Specifics are the enemy of populism:
- healthcare and pharma is overpriced because of information frictions, institutional supply constraints (this mostly means strict immigration controls), and people just really want healthcare relative to other wants! See: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/1gsezga/comme...
also biden made insulin capped at a price so.
- mass incarceration is a SUPER populist thing! How many times do we hear "we need to be tough on crime"? This sure seems like the voters behind it, it's not like people are clamoring for shorter sentences.
- Indeed, our military is expensive partially because we require domestic production and have to pay really high domestic costs, and partially because the way the US fights war places a SUPER high value on human life. Desert storm was both expensive and only resulted in ~200 coalition deaths to take down the world's 4th largest military, whereas Russia has made it not very far into ukraine and taken over 200k deaths (and it hasn't even been substantially cheaper to boot, just a bit cheaper).
- The tax loopholes exist and are bad, although I challenge you to give me specific loopholes that cost high billions and should obviously be repealed in a way that both constituents are clamoring for and the representatives don't actually do. I don't think they exist.
You know what does actually degrade the fiber of the country? The richest person in the world taking personal control over every payment and arbitrarily destroying institutional knowledge by firing every government employee he has control over or who stands up to him. But no, instead we get "he's saving money" when (see the earlier comment from me) we're not even making outlays go down! A script kiddie who randomly rewrites lines into bad assembly while destroying the build system isn't a perf eng, they're a danger.