201–210 of 316 posts
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A war that was very good for what the US economic juggernaut has become. We may be significantly better off maintaining great relationships with our Western Hemisphere countries and let the oceans protect us.
There is an ocean in the middle of the "western hemisphere". Did you mean "Americas continent countries"?
Didn't they find one department was paying for like 10k licenses of WinZip?
Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.
The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all.
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which administers research grants, is a division of the Department of Education. Given your point, how much of this funding was dedicated to research? Even if $500 million (its much more, but I digress) has been invested in research since 1980, this does not negate your point since the Department of Education does more than advancing academic achievement?
Each state has its own rules for education. The Department of Education mostly funds programs based on federal law, but they can only regulate state's activities they’re breaking federal law, you can't solely blame the department for failures of multiple state governments.
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Do you take that attitude towards all other government services?
Yes, I went out of my way to live in a place with no public roads, no public utilites, no fire, and no police and in a house built with no government inspections. Whenever there is a way to avoid interacting with public services I do everything I can to avoid them.
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The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all.
test scores have actually gone down in a number of states I don't think whatever the department of education is doing is actually working.
Y'all really don't understand how education works in America and your comments make it clear for all to see.
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The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.
Insurance companies don't make much money, actually. Hospitals, physicians, and pharma are at the top of the list (60% or so of total spending). Total insurance overhead is perhaps between 10 and 20%.
I would like to personally thank Elon, "big balls" and the rest of DOGE for causing hundreds of thousands of deaths [1] by shutting down USAID! Also an honorable for bringing the screwworm to the US. Good job everyone, you guys did it! [1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
why exactly is the US responsible for feeding people in random countries around the world? if the US is responsible for those deaths then surely every other county who didn't step up to feed them is equally responsible right?
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I've seen both sides of it. It's an unpleasant discussion but the government did drastic overhiring and now there are thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs. But how do you fix it? These thousands o…
> thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs. Surely this is easy to prove, right?
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"DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government…" Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.
>Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway. Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).
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Yep. I’ve worked on some federal contracts and all the waste is in private contractors, not the government itself. There are structural issues with subcontractors many layers deep, each middleman taking a cut for doing little to nothing. It’s sick.
And who is responsible for making sure federal contracts don't go to wasteful contractors?