cow: the Department of Defense budget, which is the LARGEST discretionary budget, where we can get the most bang for the buck. The Pentagon can't account for $35 TRILLION in spending, that's insane. But there is a lot more transparency that needs to be done, than simply budgets. I am somewhat hopeful that Tulsi Gabbard will clean up the "deep state" in terms of transparency, as CIA fomenting avoidable wars affects many people's lives around the world: https://community.qbix.com/t/transparency-in-government/234 https://community.qbix.com/t/transparency-in-government/234 Now, to answer your questions: 1. We've seen this before. The Grace Commission in the 80s concluded: "With two thirds of everyone's personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the federal debt and by federal government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services that taxpayers expect from their government." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission Subsequently, Clinton got a surplus, Gore campaigned on putting Social Security into a "lockbox", and Obama reduced deficits by 2/3 from $1.5 Trillion (after two wars, etc.) It's the Democratic presidents who actually get things done. Bush and Trump just did massive tax cuts which balooned the deficits to trillions, and the current idea is to cut a check to Americans, a la 2021. I thought the goal was to reduce deficits? In that case elect Democrat presidents (not Biden or Kamala, though, LOL) with a Republican congress. 2. Go for the discretionary budgets, working your way from the largest items on down. But Trump has done the opposite back in 2017 and 2019, giving them even more than they asked for, even though they failed audits for decades: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/10/pentagon-eyes-windfall-as-trump-seeks-750-billion-defense-budget-military/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/10/pentagon-eyes-windfall-... If MAGA makes Republicans step aside and cut wasteful spending of the DoD, that would be very impressive indeed. Kind of like Bernie's movement would have done with Democrats. I agree that USAID and CIA causes a lot of damage and costs (not just in money, but human lives) around the world with their regime-change operations, so I would like to see that brought to light and limited. 3. The health insurance agency is actually the only part of the health system whose incentives are aligned with people being healthier. Think about it... if people are healthier, they pay out less. Everyone else in the industry on the "supply side" makes more if people are sicker and aren't cured. If you really want to know how bad it is, read this: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 Besides, their profits are only like $18B I think. Not much savings there. If you want us to pay less, phase out the Patent System, where we go after the rest of the world for daring to share our R&D costs. We pay the most for drugs, and Also if you want us to pay less, then stop letting lobbyists write laws such as Medicare Part D, forbidding Medicare to negotiate drug prices as a single payer health system. That's insane. Let me quote wikipedia: Former Congressman Billy Tauzin, R–La., who steered the bill through the House, retired soon after and took a $2 million a year job as president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the main industry lobbying group. Medicare boss Thomas Scully, who threatened to fire Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster if he reported how much the bill would actually cost, was negotiating for a new job as a pharmaceutical lobbyist as the bill was working through Congress.[58][59] 14 congressional aides quit their jobs to work for related lobbies immediately after the bill's passage And the revolving door with regulatory capture is a systemic problem in general: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2023.00418 https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2023.00418 This is not rocket science, people. If government should do anything, it should be taxes, followed by single payer or UBI. That's it. The Patent system being enforced internationally only makes drugs more expensive, not less. 4. In my opinion, Corporations and LLCs etc. should be the only ones paying tax, and also required in order to be employing people. The personal income tax is stupid! And I say this not just as a libertarian, but because Milton Friedman already made these corporations withhold our taxes. They know exactly how much we make, since they pay us. Why should every employee be forced to pay an accountant in order to report the same info? Rich people can pay accountants to save money, perhaps, but that leads to just more loopholes and corruption, typically the rich people can afford to pay more tax, they'll just drop down one tax bracket. On the other hand, corporations have well-defined budgets, and they need accounting. You could cut the number of accountants -- and staff at the IRS -- in half by phasing out the individual income tax, and instead requiring this tax of the corporations which pay them, in various forms. In fact, you should tax automation and robots, as corporations increasingly fire their staff and cut their salaries. But I doubt that will happen anytime soon. I'll throw in a critique of our monetary system. Our money is issued by banks on the basis of guessing whether a business or a consumer will be solvent in X years. Instead, a UBI would be issued on the basis of what people actually need, now. People ask "how can we afford it" because they don't understand that the role of taxes in a modern monetary system is to remove money from the economy. As long as people fear taxes and money printing, they entirely miss the point. Giving every American a UBI (monetary policy) coupled with massively increasing Pigovian Taxes (fiscal policy) would give government much better levers to do things like curbing pollution, congestion, fossil fuels etc. Much better than the Green New Deal!
