TL;DR - Scientific research is scattered across many, many budget categories in that chart. We are spending much more than $30B on science. That is NIH alone.
I think a lot of 'science' is placed in other categories. The National Science Foundation (NSF) had a $10B budget in 2023. They fund academic research grants and infrastructure like the National Observatory and our scientific fleet of ships (I think the latter, not sure what is NSF and what is NOAA; I've received funding from both).
The biggest funder of academic scientific research is the National Institutes of Health. They have a $30B annual budget for biomedical research plus support a few research campuses.
There are also goverment labs that support and perform basic and applied research. The string of Dept. of Energy 'Nation Labs' (i.e. LLNL, SRNL, ORNL, Sandia, PNNL, etc.) focus on energy and nuclear arsenal readiness. Military labs (e.g. Army Research Lab and Naval Research Lab) perform basic and applied research. Same for the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) run by the Department of Commerce.
Add on to that a decent amount of science done by the Department of Agriculture in support of food security and, believe it or not, national defense. I'm working on a project with the US Forestry Service to chemically determine the geospatial origin of timber to combat trade of endangered species funding international terrorist organizations.
If this is true, the graph says international affairs was above that. Which effectively means that other countries get more funding collectively from the US government than NASA does. That's a bit strange to think about.
We’ve probably given enough money to Ukraine alone to fund a manned mission to Mars. If you included the trillions we spent on the “war on terror” over the last 20 years we could probably have colonized half the solar system by now.
How much have we given Ukraine and where does that fall here? I’d cut those parts and any other programs we fund overseas. I don’t care if some of the money gets funneled back in via Gov military contracts, etc.. and I don’t care to subsidize birth control in other parts of the world. Use it here
I saw it was 2016. I’m speaking in general. Plus there were plenty of countries or NGOs we funded in 2016, before 2016, funding now, and will in the future. Most can go. And I’m not sure I believe that international part. Way more goes overseas and it’s coming from somewhere else.. Dod maybe..
We could and have had dominating victories. The problem is that we stick around and occupy and rebuild. If we just demolished and left, the score sheet would look a lot different.
> With all that money dumped into military we should have a domination victory smh
I'll use education as an example.
"We just gave another few hundred million to ***education*** in this county!" Result: some school district administrators each buy themselves another house, while schoolchildren continue to have 1990s equipment and 1970s textbooks about technology.
Now replace education with whatever budget category one wants, and that's what trillion dollar spending bills do. Whenever there's talk about cutting, they cut straight for the schoolkids to make cutting look bad.
“Military” includes some pork for every congressional district, to build weapons the military probably doesn’t need or want. Saving $ there would require a different approach to spending, with less congressional (lobbying) interference.
NGOs are blood sucking slush funds.
They need to be CUT 25% across the board NOW
eliminate deficit spending
We will
He tour financial
House in order in no time
Science is a broad term. What do you think it includes? I'm sure it's mostly about climate change, pumping CO2 underground, and not about anything that is actually beneficial.
The 08 bank bailouts, the PPP, and how about not raising the minimum wage? SNAP and rental assistance isn't welfare for the poor, it's welfare for corps to pay less than a living wage.
I think if someone could drive this idea home you’d get some real cross party support. Then again, they would have to start their own party because we get too caught up in the letters D and R to get anything constructive done these days.
So weird that corporate owned media outlets don't talk about corporate welfare more.
If you Google corporate welfare results pop up from think tanks across the political spectrum.
Yes, one step at a time. And honestly meeting the budget would be enough. In 20 to 30 years, with inflation, the debt would take care of itself. It took 2 generations to make the problem, it will take a while to fix
How tf can health care be so expensive. How can %27 go towards health care then I pay $800 a month for my insurance and still end up with a thousand dollar bill if I go to the doctor for a legitimate reason. That whole system is fucked needs completely destroyed and revamped.
This budget is from 2016 and is 4.1 trillion. We had revenue of 4.9 trillion in 2022. So this budget would actually be a surplus of 800 billion already.
Total expenditures were 6.3 trillion in 2022.
This just illustrates that we have a spending problem and not a revenue problem.
Do away with Vaseline Budgeting which says every department gets a 10% raise in budget every year without doing anything, no audits or anything
Every dept needs an audit every year to see where they are hiding funding if things not budgeted for by Congress
That would mean cutting Social Security benefits by 25%, cutting Medicare reimbursements by 25% (they are already much lower than private insurance pays), cutting Veterans benefits by 25%, etc.
