What problems could we solve in America, that could actually save money by solving the problem, but we still don't solve them

Great Debates
1

So I’m wondering if there are problems where solving the problem either would cost far less than people think, or actually save money, but we still don’t solve them.

One is money in politics. Political spending is at an all time high, although voter turnout hasn’t gone up that much due to all the spending, and things like making it easier to vote increases voter turnout and is pretty inexpensive. Doing what Oregon does and having automatic registration and universal vote by mail seems to increase turnout more than the money spent on politics, at least thats my impression.

Apparently even now that spending is at an all time high, it amortizes to about 10-15 billion a year. The US spent 9 billion on politics in 2022 and 16 billion in 2024. Far less in 2021 and 2023. And the US spends about 4-5 billion a year on lobbying.

But replacing all that money with matching funds for small donors, subsidies and tax credits for small donors would only cost ~$10-15 billion. Plus with less bribery in politics, there would be less giveaways to wealthy industries which would likely save more than $10 billion a year.

Homelessness is another issue. I think it’ll cost $20 billion a year to solve homelessness. But if we solved it, we spend less on law enforcement and medical care, which could make up most of the $20 billion we’d spend, if not save money in the long run (at least for some of the homeless).

Universal health care costs less than our current system. Medicare for all would save about $500 billion a year. Again, one reason we don’t have medicare for all or a medicare buy-in is because of the $10 billion in spending a year on politics.

Any other problem where solving it could cost less than keeping the problem as it is?

What about fully subsidized public college? I think it would cost ~$80 billion a year to give everyone access to free public undergraduate education, but wouldn’t society save more than that in the form of lower crime rates, lower levels of welfare usage, higher employment rates, people paying more in taxes, etc? Education generally increases human capital so people contribute more to society. But I don’t know to what degree that is cause vs effect.

2

I think the real issue here is that powerful people don’t actually want to solve the problems you have listed. The issues with each “problem” are actually considered “features” by many people.

However, I would suggest that transportation is an issue that could be “solved” for far less than we are paying today. I was driving through Dallas the other day and marveling at their extensive network of freeways and interchanges. For example, 635 Texpress is a freeway completely hidden underneath I-635. We have spent billions (trillions?) of dollars on the most expensive, most dangerous, and most inefficient transportation system imaginable. Even so, the Texas Legislature is debating (and will probably pass) a bill that will devastate Dallas’ DART public transit system by yanking away its funding. Utterly stupid.

3

I agree, thats the issue. The rich and powerful like these problems. Someone once said ‘if you want to know why a problem exists, don’t look at who it harms. Look at who benefits from the problem’ and that describes things well.

The rich like having politicians dependent on them for money. The health industry doesn’t want cost cuts from medicare for all.

4

The War on Drugs is a huge one. I’m on record for favoring legalizing and regulating everything. It won’t solve all the problems, and yes, there would be a few people who would become addicted who might otherwise have not tried some substance or other due to lack of legal availability. But overall it would save money and reduce crime.

5

I think that the present situation demonstrates that to be overly optimistic. “The cruelty is the point”; the rich and powerful will gladly take a loss as long as the people they hate (which is most people) suffer. Thus all the complaints about “woke” companies; even utterly amoral, profit driven capitalism is more moral than many of the wealthy are, since even an amoral bottomless appetite is more moral than outright sadism and malignancy.

Which brings us back to the OP. Many, probably most of the attempts to encourage greater social justice are a net profit, especially for society at large. “No man is an island” after all, making things better for the unfortunate and oppressed tends to make things better for people in general, since we’re all connected. A more prosperous lower class better fuels the economy, healthy workers are more productive, women and minorities with better jobs and more freedom both consume and produce more, etc.

6

I think I read that some American politicians blocked the bulk buying of drugs at a lower rate.
I’m sure that here in the UK our NHS negotiates cheaper drugs by bulk buying.

7

One would be the issue of over-incarceration. There are a huge number of people in American prison who

  1. are serving sentences for far longer than they need to, or

  2. didn’t even really need prison time to begin with.

All of this adds up to a massive price tag for imprisonment in America, not to mention all the issues of overcrowding, low guard morale, how lengthy imprisonment worsens recidivism, etc.

Another tangential issue would be replacing most prison time with hefty fines (that is, if appropriate for the crime.) This would not only reduce the financial burden on prisons, but also generate a form of governmental revenue.

8

This might be true if you perform a static analysis. But it gets much more complex, with lots of feedback loops, if you were to actually try it. This is true for just about anything. Using your example, if $20B magically appeared, and all of it was earmarked to solve the homeless problem, the number of “homeless” people would increase dramatically.

9

We would have to amend the 1st Ad. Cant happen.

This is absolutely true. Al;tho NOTHING can solve all homelessness, we could solve 70% or so pretty easily. When I was a City Commissioner I pointed out that we were spending a craptonne of $$ on emergency services for sick homeless people, that handing out “doc in the box” Urgent care vouchers would be cheaper.

It does, but not directly. And i assume you mean real actual Medicare for everyone, not Sanders crazy program of the same name?