• Gibbon1 2y ago
  This blathering about the federal budget has been going on for 50 years. What I think if if you want a real discussion then you need to talk about the real federal budget separately from the retirement, income security, health benefits for and paid by the peons. So take away social security, unemployment, welfare, Medicare, VA and federal retirement benefits. And lets talk about what left. And pikachu there ain't any fat and little meat. The whole debate from where I sit is based on innumeracy and wishful thinking.
  • MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    It's politics, same as ever. We're not talking about the best way to balance the books of America LLC, we're talking about "who gets what, when." That's politics.
    • Gibbon1 2y ago
      I think it's important to separate out pass through expenditures that are just transfers between working class peons and actual public goods and services.
• starspangled 2y ago
  > 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1] Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been rising steadily for a century and is now approaching 40%. From IMF: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA. The recent trend is shaky due to Covid, housing crash, maybe dot com crash, etc., but it looks like it's probably still trending upward. I've actually heard claims of the opposite -- that government has been under persistent and increasing attack since the 70s (or alternatively, since Reagan). I just can't see how the numbers square with that.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    > Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been rising steadily for a century and is now approaching 40% No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years. And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth. This was a worldwide phenomenon too, not just the US. People asked for more from their governments. This is a good thing. It does not look like it's currently trending upward, from your own data.
    • starspangled 2y ago
      > No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years. Yes it has. In 1980 it was 34.25%, in 2022 it was 36.25%. > And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth. US government spending on healthcare is about as most other developed countries yet they are able to provide universal or similar healthcare access. Americans spend that amount again privately on healthcare, and the result is worse outcomes in many objective measures of public health. Just one example since healthcare is one of the biggest expenditures. This is not a good thing. The idea that "some government good" = "more government better" or "less government worse" is just not a sound argument. At all. > This was a worldwide phenomenon too, not just the US. People asked for more from their governments. This is a good thing. Not many Americans I know of asked to pay universal healthcare tier costs without getting universal healthcare. Not many asked to pay for forever-wars and interventions and meddling all over the globe. > It does not look like it's currently trending upward, from your own data. It does to me. The linear trend plotted from 1980 to 2022 does have it increasing too.
• pdfernhout 2y ago
  A deeper issue is one I mentioned here on how contractors outnumber US government employees by more than 2-1, quoting experts in public administration: "Washington Monthly "Fire the Contractors": paradoxically add government employees to reduce costs" https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1iq66qa/washington_monthly_fire_the_contractors/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1iq66qa/washington... From the article: "Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it." And also: "That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future." Why are there so many contractors? As the article explains: "There are two reasons why the number of federal workers has flatlined over the past six decades. Republicans have been distinctly unsuccessful in cutting federal programs—and often have been complicit in increasing them—but they’ve found that attacking federal employees is a useful proxy battle in the war for controlling government. Democrats have been too afraid of being labeled as apologists of big government to fight back very hard. As a result, the two parties have reached a quiet understanding. Government can grow, as long as it doesn’t grow its workforce. ... After decades of the “no more bureaucrats” political feedback loop, private contractors working for the federal government now outnumber federal employees by a factor of more than two to one, as estimated by the New York University professor of public service Paul C. Light. That’s right: There are more than twice as many contractors working for the federal government as there are federal employees. The result has been an endless parade of stories about cost overruns and policy snafus, which get blamed on Washington—and on incompetent federal bureaucrats. ..." The solution? "What we ultimately need is a massive increase in the number of civil servants in the federal government— upward of one million more by 2035, according to the eminent political scientist and scholar of government John DiIulio. ...""
• AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? To begin with, that is a chart of federal spending as a percent of GDP. Since 1960, real GDP per capita has increased by 360%, so if real government spending per capita would have only increased by 360%, federal spending as a percent of GDP would have been flat. Instead it increased by 35%, which is to say by 486% in real dollars per capita. > Federal spending largely falls into a few categories: taking care of the elderly (36%), defense and veterans (20%), taking care of the poor or disabled (22%), and interest on existing debt (13%). [2] This adds up to 91% of the budget. The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how? The premise of "government efficiency" is to improve efficiency. That doesn't inherently mean discontinuing programs as much as investigating them to see how they're wasting money. For example, a large chunk of that money is Medicare and Medicaid, and we would like people to continue to have healthcare, but maybe we would like to not pay so much for it. Medicare is paying significantly more to provide healthcare to the elderly in the US than the healthcare systems in most other countries. What's going on there? Are certificate of need laws or other rules inhibiting competition between healthcare providers? Are regulations imposing onerous compliance costs on providers? Lower the cost of healthcare and you can lower the Medicare budget without reducing benefits. Likewise, there are a lot of assistance programs for the poor. A convoluted, overlapping bureaucratic mess of them that burden the recipients with paperwork and create perverse incentives as a result of stacked benefit phase out rates. The purpose of the whole lot of them is simply to make transfer payments to lower income people, so the entire bureaucracy could be deleted and the programs replaced with a refundable tax credit in the same total amount to the same set of people. > The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if you include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block? The insurance companies aren't where most of the money is going, it's the healthcare providers. Which in turn is down to the healthcare regulations that inhibit competition between them or require them to spend an undue amount of money on administrative and compliance costs -- a government efficiency problem. > Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check? Corporations pay a variety of taxes, one of which is corporate income tax. Corporate income tax is essentially a tax on profits, but that leads to a problem. Where is the "profit" from an international supply chain? There is no principled way to pin it down because it's just the number at the bottom of a spreadsheet where all of the inputs are in different countries. But if you let the corporation decide, or leave enough play in the system that they can squish it around, international corporations will arrange to have their profits in jurisdictions with lower tax rates, and furthermore cause corporate income tax to act as a penalty on purely domestic corporations, which then promotes market consolidation because international supply chains gain a major tax advantage. But to do otherwise you have to pin the profits down to something which is happening in a particular place. If that's workers, it's equivalent to payroll tax. If it's real estate, property tax. If it's customers, sales tax or VAT. If it's shareholders, the income tax on dividends and capital gains. So of all the taxes you can collect from a corporation, corporate income tax is one of the least sensible because the megacorps you most want to pay are the ones most able to avoid it, and giving them another advantage over smaller domestic companies is nothing we need, whereas those other taxes they can't avoid while still doing business in your jurisdiction.
• cryptoegorophy 2y ago
  Not from USA but please explain 28% healthcare? I thought health care is not free and people pay ton of money from their pocket?
  • lotsoweiners 2y ago
    Medicare and Medicaid are mostly paid for by taxes. They are massive programs.
  • alabastervlog 2y ago
    The following categories of people have much or all of their healthcare expenses covered by the government: 1) Military (and their families) 2) Retired military. 3) Government workers (all levels of government—not all paid out of the federal budget, but paid by public dollars nonetheless; this includes teachers. To be clear, these folks all pay quite a bit themselves, too, but their insurance is covered by the taxpayers. This isn’t a complaint, just an observation) 4) Many of the very poor (Medicaid, CHIPS) 5) The old (Medicare) 6) The disabled (Also Medicare) 7) Elected officials. Probably a few more groups I’m forgetting about. This ends up being a large proportion of all people in the US. On top of this, the government funds things like healthcare research. End result, our government spends as much per capita as some OECD states do to provide universal healthcare… but we spend that much and don’t cover everyone. Part of the reason the math works the way it does is that the government covers a lot of the costs for some of the most-expensive groups of people (old, disabled, veterans with extra wear n tear if not outright injuries).
• chasd00 2y ago
  That’s a lot to go through but, off the top of my head, for #1 I don’t see why gov spending and GDP should be related at all.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  The proposed Senate budget includes $150 billion increase in the defense budget, which already was 50% of all discretionary spending (that means after SS and Medicare as that is covered by a separate tax). This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit the rich). With cuts to other parts of the federal budget, the defense share of the budget will be even larger than 50%. I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_).
  • stogot 2y ago
    > I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_). We all would, but given that Russia, Iran, China, and NK are aggressive states and all actively claim that the US is the enemy, and that the relative world order expired in 2022, we cannot have nice things. The peace dividend expired years ago
    • jfim 2y ago
      I fail to see how the cuts as being implemented actually make US citizens safer from Russia, Iran, China, and NK. Can you elaborate on how they do that?
      • akoboldfrying 2y ago
        Not OP, but I don't think the cuts will do that. I think the additional defence spending might, though, at least w.r.t. Russia and China.
        • KerrAvon 2y ago
• ekianjo 2y ago
  the comparison with GDP is useless. If the federal budget is putting the country in massive debt, that's the only thing you should care about. Debt will kill your country sooner or later.
  • rhubarbtree 2y ago
    Well, perhaps it is useful in pointing out that taxation, and not spending, is the real problem.
