Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Sixty percent is high. So high, that it almost seems impossible. Can you provide some details? What's the breakdown?
DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
541–550 of 1001 posts
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 me…
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 p…
Prices are set by supply and demand. Taxing corporate profits offsets the supply curve, resulting in higher prices. The data supports this.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27058/w270...
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you’re 100% correct, these aren’t the right people and these aren’t the right methods. Completely the opposite actually.
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 co…
Didn’t he fire something like 200,000 people?
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#544For 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 th…
> 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, an…
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.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you’re 100% correct, these aren’t the right people and these aren’t the right methods. Completely the opposite actually.
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 co…
Simply audit defense spending. It's the vast majority of government spending and hasn't been auditable in ages.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
> cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession This is not correct. The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds. Congress can then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever conditions Congress set. The argument could be made that this is a…
> The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds.
That’s not what the statute says. 2 U.S.C. 683(a) says:
> Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including the termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation for such fiscal year, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message specifying
There must be a determination and it must be with respect to a program. So for example Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations as a single line item. The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process. Then at some point the executive can make a determination how much of the total “program” amount will actually be needed and how much won’t be needed. Only at that point is the recessionary notice required.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 aske…
> No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years. Yes it has. In 1980 it was 34.25%, in 2022 it was 36.25%. > And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth. US government spending on healthcare is about as most other developed countries yet they are able to provide universa…
> Yes it has. In 1980 it was 34.25%, in 2022 it was 36.25%.
Honest question, do you expect people to take your position seriously when this is the stat you’re putting up in defense of your argument?
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.…
Stuff like this is why the Skunk Works at Lockheed was such a big deal.
Just a whole department of people who innovated without any of the red tape, in a government setting.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 aske…
> No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years. Yes it has. In 1980 it was 34.25%, in 2022 it was 36.25%. > And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth. US government spending on healthcare is about as most other developed countries yet they are able to provide universa…
There’s no reason we have to be spending so much on healthcare. I’m convinced if Joe Lieberman didn’t block the public option in 2009, or if the Democrats had a spine and actually bypassed the filibuster to make sure the bill was as good as it could be, we’d have universal health care today. Instead, we decided to bail out insurance companies, to the benefit of nobody but insurance companies.
We still could have single payer, but that’s not going to happen with the current group in charge.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#550For 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 th…
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_).