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Here is the thing; everyone complains about a bloated and inefficient federal government. But when it comes time to make cuts they want the "other person's" bloat and whatever cut, but not what benefits themselves.
Military spending is spread around the nation for just that reason; closing bases, ending weapons and other programs could bring hurt from Maine to California, so in the end no one in Congress wants to have that fight.
Military spending is a delectably excellent source of well-paying, high-quality manufacturing jobs - precisely the sort of jobs whose passing the so-called Middle Class much bemoans. For security reasons, these jobs can't be offshored. Then there's the engineering-jobs, and so forth. How much of academic research in America is funded via defense spending? How many new small businesses are thriving due to the military's Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program? Cut defense, and you cut some of the most attractive and remunerative salaried positions in America - in the private sector.
One person's inefficiency is another person's prized livelihood. This is why we can't cut spending on our way to prosperity.
Here is the thing; everyone complains about a bloated and inefficient federal government. But when it comes time to make cuts they want the "other person's" bloat and whatever cut, but not what benefits themselves.
Military spending is spread around the nation for just that reason; closing bases, ending weapons and other programs could bring hurt from Maine to California, so in the end no one in Congress wants to have that fight.
Three biggest areas of the federal budget that need to be addressed are military spending, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. You can wring a good amount of savings from each by cutting waste, abuse and whatever, but at what cost and to who? There are still communities that haven't recovered from the last round of base closings, and some never did or will.
I don't mean line item.
I mean paying too much for a service, mysteriously misplacing 5 million bucks here and there, ridiculous lifelong pensions for govt employees/politicians, limos, parties, private vehicles, blah blah blah.
Efficiency is never a priority when it comes to spending someone else's money.
I think that if we were responsible, we could actually have all the programs and benefits we do have for a lower cost.
Why? First, because our income taxes are actually lower than in most of the developed world. And second, because we have a huge stratum of persons whose jobs and livelihood depend on the complexity and inefficiency of "the system". And I don't mean public-sector employees; I mean persons involved in record-keeping and compliance and administration and so forth.
Health care is expensive because it supports so many jobs. Before we grouse and vex over how much of our GDP we spend on health-care, relative to how little actual health benefit we derive, we should consider: what percentage of American jobs are related to health-care? If we had a more efficient system – with lower prices for consumers (that is, the patients), how many people would lose their jobs, or sustain a pay-cut?
Service jobs are the easiest to eliminate, because there is no infrastructure investment in their position. Hospitals dealt with having to treat anyone who walked into the Emergency Room by closing the Emergency Room. It's not uncommon for someone to be an hour and a half to two hours from the nearest ER. While medical expenditures are inflating rapidly, services are being pruned along with the number of people being employed.
America has always been separated from the rest of the world equally by oceans and by ideas. Enlightenment thought didn't originate here but it grew here. A man's life, liberty and property were his by right, not by a sovereign's grace. They inhered in him prior to society and society existed and developed to better preserve these rights.
The country grew with this. The rest of the world proceeded along various paths. Free from foreign entanglements didn't just prevent costly adventures. It allowed our unique nature to develop. By the early 20th Century we were the most prosperous nation in the world, from top to bottom.
Since the income tax, we've staggered from one disaster to another. WWI.........Iraq. Not one of these, and the latter are not independent of the earlier, would have ended as it had, gone on the way it did, or started at all without the income tax.
If we were able to spend 100 times the cost of taxes on food, shelter, housing and TV it would still not be enough to erase the stain income taxes have placed on the world.
Whenever I see articles like that I wonder...if we pay so much in taxes, why don't we have cool stuff like universal health care or tuition-free college? Other countries have that stuff & pay high taxes as a result, but the article says we pay high taxes?
Either we're not paying that much tax or the U.S. government is much more inept & inefficient than those of the rest of the developed world.
Because we are highly inefficient in our spending. And some people have managed to pit us against each other as to what tax should be spent on. Notice repubs and dems now arent fighting over how MUCH to tax us, but theyre fighting over what to spend the tax ON. Military vs Social welfare etc. I laugh when repubs say dems want free stuff yet repubs want a MASSIVE military.
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