• briantakita 2y ago
  The Constitution doesn't protect the many bureaucratic organizations that have sprung up since it's inception. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's any amendments that protect the agencies either. For example, the CIA has been controversial. There's nothing protecting it in the founding documents. 1. The GDP is largely raised due to costs of services, tech innovation, & inflation. Note that the measurement of inflation has been revised several times over the past few decades. Why would we not expect the government to become more efficient due to tech innovation? Should they not get better & more cost efficient with the services they provide? Why is the expectation that the public budget must always grow to match GDP growth? 2. I don't think your numbers are correct. There's also bad accounting & no public source (possibly nobody) knows the true budget. For example, the Dept of Defense hasn't passed an audit. $11 Trillion went missing around the time of 9-11. There's also black budget projects that are top secret. Those projects are substantial & don't factor into the numbers. There's also rampant corruption with contracts. An example is the "Homeless Industrial Complex"...though that may be more of a select state + city government issue. Nonetheless, contracts are heavily padded for incumbent contractors in general across all sectors of the Federal Government. 3. IMO, the black budget projects along with the Dept of Defense should be the first to be audited & cut. The Health Care segments a close 2nd. USAID is a good cut, as it's been a vector for color revolutions & regime change. Looking forward to the IRS going away as well. Since it's founding justification was to support the war effort...And we have had never-ending wars (technically conflicts) since. And the Federal Government simply doesn't provide value to justify it's expenses. 4. I believe the argument is to attract companies. But I otherwise agree with you. I'm skeptical over the changes that are occurring, but the size & scope of the Federal Government is clearly unsustainable & counter-productive to private commerce...particularly with small businesses. Considering how regulatory agencies are often revolving doors with industry incumbents with the incentive to stifle competition & promote incumbent interests.
  • jquery 2y ago
    Knocking out USAID, Health Care programs, or the IRS by executive order isn’t how our system works. The Constitution places agency creation and dissolution squarely in Congress’s hands under Article I, not the President’s. Even under a strong unitary executive theory, the President can’t just repeal statutes establishing these agencies; that power belongs to the legislature [1]. Congress also controls the purse (Appropriations Clause), so the White House can’t simply “defund” an agency on its own [2]. Furthermore, the Administrative Procedure Act demands reasoned legal processes; you can’t arbitrarily shut an agency that Congress told you to run [3]. If the President could unilaterally dissolve such agencies, he’d effectively be acting as a dictator, collapsing the separation of powers Madison emphasized in Federalist No. 47 [4]. [1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-1-1/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-1... [2] https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/constitution-power-purse https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a... [3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/706 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/706 [4] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed47.asp https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed47.asp
• derangedHorse 2y ago
  GDP does not equate to government revenue. The expenditure to GDP is irrelevant. GDP also considers government spending and it’s easy to inflate the number when a good chunk of it is borrowed money [1]. I agree with (3) but don’t think (4) has substance. “Fair share” is subjective never used in good faith. [1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
• scotty79 2y ago
  > defense and veterans (20%) Since USA just surrendered from their role of global hegemon you can reduce this just to veterans and nukes.
• Glyptodon 2y ago
  I don't think a reasonable discussion is possible. Congress is supposed to fund the government and say how money is spent. The executive "cutting" things to "save money" is basically the executive assuming the power of the legislative branch. That said, what we're witnessing doesn't actually seem to be about spending. It seems to be more about obtaining direct dominance over the whole branch so it can be run essentially free of any oversight or connection to legislation and law - IE to create a quasi-imperial executive branch narrowly focused on the priorities of it princely leaders. So most of the "firings" are basically to make a point, winnow things down to loyalists who will ignore the law, and keep the news so filled with surface reporting on each new small outrage that the big ones don't get noticed, not so save any money. Anyone who truly believes that there's tons to cut and that government institutions need reform can't also think that getting rid of huge swaths of the institution without attempt to identify improvements, priorities, or waste, will actually create efficacy, unless their real goal is not reform and cutting waste, but rather to make the whole of the current form of government fail. I've seen some wild social media posts that suggest that people have really absurd views on this, too - someone I went to high school with like 20 years ago is having some kind of issue with navigating the Social Security Administration for something via phone and he's cheering on what's going on like it will actually solve his issue.
  • sxyuan 2y ago
    I have the same concerns as you regarding the constitutionality of everything that's been going on. The thing is, the judicial branch interprets the constitution, and while the Supreme Court likes to maintain a pretense of cold impartiality, in practice they try not to run too far out of step with popular opinion. Which is to say, the opinion of your old high school classmate matters, for better or for worse. And I'd like to believe that our conversations matter, in so far as we can talk civilly with each other, and perhaps, just perhaps, change each others' views over time. We need to reverse this trend of shouting at each other over the Internet and hating "the other side" that we've been on for the past 10, 20 years. Our democracy depends on it.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• refurb 2y ago
  > 4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check? I'd be incredibly careful assuming that lower tax receipt from corporate income is due to lower tax rates. Why? Because lots of things impact corporate tax receipts beyond tax rate. If you look at the graph since 1980, you can clearly see a correlation with economic downturns. In fact, they tend to lead downturns which makes sense as corporations see a drop in profits as the economy slows and heads into recession. Corporate tax receipts would also drop as corporate investment increases. When Amazon spent billions on expanding their business, profits dropped and so did tax receipts.
