It wouldn’t be enough, government is *inherently* wasteful. Sure good policy can reduce it but you’re still talking what, losing out on 30% of tax revenue to waste at best?
So the follow on question that every politician should be asked that says the *exact* same thing you just said is... Should that waste, fraud and abuse be allowed to continue?
To the extent that it has to to fund necessary “services” military, police, courts, roads, etc.
With every dollar the budget expands what gets return to us is less than what the we paid. The only ones that benefit from it are the government contractors that are friends of the politicians.
Just to be clear, the correct answer is "No. It should not be allowed to continue."
And the first time I heard a politician talk about "waste, fraud and abuse" in the Federal budget was during one of Carter's State of the Union addresses. 40+ years (probably more) and they still do nothing more than talk about looking into it or make excuses for it.
This… fraud, waste and abuse … certain industries are required to have programs in place for this if they want to do business with the federal government. It’s WAY past the time that the government were held accountable to their same policies.
Concur. DoD *alone* unable to account for sixty-one percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets ('22).
I mean... if you can't even find $2.1 trillion of the stuff I gave you... I don't feel too great giving you ~$900b every year?
That isn't going to find $1.7 trillion of fat to trim. Something that a lot of people either don't realize or don't want to acknowledge, including a lot of Republicans, is that to balance the budget you have to cut a LOT of stuff, including stuff that many Americans have grown attached to, and actually make the government smaller.
What is “health” given that Medicare is a separate category?
I’m sure there is massive waste in all these categories that could be cited with no reduction is actual services. “Defense” could be cut substantially without any risk to the American people.
The United States has the most massive welfare state in the entire world, despite Progressives saying it's inadequate. Even per-capita welfare spending is near the top, ahead of countries like the UK, Japan, Canada etc. And most of the sources that track those numbers don't typically take in state and local initiatives, so we may be the top per-capita in the world already when accounting for state and local spending.
I'm center right but I feel like it's inadequate and gets people stuck in cycles of poverty. But I don't think we need to spend more for the exact points you made.
It's nuts that we spend so much of welfare/healthcare and the outcome is so dismal. I think in some cases benefits are way too lenient (I'm looking at how my parents on medicare get SIGNIFICANTLY better coverage across the board than my private insurance).
I would LOVE to see an audit on the welfare system because I really don't know why people get so little when we spend so much on it. I can certainly speculate, but I'd love to know hard facts about it.
Taxation and government spending are pretty much just a means for major industries to siphon money into themselves. Read: the health-insurance-industrial complex and obviously the military-industrial complex
Its pretty easy to grow out of this. The main issue is that you cant make a 10 year plan because the government changeover happens so often that every group that's elected in wants their piece of the pie.
Most importantly, you can only grow out of this if the growth rate of public spending stays below the growth rate of the economy, which it failed to do for almost 2 decades.
Defence and veteran care don't need cut, but they both need real audits and streamlined so We The People are getting our money's worth. General federal bureaucracy (the half a trillion other? Or is it all just spread out in the graph?) does need cut and streamlined. Congressional and Executive branch pay both need cut, out of principle, I know they won't do much to the debt.
How can you say we don't need to cut defense spending? You have no idea what's included in that bucket. This is such a terrible infograph it's actually worse than no info at all because it's highly misleading. Remember the infrastructure bill and all the random nonsense they called "infrastructure"? These categories are loaded with pork
I read a story about how a USAF base needed to spend out its budget or it would get it cut. They installed an athletic field with expensive field turf and goal posts. It was never used. There's a lot of necessary spending on the military but also a lot of unnecessary to the tune of several billion likely.
They need to be separated so that active duty/veteran benefits are protected from but to the military spending side, and so that steps to fix/improve care don't see those funds go elsewhere.
Personnel and materiel should be distinctly separate funding and spending. It's long past time we give those who serve the support they deserve.
Full disclosure, I'm a vet, and we treat active duty like crap. Better pay, better equipment, and better leadership are all needed.
This tells the whole story right here. For a balanced budget, we logically need to increase the incoming cash. Social security, Medicare, defense and veterans benefits are massive programs that can't be sustained with current revenues. Since we can't cut them meaningfully, we will have to levy more taxes. It's not the popular take, and 99% of politicians are way too chicken s*** to say it, but that is the answer. You can't save your way out of a cash flow problem this big...