31 states have free (or close to it) community college tuition. Let’s make it all 50, and throw in books, etc. Let someone learn a trade or a skill thru a 2 year degree or find out if higher education, i/e. a 4 year + degree is right for them. That wont be very expensive, and it would save college bound HS grad a bunch in college loans. But of course- it is already free in most states yet still youths in those states disdain the Free College to go to a 4 year college with oppressive student loans.

10

In their minds, the 4 year college with the oppressive loans is a better bet for future success than community college, because what you get from community college is either an associate degree and the associated low level jobs that come with those, or it’s a stepping stone to a 4 year college anyway.

For many of them, the community college, lower level job is a good path, but a lot of people have unrealistic aspirations, and get out of high school believing they’re going to be a doctor or lawyer, and not a HR assistant somewhere.

11

One thing which comes to mind is the payments system in the U.S. We had a thread about it a month ago:

Generally the U.S. payments system is high cost and/or slow and/or high fraud. Many other countries have better payments systems–although none is perfect.

Some of the other suggestions in this thread are poor, for example legalizing drugs. While I think a case can be made for legalizing marijuana the costs of the two major legalized drugs is extremely high–much higher than the costs of the drug war. Tobacco is associated with 490,000 or so deaths a year and alcohol with 180,000 or so. Alcohol is also associated with a lot of violence. Why add more substances with these kinds of massive costs?

12

I constantly tell my history students to ask “cui bono?” Who benefits? One student was so taken by this he had “cui bono?” tattooed on his neck. I love the idea of him being asked, 50 years after I’m dead, “grandpa, why did you get that tattoo?” “I took a class with an instructor, a giant of a man with a full head of hair, with fierce eyes yet a compassionate demeanor who made clear the meaning of history, the universe, and everything with brilliant lectures, keen insight, and a ready wit. This tattoo is his lesson, writ large for all to see. And thus does his spirit still live among us!”

13

I love the fiery oratory in the previous post. :laughing:

14

I can’t speak to the accuracy of most of these, but for the one above I think you’d see most rural hospitals in the US go bankrupt or turn into glorified clinics in a few years. That is, unless the government spent a bunch more to bail them out.

Most hospitals operate in the red when they serve Medicare patients, and rural hospitals are considered well run if they can cover their costs or operate at a small loss. At the one I work at Medicare pays about 30% less than the cost to break even on a patient’s visit. Higher payments from insurance companies on profitable services (just about anything related to Radiology or Surgery) make up for the deficit.

To be fair, Medicare for everyone would help somewhat with patients showing up in the ER and paying nothing. But they’d still be seen at a financial loss and with no areas like surgery and radiology making money most hospitals would be in real trouble. Huge urban hospitals might fare better.

15

Yes, a 2 year college can also be a stepping stone to a 4 year degree. And in fact if you go two years to a CA community college, then graduate with a BA from a CA State University- no one will care that the first two years were spent at a community college. And you will learn whether college is right for you- about 1/3 of students drop out- so why incur a a big student loan while you are testing the waters?

Sure, but we can legalize Pot- there are little costs (other than prison) associated with pot.

This is why I suggested Urgent care vouchers for the homeless.

16

My favorite one is probably income tax filing. Every year the government asks me to do a little math test. They already know the answers. If I get it wrong, they send me a nasty letter and possibly some penalties. Why? It should be like everything else, they send me a bill, and I either pay it or dispute it.

I’m not even clear that this would be a net added expense to the government. I think it would actually be less wasteful, possibly even a net gain since a lot of people wouldn’t bother to dispute the government-prepared version. But we can’t do that, because (a) people wouldn’t loathe taxes so much, and (b) the tax prep industry wouldn’t make so much money. Certain rich people want this experience to suck, so we have to do it the stupid way.

17

It’s worse than that actually - I live in a city with an affordable public university. It’s not free - it’s currently $3500 a semester ( for residents) which doesn’t really lead to oppressive loans. There’s also a state university with similar tuition. But somehow lots of people I know and their kids think they will do better if they go somewhere more expensive. Even when they should be able to see that it isn’t always true - I had a co-worker who was still paying off her student loans as her son was approaching college age. She wanted him to go to the same private college she had attended - Colgate, I think. Because going there would be so much better for his career than going to the public university. He would meet people and make connections and so on. It was apparently lost on her that she went there, was still paying off her loans in her 40s - and had the same job I did, with my public university degree. Except that I didn’t have any loans.

18

IRS agents to go after wealthy tax cheaters.

19

I’m guessing the reason that can’t be done is that a lot of people earn under-the-table income from odd jobs and whatnot that the government/IRS couldn’t possibly know about, and that if the government were to send you a bill to be paid, then it wouldn’t take such extra income into account.

But yeah - I’d be curious how other nations do it. Are there Western nations that do send a bill to taxpayers and have them pay what’s demanded? It would be a lot more efficient.

20

I don’t think that’s it - the reason that it’s called “under the table” or “off the books” income is that most people do not report it or pay taxes on it.

The current system made a little more sense when more people itemized - but my tax return consists of saying we are married filing jointly and transferring info from W2s and 1099s to the tax return. The IRS already has all of that information except the filing status and the IRS could absolutely figure out how much my taxes are and how much I owe or how much of a refund I get.

It was different when the standard deduction was lower and I itemized because
the IRS did not know about any deductions other than mortgage interest.

But if the IRS figures it out and sends a bill, how will H&R Block etc make any money?