  • sxyuan 2y ago
    I think you're only half right. Yes, the nominal rate is far from the only thing that determines corporate income tax receipts. But in practice, what you see is that the effective tax rate has been steadily dropping. That is, corporations are more and more profitable, and contributing a smaller and smaller fraction of those profits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...
    • refurb 2y ago
      You'd need a in depth analysis to really see the impact. Companies always do something with their profit after tax. Most commonly it's paid out as a dividend (which would be taxed) or used in a stock buy-back (increasing share price and eventually taxes as capital gains).
• rvba 2y ago
  2. Techbros are young and they dont care about old people.
• dcow 2y ago
  I think this is hard to discuss because if you disagree with the premise that the cuts are targeting “fraud waste and abuse” then you’re already talking past the other side. In order to have a productive discussion you need to defend the specific spend being cut, not argue about the ideal spend pie chart. Trump’s administration believes they are cutting legitimately outrageous spending across every piece of the pie. We can ra ra all day about how an effective and ethical government shall include some layer of social welfare, but cutting out pieces of the pie is not specifically what DOGE is doing or was tasked to do. So we should spend on elderly: why must it be 36%? What makes up the 36% and is it legitimate? Are there portions of that percentage deployed in a way that does not serve taxpayers’ interests? Is the workforce tasked to manage the “give money to the elderly” program performing to expectations? Are there redundancies? Why are any of those type of questions bad to ask especially when you’re asking them unilaterally (across all gov’t programs)?
• carom 2y ago
  1. I do not really care about any historical precedent, they take 40% of my money and there is clearly a ton of waste, if not grift. 2. All of those things can be done more efficiently. Drug prices, crappy mega defense contractors, welfare work traps, etc. 3. People eat themselves to death. RFK is going after this problem. 4. I'm in favor of simplifying the tax code and charging a flat tax to corporations, ending tax havens. We should end the tyranny of the shareholder and start rebuilding the American worker.
  • kelnos 2y ago
    > I do not really care about any historical precedent, they take 40% of my money and there is clearly a ton of waste, if not grift. Er what? The top marginal tax bracket is only 37%, and no one will pay that percentage on all their income. Perhaps you misunderstand how marginal tax rates/brackets work? I was very tax-inefficent a few years ago, and my effective tax rate was still under 25%. Usually it's under 20%, even though my income does sometimes put me in into the tax brackets that are in the 30s. If you're paying 40% of your income in taxes, you're either a) doing something exceptionally wrong, or b) one of a very small, sub-1% group of people who need to do super tax-inefficient things on a regular basis for some reason. > All of those things can be done more efficiently. Drug prices, crappy mega defense contractors, welfare work traps, etc. How? That's the meat of the question and problem here. It's easy to say "government is inefficient". It's a lot harder to identify what those inefficiencies actually are, and come up with a plan to reduce or eliminate them. Simply saying that certain things in government are inefficient is not useful.
    • carom 2y ago
      >Er what? The top marginal tax bracket is only 37%, and no one will pay that percentage on all their income. Perhaps you misunderstand how marginal tax rates/brackets work? Perhaps you forget that state taxes exist. Add in sales tax after that. Then, perhaps, recall that property taxes exist.
    • monocularvision 2y ago
      You are falling into the trap of thinking that federal income tax levels are all that matters. When you account for * Federal AND state income taxes * Payroll taxes (SS & Medicare/Medicaid) * Property taxes * Sales taxes * Car registration taxes You realize that depending on income level, the level of taxation in the US is much higher than the typical numbers thrown about. I have seen estimates but couldn’t find them as almost every search ends up taking me to stories and research doing the exact same thing you mention: federal income tax rates only.
• BurningFrog 2y ago
  1. The simplest answer is that federal spending has always been out of control. 2. This assumes a 100% effective government. If it's only 70% effective, you can cut spending by 30% without affecting the noble goals you list. 3. This is the Luigi argument. Get rid of health insurance and we'll all be happy! What exactly to replace it with is TBD. 4. The main argument against high corporate taxes is that it leads to companies moving to countries with lower taxes. The US still has higher such taxes than most and suffers from that, but the optics of lowering further are too bad, so we live with it.
  • guax 2y ago
    In #2, doing the DOGE way you cut by 30% but the efficiency is now lower than 70%. Government is now less effective, costs less, wastes more. Cuts in education, research and consumer protection will cost a lot long term. For #3 there is like dozens of models from different countries around the world. The U.S. could start by looking into those.