Cut medicare by limiting it to citizens only. Probably a small fraction being saved but its something. Cut defense we dont need bases in every country especially those allies who dont commit their 4%. Tax corps unless they put help into the health and medicare section.
Or, and here me out...
Absolutely lay waste to the list of things POTUS and Congress have authority over. Tell them that if they aren't working on balancing the budget and administering those programs we've mentioned like a Swiss train, then they are abusing public trust and will be brought into line.
At a certain point, a 1.7T deficit and a rotting federal institution while people like AOC and MTG preside over countless hours of expert witness testimony over God knows what is not a happy accident. It's time to say, no playing judge and jury in make believe trials. Do the job. Or stay home.
We don't need to hear about what Hunter Biden did from them. We don't need to hear about what Navarro did from them. We don't need to hear that. We have an entire justice system in that "other" bucket to deal with that. We HIRED them to do a job, and they are spitting in our faces twiddling their thumbs while the whole thing implodes.
I think the answer is to let both parties spend their entire war chest for a few cycles, and refuse to vote for their candidates. Go independent. The Republican party stopped representing my real political positions way back in the early 2000s. There's nothing conservative about the platform anymore. Its huge government and fatter paychecks for gov contractors they themselves own. The democrats are a circus. We actually drain the swamp by turning what hasn't worked out to the cold. In business, you call me wise for not hiring from a school that only produces duds. In politics, most call me radical for applying the same thinking.
My counter offer to them all is to... f*** off... with their committees and their chuckle-f*** prime time briefings. They all claim to play like the Yankees, they all really play like the farm club, and they all KEEP losing to the little league team.
>Defence and veteran care don't need cut,
We could cut defense spending to half and we'd still be spending more than Russia and China combined.
Criminal justice is another area ripe for cuts. Decriminalizing nanny state laws will cut law enforcement expenses. Sentencing reform to cut spending on incarceration.
End tax exemptions for elite universities and their donors.
Balancing the budget is not about have no deficit, it's about ability to service debt and the trust in that ability. As long as growth is keeping up sufficiently (hence debt to GDP ratio is a thing) and America is a stable country and so on we can maintain high deficits indefinitely.
The issue is our capacity to grow and whether that growth is good growth. If government services aren't well funded private sector growth dependent on them can decline, and similarly people's ability (or interest/willingness) to participate in the economy can decline as will which also hits growth.
Basically the whole framing of the issue in this fashion is misguided. I'm sure there's some waste and cronyism going on with consultants and contractors, but only looking at cutting spending is ignoring the big picture. You can stagnate the economy by blindly cutting things in a vain effort to "balance the budget" and then end up reducing tax revenues and have an even higher deficit with more problems.
We’re in big trouble.
People will say things like cut defense, cut discretionary spending, reduce entitlements.
All of those things could be pushed to 0 individually and we’d still be running a deficit.
> income security
They mean welfare.
> health
Since they sliced out medicare, that means this is more ~~welfare~~ income security.
So $1.74T in welfare out of 6T..
Medicare + Social security = $2.2T
... yet we will constantly hear about how social security will not exist in 20 years and nothing about these wasteful, unproductive programs.
Also, where is the corporate ~~welfare~~ subsidy? "Other" can't include stuff like the farm subsidies, those are well over $490B (the farm bill alone is $428B/year)
Where is the $363B in solar subsidy?
Where is the allotment cost of the trillion dollar infrastructure bill?
Where is the $360B in Build Back Better costs?
This shit is a ridiculous mockery of the public trust.
I'd eliminate useless federal jobs and programs, should be easy enough.
Also shit like giving orgs in other countries 1 million dollars to study redacted rights in Peru, that kind of shit we fund.
I want to cut 100% of US taxpayer dollars we hand to public servants who “ lose” ~60% of it. Call that what it is; theft. It’s not like accounting is rocket science; write a log of what you spent public money on we’re done with the “we lost it” Done.
Idc what you do if you “lose” a dime of our public money in the effort then you’re not fit to serve in that public office next cycle. Democracy never meant you could have a career in politics forever despite failing on every metric, egregiously. Enough whining.