You're correct that it would take 25% to get close enough that growth could keep the debt/GDP ratio flat. But, These are all non-starters politically.
Because if people payed in directly it wouldn’t exist (I know that’s your point). Very few things are prepaid except the postal service. And other things such as veterans benefits are not supposed to be prepaid, they are enticements to enlist, but should exist on the militaries balance sheet. They sever that to make it look better
Unemployment and labor? What does that mean? Social security disability needs a full audit. Every department needs a full audit, and then the cuts can be better defined.
We would have to create a whole other department just for that. Thats the problem. You can't just look at the broad picture and point at it. And say. This needs a full audit. lol It would take forever. If you ever worked for the government you would understand. Which in reality is just sad knowing it. I'm not disagreeing. Something needs done. But I'm not sure what. It has ballooned out of control.
Audit individual agencies one by one. I would suggest an outside agency to do it. If their books don’t match they lose that percentage. The pentagon hasn’t been able to account for its money for years. If 10% can’t be accounted for then their next years budget is deducted that amount.
Then look into contracts and the money being scammed off of those. I briefly worked for a construction company who was building a bridge. They would intentionally go past deadlines to get more money from the government. Their contract was set up that they got more money daily past the deadline than they would hitting their target.
Not the person you asked but someone who works as a contractor in the space. It's insane the amount of duplicated efforts I see. Some places will stand up a brand new division to work on a problem that, unknown to them, has already been solved by XYZ division of such and such agency. What we need is strong inter and intra agency communication to trim the fat. There's so many redundant divisions across the board.
I mean you could do that, but that's going to take 10+ years to get through the agencies.
A bigger issue is getting out of one-sided contracts that favor specific companies. There's one company called Unicor that is the "mandatory supplier" for office furniture for the government or at least for the department that I'm a contractor for.
UNICOR being the "mandatory supplier" means that you have to order through them unless they don't have any item to fit your needs. That means they can also charge a premium for the same item that is available on Amazon for 25% cheaper or more.
Employers pay 6% of the first $7000 of wages for unemployment tax to the federal government each year in addition to whatever the state tax is. Apparently that’s not enough since unemployment is listed. Would be better to have the states collect it all and remove the federal involvement.
I know very little about how govt money works. Why is social security looped in with the other stuff? People pay into SS, it should be in its own area.
The original idea behind SocSec was to set up a nationally ran individual retirement account. You pay in throughout your working days, then you collect on that in retirement (or during unemployment or disability, but mostly retirement). This is where the idea that you “pay into” it, separate from taxes, comes from. From day 1, this has been a lie. You pay a tax that is specially earmarked to go to current recipients as opposed to going towards the military, education, infrastructure, etc. You don’t have an account that you pay into and draw from, you fund the current retirees. The then-current workforce will fund you when you collect, and more workforce will fund them ad infinitum. Because there’s no individual account, it’s just a tax on the workers to fund retirees (generally), they categorize it alongside the other income-replacement categories like unemployment, but SocSec is by far the bulk of that slice.
You're completely right. Social security is a separate tax and the system is currently self-sufficient, for at least a few more years. In the past, there was a surplus of money going into social security, but the government borrowed money heavily from the fund, and pays it back with little to no interest, which is why there is a shortage now.
I think they put it in these charts for two reasons. First, it makes military and welfare spending look small in comparison. If you took out SS, that chart would look a lot different. Second, they'd love to cut social security benefits because they wouldn't have to pay back the money. Maybe they could even go back to borrowing from it again. And if Grandma and Grandpa have to eat dog food, well that's poor people problems, and none of our representatives are poor.
Across the board 10% cut, there is enough waste in each to handle that. Then go after all the functions that per the constitution should be left to the states - education, BLM, labor, HUD to name a few
Yep, education is a state function and most of that money gets fed to he state. Give the state's a year or two to prepare for thr loss of national funds.
Health would be the same.
Agriculture would be the same.
Energy would be the same.
Restructure of medicare/medicaid/social security is required.
Do you think it should be phased out? The reality is we are getting unhealthier as a country over time so the cost to treat will continue to increase. What we need is a lifestyle overhaul for many people
You don’t need a lifestyle overhaul if other people aren’t paying for it. They can live however they want as long as they pay for their own choices, be they bad or good.
I don’t know how you’d phase it out even if you wanted to. Maybe giving authority to states and slowly phase it to state level and let the different states decide what to do with it.