    • BurningFrog 2y ago
      I you ask the locals about the health care systems in those different countries - I am from one - they'll tell you that it has it's own set of serious problems. A lot of the savings in those systems come from simply not providing certain costly treatments that are common in the US. That's not to say the US system is the greatest etc, but many Americans have a really idealized view of the alternatives.
• 29athrowaway 2y ago
  1. The higher the debt-to-GDP ratio, the less likely it becomes that the country will pay back its debt and the higher its risk of default. The most recent number for the US is 123%. $28.83 trillion GDP vs $35.46 trillion debt. 2. They are "overlapping" categories. The money you give to the elderly is then spent by them in healthcare. So the true expenditures in healthcare are higher when you take this into consideration. 3. The pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies share a lot in common with organized crime. It is here where most of the money is leaked. 4. Because there is tax avoidance and tax evasion. Tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is not. If there's a way to achieve tax avoidance, someone will find it and use that approach.
• nielsbot 2y ago
  Seems like all the savings we need could be gained by a 50% (or more) cut to "defense" spending. Doesn't that align with US conservative principles? Instead of trying to be the world police (in actuality suppress our "enemies'" access to dwindling oil and minerals) we could focus our efforts domestically? I'm all for it: more education, healthcare, arts, housing, green economomy, less BS libertarianism (loot the treasury and "break out the bootstraps, you poors")
• bambax 2y ago
  These questions are about common sense, but the election of Trump has proven once again (if it needed proof) that politics don't have anything to do with common sense. Politics is about sticking it to the other side, even if it means hurting oneself in the process. I'm not sure anymore the famous Churchill quote about democracy[0] is true. Elections inevitably produce populism, and populism often lead to catastrophe. But we haven't tried "all the other" forms of government, and some could be tried again. Sortition being a prime candidate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition [0] “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
  • ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    As a fan of democracy, I always like to point out when people complain about the results of the democratic process in the US, that the US has many well understood flaws in its democracy that could be fixed to the benefit of all by increasing the level democracy. Some examples are: * Voting systems that don't encourage polarization * Mandatory voting * Anti-gerryamndering But there's lots, from small scale to large, within and outside of political parties and politics generally. It's a bit "no true democracy" but generally giving people a say seems to work really well, even in the face of people trying to sub wet it.
• bostik 2y ago
  > The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how? The callous, cynical and on-brand answer to that question is: "the number of elderly, in the cruellest possible fashion". You've got to balance the age pyramid somehow, right? And if that sounds obscene, you're not alone. The depraved part is that from an inhuman, entirely utilitarian perspective there is a ruthless logic to it. For many Western societies it would be fiscally so much easier if you could just ... get rid of the over-aged population. Or at least the segment who don't have dynastic wealth to protect them from the ruin. It seems to me the US now have a government who have no problem trying out their own variant of Logan's Run.
  • ant6n 2y ago
    Ironic, given the age of the leadership.
  • hamburglar 2y ago
    It’s also notable that those who used “death panels” as a scare tactic back when Obamacare was being created were perfectly fine with saying some old folks just have to be sacrificed during COVID and will be perfectly fine cutting Medicare and Medicaid if they can get away with it. And, of course, they are also ok with the private-run death panels most of us are subject to by our insurance refusing to cover necessary treatments.
  • bregma 2y ago
    Those with dynastic wealth should be the first to go. The sooner the inheritors get their hands on what's coming to them the better off they'll be.
• ingohelpinger 2y ago
  most GDPs around the world are printed.
• somenameforme 2y ago
  The opposition against spending in itself is a subset of a wider issue of spending well beyond our means - taking on ever mounting debt. This [1] is a graph of the US debt to GDP. That's a rather unpleasant graph. The countries with comparable debt:GDP ratios (2 worse, 2 better) are Bahrain, Maldives, Laos, and Cape Verde. [2] In fact we have the 7th worst debt:GDP ratio in the world. So the obvious response here should be - who cares? Nothing apocalyptic's happened so far. True. And the reason for that is because the US has (and to a lesser degree) retains a unique superpower to export our inflation [3] to other countries. This was because of a perfect storm of a number of factors including: - the USD being world reserve currency (the currency other countries kept under their bed in case of a rainy day, or if they wanted to buy oil...), - the US being the largest consumer economy - the USD being the standard in global trade But these factors are all coming to an end, some slowly and some not so slowly. The petrodollar is basically dead, countries are gradually to detaching themselves from the dollar, an increasing chunk of the largest economies in the world are now no longer settling trades in the USD, and so on. The world becoming more multipolar, the introduction of alternative global currencies, and such will only accelerate this trend. This is also happening that the US economy is starting to slow down. So basically this level of debt spending is simply unsustainable. If the spending is indeed necessary, then our economy will have found itself in a situation where it can't sustain itself, and there will end up being a 'correction' that'd be far more painful than some bluntly targeted cuts. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen... [3] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation
• aikinai 2y ago
  I can’t even make my car payments, so I might as well eat out for lunch every day.