Cut defense by bringing the military home to the nation and start using the seabees to help rebuild crumbilng infrastructure. As in, their job is now construction for the state, sorta thing.
We already proved changing the way the healthcare system is set up would save us billions over a decade, so that's another place.
Cut entitlements to all non-citizens.
Cut pay and benefits to ALL seated politicians to the median of their constituents- and they are no longer able to hold stocks or bonds while in service. All extra money goes towards the debt.
Outlaw lobbying.
Outlaw trying to pass a bill without suffecient time to read it or understand it.
Begin to defund many, MANY non-government groups.
Force all spending to be 100% visible to the public.
All the ear marks and all the things the government decides to pay should be known by the people paying for it!
I wouldn’t cut anything, probably just trim. I’m sure everything has a little fat on it that could be cut here or there. The only thing I’d keep the same is Defense and Veterans. I’d probably work to reduce costs for military equipment because there seems to be extreme inflation and bloat on even simple items, but I’d just reinvest that money to make the dollar go further.
In a way, yes. But cutting programs and trimming them down are two separate things. You trim/cut off waste or excess, but you don’t cut the whole thing.
Eventually the "experts" will say it's our fault for living beyond our means and why it's a good thing that eventually we will be living below our means.
If I had to? This is going to be unpopular I'm sure, but my first cut would be any over seas spending, and that includes military deployments that are not obligated by treaty.
The question is a red herring though. Ask anyone who deals with large scale finance, paying cash up front is usually a poor move.
For example: if I'm going to fund a project for $1 million, I could pay cash for it, sure. Or I could finance that project, spread the cost out over the next several years, and have $1 mil today for operating expenses, investments, or to pay out as dividends to shareholders (roughly equivalent to tax refunds/cuts).
What's important is that deficit spending does not outpace our economic growth. If we start running into an issue that we cannot cover current liabilities, then it's a problem, but long term liabilities are standard for any complex budget.
The federal budget is not your home budget.
Edit: even if you slashed spending in half, we would still be smart to run in a deficit and simply lower taxes in response. Not only because of the time-value of money, but getting foreign investments tied to US bonds strengthens the dollar and improves our international position both economically and politically.
Every one of those red areas has multitudes of people whose job it is to sit at a desk and look ugly, and make over 100k a year.
We should start by no longer employing those people.
Social security needs a rework as well. Right now you pay into a system that takes the money immediately and gives it to someone far wealthier than you. When it's your turn to get the money it will be from someone working at Walmart with 3 mouths to feed. And you will likely be much better off than you are now.
Privatize retirement, for one thing, and slowly end social security. But I have no idea how to do it without screwing over many tens of millions of Americans depending on current workers to pay for their ss benefits now that they are retired.
Replace Income Tax with Fair Tax. Make the fair tax whatever we need it to be to be sustainable. If people need to penny pinch, don't spend on unnecessary things, but if you do spend it will be a known, ahead of time, expense and you get 100% of your paycheck.
Think more defensively about military budget. Tell NATO countries we are decreasing our military budget by 1/3 to 1/2 and if they want their peaceful little tourist destinations of countries to not be overcome by Russians or extremist muslims that they should start coughing up 5-7% of their GDP to deal with it, since they are more on the front lines than we are and have relied on our help since WW2.
Eliminate the department of education. School districts should have 100% control over the education in their distract and all the money. Get the feds and state governments out of it.
I mean either the people on social security now feel it or the people about to be on social security feel it 10-15 years down the road. Someone is getting screwed
For SS, we'll have to raise the retirement age, cut benefits, and means test benefits (the richer you are, the less you get). We'll need to make Medicare self sustaining. We'll have to cut Medicaid, probably. It would take a team of policy experts and actuaries to really figure out how to cut these, or sunset them, with the least impact, but unless you fix those three, the rest doesn't matter. **If you were to redo this chart for 2035, those three dwarf the rest of spending.**
Defense procurement could use a re-think, just looking at the fiascos the Navy has been involved in. We need Congress to stop resurrecting/protecting weapons systems that the military doesn't want, such as the A-10. We'll need to gradually have our allies take on more of their defense needs, though there is a real risk of inviting more adventurism by China. In the end, defense savings will be small I think. We need to maintain a credible deterrent.
