DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/upshot/doge-musk-trump-errors.html

by belter • 1 year ago

1092 1264 1 year ago

anoxor5• 1 year ago

I like that the focus is on the issues with the disruptors that have been running for a few weeks, not the egregious spending for decades.

NotGMan• 1 year ago

The trashing of a (hopefully) dying octopus.

mieses• 1 year ago

hopefully to be replaced by something less rotten

DFHippie2• 1 year ago

That egregious spending bears a family resemblance to the malfeasance that cost Trump the 2020 election and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

qwe----3• 1 year ago

I bet back in the day you were the complaining about 200000$ toilet seats in Iraq. Now that’s it’s not on your side of politics it’s a fabrication

mc322• 1 year ago

And honestly it’s been both parties who have been more than happy to pay lip service to the problem but instead of paring things add additional oversight that has no enforcement power so they only add more weight to the bureaucracy with a few reports no one reads to show for. In the face of deficits, they don’t retrench as individuals and private entities have to.

watwut12• 1 year ago

both parties invoked in highly assymetrical situation is getting old.

anoxor5• 1 year ago

Totally agree. I think the debt is at 100k per taxpayer. Either taxes or inflation will have to be used to pay that.

pizza• 1 year ago

What's wrong with evidence?

fhd2• 1 year ago

One could agree with the goals of reducing government spending and still argue that "the disruptors" are moving too fast and breaking too many things.

anoxor5• 1 year ago

Sure, where are the nytimes articles that praise and highlight the good cuts?

JoshTko3• 1 year ago

And illegally

phh• 1 year ago

I personally wouldn't want my government run by unchecked people who get the value of something off by three orders of magnitude. In a meritocracy private company someone confusing 8M with 8B is at best put in a closet job. More likely getting fired, and probably getting sued. When Jerome Kerviel was off by 5B he went to prison.

agumonkey2• 1 year ago

don't get fooled by the disruptor narrative, it might very well be just pretentious immaturity

relaxing6• 1 year ago

Always was.

noah_buddy• 1 year ago

There is a dual point:

- many of the organizations cut certainly have done evil which the average American would not support.

- I do not expect Trump to do less evil. I expect him simply to command it more directly.

biophysboy2• 1 year ago

People regularly discuss the debt, this is a strawman.

_DeadFred_6• 1 year ago

This disruption are not about spending though.

In their own words what it is about:

"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...

wsve• 1 year ago

This is exactly right. DOGE deserves no praise. Their goal is not to cut spending to bring money back to the people. Their goal is to gut the government itself and make it ineffective in improving people's lives. They don't actually care whether these departments are "wasteful", and anyone who thinks they do has bought and drunk the snake oil.

user9999999999• 1 year ago

destroying institutions is the plan. it's a cynical party. the only time "build" is mentioned is border walls. unfortunately "great" countries aren't BUILT on fear and cynicism.

_heimdall27• 1 year ago

I'm still not sold on this. I can't yet distinguish if the plan is to get rid of institutions or to gut what's their and rebuild it how the want it.

We may not end up with a smaller government, just a different one.

Master_Odin• 1 year ago

The Republican plan for the federal government for decades has been to try to kneecap various agencies and departments so fully that they can't function well, go "look how poorly they operate! Time to close it down and let private sector handle it!"

underseacables• 1 year ago

I can't recall when government was so enthusiastic about rooting out fraud. I kind of like this, and I want the government to actively pursue fraud and mismanagement. Feels like it always gets buried in some bureaucratic report.

mlnj5• 1 year ago

It is not to have a larger/smaller government. The plan is to privatize as much as possible. I mentioned this in another comment: 'Elon has already tweeted "The safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter. SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer"'

I believe the number of air incidents has been 2 a week in the last month. Any time now the government just will be ready to declare FAA as a disaster of the previous regimes and that Tech industries will be better at running the admin for the aviation sector.

relaxing6• 1 year ago

Their stated goals are lower taxes, less regulation, less government presence. What they want bigger is private riches through industry and church. They all believe this, voter and representative.

What part do you think gets built back? Maybe the FBI, when they’re sure it can be weaponized against their enemies.

ZeroGravitas4• 1 year ago

That's the Heritage Foundation christo-fascist plan. Unfortunately they've teamed up with the mad Libertarian wing of the Republicans who turn up in places like HN and complain that all taxation is theft and are ready to burn the country to the ground because they've been so well programmed by propaganda that originally just wanted to build support for a tax cut for the already rich but metastasized into a superpower destroying cult of insanity.

EasyMark3• 1 year ago

All you have to do is read project 2025 and you will know all their plans and reasoning for Stage 1 of fascism

jimmydoe2• 1 year ago

The plan is not destroying, but taking over. Once the cut narrative is fulfilled, these institutions will regrow with Don King's own people.

Despite DDoS on the wave length, DOGE will not really gain much in the end, the real matter to balance the sheet will come from selling Ukraine which obviously takes some time to materialize.

squarefoot2• 1 year ago

You missed the part where they're deleting a ton of scientific papers from government sites.

throw_pm23• 1 year ago

If institutions can only be created and never destroyed, how many institutions per person would we end up with?

TomK329• 1 year ago

They can be dismantled. By Congress who created them in the first place and gave the president and his executive only a limited range of powers.

phgn• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/YSlkm

MisterKent5• 1 year ago

Two points that are often missed:

1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least from an overall value perspective.

2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in with a hatchet and no plan to build gets cheered instead of booed by a large percentage of the populace.

The problem Americans have with the political system has roots on Webers concept of politics as a vocation.

turtlesdown1110• 1 year ago

Strong points in the face of this inaccurate, politically biased ledger that has revealed zero fraud, corruption or waste.

MisterKent5• 1 year ago

I am maybe cynical, but I sincerely doubt there's no fraud or corruption in the government spend. Among trillions of dollars of money being spent by people who can easily siphon some off, etc.

Intuitively, there _must_ be some corruption.

I have zero faith that Musk is interested in finding real corruption. He seems to be more interested in changing budget allocations and calling the removed regulations / "woke" things corrupt.

I also think that corruption was within my acceptance tolerance of wastage. _Think_ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but maybe that's all that really matters when it comes to something like this.

EasyMark3• 1 year ago

his cuts are max 0.1% of government outlays, yet the MAGAs are acting like it's slash and burn and worshipping at the idol of their cult of personality(ies?) . Anyway it's so obvious to anyway who steps back and turns off the political blinders. Just look at the sheer number of lies coming from Musk and Trump about the "savings" ,about millions of people over 100 getting social security checks, that the few million of probably waste of money USAID was spending is evidence to cut without any other proof the entire USAID organization, even though it's a $50 billion dollar outlay. It's so effing sad that people fall for this, and that our education system is such a failure on probably the most necessary modern skill other than literacy--critical thinking.

rayiner9• 1 year ago

[flagged]

biophysboy2• 1 year ago

The estimate should at least be within an order of magnitude; otherwise, the estimate is pointless.

Also, I am booing them because all of the doge line items on their website are in the millions, and our debt is trillions.

mandmandam6• 1 year ago

Americans cheered for the gutting of USAID because they thought that spending 25% of the federal budget was too much, and should be around 10% instead.

The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.

Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.

TomK329• 1 year ago

It'd be fantastic if surveys would allow those surveyed to do a minute or two of research before answering or correcting their answer.

MisterKent5• 1 year ago

People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first"

The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.

yadaeno2• 1 year ago

I agree but condemning government budget cuts because USAID seems reactionary. I think the spirit of cutting budget is still overall popular, and is impossible to do painlessly.

Also in the context of federal budget, 1% is a huge number since most of the budget (like social security, interest payments, and Medicaid) is non negotiable.

~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.

refurb8• 1 year ago

USAID is not "international aid". It's an arm of the CIA that uses "international development" as a cover for it's activities.

Look at the role of USAID during the Vietnam War under CORDS. It funded the "strategic hamlet" program which uprooted rural civilians into barb wire enclosures and provided arms and training to militia.

That doesn't sound like international aid.

Look at the Phoenix Program during the same war. It was an intelligence program which sough to identify "VC infrastructure" within rural villages and "capture or kill".

One can argue that such activities are beneficial to the US, but claiming it's soft and cuddly "international aid" for countries in need is just not accurate.

JeremyNT• 1 year ago

2) is questionable. Most of the budget is spent maintaining global hegemony through military dominance.

Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly irrelevant.

MisterKent5• 1 year ago

I think many who are okay with our civil spend may take issue with our military spend.

I have rarely encountered anyone who thinks the government isn't overspending. And nobody ever agrees on how we should be spending the money.

I realize the comment above paints me as a conservative, I assure you I am not.

However, I guess I can at least sympathize with how we got here (DOGE being acceptable).

And from that I blame almost everyone in politics and every person tangentially related to those in politics.

rayiner9• 1 year ago

Without looking it up, what do you think is the military budget in comparison to the whole budget.

pclmulqdq10• 1 year ago

You should look at the CBO's reports on this. Most of the budget is spent maintaining Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. The sleight of hand involved in the idea that the military budget is "most" of the spending is by calling large parts of the government's spending (but none of its military spending) "mandatory," and then slicing up the "discretionary" portion only, most of which is the military.

However, the discretionary part of the budget is less than half the size of the mandatory part of the budget. If the entire discretionary budget were cut to $0, between mandatory spending and interest, there would still be a government deficit.

That sleight-of-hand is how $900 billion of military spending becomes "most of the budget" when the full budget is $4.4 trillion.

jhp123• 1 year ago

if you take a dollar from government spending, then 60 or 70 cents of that is coming from the bank accounts of retirees, disabled people, and the poor. If you return that dollar as tax cuts, as Trump has proposed, then something like 80 cents go into the bank accounts of the rich.

The discourse of "wasteful government spending" is a smokescreen. It mystifies the basic operation of taking a dollar from a worker, retiree or poor person and giving it to a rich person.

EasyMark3• 1 year ago

1. I can't agree with this. We have AI to raise flags and we have computers to make payment and bookkeeping trivial.

2. we may or may not spend enough. what we don't do is collect enough taxes to pay for it, that is the failure.

rstat1• 1 year ago

We have AI to raise flags

That it would like get wrong more often than not. No thanks.

munchler3• 1 year ago

"We spend too much" is a political opinion, rather than a statement of fact. Only Congress can change the amount of money spent by the government, so the executive branch's actions are unconstitutional, no matter how large the crowd cheering it on. This is exactly the sort of mob rule that the Founders wanted to prevent.

johnnyanmac• 1 year ago

Depends on the lens. Depending on your tolerance for debt, we can argue that we objectively spend too much. Another lens can be that we don't collect enough taxes and therefore we don't have enough to spend.

Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.

rayiner9• 1 year ago

It’s quite debatable what the founders intended here. Congress has the power to appropriate funds, it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.

Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires rescission notification once it’s clear that the executive won’t use all the money appropriated for a “program.” When Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won’t use all $3 billion.

Sysreq22• 1 year ago

I keep harping on this - but two points:

1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.

2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.

loanedempathy3• 1 year ago

Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.

Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.

The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.

sbochins• 1 year ago

This is a silly charade. To actually cut the debt, it requires congress. Not just saving a couple millions dollars and posting on twitter about it. We’ll need to cut Medicare, Medicaid, social security, the military, etc. All the popular stuff that was never easy and will never be easy to cut. We’re not spending 2 trillion per year on condoms.

bamboozled4• 1 year ago

Won’t wiping all this stuff just lead us into a Great Depression anyway ? I’m not an expert on the topic but my basic understanding was that we (government) just decided we didn’t have any money, so everything just stopped.