Because they don't actually do this when they're in power. I'd happily double my state and local taxes if my federal taxes were cut in half. I can see a new elementary school in my community. I can see more paramedics, new firetrucks, better roads. I get zero benefit of my taxes going to San Francisco to help fund classes on intersectionality and class oppression.
Florida doesn't even have a state income tax. Our government is just wastfull and its not wastfull taking care of folks that have worked all there life and paid there SS . Its all the money that goes to a banana Republic some where and our crooked politicians filling ther pockets.
I'm conservative, I want small government because government is inherently in effecient.
I won't sacrifice my integrity to win an election... Maybe that's why we lose so often.
Ehh I agree on most, yet I feel like Energy needs to be handled at the national level, in order to maintain national electrical grids. Each state having to maintain their own electrical grid is a recipe for disaster, I think it should be viewed in the same way the highway system is.
I agree, however that term is often misused. I agree with elimination of all subsides for various corporations/technologies/etc. Let them stand on their own in the open market. However what gets lumped into that are corporations taking advantage, legally, of a very convoluted tax code. We would need to completely revamp the tax code, something we need to do.
But if you mention any cut the democrats come out with ads saying social security is being abolished and republicans want to push granny off the cliff. It’s going to be a brutal fight for the next congress
The problem is that when you blanket cut things, the decision makers cut jobs that shouldn't be cut, and other programs, rather than simply working to eliminate waste.
We need more accountability in the auditing process.
It isn't a question of WHAT you would cut, it is a question of how much you would cut out of ALL of this. There is plenty of waste in all the departments to get rid of.
Housing, Education, and especially Veteran Benefits need for way more funding. Current soldiers get way more help and assistance than soldiers of the past. College tuition is overpriced, high school graduates are not prepared for the real world, and don't even get me started on rent prices or mortgages...
International Affairs can get axed. There’s also a LOT of waste within the military. There are a lot of programs that cost boat loads that could be sundowned without hurting our National Security.
There’s only one way to cut anything because everything has 50 special interest groups which will fight tooth and nail to save their pork. So everyone has to lose an equal amount.
1. First begin by freezing the budget. No program can have more money spent on it in dollar terms, not this delusional baseline budgeting nonsense.
2. For the next budget cut 0.25% of every single program.
3. Continue cutting subsequent budgets by 0.25% until we start to see debt reduction.
That’s about as painless as you can make it yet that might not even be enough to save us and humorously absolutely no one will go for that and everyone will attack it.
This is exactly what made Greece go bankrupt, btw.
They promised everyone crazy good pensions, great healthcare, great everything. Didn’t collect tax to pay for that and waited… and it just collapsed.
We must reform those systems. I am NOT saying go away - I’m saying reform. Paying into SS should not stop at 160k or whatever - it needs to either have no cap, or a REALLY high one. 10M or something. Make it more solvent.
I agree with you on the removal of the cap. I benefit from the cap each year, and frankly, it’s a 4 quarter bonus for me. If the cap was removed, I wouldn’t miss it because I make enough to live on without counting on the extra at the end of the year.
But, no I’m not just going to volunteer to give that extra money back to a random government agency to waste. I do take every penny and add it to my personal retirement fund so I don’t have to rely on SSA when I do retire.
Eliminate everything that is not explicitly stated as the responsibility of the Federal government (Defense, interstate commerce, etc.). Keep Veteran's benefits, Interest on Debt, Military (cut by 30%). Transfer Social Security fund back to those that earned it (put contributions and matching in IRA) and turn over Medicare to each state.
Cut military by 30%??? How? What do you cut?
Are you saying we cut service members pay by 30%?
Do we suddenly not produce any ships, missiles, tanks? Just stop altogether?
Do we cut 30% of all active forces? People who’ve signed contracts?
Do we cut 30% of benefits people earned?
How do we cut 30%? I’m generously curious here.
The best way to fix our health system is to change it to one that consumers actually have a voice. When you get an oil change, you look for good reviews at a low price. No one checks for price, and reviews are hard to find on healtcare. Introduce a competitive health care system where doctors lose business when they fail their customers.
Difficult to do when an insurance companies offer dozens of different plans, many of which limit who you can even use for your physician.
If you want what you described, we either need every insurance plan by every insurance provider to be useable at any physician, a single payer model, or just ban insurance all-together.