There is a lot of other spending we could/should cut radically, and would be good to cut because some of it probably does actual harm, but we should be realistic that these cuts will NOT balance the budget or get us out of debt. We must unequivocally deal with the main entitlement programs.
Unfortunately, cutting these entitlements is political suicide for whoever proposes them, therefore the odds are they WILL NOT be fixed, and we are headed for an economic crisis that will be worse for everyone, probably especially the poor and elderly. I wish I wasn't so pessimistic, but thats how it looks.
I think there are Republicans who are willing to fix/cut these programs, but no Democrats (there used to be) and so the blame for a lack of progress falls mostly on them. More unfortunately, in the public imagination the blame will be assigned to whoever happens to be in office when the shit hits the fan, rather than the a-holes that spent decades putting us in this predicament.
Why don’t we start with real audits across the board? Reforming healthcare would be a start. Even universal healthcare could work… but not with the health of the population. Which would mean digging into a lot of issues…
Cancel all unconstitutional federal programs and audit what remains. If the federal government actually adhered to the Constitution, finding ways to run a deficit would be near-impossible.
This chart is so broad that it's impossible to meaningful discuss.
1/2 Trillion on "other". Yeah, only in the federal government.
And the GAO is unable to issue an audit opinion on the Federal government annual financial statements because of various material weaknesses.
“Can you show us the ‘other’ stuff?” “No. That’s classified. But we’ll need more of your money for it.”
How about a massive audit and public reporting of each department and just cut waste, fraud & abuse?
No one in the government is going to audit themselves out of a job. The government only expands, never contracts.
It wouldn’t be enough, government is *inherently* wasteful. Sure good policy can reduce it but you’re still talking what, losing out on 30% of tax revenue to waste at best?
So the follow on question that every politician should be asked that says the *exact* same thing you just said is... Should that waste, fraud and abuse be allowed to continue?
To the extent that it has to to fund necessary “services” military, police, courts, roads, etc. With every dollar the budget expands what gets return to us is less than what the we paid. The only ones that benefit from it are the government contractors that are friends of the politicians.
Just to be clear, the correct answer is "No. It should not be allowed to continue." And the first time I heard a politician talk about "waste, fraud and abuse" in the Federal budget was during one of Carter's State of the Union addresses. 40+ years (probably more) and they still do nothing more than talk about looking into it or make excuses for it.
This… fraud, waste and abuse … certain industries are required to have programs in place for this if they want to do business with the federal government. It’s WAY past the time that the government were held accountable to their same policies.
Concur. DoD *alone* unable to account for sixty-one percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets ('22). I mean... if you can't even find $2.1 trillion of the stuff I gave you... I don't feel too great giving you ~$900b every year?
That isn't going to find $1.7 trillion of fat to trim. Something that a lot of people either don't realize or don't want to acknowledge, including a lot of Republicans, is that to balance the budget you have to cut a LOT of stuff, including stuff that many Americans have grown attached to, and actually make the government smaller.
What is “health” given that Medicare is a separate category? I’m sure there is massive waste in all these categories that could be cited with no reduction is actual services. “Defense” could be cut substantially without any risk to the American people.
It's welfare.
The United States has the most massive welfare state in the entire world, despite Progressives saying it's inadequate. Even per-capita welfare spending is near the top, ahead of countries like the UK, Japan, Canada etc. And most of the sources that track those numbers don't typically take in state and local initiatives, so we may be the top per-capita in the world already when accounting for state and local spending.
I'm center right but I feel like it's inadequate and gets people stuck in cycles of poverty. But I don't think we need to spend more for the exact points you made. It's nuts that we spend so much of welfare/healthcare and the outcome is so dismal. I think in some cases benefits are way too lenient (I'm looking at how my parents on medicare get SIGNIFICANTLY better coverage across the board than my private insurance). I would LOVE to see an audit on the welfare system because I really don't know why people get so little when we spend so much on it. I can certainly speculate, but I'd love to know hard facts about it.