Like shutting all this stuff down or radically cutting it back will surely have some dire economic impacts?

secos2• 1 year ago

or raise taxes.

oezi5• 1 year ago

What I don't understand is why they want to cut the debt or the budget. Previous terms have shown that increasing spending and racking up debts isn't leading to loss of polls. Why are Trump and Elon going on this cutting spree instead of doling out tax cuts and increasing pork to their constituents on borrowed money?

softwaredoug• 1 year ago

Do we spend too much? Or do we not take in sufficient revenue?

All these things BTW do have some limited ability to be controlled by the executive (Clinton did layoffs in the 90s, but kept supporting the same federal services). But ultimately most of this stuff is the mandate of congress and can’t just be canceled by executive order.

rawgabbit2• 1 year ago

It is more we believe in magic. We hand out tax breaks like they are candy, cripple the government, and believe some DOGE waving a chainsaw will fix the budget. Extending the Trump tax cuts is estimated to cost $4.6 trillion over ten years.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tax-cuts-extension-republ...

istjohn2• 1 year ago

That's one way to frame it. Alternatively, one could argue we don't tax enough, and that's due to large tax cuts, first under Bush and then under Trump. Now Trump wants more tax cuts.

matthewdgreen• 1 year ago

The people coming in with a hatchet are not planning to reduce spending. They’re planning to use any money saved to fund an enormous tax cut that will primarily benefit the very rich. https://www.courant.com/2025/02/12/congress-budget-tax-cuts/

oezi5• 1 year ago

They didn't need to cut so aggressively the first time around when they did the previous tax cuts, didn't they?

James_K2• 1 year ago

2 is not a fact in the slightest. The American government is guilty of under-investment in perhaps every area outside of military. The notion of bipartisan climbing public debt is also false. Bill Clinton brought the government into running and Democrats have had consistently better budget responsibility than Republicans, though the reason for this is more that the Dems fund government through taxes where the Republicans fund government through debt to give out tax cuts. The actual levels of spending are not so much changed because it turns out that most of the money spent by government is quite important and you can't just get rid of it.

oezi5• 1 year ago

So why are the Republicans now trying to reign-in the spending? It worked well for them in the past to rely on debt. Why should they care now?

Is it about funneling this money into their tax cut? Why not just run up more debt?

shadowgovt6• 1 year ago

The booing will start when Americans realize what a delicate web of interconnects they live in. It hasn't really sunk in yet, but these "waste" jobs tend to be there for a reason, and this whole project is the ultimate exercise in flattening Chesterton's Fences and seeing what happens.

(I'm reminded of the Golgafrinchans from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They sent their "useless" third of society into space... The folks who did jobs like telephone cleaner or insurance salesman. The remaining two-thirds of the population died from a plague sourced from a dirty telephone.)

whoitwas6• 1 year ago

GOP has made it it's mission to ensure the federal government doesn't function my entire adult life. They've been working to destroy the middle class since long before I was born. They continue with this mission now and have really turned up the heat. They're currently working to cut taxes for those who make >$360k/year and also eliminate medicaid while INCREASING the deficit by $4.3 trillion.

roenxi2• 1 year ago

If anyone has been involved in any sort of internal data analytics this is basically what is expected to happen. Data that is used in a new way tends to turn up all sorts of limitations and soft points. Trump, Musk, etc should have been (read: probably were) well aware this was coming; for what it is worth they've surely seen it a few times in business life.

That being said, I doubt it is much of a factor. The strategy of hitting fast & hard is to bypass the unreliable data by triggering screams from the areas that are most important. In some sense, anticipating this revelation is why the strategy is chosen in the first place. Trying to do massive cuts slowly and carefully gets a few months in to the project then crumbles under the weight of unreliable data and analysis paralysis.

watwut12• 1 year ago

[flagged]

dang16• 1 year ago

Please don't cross into personal attack.

viraptor3• 1 year ago

hitting fast & hard is to bypass the unreliable data by triggering screams from the areas that are most important

This works for companies which can risk some debt and restructure and maybe getting better. Worst case they'll go bankrupt. In this case the screams after mistakes will be literal screams of people dying.

TomK329• 1 year ago

Hitting fast & hard is not the legal way to do it. Congress has allocated the money and the President can't just stop spending it. You also ignore the human aspect, firing people in the most disrespectful way, with just single sentences, will hurt the trust in the government as a workplace for a long time. Good government needs good workers who trust the government.

torlok• 1 year ago

Why is this flagged? Even if the comment section isn't up to standards, the article should be relevant to everybody.

mlnj5• 1 year ago

[flagged]

nathanaldensr• 1 year ago

Either that or, you know, we want to keep Hacker News about tech. Lots of us don't want /r/politics here.

dang16• 1 year ago

I've been posting a lot about this lately. Here are some recent posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130063

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051836

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

If you (or anyone) will read some of those and follow some of the links in them, you should get answers to all the common questions about this. If, after that, you have a question that hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

(Plus I'd like to know what it is! It's been a while since I've heard a new one.)

anigbrowl7• 1 year ago

I'd be glad if you'd do something about the influx of trolls, like maybe requiring a few submissions before allowing comments. Right now it's easy to create an account and then just post slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting shadow banned (and those of us who have showdead turned on still get to see it).

alecco3• 1 year ago

This is starting to look like a lost battle. Can we have a "US Politics" filter at least? Thanks.

YeGoblynQueenne• 1 year ago

> Whenever there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), the flood of submissions about it quickly exhausts HN's capacity to host substantive discussions. That goes double when a topic is divisive and enraging, like you-know-who is.

I thought you-know-who was defeated? Are the Death Eaters assembling again?

romaaeterna3• 1 year ago

US debt is 124% of GDP. That's not as high as UK debt after WWII, 270%, which impoverished the country that had been at the top of the world. But combined with an aging population that has more people than ever hailing from the historically low-achievement global south, you can expect some standard of living adjustment to occur. Your grandparents had a house by your age, and the economic ability to raise a family. You get to slave for an apartment and a wife who works for another man. Historically, there were names for that economic arrangement and the class of people who were condemned to it.

That Trump I and Biden did not have an effort like DOGE (which does not have Congressional support and therefore should not yet be enough to give serious people hope) shows how fundamentally unserious both of those administrations were. I hope that Musk can find a way to make it successful somehow. But if he does, it will break 1000x the number of eggs that you've seen him breaking so far.

turtlesdown1110• 1 year ago

I love this reply. It's lots of serious words about the debt, and it ignores that Trump and the R party are currently trying to balloon the debt for their tax breaks.

romaaeterna3• 1 year ago

In fact the reply specifically criticizes Trump I, the administration that passed those tax breaks.

Whether you consider yourself either a Democrat or a Republican, this is not a problem that continued party politics can solve.

belter5• 1 year ago

Inflation and the US bond market will quickly sort this out. It is going to be beautiful and terrifying at the same time, the same way a cosmic collision is.

chillingeffect2• 1 year ago

Almost every presidency has taken more or less responisble effors to minimize spending. But they werent aimed at people who had prosecuted those in power, targetted at regulation agencies for the president's oligarch cronies, racially targetted, or driven by outsiders with no experience:

Initiated under President Jimmy Carter in 1977, Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) required agencies to justify their budgets from scratch rather than just adjusting from the previous year.

President Ronald Reagan pushed for privatization, deregulation, and reduced federal spending.

The Grace Commission (1982-1984), led by businessman J. Peter Grace, was tasked with identifying inefficiencies in government.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton launched the National Performance Review (later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government), led by Vice President Al Gore.

The NPR aimed to make government "work better and cost less" by cutting red tape, streamlining bureaucracy, and increasing customer service.

Key successes included shifting more government services online, consolidating purchasing, and reducing federal workforce size.

Launched by President George W. Bush in 2001, the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) focused on:

Strategic management of human capital

Competitive sourcing (increasing private-sector competition for government contracts)

Financial performance improvements

E-Government expansion (improving federal websites and online services)

Budget and performance integration

2010s: DATA Act & Digital Transformation

President Barack Obama signed the DATA Act (2014), which aimed to improve transparency and accountability in government spending.

Obama also created the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and 18F, teams dedicated to modernizing government technology.

The Trump administration’s PMA (2018) emphasized IT modernization, data transparency, and a shift to "shared services", where multiple agencies use the same administrative systems.

The Biden administration has continued these efforts, focusing on AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation, as well as improving citizen-facing services like healthcare and tax processing.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like “they’re cutting something important!” Or “they’re stopping critical research!” because every government contract needs justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire industries dedicated to simply analyzing and tracking contracts and spending. None of them are above ~90% accurate. Many “analysts” born over the last couple weeks are talking about things they know nothing about; for example measuring savings off calls on BPAs or IDIQs is silly because a call = spent money. You cannot save money you have already spent, but you can stop the vehicle.

I’m not saying DOGE is definitively good or even that they are going to actually accomplish their mission (probably their cuts will become a piggy bank that gets raided by OTA’s at the end of the fiscal year). But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.

What is on paper for government contracts is totally different from reality. Most of these programs accomplish nothing, are totally un-utilized, filled with employees who literally do not show up to work.

I could write a novel with examples but here are some notable anecdotes:

- Once, I built an intelligence solution for a large-ish intelligence program within a civil agency. After 6 months it was not used once but cost the government a cool ~12M$. Only after a full year did the program leadership finally take a look and discover, wait a second, none of these people have worked more than a week total in the past year. Only half got laid off, the rest are still gainfully employed elsewhere in the government. Many such cases!

- I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!

- Dozens of cases of the government spending on “XYZ tool” that sounds super critical. In reality they are paying $12M for a postgres database and an extremely basic data entry UI on top. Also, I can’t believe I am about to defend Sharepoint, but realistically something like tracking 10 SIM cards can go in an excel spreadsheet and doesn’t need a $12M “inventory tool.”

- Many cases of projects investigating bird flu in depth and tracking its spread as early as 2022. You would think this is critical with bird flu being a thing right now; however none of these $20M+ contracts have accomplished much at all.

You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same. The only way to go from GS-12 to GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 is just to spend recklessly. They are experts at justifying their budget and navigating internal hierarchies. However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.

(Disclaimer: “government” above refers to civil, exclusive of DoD)

chillingeffect2• 1 year ago

Great info thanks! Frustrating that we don't see anyone declaring victory by cutting off Palantir contracts.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

It’s probably a lot of things causing that:

- new age defense tech companies band together pretty tightly

- you can cut 10 Palantir contracts and save $200M but then you’re stuck with the existing tools (Sharepoint+PowerBI or Salesforce+Accenture) that are usually super shitty and 1-2B$ contracts vehicles for SI

- Palantir actually has really low revenue, as recent as 4 years ago they would have often qualified as a Small Business

- if you cut down entire lines of effort, sweep out the legs from under an entire program, lay off bureaucrats, etc. you can stop more stab wounds and stem bleeding; this is an okay step 1

Ironically the easiest way to quickly fix the deficit is actually to spend money. Most government employees are contractors because a GS-15 can earn maybe 150k while a contractor translating to only a GS-13 can earn 200k while their agency charges the government 600k a head. So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed. Then you can cancel all the PWS contracts. By napkin math this would account for a cool ~$1T over 4 years.

nickthegreek• 1 year ago

That didn’t happen. Palantir Has not currently lost any contracts. They lost stock value.

TomK329• 1 year ago

Very nice examples, but why then doesn't DOGE go through every project? Why did Trump end all DEI contracts, why cause the disruption by freezing all outgoing money, why fire the Inspector Generals that are inspecting their agencies for waste, why fire all probationary workers, and why the fuck do they want to mess with the IRS, the one agency that brings money in at a very successful rate?