• somenameforme 2y ago
  > "4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [1]" That needs some context. Here [2] is a graph of corporate profits after tax versus GDP. Corporate profits are, counter-intuitively, a far smaller percent of the total GDP, so it's rather logical that tax from said profits would be a smaller percent of GDP. This is one sample of why looking at things as a percent of GDP can be quite misleading. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DUdb https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DUdb [2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DUIy https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DUIy
• Sparyjerry 2y ago
  GDP includes government spending as well. Cut government spending and GDP goes down. Our ability to make debt payments is not very great when you look at it this way. GDP is not revenue. Revenue as a percentage of the debt is nearing all time lows.
• khana 2y ago
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• lm28469 2y ago
  From what I gather these people don't understand country scale spendings and debts. They think it's 1:1 the same thing as a family budget, that if we don't "pay the debt" some kind of magical entity will come and collect their cars an houses
• deleted 2y ago
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• thewanderer1983 2y ago
  > For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions Have you seen this? https://balajis.com/p/americas-175-trillion-problem https://balajis.com/p/americas-175-trillion-problem
• regpertom 2y ago
  Not from USA but the q’s seems strange imo: 1. Is spending as a % of GDP the metric used to determine whether spending is out of control? If so, 70’s was Vietnam and other things since, is that why the date starts there? Is all spending the same? If I had limited money and spent it on luxury cars where as before it was beans for food I haven’t changed spending but it’s not far off to say I’m out of control. The USA govt isn’t necessarily doing that though just an example. 2. If those are the categories, are the $ spent in those categories spent well? If a $ marked for the elderly category is spent badly, is stopping that taking $ from the elderly? 3. Why should it? Would I be wrong to expect that theoretical timeline to have 3. instead be something like why should healthcare be first in the chopping block? Kind of like 2. alludes? The chopping block is t/f sometimes good. 4. National debt isn’t included in 1. Is locking in CTR as a % of GDP what’s fair? Seems that you want more taxes instead of spending cuts and to go after health insurance. Maybe that’s the right thing to do I don’t know but the q’s seem loaded.
• base698 2y ago
  1. My main concern is the total debt and its interest, as you mentioned in point two. With DOGE, ensuring orders are followed to fix policy is crucial, but some of these cuts do seem more about installing loyal personnel than just reducing costs. I also worry about shifting staff to contractors. From friends that work in the DOD contracting they get paid 3-4x what an equivalent gov employee does. If contracts are cut too that could be a much bigger win than the gov staff. 2. They've discussed cutting programs like the F-35 and shifting towards robotics and drones for defense and offense. The goal is to move away from expensive Cold War-era weapons that are easy targets. If this just redirects more money to Anduril and Silicon Valley, that’s unfortunate. But if it reduces overall costs, that’s a positive step. 3. Diabetes and dialysis treatments are extremely expensive. Addressing obesity could significantly lower end-of-life healthcare costs. RFK has explicitly focused on this issue. 4. Agree. Another major issue is the sheer number of regulations involved in anything. Not all are federal, but it's revealing to count how many laws you unknowingly break. For example, where I live: If your dog chases a squirrel—illegal. Flying a drone and disturbing a bird’s flight path—illegal. Using a quadcopter to photograph your house in snowy conditions (when visibility is below IFR limits for airplanes)—illegal. Taking pictures of dolphins from a boat, even if they move away on their own—illegal. I don’t own a business, but friends who do often describe the nightmare of dealing with regulatory agencies. They may not be police, but the experience feels just as stressful—especially since they can effectively shut down your business. Compliance is incredibly expensive for the company.
  • DrillShopper 2y ago
    > I also worry about shifting staff to contractors. From friends that work in the DOD contracting they get paid 3-4x what an equivalent gov employee does. If contracts are cut too that could be a much bigger win than the gov staff. Why would contracts be cut? If you're firing federal employees but the work still has to get done (as directed by the laws enacted by Congress which the president is obligated to faithully execute to the best of his ability) then the only solution is more contractors, not less. In addition as you hollow out the expertise in agencies by buying people out or letting them take early retirement you're going to have more government consultants and contractors providing that expertise at a multiple of what the existing employees cost. Is the Stalinist purge of perceived enemies by the president and resident billionaire worth all of that extra spending? Is it worth introducing more spending and inefficiency in the name of saving money and efficiency?