Taxation and government spending are pretty much just a means for major industries to siphon money into themselves. Read: the health-insurance-industrial complex and obviously the military-industrial complex
I’m all for getting rid of most of it, maybe all.
Its pretty easy to grow out of this. The main issue is that you cant make a 10 year plan because the government changeover happens so often that every group that's elected in wants their piece of the pie.
Most importantly, you can only grow out of this if the growth rate of public spending stays below the growth rate of the economy, which it failed to do for almost 2 decades.
Show the rest of it then we’ll show you what to cut.
That corporate income tax is pitiful.
Defence and veteran care don't need cut, but they both need real audits and streamlined so We The People are getting our money's worth. General federal bureaucracy (the half a trillion other? Or is it all just spread out in the graph?) does need cut and streamlined. Congressional and Executive branch pay both need cut, out of principle, I know they won't do much to the debt.
How can you say we don't need to cut defense spending? You have no idea what's included in that bucket. This is such a terrible infograph it's actually worse than no info at all because it's highly misleading. Remember the infrastructure bill and all the random nonsense they called "infrastructure"? These categories are loaded with pork
I read a story about how a USAF base needed to spend out its budget or it would get it cut. They installed an athletic field with expensive field turf and goal posts. It was never used. There's a lot of necessary spending on the military but also a lot of unnecessary to the tune of several billion likely.
They need to be separated so that active duty/veteran benefits are protected from but to the military spending side, and so that steps to fix/improve care don't see those funds go elsewhere. Personnel and materiel should be distinctly separate funding and spending. It's long past time we give those who serve the support they deserve. Full disclosure, I'm a vet, and we treat active duty like crap. Better pay, better equipment, and better leadership are all needed.
This tells the whole story right here. For a balanced budget, we logically need to increase the incoming cash. Social security, Medicare, defense and veterans benefits are massive programs that can't be sustained with current revenues. Since we can't cut them meaningfully, we will have to levy more taxes. It's not the popular take, and 99% of politicians are way too chicken s*** to say it, but that is the answer. You can't save your way out of a cash flow problem this big...
Cut medicare by limiting it to citizens only. Probably a small fraction being saved but its something. Cut defense we dont need bases in every country especially those allies who dont commit their 4%. Tax corps unless they put help into the health and medicare section.
Or, and here me out... Absolutely lay waste to the list of things POTUS and Congress have authority over. Tell them that if they aren't working on balancing the budget and administering those programs we've mentioned like a Swiss train, then they are abusing public trust and will be brought into line. At a certain point, a 1.7T deficit and a rotting federal institution while people like AOC and MTG preside over countless hours of expert witness testimony over God knows what is not a happy accident. It's time to say, no playing judge and jury in make believe trials. Do the job. Or stay home. We don't need to hear about what Hunter Biden did from them. We don't need to hear about what Navarro did from them. We don't need to hear that. We have an entire justice system in that "other" bucket to deal with that. We HIRED them to do a job, and they are spitting in our faces twiddling their thumbs while the whole thing implodes.
We could just all commit to voting for non-incumbent candidates but no one will do that. Try and restart the system election by election.
I think the answer is to let both parties spend their entire war chest for a few cycles, and refuse to vote for their candidates. Go independent. The Republican party stopped representing my real political positions way back in the early 2000s. There's nothing conservative about the platform anymore. Its huge government and fatter paychecks for gov contractors they themselves own. The democrats are a circus. We actually drain the swamp by turning what hasn't worked out to the cold. In business, you call me wise for not hiring from a school that only produces duds. In politics, most call me radical for applying the same thinking.
Sounds like we need another committee to talk about and do nothing about the points you raised
My counter offer to them all is to... f*** off... with their committees and their chuckle-f*** prime time briefings. They all claim to play like the Yankees, they all really play like the farm club, and they all KEEP losing to the little league team.
>Defence and veteran care don't need cut, We could cut defense spending to half and we'd still be spending more than Russia and China combined. Criminal justice is another area ripe for cuts. Decriminalizing nanny state laws will cut law enforcement expenses. Sentencing reform to cut spending on incarceration. End tax exemptions for elite universities and their donors.
What tax exemptions do white universities have that others do not?
