You’re welcome! I say that wasted federal money turned the sky green, but I won’t back up that claim, because it’s your job, for some reason, to prove me wrong.
Anyway, you can always find little programs or funny-sounding programs that seem like they are wasted, but they are less than insignificant. Meanwhile, billions of tax dollars are lost due to a lack of funding at the IRS.
You mention the PPP, and I’m sure there was lots of fraud. Do you think you should combat that fraud by defunding the IRS or getting rid of inspectors general?
Specifically, those reasons seem likely to be mostly based in disinformation and popular misunderstandings, rather than on any personal actual understanding.
In your opinion. So, go run for office, and make this an issue, and see if enough people agree with you.
There are mechanisms in place to affect spending in the way you want, and it’s called “Winning elections and passing legislation.” The US Congress passes budget bills every year, so that’s the time to fix this, if you have the political support.
What you don’t do is let some unelected jackass take a chainsaw to everything they personally dislike, which is how it’s being done as we speak.
The largest portion of the spending that we know is trimmable is health care spending. Other countries are able to spend half on health care as the US, with no loss to health outcomes.
If you really want to accomplish something, that would always be the place to start.
The question with Trump is always, do you actually want to do something, or do you just want to generate headlines?
I’d like him to reduce and optimize the government, ensure that it is spending the least money for the greatest and most positive results on our future growth, etc. I’d like him to reduce the number of people living in the country illegally or under questionable legal footing.
But it’s like, you say that you want to lose weight. If you actually want to do it, then you eat less and burn more calories. That’s it. You do the actual thing that you need to do, directly and simply. If your solution, instead, is to burn incense candles and swap out carbs for fats, you’re probably not really interested in success.
Don’t go asking me to do it, that’s Trump’s job now. If his focus stays on stealing the Panama Canal, turning Gaza into Mar a Lago II, deporting 12 million people, closing student clubs at West Point, and firing a half million federal employees, the economy won’t grow, and the deficit will, no matter how many USAID employees he fires.
What, precisely, in the current federal budget – or the federal budget as it existed a month ago – are you characterizing as “bedazzled yoga pants”?
Exactly. You need to provide links to sites that support the specific examples that you claim. You’re the one making the claims, you’re the one who needs to support them. That’s how this works.
Cite, please? Including not only evidence that this happened, but who the cars were purchased for and who they were purchased from, and what reason was given for the purchase?
We might or might not disagree on whether such a purchase was wasteful if we had that information. I, at least, am not going to claim an opinion on it without that information.
I’d like to know that as well; what US government money is being spent on purchasing electric cars in Vietnam? The only thing I can think of is that there is a company, Vinfast, that produces electric cars and is based in Vietnam. They’re planning a US plant.
Maybe there was some program to help EV development in Viet Nam (from some of the cites that I saw) – if so, it was $2.5mm. Like I said, less than insignificant in the context of the overall budget.
SS, Medicare, defense, interest on the debt – that’s where the money is spent. Everything else is small, and broken up into smaller and smaller chunks. Here’s my cite, since I cite my claims:
I’ve tried to post reasonably, yet the OP has not responded to me. I realize you are busy. Just explaining why this will be my last post for a while.
What was your intention with your OP? Because I think the unanimous answer is a resounding “Yes!” Should the thread be closed?
I readily acknowledge that a HUGE flaw in just about EVERY governmental budget is that components have no incentive to reduce their budgets. Phrased another way, one of the most basic “goals” of any governmental entity is to grow its budget and increase its staff. I suggest this is true of departments large and small, and of departments the OP generally supports and the ones they generally disfavor. You spend EVERY PENNY that is allocated to you, and explain why you need more money and staff next year.
How to combat this very basic dynamic is quite challenging. But I’m not at all sure this is the sort of discussion the OP desires. I will suggest that if you wish to address waste in - say - the FDA, there are much better ways to go about it than to simply declare a reduction - say 10% in staff and budget - across the board. It may be that some programs are currently grossly underfunded, while others are overfunded, and some are just about right.
Please correct me if I am wrong in perceiving that what you actually are wishing to do is to point out a few specific instances of spending which you personally consider wasteful or fraudulent. Even if I agree with you as to Guatemalan sex changes and Egyptian tourism, that proves very little about governmental (presumably federal) spending as a whole.
As someone very correctly pointed out above - unless you meaningfully reduce Social Security/Medical/Military/debt service, you really are quibbling about pennies.
Yep. The IRS, fully staffed could make a huge dent in balancing the budget.
“Waste” is in the eye of the beholder. Some would claim shipping condoms for areas ravaged by AIDS is waste, other (like myself) applaud the effort. So, nix the 'waste" idea, especially with Musk/trump running it.
Fraud is a different matter. At a certain point, stamping out fraud gets to the point where it includes too many non-fraudulent cost, and gets so that the cost of stamping it out exceeds the fraud itself.
It is not, since one persons “waste” is another person 'good idea". Condoms for example.
Yep, according to these guys it would be part of about $150mm invested in Vietnam to promote their development into a self reliant nation that can be a valuable economic partner to the United States.
For some reason I have a feeling the Musk kids aren’t going to be asked to find waste and fraud related to the billions upon billions of dollars paid to Musk-owned companies.
Sure - we do not all agree as to what specific things are “waste.” Is that how you read the OP? Asking us to go through the budget line-by-line and agree as to which items - large or small - constitute waste?
I would think that everyone would agree that eliminating waste is a good thing - even though we might differ as to whether - in your example - condoms are wasteful or not. The only possible exception I could imagine would be if someone said, “The government pursues such laudable goals that cannot be assessed through a business lens, that it is better to have SOME amount of waste, to ensure that all of the desired “good” is being accomplished.”
But, isn’t it easier to just rail against tiny programs with funny names, or spending that doesn’t exist at all? Seems easier to me, than putting together a coherent argument with cites explaining why this is wasteful and that isn’t.
It’s like a guy going fishing with his buddies on his big new boat some weekend, and griping to them that his wife wastes gas money to visit her mother a town over instead of just calling her.
Or, possibly, “the amount of time and money it would take to make sure there was no waste or fraud whatsoever will at some point in the process exceed the amount of time and money saved by eliminating any more of the remaining waste or fraud.”
In other words, sure, it should be possible to prevent some waste and fraud. Trying to make sure there’s none at all isn’t practical. There’s a similar issue in private business as well – how many people do you want to pay to research (and to keep updating the research on) the cheapest printer paper that will serve the purpose and how many do you want to pay to make sure that nobody ever orders the next grade up? and how many do you want to pay to police everybody in the place to make sure nobody ever prints something that didn’t need printing, and nobody ever prints their personal grocery list, but that everything that does need printing gets printed? And while it’s probably worth checking why somebody’s going out the door with a pallet jack and a full pallet, is it worth hiring someone to search everybody on their way out (and creating the associated resentments) to make sure nobody’s got a ream of paper concealed on their person? (Maybe it is, if one piece of paper could have critical secrets that couldn’t just be memorized. But I bet it isn’t worth it otherwise.)