Clearly no one at Musk's DOGE has spent time in actual government bureaucracy.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

These are good questions that are easy to answer once you’ve spent time in gov:

- it is very hard to go thru every project and generally not worth it, it seems like they are sorting by contract vehicle size. there are 120k+ contracts spit out by the government every fiscal year alone so this is a monumental effort

- the DEI programs are probably a PR thing, generally speaking though they accomplish essentially nothing; I would probably go further though and roll up any program staffed by less than 10 people, then furlough 20% of the workforce under the larger program

- not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this rumor got started, it’s very specific and generally just foreign aid. this is part of trump’s campaign promise so while I don’t agree with it and it is probably going to shatter US hegemony, it is also what people voted for. the government is still spending tons of money, we are still doing more in depth tracking but it seems like only a 3-4% decrease overall

- the OIGs deserve to be fired they have not been able to stem any underlying issues for years, the outrage here is all manufactured. let me ask you this, if you hired an accountant and for the last 10 years they can neither tell you how much money you are spending nor find savings, are you going to keep that accountant?

- the IRS is not really efficient! first of all a majority of their audits are on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. yes of course the top 20% are still overrepresented correctly, but they are actually losing money for every audit they conduct on the bottom 80%. estimates are around 0.96$ per dollar with ~6k$ per audit, so they’d save $240 per audit they skip on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. it’s true they recover 6$ on average for every dollar spent on the top 20% which cost averages out to a little over 3$ recovered per dollar; however this is actually not much money, around $30B a year total. for such a massive agency and mission they do a pretty terrible job, and is very warranting of disruption

People are being gaslit into thinking the government is efficient; in reality it is endlessly bloated.

nostrademons• 1 year ago

Trimming down a bureaucracy is a good example of Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."

The usual reason for this is simply dependencies. At some point in time, somebody took a working system, had some extra budget, and then invented a process that took the existing system as an input and produced some marginally useful work. But then next year, the new process was part of the working system, and they had more budget, and they added more roles and processes based on its output. Now you can't take it away: regardless of how marginally useful it was last year, everything built on top of it will fail. That $10M contract with one user might have just one user, but that one user might be the crucial communication link that determines the budget for a 1000-person department. You might even have a contract with zero users, but without auditing the inner workings of the whole department, how do you know it has zero users and won't just break everything when you terminate it?

Sparyjerry4• 1 year ago

It's only cuttable because DEI is not the actual budget line item. Think of it like this 'program gets a budget of $10M' and the people that run it decide the best way to implement that program includes $8M of DEI training. They can instead decide to spend $0 on DEI and the full budget on payroll. This is simply changing the priority of what was effectively an HR function to actual productivity functions.

turtlesdown1110• 1 year ago

[flagged]

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

Analyzing this is my job and one of the main functions of the startup I founded!

yodsanklai2• 1 year ago

All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem. I'm pretty sure everyone could come with many anecdotes of waste in the private sector. I also worked in the public sector (not in the US) and frankly, I think it was pretty efficient. Most employees were competent and weren't paid very well.

The problem with reducing costs with a heavy hand is that you will cut things which are actually useful. And probably, the saving will be very little compared to the overall budget. I think DOGE is primarily a demagogical operation.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

I see this take a lot in this thread, I think people do not comprehend the scale.

Your company sends people in business class needlessly, ok. The government sends people in private jets needlessly -- there are dozens of separate aviation programs just within Dept. of State each with their own planes and contracts to staff and supply those planes. We have hundreds of posts around the world, many people are getting to those mainly on charters, private legs, or in the contractor case, business class tickets billed at 2x rate under T&L.

This is just one specific example; it applies across the board, when the government spends it is on an exponentially different scale to commercial. A single database will easily cost them 5M$ -- that is ~10x the cash moved on the floor of a major casino during a busy night.

I also worked in the public sector (not in the US)

Yes, key phrase not in the US. As a comparison, the largest spending item in our budget is Medicaid -- ineffective healthcare that applies to less than 20% of our population. We spend 4x more on Medicaid somehow than the UK spends on the entirety of the NHS.

gadders• 1 year ago

>All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem.

The difference is that businesses that are inefficient are wasting revenue, and eventually go bust. There is no self-correcting mechanism for government.

uses• 1 year ago

Even if you’re 100% correct, these aren’t the right people and these aren’t the right methods. Completely the opposite actually.

spiderfarmer2• 1 year ago

Exactly. They exploit people like the one you’re responding to as mouthpieces for their broader campaign against the institutions that regulate their businesses. As long as they can claim they’ve stopped some money from being “wasted,” these people will look the other way and let them operate unchecked.

Trump and Musk are both petty, vindictive, greedy, and narcissistic billionaires, known for grifting, deception, abuse, and ruthless behavior. How can anyone trust them?

leandrod• 1 year ago

So who and which would be? Given SpaceX, Trump could have chosen worse.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.

It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution? We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, and the last person to make headway here was Bill Clinton -- who proposed an even more callous approach to cuts.

christophilus5• 1 year ago

I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them about it, and they shrugged it off by noting, “We are way more efficient than our competitors.”

I’m not defending DOGE’s specifics or competence here, but do we need to clean house? Absolutely, yes.

Neywiny2• 1 year ago

That's why I like where I am. We usually work in really lean teams. One person in each role. And usually we're making a physical product so that's one mechanical, one electrical, one sideways, etc. Has its downsides but I don't feel like we're wasteful.

aSanchezStern2• 1 year ago

Yeah, if you're actually interested in government efficiency, Ro Khanna has been advocating for significant cuts to the federal budget in a way that actually improves efficiency.

bamboozled4• 1 year ago

I love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”.

I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired.

I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more successful prior to acquisition.

So yeah , sorry, startups can be extremely inefficient too.

I’ve also worked for some of the biggest tech companies or have friends that work there now, including Meta, they are extremely wasteful in nearly all cases. They just make a lot of money. Probably like the collective United States.

The moral of my story is that efficiency isn’t necessarily profitable, desired or even required.

In my opinion DOGE is telling stories to distract and achieve other ends. Last I hear most of Musks companies actively received government welfare :)

dustingetz6• 1 year ago

did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison. So when I see USAID or whatever with some bleeding heart mission statement, all i can think of is how many vendors are siphoning off that money while paying lip service to the culture war theme of the year, like a drug lord making sure to be seen at church every every Sunday. It’s not a question of, like, is it one third fraud or half fraud. There is absolutely no accountability and there is not a single competitive aspect about these projects. At no point whatsoever is there a credible attempt to deliver on promises made. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does and what that program I saw does is let about 150 people bill about $100 per hour to the government. All you have to do, to collect your $800 per day, is report that your jira ticket is taking more story points than expected due to technical debt, and make sure your MS Teams stays green from 8 to 6 (buy a mouse wiggler)!

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

Yes, I maintain anyone who has spent any measure of time in govcon will come to the same conclusion. Our government is endlessly wasteful -- this was a universal, bipartisan take 3 months ago but now people are getting successfully gaslit into believing every dollar the government spends is efficient and critical.

SubiculumCode• 1 year ago

You spent a few weeks somewhere and knew all that? Seems doubtful to me.

insane_dreamer19• 1 year ago

There's no question this exists.

But firing a bunch of government employees doesn't fix this problem. Where there is waste, it mostly comes in the form of contractors bilking the government, not the government employees themselves.

Is DOGE going after the private sector and their bilking of the government?

matwood2• 1 year ago

I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts.

As an aside, you're actually making the argument that we need more federal employees. The push to privatize everything has led to higher costs and more abuse. So DOGE is currently doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

joquarky4• 1 year ago

Are they going to clean the entire house, or will they ignore the parts that benefit their cronies?

PeterStuer• 1 year ago

"You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same."

This x100. For all those lambasting the public sector, understand that its flaws are not because of the 'public' part, but because of the size of the organization.

Private sector organization's inefficiency, fraud and waste also scales directly with their size.

croes2• 1 year ago

Imagine you know you are sick.

Doge is the one recommending bloodletting and brushing with burning straw.

The issue is rarely that neither side can name the problem but what is claimed to be the reason and therefore the solution.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

I will raise you a more direct analogy, let's imagine you have a deep wound in your arm and are actively bleeding out.

There are 5 doctors who you have paid to treat you; they came, performed some tests, confirmed you are wounded, but don't know how to patch you up.

DOGE comes along and says well, what if we amputate the arm and cauterize it?

This will stop the bleeding, but you will lose an arm. That sucks, there is probably a method to treat you to stop the bleeding and prevent the loss of an arm, but nobody has figured it out and you are going to run out of blood.

Do you amputate or choose to bleed to death?

wat100006• 1 year ago

The main problem is that taxes are too low. But even Democrats are afraid to say it now.

Tade0• 1 year ago

However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.

Reading your comment I saw so many similarities to any large organisation which I worked for that I can't help but think it's simply on the same level.

Hell, my first internship was 100% budget filler and, in line with my role, I was useless.

Regarding inefficiency: I'm a contractor for a large organisation and have been for over three years now.

My contract is up in a few months and by that time I will have a total of four years of cancelled projects under my belt. At least one of them started out as an Excel sheet and in truth could have remained so.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

I say govt politics is so much worse because it is not like, a handful of people trying to get ahead by spending a lot, it is almost all of them.

They're also vicious, many times I have been cussed out by bureaucrats over stupid things like css padding on a table. There are lines that don't get crossed in corporate politics, none of those lines exist in government.

DarkNova63• 1 year ago

Makes you think that waste is a universally emergent issue which gets worse with the size of an entity. Not making any distinction between governmental or corporate structures.

Everybody cries when the government raises taxes. Yet, when corporations increase prices despite not having higher cost, we just accept it as "business as usual".

As corporations rival the power of nations more and more, some people should rethink their attitude to public and private enterprise.

api• 1 year ago

I worked with the government as a contractor for a while and saw a lot of waste and inefficiency. My brother in law works for a bank and what he describes sounds a lot like what I saw at the government: crazy amounts spent on contractors to do stupid or trivial things, massive hardware and software purchases never used, LOTS of consultants consultants consultants, lots of unnecessary travel, people hired to do no work, failed IT projects, wasteful disposal of working equipment, etc. It all sounds exactly the same.

I've talked to a lot of people who have worked for other huge companies and the stories are similar. When I worked for the Fed there were people there who had worked for GM, Boeing, etc. and a few said the Fed was actually more efficient than some of those.

Has anyone ever worked for a very large (several billion annual spend or more) entity that was anywhere near as efficient as a startup or SMB?

This is why small startups can beat enormous companies. From what I've seen, comparatively, startups can at times be thousands of times as cost-efficient. But as startups grow they become less efficient. I've seen this too. It's incredibly hard to maintain efficiency as things scale for a very long list of reasons.

llsf• 1 year ago

"Your margin is my opportunity"

zamalek• 1 year ago

Look, beyond unobjectionable facts that the government wastes money, that money isn't completely wasted: some percentage eventually becomes salaries for Americans (the rest in some rich person's pockets). For example, all the USAID jobs that are now gone.

There are now billions-USD-worth fewer jobs in the American economy.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

There are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers.

Administrative spending is also not that high, the majority of savings are in contracts. This is related to jobs because every employee you lay off, is one less person who can spend millions of dollars.

So in practice, there are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers and being sent abroad. And only some millions-USD-worth fewer jobs.

subharmonicon• 1 year ago

But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.

It's also absolutely true that private companies are endlessly wasteful. I've worked for four large companies now, and the waste is mind boggling. I think what upsets people about government is that tax dollars are used to fund it, but I would claim from my own observation that beyond a certain size any kind of organization is filled with waste.