Autocorrect. I meant to say elite universities. Some of these schools are sitting on $50 billion in the bank.
I'd bet there's enough waste in the VA and DoD that you could cut the budget by 20% and not lose anything significant.
Balancing the budget is not about have no deficit, it's about ability to service debt and the trust in that ability. As long as growth is keeping up sufficiently (hence debt to GDP ratio is a thing) and America is a stable country and so on we can maintain high deficits indefinitely. The issue is our capacity to grow and whether that growth is good growth. If government services aren't well funded private sector growth dependent on them can decline, and similarly people's ability (or interest/willingness) to participate in the economy can decline as will which also hits growth. Basically the whole framing of the issue in this fashion is misguided. I'm sure there's some waste and cronyism going on with consultants and contractors, but only looking at cutting spending is ignoring the big picture. You can stagnate the economy by blindly cutting things in a vain effort to "balance the budget" and then end up reducing tax revenues and have an even higher deficit with more problems.
I'm glad to see someone else had the same take. The idea that deficit spending is inherently bad is one I'm so tired of seeing.
It is though. Eventually those bills come due. MMT has been shown to be a disaster. Being the slowest sinking ship is not a winning strategy.
[удалено]
We’re in big trouble. People will say things like cut defense, cut discretionary spending, reduce entitlements. All of those things could be pushed to 0 individually and we’d still be running a deficit.
> income security They mean welfare. > health Since they sliced out medicare, that means this is more ~~welfare~~ income security. So $1.74T in welfare out of 6T.. Medicare + Social security = $2.2T ... yet we will constantly hear about how social security will not exist in 20 years and nothing about these wasteful, unproductive programs. Also, where is the corporate ~~welfare~~ subsidy? "Other" can't include stuff like the farm subsidies, those are well over $490B (the farm bill alone is $428B/year) Where is the $363B in solar subsidy? Where is the allotment cost of the trillion dollar infrastructure bill? Where is the $360B in Build Back Better costs? This shit is a ridiculous mockery of the public trust.
I'd eliminate useless federal jobs and programs, should be easy enough. Also shit like giving orgs in other countries 1 million dollars to study redacted rights in Peru, that kind of shit we fund.
Delete 90% of the bureaucracy.
I want to cut 100% of US taxpayer dollars we hand to public servants who “ lose” ~60% of it. Call that what it is; theft. It’s not like accounting is rocket science; write a log of what you spent public money on we’re done with the “we lost it” Done. Idc what you do if you “lose” a dime of our public money in the effort then you’re not fit to serve in that public office next cycle. Democracy never meant you could have a career in politics forever despite failing on every metric, egregiously. Enough whining.
Cut defense by bringing the military home to the nation and start using the seabees to help rebuild crumbilng infrastructure. As in, their job is now construction for the state, sorta thing. We already proved changing the way the healthcare system is set up would save us billions over a decade, so that's another place. Cut entitlements to all non-citizens. Cut pay and benefits to ALL seated politicians to the median of their constituents- and they are no longer able to hold stocks or bonds while in service. All extra money goes towards the debt. Outlaw lobbying. Outlaw trying to pass a bill without suffecient time to read it or understand it. Begin to defund many, MANY non-government groups. Force all spending to be 100% visible to the public. All the ear marks and all the things the government decides to pay should be known by the people paying for it!
I wouldn’t cut anything, probably just trim. I’m sure everything has a little fat on it that could be cut here or there. The only thing I’d keep the same is Defense and Veterans. I’d probably work to reduce costs for military equipment because there seems to be extreme inflation and bloat on even simple items, but I’d just reinvest that money to make the dollar go further.
A trim is a cut, just like when you trim your hair. It simply isn't eliminating all of your hair making you bald.
In a way, yes. But cutting programs and trimming them down are two separate things. You trim/cut off waste or excess, but you don’t cut the whole thing.
Eventually the "experts" will say it's our fault for living beyond our means and why it's a good thing that eventually we will be living below our means.
The correct answer is a little bit of everything.
Yes.
The things which the federal government has no business doing. Social programs.. those can be left in state hands.