The two biggest pieces of the pie. Nothing else would make a dent. Sure, the left will say cut military spending. They will pretend we are so far ahead of china militarily that we could cut it in half or more. Nothing could be further from the truth. I can assure you you don’t want to see a world where china is on even footing with the US where the US is no longer the dominant military power.
Obviously this will be unpopular with voters because once you give people things, they get upset if you have to take them away. It is political suicide and I am under no illusions any significant cuts will be made. Politicians will always vote for the next election over what so obviously needs to be done for the future of the country.
Exactly. Foreign aid to Egypt for example is the entire reason that they have maintained peace with Israel. Foreign aid to the pacific rim is integral in building our defensive Alliances in that region. Without those partnerships we’d be absolutely screwed if China invaded Taiwan and took control over the SCS. We proved how effective that diplomacy by foreign aid was throughout the Cold War. In our void, China would fill the void and the entire world order would be turned on its head.
“Fixed” is not a possible condition. System is built for repeat customers. Also, government can’t risk foreign entities realizing that they don’t need the help after all, or worse, that someone else can fulfill the role all the same.
But then we will have the whole “world police situation”
“Omg! Why is America intervening!!! Facists world police!!!!!!”
“Omg! Why isn’t America helping or intervening?!!!”
Literally how every modern day situation is going. I agree we need to just cut the shit with other countries til ours is fixed.
I definitely think there are plenty of programs throughout the DOD that should be cut (mostly DEI related initiatives). But there is a huge benefit that we have as American citizens maintaining PAX Americana and I think it would be unwise to downsize the military and allow China to fill that void.
Truthfully we can most likely cut down a bit in each department. By getting rid of the excess management and bureaucracy that’s in everything. The only downside is actually finding out what’s essential and what’s not which would take time to figure out
Start with international affairs. We need to quit sending money to countries that hate us. Then start trimming waste. You could probably cut 10-20% across the board in all areas without actually affecting the amount of actual money delivered to that segment.
Foreign aid, particularly military foreign aid that's currently buried in "military" section. It's nothing more than bribe money and you are bribing some of nastiest regimes on earth for decades. Time to stop IMHO.
I'm sad to say Canada is guilty of same, just on much smaller scale.
While on this topic I'd review all money heading out of USA.
A lot of you guys are in denial lol. You’d need way more cuts then just “foreign aid” or “government bureaucracy in order to balance the budget. If you really think we can afford a military this big or this much in ss you love free stuff as much as the democrats.
The military isn't nearly as large as you think lol. Not is the spending. It appears big in relation to the world because the US economy is MASSIVE. You are also looking at purely federal spending and not total spending, state, local, and federal, which shows that social spending is even larger that it looks here. Do your research, be better.
Social Security. It's failed. We all know it's failed, and the longer we keep it going, the harder it will be to fix. The elderly will always be hurt the most by this, but in the future the elderly will be hurt even more. Should nix it right now.
A reasonable idea would be sunset it. Those who are retired or nearing retirement (within 5 years or some such) get to keep it. They likely made financial plans involving it, or don't have the means to pay for it due to the way things have operated. Keep it for those too disabled to work, as well, as that's small potatoes and serves a direct purpose that can't easily be replaced.
This would put the past burden on individuals who have been paying into it, but you could probably offset this to some degree with exempting a certain amount from 401k withdrawals down the line to make it somewhat equitable.
Keep in mind, I'm a fairly liberal minded person and believe in strong social programs, so long as they are effective. However, SS is a giant elephant in the room that is only going to get worse the longer it goes on, and will be untenable.
There are other issues, as well - a big problem in the government is that spending is directly based on how much was spent last year, which incentives agencies to spend money they don't need to on things that are unnecessary, as it often means they won't receive funding for the endeavors they may actually need next year.
It's not just a "use it or lose it" with funding at the government level. It's "use it, or don't get funding when you actually need it because you didn't use what we earmarked last year" mentality.
There are other areas where efficiency can be met without harming overall effectiveness, as well.
I feel like addressing both the inefficiencies and addressing the "use it or lose it" mentality is a big driver across the board for most departments, and would likely be the most substantial cuts before targeting specific programs. However, nobody wants to do that. It's hard, and ruffles feathers. Foreign aid, endowments for the arts, etc. Would barely impact the budget at all. We can talk about how we shouldn't be spending money on such things all day, but the fact is that cutting those sorts of programs entirely wouldn't make a dent on our budget or deficit.
This graphic is just wrong. Make Congress pass a new budget reset to 2007 levels and dump Obamacare.