I'll point out, though, that there are areas of government that have been studied and found to be very efficient, and have high levels of satisfaction. It's been quite a while now, but I recall around ~2006-2007 an academic study came out which was originally intended to look only at private insurers. As they designed the study they realized that given the size of Medicare they should also include Medicare as part of the study.

What they found:

- A much much higher percentage of the money going into Medicare goes toward patient care than in any of the private insurers. Like low single digit percentages of overhead vs. 10-25% overhead in the case of the private insurers.

- Customer satisfaction from dealing with the bureaucracy (claim processing) of Medicare was much higher than customer satisfaction with the private insurers.

- Patient satisfaction with the care they were receiving from Medicare was as high or higher than the private insurers.

dmix5• 1 year ago

It’s still worth looking and finding that stuff out (carefully and transparently). There’s only been token attempts at a meta analysis of gov efficiency in the past. GWB created a small version of DOGE with almost the same mandate that never really did anything notable because it was small and never ambitious (it also still exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene...).

Most large wasteful private organizations are often the ones who get comfortable in their existing market, employees get hardened in their ways, and eventually are threatened by changes in the market and competition and die off. There is no competitive pressure on gov agencies. It’s almost always a one way street after an agency gets formed that it continues as is indefinitely with only occasional changes in leadership. The number of agencies (>400 federally in US) only increases. Congress rarely looks backwards with spending, they only challenge demands for new spending plans to expand agencies. Otherwise budgets only go up with new line items as US tax revenue forever increases each year.

sixothree3• 1 year ago

it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.

It's equally insane to me that people think the private sector is somehow efficient. The amount of resources used to feed profit alone are a huge waste.

Sparyjerry4• 1 year ago

Private is not 100% efficient but it is much more efficient because if you don't make a profit you no longer exist. A government program can't go broke. Government programs simply get money with zero effect on their budget or revenue if they execute poorly or well. That's why removing an 'optional' HR role like DEI that does not actual produce anything measurable is slow hanging fruit. You are reducing cost and the result will not actually effect the outcome. It's an unnecessary ideological add-on, not a function. It's like removing the training on how to use a coffee machine in an office that doesn't drink coffee.

pembrook2• 1 year ago

Wild red herring fallacy, I’ll bite.

The private sector is indeed filled with lots of inefficiencies, but due to the profit motive and presence of competition, there’s massive incentives to correct those inefficiencies slowly over time. You'll make more profit doing so!

Hence, the private sector is constantly self correcting itself and becoming more efficient via creative destruction. You can just look at the numbers, even the Chinese Communist Party understand this. Turns out the profit motive combined with competitive instincts of humans results in a consistently greater good.

Not sure you’re aware, but the government doesn’t do that. Hence why the US is massively indebted. Unfortunately the US debtors aren’t doing so great these days so it can’t continue even at current rates. Instead of DOGE they should have named it “The department of not finding the level of US debt that leads to currency debasement and collapse.”

I never thought I’d need to explain the elementary school 101 of why communism is bad and why debt is not endless on HN but apparently this place is turning into Reddit.

juanjmanfredi• 1 year ago

Do you expect that contracts with Palantir will be under any scrutiny? Do you really think Peter Thiel would have supported this administration if that was at all a risk?

Lots of Americans think the government needs to be more efficient. Very few Americans think the way to do that is closing national parks, cutting veteran healthcare, and firing the nuclear security workforce. It is easy to be pro spending reform but still be unhappy with DOGE's body of work thus far.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

You are falling for Washington Monument Syndrome!

I don’t know that Palantir will be under scrutiny but they are a really tiny government contractor. I would love to see the defense primes + big consulting firms like Accenture be on the chopping board.

On an absolute scale, DOGE is not performing well and it makes sense so many are upset with their performance. On a relative scale to past attempts and the 5 existing agencies that exist to audit and reduce spending, DOGE is like a unicorn and that’s why many with experience are silently cheering them on.

They have not gotten far but have gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.

scintill762• 1 year ago

Bringing up Palantir is funny to me. I don’t know enough gossip on Musk and Thiel’s relationship, but if I did I would bet it would solely determine the outcome of a hypothetical DOGE investigation into Palantir contracts. It seems from a sibling comment I’m not alone. If we’re right, DOGE isn’t going to eliminate government waste and corruption, just move it around.

We’re not gaslit into thinking everything was fine with government spending, we’re angry that this is how they’re going to “fix” it.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

I think for many people, this is the first exposure to audits and spending reduction in govt. So judging on an absolute scale, yeah DOGE is not doing a great job.

Judging on a relative scale to past attempts and the existing 5(!) agencies with the sole purpose of auditing and reducing spending, DOGE looks amazing and has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.

It is an immensely difficult undertaking and the bureaucracy will struggle, writhe, and set fire to everything around it before it can be put down. We should hope that DOGE is just getting started and picking up momentum rather than having settled.

Glyptodon2• 1 year ago

USGS seemed like it was mostly worthwhile stuff when I was there, just operating on outdated technologies and under budget cycles and patterns that incentivized goofy behaviors because saving money in even the simplest of ways could only lead to budgets being cut in unconstructive ways.

For example, imagine there's a budget of $5k and it's assuming that you'll replace a computer with part of it.

But you don't actually need to replace your computer until after the fiscal year.

But if you wait, the next budget will just think whatever you didn't spend can be cut, not that you deferred a cost for slightly longer.

Similarly, even if you have budget for something you need at the start of a fiscal year, everyone is afraid of blowing budget before the end of the fiscal year... So many expenses get deferred until things are close enough to the fiscal boundary that everyone starts worrying about not spending instead...

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

Yes, well documented phenomenon — the government spends more between July-September than the rest of the year combined. Conversely spends very little in December and January.

Not me but another contractor got a phone call the last day of the fiscal year and was told essentially “hey we have an extra 5M$ in the budget we need to spend, can you make something up and we will just give you the money for a random pilot.”

anon_hn_pltr• 1 year ago

I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!

Just to back up this point: This is 100% my experience when I was an employee for them (disclaimer: 3-4 year tenure, some number of years ago). Everything we built was marketed as this brilliant, cutting edge, leading AI ML tech, and what we were actually building was React CRUD apps with 0 users, with a heavy focus on "making the UI feel like Minority Report / feel futuristic", etc.

It's not Skynet, it's a contracting company with a great design and marketing team.

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

I think people would react viscerally if they knew Shyam blasphemed himself as Jesus, literally appointed 12 apostles, and held a last supper-like meeting with a long ass conference table.

Many such stories

DarkNova63• 1 year ago

Doing consultancy for the government, I agree with your assessment. Yet, it is fairly unrelated to what DOGE is doing.

1. Streamlining and simplification is good. Trimming can come with harsh cuts. But what we witness is arbitrary destruction. Otherwise Musk wouldn't try to reinstate nuclear inspectors they just fired.

2. Efficiency is not the goal. Neutralization of governmental power is. And with less governmental power, corporate power will fill the gaps.

3. Ideology is the driving engine. Talking points of "Anti Woke/DEI" or "no work from home" sounds appealing one half of the people, but carries no substance beyond it. In fact, these terms are misused and retooled as weapons (such as getting rid of "woke" generals).

4. If you want more efficiency, you must make investments. No company or state entity has ever become more efficient just by cutting cost. Slashing budgets only cost you more money in the medium/long run.

5. Transparency is good. It holds people accountable and allows for better decisions. But one of the few purposes of these acts seem to bring are to bring chaos. In chaos, the stronger will win. It is the opposite of transparency.

jhedwards• 1 year ago

Could you help clarify something for me? When I looked into the federal workforce, just looking at raw numbers without much insight about the "inside", it doesn't seem particularly bloated or wasteful to me: it runs at ~5% of the federal budget and at 2mil people it is about 0.5% of the population.

It looks like you and some other commenters, however, are discussing government contracts, which are projects and programs paid for the government but implemented by third-party contractors. Is that correct?

cuuupid37• 1 year ago

Yes, they are correlated ; contracts are created with budget authority afforded to federal employees. Essentially the only way to get promoted is to amass reports and budget, and use it in some way.

So it’s basically like this: yes, the federal government creates jobs and the cost of those jobs directly is only 5% of the budget. However the real cost of those jobs is in spending, in terms of opportunities they champion, which essentially amounts to all discretionary spending conducted by the federal government — ~30% of the budget.

rainsford3• 1 year ago

I don't think the complaint is that all government spending is good or that cutting waste would be bad. The objection is that they're not cutting the kinds of things you're talking about and their approach seems fundamentally unlikely to do so.

Finding things like solutions nobody is using or systems that are far more complicated than they need to be is worthwhile if you're goal is removing waste and increasing efficiency. But it also takes in-depth analysis by people who understand the context. You're definitely not finding it with just raw budget access and first principles from people with little relevant experience. Same goes for employees. There are definitely poor performers or people doing unnecessary things, but you're not dealing with those cases if your approach is just to fire all the new employees.

It's not that this approach is an imperfect solution to a legitimate problem, it's not a solution to the problem at all. Instead, it's basically about redefining a hard problem (identifying and addressing waste and inefficiency) into an easy problem (have less stuff) and then trying to solve that one. Which is great if your goal is to declare victory, but it doesn't actually address the original problem of efficiency.

I find it frustrating because I agree with you that the government is absolutely not perfectly efficient and it would be great if there was a concerted effort to improve the situation. But not only is that not what's happening, this approach seems likely to make things worse given that random chaos and disruption are generally the enemies of efficiency and it seems likely all this will make it harder for the government to attract or retain the best, most efficient employees.

joquarky4• 1 year ago

Is perfect efficiency really desirable, when increase in efficiency often results in increase in brittleness?

TomK329• 1 year ago

Why is this flagged?

rvnx3• 1 year ago

It's criticizing the self-proclamed god elon musk. It's unofficially forbidden here to criticize a few people (elon musk, sam altman, etc), and asslickers are flagging such threads.

dang16• 1 year ago

This topic is by far the most-discussed right now, and the opinions you favor (to judge by this post at least) are by far the most-expressed. Yet somehow it still ends up feeling as if they are forbidden! I call this the "nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded" theory of HN threads (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

The phenomenon isn't as paradoxical as it seems (it has a fairly simple explanation), but it's striking to encounter.

computerthings3• 1 year ago

[flagged]

dang16• 1 year ago

Since I just recently asked you to stop posting unsubstantive flamebait and you've continued to do it non-stop, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. I suppose I'd better add that (1) no, this has nothing to do with your political views, and (2) yes, we ban accounts who are doing the same thing with different politics. Oh and (3) yes, if other accounts keep doing this after we ask them to stop, we'll end up banning them as well.

Macro trends notwithstanding (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), the amount of low-quality nastiness that HN has been hosting lately is a serious problem and we're not going to let it continue.

dang16• 1 year ago

I answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645.

If you take a look at the links there, and still have a question that hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

wdb• 1 year ago

Roughly 40 years of hard work of some entities, finally getting somewhere. Worrying and hope it doesn’t further spread to Europe.

mlnj5• 1 year ago

Another thread getting flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138522

ck2• 1 year ago

and isn't annual budget $2,400 billion?

so basically without caution or care

or actually evaluating gains vs investments just slash and burn

scorched earth, destroying lives

to save 55 out of 2400 billion?

which might only really be 7 billion "saved" ?

How about the $10 million per month to go play golf?

Or $20 million to watch half the superbowl and leave?

laweijfmvo• 1 year ago

you should say, the $0.01 billion to play golf. switching to millions makes it look like more and is directly against your own point.

