Congressional budgets are really complex and can't be evaluated like code. That $3 billion subsidy for farmers in Nebraska? The people of Nebraska really, reall

Congressional budgets are really complex and can't be evaluated like code. That $3 billion subsidy for farmers in Nebraska? The people of Nebraska really, really want that. So much so that if their senators can't push it through, they'll likely vote them out of office. So those senators trade every favor they have to get it through, which usually means voting for keeping a military base open in Colorado, funding road work and pipelines in Texas, building a new airport in Oklahoma, etc. That's how we get such a bloated federal budget. It's why Congress wants to build a whole bunch of tanks for the Army that they have said they don't need. It's really more of a tragedy of the commons situation than inefficiency. IMO the question shouldn't be "how can we lower our tax burden", it should be "how do we get more value out of our tax dollars." That may mean increasing the tax burden. There's a sweet spot between socialism and capitalism, and IMO we're swinging a bit far towards capitalism right now. I'm not saying we should go full-on welfare state, but our infrastructure is crumbling and people are losing faith in the American dream, yet companies are more profitable than ever. It's also important to recognize that government accounting is substantially different from normal corporate accounting. Governments can literally print money if they need to do so to cover debts (and thus shift the burden of debt repayment onto all holders of their currency). The flip side of that is that governments have such a massive scale, they tend to absorb a lot of economy-scale losses (such as building vacancies) that businesses wouldn't have to, so their balance sheets look awful.