• 13_9_7_7_5_18 2y ago
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• smegger001 2y ago
  Ignore all of that is it even within the president's purgative to cut the spending? As I understand it congress, specifically the House of Representatives, hold the power of the purse and sets that national budget. Congress apportions funding for specific programs to be spent, and its the job of the executive to execute the legislation as specified by the legislative branch. They must spend the money on what they are told to spend it on. Similarly congress created many of these agencies and department Trump/Musk/D.O.G.E. are trying to kill and as such only congress can dissolve them. This is a massive executive overreach. Trump is trying to claim that all congress can do is set a ceiling on spending rather than tell him to actually spend it which is patently ridiculous as then he could just defund anything he disagrees with congress with and de-facto nullify any congressional action.
• vladimirralev 2y ago
  1. Is personal spending and wages growing with GDP? Answer in no. How is it fair for government spending to track and exceed GDP, but personal not to follow? GDP itself is a flawed metric that politics push to overstate. 2. This is all true, but much of the fraud takes please "in name" of something good. You will easily find things like funding some NGO to host a party in the "taking care of the elderly" code. Many things get misclassified to hide them better. 3. You don't really want to be fast and loose with health because it can produce some very bad headlines like people left with no care. Truth is, you can cut some spending and some pharma company who is on the receiving end of it can just stop supplying drugs or services leaving people to die and blaming you. And because it's a private company with it's own accounting, that may be true or not, but in any case it's better business for them to sabotage you and teach you a lesson. 4. This has more to do with accounting quirks than anything else. Companies have ways to spend money on intangibles with less and less scrutiny and it makes no sense to book any kind of cash profit, especially with higher inflation among other factors.
  • sxyuan 2y ago
    A couple of interesting graphs: Personal spending is up relative to GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DWC7 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DWC7 Household net worth is up relative to GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DWCd https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DWCd This might be chalked up to population growth, but then again so could increased GDP or government spending.
• coffeemug 2y ago
  This may seem like a minor objection, but I think it's substantive. The term "their fair share" is a deliberately wordsmithed term designed to manipulate people's thinking process. (Not by you, but by the politicians; it's very easy for all of us to miss these terms.) It makes a substantive discussion harder and less likely. A much more objective way to state this question is "Why shouldn't corporations pay more".
• stainablesteel 2y ago
  1. it is, we're bound to pay $1T in interest and that will spiral us out of financial hegemony 2. this is the typical response i've seen to this and it's missing the point entirely. in government spending you typically pay off lots of groups, pay too much, and give some guy's friend's cousins shop some business because it puts money in people's hands. this is wasteful and can be cut out. it's not the point of DOGE to cut programs that people want, they just spend their money irresponsibly and that can be further optimized to deliver the same results for less money. just as was done with twitter 3. without even getting into it, trump didnt campaign on this. the healthcare system is big and complicated and it needs a lot of magnifying glasses to go through it, if you want that then find a candidate who supports it 4. they do, they pay a lot and those costs can be inhibitive. the taxes generated from this process doesn't pay for what we need, the problem is that government spending is way higher than what industries generate and this is backwards. private business is supposed to support the government through its taxes, not the government spending supporting businesses through nepotism
• cavisne 2y ago
  The cuts are justified regardless as they are in wasteful areas that don’t contribute to anything you listed. The next argument would be that most of the spending is not wasteful, so doge will fail to make a dent, as most money is going to directly help people. Lets see!
• bitcoin_anon 2y ago
  > 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1] Why do you choose 1970 as a baseline? Federal spending is absolutely out of control when compared to, say 1913, as a baseline. “…a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.” - Thomas Jefferson
  • frankish 2y ago
    Exactly this IMO. Federal government is way too big. I would be more sympathetic if we moved most of these concerns to a more local level of government. Trying to have a one-size-fits-all approach for the whole country is what causes so much polarization. Let the ideas be run as experiments more locally, so that people can more easily vote with their feet and wallets. I have never actually gotten a chance to vote how my tax dollars are used.
• deleted 2y ago
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• yellowapple 2y ago
  > There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? Pretty sure one of the core arguments behind the drive to slash federal spending is the belief that federal spending has been out of control since long before the 1970s.
  • starspangled 2y ago
    Government expenditure to GDP is up on the 70s anyway, and not just because of a covid outlier, it was well above the 70s rates in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 10s (i.e, before covid expenditure).
• foxyv 2y ago
  I think a lot of the belief of government waste comes from anecdotal data usually centered around misunderstandings deliberate and otherwise. Welfare queens buying lobster (After not eating for a week). NASA bought a million dollar pen (It wasn't). People form opinions and ideas through stories. They see that there is a sub ten percent wastage and it doesn't even register. But tell a story about some insane thing the government did and people will remember it for decades.
• dapf 2y ago
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