Axsuul• 1 year ago

That $20 million number does not pass the sniff test.

projectileboy• 1 year ago

Frankly, this doesn’t matter. What matters is that an unofficial agency of the executive branch is deciding unilaterally - with no oversight - to stop payments that were voted on by Congress. Even if Musk and team were geniuses and doing brilliant work, it would be outside the rule of law.

munchler3• 1 year ago

It still matters. In addition to just being criminals, now we know that they are also incompetent.

krapp• 1 year ago

People already knew Trump was incompetent, other people just called it "Trump Derangement Syndrome."

People already knew Musk was incompetent, other people just called it "Musk Derangement Syndrome"

People were saying DOGE was full of incompetents prior to this, simply judging by their methods (or lack thereof.) They were dismissed as partisans, or using whatever thought-terminating cliche they have on hand.

Knowing this doesn't mean a thing, no one is doing anything about it.

wnevets• 1 year ago

These criminals don't care, their goal is to spread FUD then rob the tax payers.

jmward01• 1 year ago

People aren't voting for what benefits them which means we are now in post policy politics. That means that what matters is the messaging and not the actual things done or the impact of those things on people. This leads to doing things that you have the ability to message the way you want and not doing things that help people. The MAGA crowd figured this out and figured out that angry yelling is the easiest message out there.

This is why democrats lost. They kept trying to have policy discussions about how to run the country along with ways to implement policy tied to impact on people, but that is hard to message. The MAGA crowd just finds things they can yell about. By the time impact happens they just yell about something else, louder and the people being hurt are just ignored.

The discussion about how much money is being saved/spent/etc is basically meaningless in post policy politics. The average person can have a massive drop in life expectancy and quality of life and it won't impact their voting so why does it matter how and where government spending happens? The sound bite is all that people are looking at and because of that DOGE is a huge success for those using it to get what they want.

bamboozled4• 1 year ago

I don’t really see a remedy for this behaviour too. It’s quite horrifying. Like being strapped into a plane heading for the ground.

IAmGraydon4• 1 year ago

This post is a series of illogical leaps strung together one after another, starting with the first sentence. The core fallacy that is obvious in your post is that you seem to think everyone who voted for Trump is part of this “MAGA” group of yelling yokel troglodytes. Your viewpoint is utterly saturated with obvious polarization. I honestly don’t know a single MAGA or anyone who would be caught dead at a Trump rally, but I know lots of Trump voters. Most of them do care about policy and they say the same thing - they don’t really like Trump, but they’re tired of bad policies and extreme liberalization of everything.

rat876• 1 year ago

Voting for Trump is stupid. Im sure there are plenty of people with lots of schooling that voted for Trump. They made a stupid choice.

Even if you agree with some policies Trump is the height of incompetence fraud corruption and abuse of power. Gutting effcient and useful goverment agencies to fund the Wall is stupid and wasteful. It also wont reduce illegal immigration.

fastball• 1 year ago

People aren't voting for what benefits them

Is this actually desirable? I want informed people who vote for what they think is best for the country.

I'd prefer it if everyone else abstained.

28304283409234• 1 year ago

"Limbic Governing System", is the term I learned recently. We are governed by posts on 'the socials' designed to trigger kneejerk responses from our limbic system. By undercutting education, (real) social interactions, and science in general people are falling back to their animal instincts more and more.

bloopernova• 1 year ago

That ties in well with my experience of news and social media spewing out "Amygdala-bait". Anything to short circuit your rational thought processes and get you angry, indignant, fearful, smug, shocked, etc.

I don't know if that's purely due to chasing advertising revenue via "engagement". We certainly saw something like it in the 90s with 24/7 news channels.

And with some people being just fine with obviously fake AI slop images and stories, it feels like they're just fine with no longer having to think complex thoughts.

Has this happened before in history? Is it part of a natural cycle in society? I am very doomer when it comes to climate change, so I wonder if people subconsciously feel like "there's no future so why bother thinking?"

ruraljuror• 1 year ago

Keeping Musk’s interests in mind helps clarify what’s going on. Scorching earth and constantly lying is the playbook for dismantling agencies with oversight into the companies he runs and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors (e.g. pulling the ladder up behind him after the DoE’s Tesla loan). The Canada/China tariffs will cripple other automakers who depend on trade while Tesla’s integrated manufacturing chain will leave them immune and provide a massive advantage. I don’t see any reason to put any stock into any motivation DOGE may have toward increasing governmental efficiency, it is a purposeful distraction.

thrance7• 1 year ago

Yup, that's basic class consciousness on Musk's part. The American people simply forgot that billionaires' interests are diametrically opposed to theirs, a fact they knew well in FDR's time. Hopefully this situation will act as a booster shot, and not slip into full-blow oligarchy.

pclmulqdq10• 1 year ago

He doesn't have "class consciousness." He has consciousness of his own interests. That is what pretty much everyone has.

foxglacier• 1 year ago

Is there a specific thing DOGE did or said they'd do which has those effects or are you just making it up?

whoitwas6• 1 year ago

DOGE has destroyed several agencies that were investigating his companies including FAA (starlink), FDA(neurolink), NHTSA(tesla). I'm sure there are many more, but these instantly come to mind.

dimal• 1 year ago

Focusing on what’s being cut and whether the cuts are “right” misses the point. The richest man in the world bought himself a department in the US government and now has free will to run amok. Our country has been an oligarchy for a while now, but it was behind the scenes and there was some hope of dialing it back, however slim. Now it’s nakedly out in the open. What if this kind of shit becomes the new normal? We’ve been worried that Trump will become a dictator, but this almost seems worse.

TheAlchemist2• 1 year ago

Except, these are not mistakes. This is every single Musk's company modus operandi.

Completely made up or inflated numbers, unrealistic timelines etc. Customers or investors buying into it, but if you look under the hood, outside of government subsides and contract, there is pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses.

He's just using the same playbook now, except when people will realize that the 5000$ DOGE checks are bullshit (btw, 5000 x ~150M taxpayers = 750 Billion $...) they may finally wake up.

adrr• 1 year ago

They won't be able to cut checks unless congress approves. They'll say they will cut checks, get sued and lose. They'll blame the judicial system and it will probably be a pretense to undermine that branch of government.

thrance7• 1 year ago

So far they have found pretty much no resistance. The few judges raising their voices are threatened with jail to make examples. Do not put too much faith in the strength of your institutions.

cwalv12• 1 year ago

but if you look under the hood .. there is pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses.

There are many valid criticisms of Musk. Saying that he has not added any real value in his ventures, or that he doesn't really know how to make money, just destroys your credibility.

TheAlchemist2• 1 year ago

How so ?

Which company is making money ? Especially if you exclude government subsides and contracts ?

Tesla lost tons of money, and only recently (and probably for a very brief period of time) was profitable - mostly from various government subsides and help (through carbon credits, IRA for Tesla buyers etc). SpaceX so far did not make any profit (or more specifically they said they achieved profitability last year, but you would need to trust Musk with his word on that...) and is 90% dependent on government contracts. Twitter is a money furnace, so is Neuralink, Boring Company and xAI.

I didn't say he did not add 'real value'. Obviously these companies would not exist without him. I'm just saying that profitability wise, so far (and it's been a long time for most of them) they are not or barely profitable.

sxyuan16• 1 year 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 (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread):

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]

2. 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?

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?

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] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DUdb

e404• 1 year 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.

noirbot4• 1 year 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.

TOMDM• 1 year ago

You don't need their permission to have these conversations.

JumpCrisscross22• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

1. Yeah, they weren’t good at reigning in spending in the 70s either.

qgin• 1 year 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)

firejake3082• 1 year 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-o...

harry8• 1 year ago

20 years ago I read a story about an obstetrician in the USA.

His premiums at that time for professional negligence were $1m per year. He would have to keep paying those premiums for 18 years after his retirement.

Same for every obstetrician.

Professional fees then must be set to cover those insurance premiums.

Has that changed for the better in the USA? Seems very unlikely to be the same in Europe.

Obstetrics is obviously a illustrative case. How are the professional negligence premiums across the other specialties?

Why does the effect of the US legal system never seem to come up much in the “US healthcare is insanely expensive” discussion? Is the effect of it really not significant?

michpoch• 1 year ago

Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe.

And so are the salaries.

MisterBastahrd2• 1 year ago

I went into the hospital for shortness of breath but my main issue was fluid accumulation. I had 3 paracenthesis procedures and was hooked up to a drip of Lasic and a catheter bag for 20 days. I didn't even recognize that I was in the ICU until I got the bill.

They charged $194,000. Insurance claims they paid $193,781. Of that, it was $7300 a day for staying in the ICU. My ambulance ride was $2500 for an 11 minute trip where one guy listened to my lungs and took my blood pressure. I had a palliative care doctor who met with me for 1.5 hours during my entire stay. She charged me $1K per hour.

pclmulqdq10• 1 year ago

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)

Are you sure? People comparing US healthcare costs to European costs don't realize that these are two very different products. The US population is much more unhealthy, yet it has about the same life expectancy as an average European country. This would suggest that Americans actually have access to significantly more healthcare services than Europeans do.

I think a lot of people assume that some of this stuff is linear when it actually seems to be exponential (or super-exponential) in cost. The median American spends half of their lifetime medical bills in their last year of life. That's a lot of money for not a lot of time. Incidentally, American doctors also tend to spend a lot less in this period, indicating that they have a much more healthy relationship with at least one of health or death.

I haven't been particularly convinced, looking at the healthcare systems across the pond, that they are providing anywhere near the same level of service that you get from the ultra-expensive US healthcare system. They are somewhat more optimized for efficiency and the US healthcare system is much more optimized for outcomes - partly because Americans are so litigious and IMO partly because the patient is the customer. That doesn't lead to low costs.

brightball10• 1 year ago

The way to attack the problem economically would have involved giving everyone in the USA an HSA that was funded to allow them to directly consume healthcare services with price exposure. It would naturally force competition on price.

The ACA that we got instead cemented the separation of people from the price of their service and costs have ballooned even more than that were previously.

The economic approach is the only real way to fix things long term.

newzisgud9• 1 year 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?

sxyuan16• 1 year 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

(Yay, thanks to whoever saved the parent post so my thumb exercise wasn't entirely wasted.)

nobodyandproud3• 1 year ago

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?

I can answer this one: Corporations come with a veil, to shield risk takers from financial liability and ruin.

That’s normally good, as we want to encourage business.

But the corporate veil was never intended as free pass to break or subvert the law; nor to undermine national interests.

It’s both the corporate veil and the sheer size of some multi-state and multinational companies: It takes considerable resources to police.

A single multinational has the resources to undermine any state, with lawyers to delay; and lobbyists to influence legislators against their constituents interests. This undermines government credibility and rule of law.

Look at the broadband fiber fiasco: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/verizon-wiring-u...

Or the garbage tier right to repair law, written up by the NY lobbyists: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/29/23530733/right-to-repair...

You say corporations are very productive, but these hidden costs are being born by everyone including the consumer.

This why limited-liability businesses are expected to pay more: It takes a lot of money to provide necessary oversight.

terribleperson6• 1 year ago

Are you sure customers pay corporate taxes? Corporate taxes are on profits. I keep hearing corporate taxes are passed on, but I genuinely cannot figure out a mechanism for them to be directly passed on.

triceratops• 1 year ago

tax on their workplace before they even get paid

After. Corporate taxes are paid on income, not revenue. Income is what's left after paying employees.

Corporations get more productive by having fewer employees or paying them less. That's not a bad thing, it's what's supposed to happen in a competitive market with technological progress. But it also means tax revenue will shrink unless taxes on workers increase. I don't see how that's better.

fzeroracer2• 1 year ago

Customers and employees are not burdened by corporate taxes and this can be shown by a simple equivalence. Savings and profits are not passed onto customers OR employees, they're pocketed by wealthy investors and the c-suite.

kelnos11• 1 year ago

Corporations do not pay corporate tax, their customers and employees do

Corporations pay tax on their profits not, revenue. Employees have already been paid and customers have already bought before these taxes are levied. (The first bit is of course more complicated; for example, salaries paid for R&D don't always count as a deductible business expense.)