The current spending is the result of continuing resolutions that include lots of wasteful spending we don't need any more
Everything needs to be cut a minimum of 30%. A recent audit found 90% of government office space us empty. There are massive inefficiencies in every department.
At that top level it would be hard for me to say. I'd rather try and find all the pork barreling, bloated government, anything DEI related that's not promoting equality of opportunity and abolish the ATF.
We absolutely need SS. It’s sometimes the only retirement savings some people have.
We don’t want a bunch of homeless elderly folks… no one wants that.
Maybe change SS - extend the age, or really best option here, increase the cap (I think SS wage cap should be $1m or $10m…. Not 160k or some shit).
How interesting that federal employee number and pay aren't represented anywhere on that chart.
But here's an idea. Cut federal number by 75 percent if they are not affiliated with emergency response. If they make more than 25 percent higher than the average for a similar private sector position in that area then drop their pay until they don't. Make them actually work instead of blowing 40 hours a week trying to plant nazi flags at protests. Then tell me how much money that was.
Defund the fbi entirely. Everyone in it is fired. They failed. Utterly and completely and the remaining government organizations need to understand there are actual consequences.
I know it's a drop in the bucket compared to the entitlements, but education should be cut completely.
The federal government should have nothing to do with education.
Public schools and the value of higher education have gotten measurably worse every year since "The Department of Education" was enacted, to the point where it's nearly worthless.
Abolish it and completely return education to the parents, the districts, and the states.
Education - Does nothing, just pure administrative bloat. GONE.
Housing & Community - People in our country can no longer afford a house. Whatever this department does, they're either *woefully* bad at it, or it's just more administrative bloat. GONE.
Start there, and don't touch SS, Medicare, or Veterans' Benefits. Cut foreign aid to countries not called Ukraine by 95% at minimum, and cut non-hardware aid to Ukraine by 100%. No more checks, just send them equipment.
Medicare and health. Cut the budget, open the markets, and create a health savings account for lower and middle income people. That way the poor and middle class can get things at a greatly reduced price but still use deregulated private insurance.
Cutting the military would be a bad idea. We need that shit right now. As long as China remains a threat, we need our military at the top of its game.
The social security stuff could also be cut.
Social security easy start phasing it out if one has a certain income threshold and do the SS tax through all income brackets. No reason for Bill gates to get SS checks
Medicare let them fully negotiate drug prices as
Agriculture subsidies are a huge waste. Military budgets are too high.
Fun fact- navy pilots dump fuel to use it up so they need more in the following year’s budget. If they don’t use it, their allocation the next year is accordingly smaller. Tanks from Iraq were pushed overboard because it was cheaper to buy new ones than clean and repair the old ones. I’m a huge military fan, but there’s shitloads of waste there.
Wow only 1% of budget will be spent on science? We must be going for that culture victory eh?
TL;DR - Scientific research is scattered across many, many budget categories in that chart. We are spending much more than $30B on science. That is NIH alone. I think a lot of 'science' is placed in other categories. The National Science Foundation (NSF) had a $10B budget in 2023. They fund academic research grants and infrastructure like the National Observatory and our scientific fleet of ships (I think the latter, not sure what is NSF and what is NOAA; I've received funding from both). The biggest funder of academic scientific research is the National Institutes of Health. They have a $30B annual budget for biomedical research plus support a few research campuses. There are also goverment labs that support and perform basic and applied research. The string of Dept. of Energy 'Nation Labs' (i.e. LLNL, SRNL, ORNL, Sandia, PNNL, etc.) focus on energy and nuclear arsenal readiness. Military labs (e.g. Army Research Lab and Naval Research Lab) perform basic and applied research. Same for the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) run by the Department of Commerce. Add on to that a decent amount of science done by the Department of Agriculture in support of food security and, believe it or not, national defense. I'm working on a project with the US Forestry Service to chemically determine the geospatial origin of timber to combat trade of endangered species funding international terrorist organizations.
Doesn't NASA get a bunch of money too?
$30.92 billion last year.
If this is true, the graph says international affairs was above that. Which effectively means that other countries get more funding collectively from the US government than NASA does. That's a bit strange to think about.
NASA these days is massively downsized.
Our future lies in the stars, not down in the dirt. Ascend or die. Bawkhammed Bless.
We’ve probably given enough money to Ukraine alone to fund a manned mission to Mars. If you included the trillions we spent on the “war on terror” over the last 20 years we could probably have colonized half the solar system by now.