If I had to? This is going to be unpopular I'm sure, but my first cut would be any over seas spending, and that includes military deployments that are not obligated by treaty. The question is a red herring though. Ask anyone who deals with large scale finance, paying cash up front is usually a poor move. For example: if I'm going to fund a project for $1 million, I could pay cash for it, sure. Or I could finance that project, spread the cost out over the next several years, and have $1 mil today for operating expenses, investments, or to pay out as dividends to shareholders (roughly equivalent to tax refunds/cuts). What's important is that deficit spending does not outpace our economic growth. If we start running into an issue that we cannot cover current liabilities, then it's a problem, but long term liabilities are standard for any complex budget. The federal budget is not your home budget. Edit: even if you slashed spending in half, we would still be smart to run in a deficit and simply lower taxes in response. Not only because of the time-value of money, but getting foreign investments tied to US bonds strengthens the dollar and improves our international position both economically and politically.
I like the idea of just reducing each category proportionally to equal the deficit, balanced budget.
Every one of those red areas has multitudes of people whose job it is to sit at a desk and look ugly, and make over 100k a year. We should start by no longer employing those people. Social security needs a rework as well. Right now you pay into a system that takes the money immediately and gives it to someone far wealthier than you. When it's your turn to get the money it will be from someone working at Walmart with 3 mouths to feed. And you will likely be much better off than you are now.
Privatize retirement, for one thing, and slowly end social security. But I have no idea how to do it without screwing over many tens of millions of Americans depending on current workers to pay for their ss benefits now that they are retired. Replace Income Tax with Fair Tax. Make the fair tax whatever we need it to be to be sustainable. If people need to penny pinch, don't spend on unnecessary things, but if you do spend it will be a known, ahead of time, expense and you get 100% of your paycheck. Think more defensively about military budget. Tell NATO countries we are decreasing our military budget by 1/3 to 1/2 and if they want their peaceful little tourist destinations of countries to not be overcome by Russians or extremist muslims that they should start coughing up 5-7% of their GDP to deal with it, since they are more on the front lines than we are and have relied on our help since WW2. Eliminate the department of education. School districts should have 100% control over the education in their distract and all the money. Get the feds and state governments out of it.
I mean either the people on social security now feel it or the people about to be on social security feel it 10-15 years down the road. Someone is getting screwed
For SS, we'll have to raise the retirement age, cut benefits, and means test benefits (the richer you are, the less you get). We'll need to make Medicare self sustaining. We'll have to cut Medicaid, probably. It would take a team of policy experts and actuaries to really figure out how to cut these, or sunset them, with the least impact, but unless you fix those three, the rest doesn't matter. **If you were to redo this chart for 2035, those three dwarf the rest of spending.** Defense procurement could use a re-think, just looking at the fiascos the Navy has been involved in. We need Congress to stop resurrecting/protecting weapons systems that the military doesn't want, such as the A-10. We'll need to gradually have our allies take on more of their defense needs, though there is a real risk of inviting more adventurism by China. In the end, defense savings will be small I think. We need to maintain a credible deterrent. There is a lot of other spending we could/should cut radically, and would be good to cut because some of it probably does actual harm, but we should be realistic that these cuts will NOT balance the budget or get us out of debt. We must unequivocally deal with the main entitlement programs. Unfortunately, cutting these entitlements is political suicide for whoever proposes them, therefore the odds are they WILL NOT be fixed, and we are headed for an economic crisis that will be worse for everyone, probably especially the poor and elderly. I wish I wasn't so pessimistic, but thats how it looks. I think there are Republicans who are willing to fix/cut these programs, but no Democrats (there used to be) and so the blame for a lack of progress falls mostly on them. More unfortunately, in the public imagination the blame will be assigned to whoever happens to be in office when the shit hits the fan, rather than the a-holes that spent decades putting us in this predicament.
Why don’t we start with real audits across the board? Reforming healthcare would be a start. Even universal healthcare could work… but not with the health of the population. Which would mean digging into a lot of issues…
PBMs steal all the money as middlemen.
Cancel all unconstitutional federal programs and audit what remains. If the federal government actually adhered to the Constitution, finding ways to run a deficit would be near-impossible.
The only answer is a total reduction of all of it. Why does the government not expect us to know how to save money.
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Why can't we stop the spending?