The market price is the market price. If corporations could raise prices further (even without new taxes) without losing customers, they would. If corporations end up being taxed more, raising prices in order to "pass on" those taxes will just cause them to lose customers, and end up with lower revenue (and likely profit too), perhaps even more than if they just sucked it up, paid their taxes, and left prices alone.

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

No, because they're not the same thing. Taxes, as I said, are applied only to profits. Tariffs are essentially in increase in COGS. They more or less require corporations to increase prices, with the expectation that sales will decrease. (They can also choose not to raise prices, and live with lower profits, if they have the margin to do so.) And this is the actual point of tariffs: to get people to buy less of that particular good, and presumably buy more of a similar locally-produced good. (The problem, of course, is when the locally-produced good already has a higher price, so everyone either has to pay more, or do without.)

rKarpinski• 1 year 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

cassepipe3• 1 year ago

ZIRP ?

Ok, Zero Interest Rate Policy

largbae3• 1 year 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

JoshTko3• 1 year 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?

generalizations• 1 year 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

sxyuan16• 1 year 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.

istjohn2• 1 year ago

Long doesn't equate to substantive.

Edit: I didn't flag it, to be clear.

sxyuan16• 1 year 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.

rhubarbtree2• 1 year 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.

kelnos11• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

FWIW many people who believe that federal spending is out of control would say the same about 1970s.

bobmcnamara• 1 year ago

Where I grew up, federal spending has been out of control since the Spanish American War.

ncallaway5• 1 year 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?

xdavidliu• 1 year 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?

sroussey4• 1 year ago

Medicare?

marnett• 1 year ago

In the context of government it would mean nationalizing them.

jedberg2• 1 year ago

By having a national health care system that would obviate the need for private insurance.

ncallaway5• 1 year 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.

nobodyandproud3• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

sxyuan16• 1 year 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?

hnmullany2• 1 year ago

The more competitive the market, the less that companies are able to pass on income tax increases (as opposed to input tax increases - like tariffs). If companies are able to pass along income tax increases, it means that they have pricing power.

unclebucknasty12• 1 year ago

Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers

The manner by which tariffs and taxes effect the price consumers pay are not at all the same. Tariffs have a far more direct (and immediate) impact.

And, in the case of taxes, these are not "just passed onto consumers" in healthy markets with good competition. But, I agree that this does not describe our current market, which I'm all in favor of fixing.

As it is these oligopolies and monopolies are double dipping. They get us on price and selection to their own gain, then threaten to get us even more if we ask them to pay more taxes on those gains.

terribleperson6• 1 year ago

Are you sure about point four? Taxes on corporate profits might be indirectly passed on to consumers (e.g. corporations take advantage of the knowledge of the taxes to justify raising prices), but since goods and services are presumably already optimally priced, and taxes on profits aren't an increase to costs, they shouldn't be directly passed on.

It would be an extraordinary claim to say that corporations are not pricing as high as they can without decreasing profits. If you believe that there is some other mechanism by which taxes on corporate profits could increase prices, please explain it.

blago5• 1 year ago

Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers

Never heard this argument before - it sounds very implausible. Do you have any studies or source for that claim?

kelnos11• 1 year ago

Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers.

Perhaps, but that's not really how it works. The market price doesn't care how much it costs to make a particular good, it's just the market price. If you raise prices in order to pass on new costs, fewer people will buy your stuff.

Put another way, if consumers would tolerate higher prices, corporations would already be charging those higher prices.

everdrive• 1 year 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• 1 year 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/ [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

pstuart2• 1 year ago

It is an issue and should be addressed. But it should be fixed, not burnt to the ground.

sxyuan16• 1 year ago

See my third point. :)

Article from 2022: 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• 1 year ago

You linked to a blog post about Medicare fraud, not Social Security fraud.

taeric3• 1 year ago

Medicare would not include SSN payments, though? With a quick search showing Medicare will have a trillion dollar budget. Feels like you are picking incompatible numbers to exaggerate a point.

Fraud is also tough, as it is an optimization problem. You want the amount of fraud to be less than what it would cost to fight it more. Especially since a lot of mistakes are labeled as a type of fraud.

danso• 1 year ago

The Medicare budget in 2023 was $830 billion [0]. Where are you getting $400B from?

[0] https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/what-to-know-about-...

ipython7• 1 year ago

The problem is that the real perpetrators of the fraud are just trying to redirect the blame to regular citizens. The biggest source of fraud is the insurance and hospital industry itself. See the example of Rick Scott: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott, yes, that Rick Scott- current Senator from Florida.

Scott was pressured to resign as chief executive of Columbia/HCA in 1997. During his tenure as chief executive, the company defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs. The U.S. Department of Justice won 14 felony convictions against the company, which was fined $1.7 billion in what was at the time the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history.

apercu2• 1 year 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.

forrestthewoods2• 1 year ago

1. But debt as percent of GDP has been growing. Can't do that forever. 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!

sxyuan16• 1 year 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.

canadiantim• 1 year 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

ctrlp12• 1 year 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?

yodsanklai2• 1 year ago

Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption

Does it look like we're going to less of that though?

Also, just looking at the numbers, I wonder if a few percent savings in the federal budget could possibly translate to positive changes for the working class. Maybe part of the population will be happy to know they don't fund hypothetical gender studies anymore, but let's hope the cuts don't affect them negatively.

ncallaway5• 1 year ago

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

Is having a federal workforce that's managed by an unelected, and unaccountable, oligarch more in line with the best interests of any country?

Centralized power is very susceptible to grift and corruption.

Isn't putting oligarchs with significant conflicts of interests in charge of the federal bureaucracy also susceptible to graft and corruption? Isn't halting enforcement of the law banning Americans from bribing foreign government officials also susceptible to graft and corruption? Doesn't pardoning a former governor convicted of literally selling a Senate seat make us more susceptible to graft and corruption? Doesn't the Supreme Court continually narrowing the conditions for bribery, making all but impossible to ever charge someone for accepting a bribe make us more susceptible to graft and corruption?

Honestly, it seems strange to me to say that the current administration is reducing graft and corruption, when the policies of this administration and the current conservative Court all seem to be *pro* graft and corruption.

jampekka3• 1 year ago

Social spending has overwhelming public support, with majority calling for more spending, and under 20% call for less spending.

https://apnews.com/article/ap-poll-government-spending-socia...

unclebucknasty12• 1 year ago

As the recent political realignment suggests, most people don't want to be governed by this a federal bureaucracy

I don't believe this conclusion can at all be drawn from the many variables involved in the "political realignment".

From, Gallup [0], top 5 issues for Republicans:

Economy

Immigration

Terrorism and national security

Crime

Taxes

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-...

sxyuan16• 1 year ago

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.

The word "unaccountable" gets thrown around a lot in these discussions. The leaders of these bureaucracies are ultimately appointed by and accountable to the President, who is in turn elected by and accountable to the public. In what sense are they unaccountable?

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.

I'm talking about both Social Security (21%) and Medicare (15%). Historically, families were much bigger; you'd have many children who could all pitch in to help take care of their parents. Historically, people also didn't get treated for cancer, heart disease, etc.

Families, churches, and charities still exist, and still can help in this capacity. As a person with gradually aging parents, I fully intend to help my parents however possible, but I'm also glad that society (well, for them, Canadian society) sees fit to provide them some support too. And as a Christian, I'm both happy when I see churches serving the poor and elderly, and happy when I see society agreeing with these Christian values and also collectively striving to serve the poor and elderly.

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.

If you're talking about welfare traps where government benefits disappear when your income increases over a (fairly low) threshold, disincentivizing extra work or raises, I fully agree that there are changes to be made.

On the other hand, if you think people don't work because they think they can live off government handouts, I'm curious if you've ever tried that, or put yourself in the shoes of someone who has.

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.

Fully agree on Medicare negotiation. I've seen my fair share of hospital bills, and believe me, I wasn't laughing...

The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie.

Only if you pretend that FDR, LBJ, etc. are not "American" (or perhaps, as American as apple pie - but maybe pumpkin?). Yes, there's always been a strain of rugged individualism in American political thought. We'll see where it leads, I guess.

They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network... Is that so hard to understand?

What's hard to understand is how this (IMO) distorted view of the government has taken hold. The government may be slow at times, may be wasteful at times, but, til now, it's worked. Old people get health care. Social Security checks get cashed. National parks stay open. Science gets funded. Planes stay in the air. The US university system is the envy of the world. And so on.

What hasn't worked is that people's lives haven't really improved that much. Jobs have gotten worse - more part time, more "gig economy". Housing prices have shot up. Health care costs are out of control. Etc. But please, help me draw the line between excess government spending and all of these problems, because I can't seem to see the connection.

People voted for change, and now they're going to get it I guess. Let's see if it's the kind of change they wanted.

kelnos11• 1 year ago

unaccountable bureaucracy

I'm not sure what's unaccountable about a bunch of people who report to political appointees who have been confirmed by the Senate (a body elected by the people), who then report to the president and vice president (also elected by the people).

JumpCrisscross22• 1 year 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-turnou...

[2] https://ivmf.syracuse.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2024_Re...

[3] https://nlihc.org/resource/new-census-data-reveal-voter-turn...

Uehreka• 1 year 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.

winter_blue• 1 year ago

absent a progressive corporate tax structure

AFAIK, we had a progressive corporate tax structure prior to Trump’s 2017 TCJA bill.

Jedd3• 1 year ago

Health insurance is orthogonal to federal spending.

As an Australian looking at the USA - I'm not sure how you make that claim sincerely.

Perhaps you're constraining it specifically to 'insurance', rather than the only slightly broader question of private health coverage. It still feels like a tenuous claim, given parent's valid point about health costs at the federal level, and intimation around the poor comparison to almost all the other advanced nation states on the planet.

Be honest and say why shouldn't corporations pay more. The answer to that is it's an inefficient way of taxing the wealthy ...

You seem to be conflating corporations with wealthy people.

Taxing corporations more has been shown - in your country, albeit some decades ago - to be both eminently achievable and effective.

Taxing corporations less has, in recent years, demonstrated clearly how poor a decision that is.

patagurbon• 1 year ago

given partisan polarization…

Democrats do a lot of things deeply wrong, but they seem to exhibit punitive behavior like this a lot less than their Republican counterparts. Republicans pay a lot of lip service to veterans but actual GOP legislation in favor of them is sparse at best

cryptoegorophy3• 1 year ago

Googles net income in 2024 was 100 billion. How much did they pay in taxes? And why %wise my company pays more. This should be DOGEd on top of what is being doged now.

mlsu• 1 year 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.

etchalon3• 1 year 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.

kelnos11• 1 year 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• 1 year 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-...

cwalv12• 1 year 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_2• 1 year 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.

LargeWu2• 1 year ago

Scaling with GDP, rather than population, implies that government spending is scaling with the country's ability to provide services commensurate with prosperity.

JumpCrisscross22• 1 year ago

Why should it scale linearly with GDP?

It doesn't have to. But GDP is a good proxy for the tax base. If the problem is deficits and spending isn't increasing linearly with GDP, that suggests the problem is with taxation. Not spending.

digitaltrees2• 1 year ago

It scales linearly because the same ratio of services to people continues. There aren’t suddenly less kids to educate, less elderly that need health care or less cases in federal court as the population grows.

