DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

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

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.

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)

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!

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.

OBGYN is not an illustrative case, it's an outlier.

> How are the professional negligence premiums across the other specialties?

The malpractice insurance is about 1-3% of the cost. The physician and nurse salaries are about 15% of the cost in total.

The majority of expense goes towards prescription drugs, devices, and for the admin costs.