—- As someone that has been in healthcare for 12 years it’s broken because of the corporate structure and administrative state of companies. The payors and providers share the same incentive to raise rates because they each collect a percentage of premiums. This is a solved problem in every OCED country in the world except here. RFK isn’t going to fix this, he hasn’t even labeled the problem correctly. He has some ok ideas around nutrition but the rest of his ideas range from futile to dangerous.

—- Corporate tax contributions aren’t at fair levels the national debt is increasing even while spending isn’t. They get access to markets created by society and government and yet as debts increase their ratio of tax payments is going down. The fair level would cover social service costs. I haven’t even gotten to the companies that receive subsidies or pay workers so little that they are in social support.

unclebucknasty12• 1 year ago

Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe)

That does seem more intuitive, but I think throwing GDP in the mix is intended to measure something different—kind of our theoretical ability to bear the cost.

but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease.

To some degree, yes. But, this potential decrease is limited by the proportion of our spending represented by direct transfers, such as Medicaire and Social Security.

terribleperson6• 1 year ago

There's a lot of other data on the site the graph in 4 came from. I put together my own chart comparing corporate tax receipts to annual corporate profits, and it doesn't look any better. Looks worse, in fact. I have successfully convinced myself that corporations are not, in fact, paying their fair share.

See the CPROFIT, CPATAX and FCTAX charts.

shadowgovt6• 1 year ago

you could also expect better tech/productivity

A lot of government service does not scale that way. When a veteran needs help getting groceries, or getting to the VA, or has to go into long-term care, for example, there isn't technology to scale up a human being helping them with the groceries, or the transportation, or the nursing.

The government mostly serves human beings and the options for scaling that problem domain (which aren't dehumanizing) are limited.

harimau777• 1 year ago

I'd argue that we shouldn't expect government expenses to be effected that much by advances in productivity. Government services largely exist to handle situations that are inherently inefficient (disability, national defense, civil rights, education, elder care, etc.).

What's the argument that corporations should be laying a lower share of the GDP? Due to their greater proportionate wealth, corporations and the wealthy can better afford to pay. They also tend to disproportionately benefit from the government.

SmirkingRevenge8• 1 year ago

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.

Eh, we're going to see a lot of scrutiny on proven vaccines and other proven medications that RFK harbors a lot of delusional beliefs about, because he's a conspiracy addled pudding-brained nutjob.

pwagland• 1 year 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.

Over time it _can't_ scale linearly with population, unless you decide to not adjust for inflation. It _could_ scale with population and inflation, assuming that you agree that you don't want more services from your government.

Don't forget, a percentage of that GDP increase is just inflation.

Most people, as they get richer, want to have services increase, as they can afford to pay more. For example, they go to nicer restaurants, nicer hotels, maybe they get a massage, where previously they would not have, etc.

This is largely also true of a population. We expect that our children will be better educated. We expect better roads/bridges/other infrastructure. Heck, we might even expect better public infrastructure such as trains, buses, etc.

stouset11• 1 year ago

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.'

This is such an unbelievably lazy response. Every single person in existence thinks there’s some amount of government waste that we wish were cut and either returned to the citizens or put to better use elsewhere.

The interesting and important question which GP poijted out—and which you completely dodged—is where and what should be cut. DOGE is looking at the set of government spending that accounts for less than 9% in aggregate of the entire federal budget. At best if they found that 10% of this money was abuse, it would account to less than 1% of the overall federal budget.

This isn’t about reducing government spending. If it was, they’d be going after larger targets. It’s about fulfilling their long-stated wet dream of finally drowning the government in a bathtub.

onislandtime• 1 year ago

I think we all agree that making the Gov more efficient is a good thing but this is about terrorizing federal employees for ideological reasons. There is no crisis to justify this. We do have a crisis in healthcare which is being ignored.

throw0101d3• 1 year ago

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.'

You mean like Reagan did, bringing in the private sector:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Commission

* https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/president...

* https://www.gao.gov/products/123531

* https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/convening-experts...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463355

Or Bush (43):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene...

Or FDR:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownlow_Committee

Or Truman:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission

Or Clinton/Gore:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...

There's an entire agency whose job is auditing:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...

rco87862• 1 year ago

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.

This isn't the question. The question is about the premise of federal spending being "out of control". By what measure is it out of control?

rainsford3• 1 year ago

"Better tech" is a double edged sword though because it can result in more efficient output but also more demand for output. The military was a lot cheaper in absolute terms before the technology existed to build nuclear powered aircraft carriers. But if you want to maintain a capable military you need to build nuclear powered aircraft carriers not just equip your troops with more efficiently made muskets.

While certain specific functions of government can and probably do get more efficient as technology progresses, the demand for new functions or more of existing functions goes up. You didn't need an FAA before air travel and you needed less FAA when there was less air travel, for example.

naasking• 1 year 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_2• 1 year ago

Aren't shareholders already taxed?

Employee wages are "already taxed" too, for the same underlying reasons even if not the same mechanics.

_DeadFred_6• 1 year ago

[flagged]

xvector2• 1 year ago

[flagged]

d_burfoot• 1 year 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...

[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/19/pete-hegseth-orders...

ufo• 1 year 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

EGreg2• 1 year 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

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

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

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-...

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

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

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!

Jeremy1026• 1 year ago

[flagged]

Gibbon12• 1 year 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.

MathMonkeyMan2• 1 year 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.

starspangled17• 1 year 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. 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• 1 year 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.

pdfernhout3• 1 year 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...

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. ...""

chasd002• 1 year ago

Well just give it some time, the axe is coming for fed contractors IMO. It’s no secret they cost a lot and Elon hates consultants anyway. I’ve spent the past 5 years in my firm’s public sector practice but am transitioning out over the next 6 weeks. I’m heading to an entirely different practice and bringing the pick of the litter from some of my past projects with me. We’re being welcomed with open arms. I think the writing is on the wall that the fed consulting gravy train is coming to an end.

kelnos11• 1 year ago

An even deeper issue is the fact that Trump's and Musk's plan isn't to eliminate government waste, it's to privatize as much of government as possible in order to funnel money to their corporate cronies. And on top of that, eliminate much of the government's ability to make and enforce regulations, so those same corporate cronies can spend less on regulatory compliance.

AnthonyMouse9• 1 year 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.

sxyuan16• 1 year ago

Thanks for the response. I think we agree on a fair amount - in particular, I absolutely think Medicare and Medicaid can and should be made more efficient. I'm doubtful, however, that an administration that tries to antagonize its civil servants at every turn and an organization like DOGE is going to do the kinds of things you're suggesting. At the end of the day, I don't efficiency is really even the goal for them.

Regarding insurance companies, I was writing a bit hastily - my train of thought is that providers are able to charge obscene amounts largely because insurance companies pass on these costs to consumers, who have little choice (and only see the result as steadily rising premiums). Meanwhile, these government programs end up paying the same kind of increasing costs to health care providers.

On your first point, I think sibling comment threads already have some good discussion about why it may make sense for spending to keep pace with GDP.

cryptoegorophy3• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Medicare and Medicaid are mostly paid for by taxes. They are massive programs.

alabastervlog2• 1 year 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).

chasd002• 1 year 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_dreamer19• 1 year 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• 1 year 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

SmirkingRevenge8• 1 year ago

DOGE isn't really cutting things to fund others. Many of their cuts are going to be net revenue negative. Many will cost taxpayers more of their money.

It's about gutting the civil service and staffing them with loyalists that will do what Trump or Musk want, despite what the law says. It's consolidation of power and corruption. Musk is also crippling many of the agencies that enforce regulations on his businesses.

ipython7• 1 year ago

And don't worry, the House is ready to extend and expand tax cuts to more than extinguish any potential "savings" - to the tune of over $3 trillion in extra deficit spending. But don't worry, they've planned for that- just increase the debt limit by $4 trillion to cover the difference!

After all, now that the Democrats aren't in charge any longer, increasing the debt limit is no biggie - we'll just grow ourselves out of the hole! Once we enact those tax cuts, it'll be hard to justify even more debt spending on such silly things like "education" and "research". We've got to pay the interest on the money we borrowed to provide those tax cuts after all.

BurningFrog5• 1 year ago

This is much more than any DOGE savings

DOGE is an 18 month project. Confidently asserting the end result after a few weeks is bold.

smogcutter• 1 year ago

I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste

In fact, I’d argue that the government’s role is specifically to spend on things that are economically inefficient but nonetheless important.

slaw5• 1 year 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_).

I would rather not spend taxpayers money on any of these and especially on military.

presentation5• 1 year ago

I don’t think it’s about the budget at all. It’s just an excuse to purge the civil service, since it’s overwhelmingly liberals in it, so that they can swing it more republican. Deficits are just a cover.

specialist• 1 year ago

Yes and:

about cutting services in order to fund two things

Gutting the administrative state. Then restaffing with loyalists.

lbarron68682• 1 year ago

It's also about weakening the federal government. Cutting regulations and throwing everything into chaos. It took some time for me to buy into the Techno-authoritarian theories, but the evidence is overwhelming.

ekianjo• 1 year 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.

rhubarbtree2• 1 year ago

Well, perhaps it is useful in pointing out that taxation, and not spending, is the real problem.

briantakita• 1 year 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.

jquery8• 1 year 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... [2] https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a... [3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/706 [4] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed47.asp

kelnos11• 1 year 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.

Not sure what you mean by "protecting". Of course none of those agencies are mentioned in the constitution, but that doesn't matter. They were all created by bills passed by the legislature and signed into law by the president at one point or another. Their existence has been upheld by the judiciary on more than one occasion. The executive branch doesn't have the authority to disband something that Congress has created by law.

If you don't like that those agencies exist, you are free to lobby your congresspeople to write and sponsor bills to disband them.

derangedHorse• 1 year 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/...

scotty79• 1 year ago

defense and veterans (20%)

Since USA just surrendered from their role of global hegemon you can reduce this just to veterans and nukes.

Glyptodon2• 1 year 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.

sxyuan16• 1 year 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.

refurb8• 1 year 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.

sxyuan16• 1 year 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_St...

rvba• 1 year ago

2. Techbros are young and they dont care about old people.

dcow17• 1 year 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)?

carom3• 1 year 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.

kelnos11• 1 year 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.

javcasas• 1 year ago

and there is clearly a ton of waste

Can you be a bit more specific? I mean, I can use that "argument" everywhere.

* Pointing to a government building "there is clearly a ton of waste"

* Pointing to a car "there is clearly a ton of waste"

* Pointing to a rock "there is clearly a ton of waste"

BurningFrog5• 1 year 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.

guax8• 1 year 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.

29athrowaway2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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

[0] “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

ZeroGravitas4• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Ironic, given the age of the leadership.

hamburglar2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

most GDPs around the world are printed.

somenameforme2• 1 year 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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

[3] https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation

aikinai3• 1 year ago

I can’t even make my car payments, so I might as well eat out for lunch every day.

somenameforme2• 1 year 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

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DUIy

Sparyjerry4• 1 year 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.

lm28469• 1 year 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

thewanderer1983• 1 year 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

regpertom• 1 year 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.

base6982• 1 year 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.

DrillShopper5• 1 year 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?

smegger00112• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

sxyuan16• 1 year ago

A couple of interesting graphs:

Personal spending is up relative to GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DWC7

Household net worth is up relative to GDP: 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

yellowapple• 1 year 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.

starspangled17• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

JackYoustra2• 1 year ago

Rule of law is what allows us to grow. Acemoglu won a nobel prize showing that institutions cause growth. Destroy institutions and you'll undershoot potential.

thrance7• 1 year ago

Pet peeve: there is no Nobel prize of economics, Alfred Nobel didn't include "economy" in his will. Instead there is a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences" whose purpose is to give credibility to the unscientific field of economics. The prize itself is mostly awarded to neoliberalists economists and does not often represent the majority views in the field.

ctrlp12• 1 year ago

YATP: Yet Another Tool of Patronage.

tovej• 1 year ago

The price is awarded exclusively to neoclassical economists, because it's effectively a marketing tool for neoclassical economics, which is the economic theory base of neoliberal shareholder capitalism.

JackYoustra2• 1 year ago

You can look at the economic experts panel to find the majority view of the field: https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/us-economic-experts-panel/

and most nobel prize winners have majority support. If you have objections to acemoglu, please show me the majority of economists that object to him?

JumpCrisscross22• 1 year ago

there is no Nobel prize of economics

It's commonly called the Nobel prize of economics. That it's not a classic Nobel prize is mostly finance jargon.

prize itself is mostly awarded to neoliberalists economists

Source? The period in which neoliberal economics won the prize was when neoliberal economics was in vogue (and most successful and producing useful theories).

alienthrowaway3• 1 year ago

The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades at many American institutions, such as for-profit companies. Openly selling the country short for personal benefit is just one small step after many hundreds of them to get where we are.

zvorygin• 1 year ago

When have the corporations ever not had a short-termist "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality in America?

drawkward6• 1 year ago

The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades

...in American culture

wolfcola• 1 year ago

“mistakes”

TehCorwiz• 1 year ago

This was basically the same shtick he did with Twitter. He "open sourced" the "algorithm" but it was basically a git repo of BS that rarely gets updated and doesn't seem to match what actually happens.

etchalon3• 1 year ago

I for am shocked that something associated with Elon Musk would be riddled with mistakes.

cwalv12• 1 year ago

While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.

Billions. I understand that it may be far from sufficient to prevent the US from entering a debt spiral if/when interest rates increase (or stagflation if/when yield curve control is enacted to prevent a debt spiral), but it's still a lot of money. No doubt mistakes have been made, but it's very unlikely that DOGE critics will be able to convince most tax papers that the pain wasn't worth it.

crooked-v3• 1 year ago

I absolutely expect that the slapdash firing and cutting is going to cost the country much more than it saves over the next ten years.

owl_vision2• 1 year ago

Have these changes been analyzed prior to implementation?

Laying off electrical line workers during snow season in Paific Northwest is really not a good idea. As an example.

aqueueaqueue• 1 year ago

Oh that doge. Thought this would be about the cryptocurrency.

userbinator• 1 year ago

I would not be surprised at all if the two somehow became even more related in the near future.

frugalmail• 1 year ago

I think what doge is doing should always be happening. According to the article the website doesn't have the rigor they're expecting. But then again, I never interpreted it as a double entry ledger for the public to review. They're moving fast and put in a position able to make the changes that many know should be made, but lacked the power to make the changes. As long as it's all legal, we should all be glad that there is opportunity for things to come to light. The article even confirms billions have been saved already. Sounds good to me, considering what some of the expenses were.

The fact that workers, in many cases new or probationary, sued for irreparable hardship, when many organizations go through layoffs every few years is exemplary of a sense of entitlement that has been calloused.

InfiniteTitan3• 1 year ago

As long as it's all legal

It’s quite clear by the preponderance of the evidence piling up that these actions are not legal.

The cost of defending all of the employment actions that result from this will easily eclipse the “savings” presented.

ave_b_20114• 1 year ago

First of all none of this is legal- it’s all money that is appropriated.

Secondly, this is a see-through attempt to further extend an already short staffed federal government in order to justify selling it off in pieces to the millionaire and billionaire class.

One final question, is Elon Musk doing this all purely out of the goodness of his heart? He has nothing to gain from what he is doing?

Basic game theory suggests that maybe he is acting more selfishly than we are being told.

29athrowaway2• 1 year ago

DOGE = austerity measures

Without saying austerity

presentation5• 1 year ago

Nah austerity is the excuse, it’s just an ideological purge.

slaw5• 1 year ago

Both austerity and purge are good.

_DeadFred_6• 1 year ago

Right in line with Umberto Eco's item 3 in his list of common features of fascism:

"3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the...

IAmGraydon4• 1 year ago

Ok, but while I disagree with Musks actions, more than half of the 14 items don’t fit what’s currently happening.

_DeadFred_6• 1 year ago

Only meets HALF of the fascism warning signs you say? Nevermind then. Nothing to see here.

rollinDyno• 1 year ago

In his essay, Eco says no instance of fascism will present itself with all items. He starts out by saying that fascism is very hard to define, so the 14 item list is meant to be a soft guide more than an absolute rule book.

I am starting to accept that this is a conversation we are going to be having over and over again, even after Elon and Trump. We are rightly traumatised by the excesses of the past, so it's very easy to imagine that any slight will inevitably lead to full on fascism.

This last qualification of fascism could be key, it differentiates 20th century fascism to what we are seeing today. We don't yet know whether this new form of fascism is just as harmful. For instance, when debating about whether Elon—who meets many of the elements in Eco's list—is a nazi or not, people are having very different conversations. There is no nazi party Elon can be a member of so that's not what I've been interested in. For me it has been more about the possibility of Elon advocating the same extreme policies fascist parties did. We could say he shares some of the worldview as the white supremacists, but would he go as far as implementing a 'final solution' to remedy the diagnosis?

guax8• 1 year ago

I counted 3 that I would not apply, 2 can be argued. The rest is applicable just fine to what I see from the rethoric coming out of the US government.

wat100006• 1 year ago

Which ones don’t fit? Seems to me they’re all happening now.

drawkward6• 1 year ago

I see all 14

patagonianboy• 1 year ago

Debt will skyrocket. They will slash billions of dollars from federal spending under the guise of "efficiency," while simultaneously cutting taxes for corporations and millionaires. The result: the first trillionaires will emerge, and they won't be the oil sheikhs you expect.

mint2• 1 year ago

it’s easy to be a trillionaire with four years of bad inflation when you start with 50B.

chmorgan_• 1 year ago

I'd be interested in whether they are fixing mistakes that are reported to them. If they won't then there is an issue. If they do then maybe this is just another nitpicking attack on DOGE.

voiper1• 1 year ago

From the article: "... but did not respond to numerous questions about other aspects of the group’s accounting."

It's not "nitpicking" when the reports of where/how much they are saving money -- their purported goal -- is _fundamentally_ inaccurate in many circumstances that can be verified. And even worse for what that implies about everything else that can't be verified.

BLKNSLVR• 1 year ago

I believe Musk and Trump have doubled and even tripled down on the ridiculously implausible $50 million in condoms for Hamas claim.

Correcting mistakes isn't their goal. Maintaining the narrative is their goal, seemingly at any cost.

llm_nerd• 1 year ago

Nitpicking?

They are in a role of "auditor". The most important requirement of an auditor -- a mandatory requirement -- is accuracy and correctness. It isn't nitpicking to point out that they are either intentionally lying, or are profoundly incompetent at the role they anointed themselves with.

reubenswartz• 1 year ago

just another nitpicking attack on DOGE I'm not sure that pointing out that DOGE is unconstitutional, a massive security threat, and not designed to save money but to consolidate power and punish enemies is nitpicking...

mannyv• 1 year ago

Now they're fact checking the government. About time.

zombiwoof• 1 year ago

And these are the people lying about self driving cars

maga_2020• 1 year ago

I would like to have a substitative discussion of how to validate the claims that DOGE is not saving as much as they claim.

Should I trust the Intercept's article [1] that New York times is referring to?

I guess a larger point is that NY Times wants to their readers to focus on particular instances where Doge, they believe, they miscalculated their impact on waste.

But, in my mind, does not change the overall intend of Doge's remit, the short term and long term benefits of improving organization efficiencies, reducing corruption, and reducing federal budget.

50 years from now, the next generation will be looking at these times, and these efforts -- as a rare example of positive, transformational polices, a bloodless revolution of the common sense defeating the monster of corruption, selective persecutions, identity politics and senseless wars.

[1]https://archive.is/MCUX8

worthless-trash• 1 year ago

To be fair, they are drawing from bad data so it shouldn't be a surprise.

hofo• 1 year ago

Sounds like waste, fraud, and abuse to me

refurb8• 1 year ago

If we look at one example of the errors the article calls out:

"The contracting company, D&G Solutions, confirmed to CBS News that this was originally the result of an accounting error and that $3.8 million of the contract had already been expended."

So DOGE reported $8B because the receipt indicated $8B? So DOGE reported the saving because the system said it was spending $8B? That is an error, but one that originated with the data?

rawgabbit2• 1 year ago

The FAQ of the FPDS database explains this is not the system of record. It is not the real accounting database for federal contracts. Instead, after a contract is signed, contracting officers are supposed to report it to FPDS. It is like (incorrectly) manually filling out a timesheet. There was no $8B contract.

https://www.fpds.gov/wiki/index.php/FPDS_FAQ

“What is FPDS not designed to collect? The following data elements will not be found in FPDS. Contracting officers can’t put this information in FPDS even if they want to. Most of this data resides at the individual contracting office.”

alfiedotwtf• 1 year ago

Why aren’t people seeing through the facade?!

The point of DOGE isn’t to save money, it’s to shut government programs that don’t align to Project 2025’s agenda.

mibes2• 1 year ago

Yep. Reward friends and punish enemies. At long last the right has learned to play the game that the left has played for decades

drawkward6• 1 year ago

the game that the left has played for decades

Can you give some examples, please?

UberFly• 1 year ago

With it's massive history of bias and credibility issues, I don't trust the source of this story. Sorry.

chasing• 1 year ago

Doesn't matter. It's a propaganda tool. Go look at Twitter: It's full of right-wingers latching onto obviously false information "proving" some sort of Trump/Musk narrative. Which then gets sanitized into news articles and media pieces. Which then becomes the reason why people who live in information deserts vote against their own interests, their communities interests, and general common sense.

TypingOutBugs• 1 year ago

Tbf, saying they did cut “some billions” as a group of unpaid or low paid 20-somethings is fantastic returns

owl_vision2• 1 year ago

This "wall-of-receipt" data does not meet the standards of the government's data communication requirements. It is not transparent, inaccurate and many difficulties are added to make it available to the public.

Anyone thought of a petition to request and meet the standards?

thom• 1 year ago

Even if government were like a tech startup, you shouldn’t run it like a stupid one.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

sebastianconcpt3• 1 year ago

Discussing the correctness in the immoral use of public money is the wrong discussion to have. You don't try play chess with a parasite. You deparasitize a patient and then do any next thing you need to do.

drawkward6• 1 year ago

Our system is based on laws, not morals.

sebastianconcpt3• 1 year ago

And is Achilles heel: to infiltrate the country's bureaucratic corpus (to make system design decisions by unelected experts that if ideology driven the population has no defense against) and infiltrate the judiciary. If you have the supreme court in one ideology aisle alone, the population have zero defense against the problem of these subjects secretly executing a pact of conspiracy against their people. Zero. It's game over. This is Brazil today, by the way. The U.S. got just saved of having that same fate.

ave_b_20114• 1 year ago

I’m sorry. Just one thing to clear up. Are you saying that the public at large that pays taxes are the parasite?

Veterans seeing the doctor at their VA location are parasites?

Is the clean air and clean water we drink, seat belt laws, cancer research, etc. immoral? I’m not following what you’re saying at all.

sebastianconcpt3• 1 year ago

No, the public at large has the parasite. The bureaucratic muscle of the country is parasitized (by "low and high calories" ideology-driven subversives in disguise advancing a sort of religious war against wester-civilization values).

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

DOGE logistics is simply 'It became necessary to destroy the budget to save it.'

chriscrisby2• 1 year ago

To sum up this article, the Government is so big in inefficient that it’ll costs too much money to cut back on spending.

DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

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