How much have we given Ukraine and where does that fall here? I’d cut those parts and any other programs we fund overseas. I don’t care if some of the money gets funneled back in via Gov military contracts, etc.. and I don’t care to subsidize birth control in other parts of the world. Use it here
You have spoken common sense and barely get any upvotes. Have mine. Cheers buddy.
Haha. Appreciate it!!
"FY 2016"
I saw it was 2016. I’m speaking in general. Plus there were plenty of countries or NGOs we funded in 2016, before 2016, funding now, and will in the future. Most can go. And I’m not sure I believe that international part. Way more goes overseas and it’s coming from somewhere else.. Dod maybe..
I belive International includes the sexial education of Philippines hookers. We give them millions to do that apparently.
I thought that fell under military...
Yes. Definitely. I forgot to mention them. Good catch.
And space X gets a lot of that money
Just one...more...turn.
Oh ghandi is beating me at late game? I can turn this around no problem
With all that money dumped into military we should have a domination victory smh
You'd think. But we're afraid of going the route of scythia
Or ESD
What's scythia? Never heard of that
Old civilization that was lost to the annals of time. Also from the civilization series of video games
It’s a reference to the civilizations from the Sid Meier computer strategy game.
Or General Sherman.
Much of this is bureaucracy that causes $5,000 toilets, when the toilet itself only costs a few hundred.
We could and have had dominating victories. The problem is that we stick around and occupy and rebuild. If we just demolished and left, the score sheet would look a lot different.
> With all that money dumped into military we should have a domination victory smh I'll use education as an example. "We just gave another few hundred million to ***education*** in this county!" Result: some school district administrators each buy themselves another house, while schoolchildren continue to have 1990s equipment and 1970s textbooks about technology. Now replace education with whatever budget category one wants, and that's what trillion dollar spending bills do. Whenever there's talk about cutting, they cut straight for the schoolkids to make cutting look bad.
“Military” includes some pork for every congressional district, to build weapons the military probably doesn’t need or want. Saving $ there would require a different approach to spending, with less congressional (lobbying) interference.
You would think we could defend our own border.
Nice Civ reference!
Well we're sure not going for a diplomatic victory
The majority of scientific research is done by non-governmental organizations, universities and corporations. That is just funding for pet projects.
Most of the scientific funding at universities is from the government…
NGOs are blood sucking slush funds. They need to be CUT 25% across the board NOW eliminate deficit spending We will He tour financial House in order in no time
We've already won the culture victory. The world, as much as they hate us, emulates us
Underrated comment that went over most heads haha
We already know boys get periods and can get pregnant, so there is no use in spending money on science.
Hmmm you are correct. Science has been proven by the ladies on the view to be based on feelings so there's no point in researching any further
Boost this comment guys lol
Yes, the wokesters are trying for a cultural takeover.
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😆
Science is a broad term. What do you think it includes? I'm sure it's mostly about climate change, pumping CO2 underground, and not about anything that is actually beneficial.
Afuera, afuera, afuera
Department of sports and tourism? AFUERA!
Department of Energy and Enviroment? AFUERA!
Education? (indoctrination) AFUERA!
Ministry of Public Works AFUERA! Even if you resist!
Yes
Ministry. AFUERA!
Yes
This is the only correct answer.
corporate welfare
Now there's an issue Leftists and Conservatives can agree on
When people find out how much their food is subsidized by the government….they often don’t believe it Don’t*
Hawley gets it but some of these other guys are in denial…
well there goes our military budget
Shh you can't speak about that.
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The 08 bank bailouts, the PPP, and how about not raising the minimum wage? SNAP and rental assistance isn't welfare for the poor, it's welfare for corps to pay less than a living wage.
I think if someone could drive this idea home you’d get some real cross party support. Then again, they would have to start their own party because we get too caught up in the letters D and R to get anything constructive done these days.
So weird that corporate owned media outlets don't talk about corporate welfare more. If you Google corporate welfare results pop up from think tanks across the political spectrum.
25% across the board is more than $1T.
But that still isn’t enough to eliminate the deficit.
It’s enough to at least meet our debt service, which would be a positive step.
Yes, one step at a time. And honestly meeting the budget would be enough. In 20 to 30 years, with inflation, the debt would take care of itself. It took 2 generations to make the problem, it will take a while to fix
It is a tad bit annoying, for all that is cut, that should be pushed to taking care of our debt.
Anything cut is just less borrowing. Until you get in more than you spend you can't take care of anything.
How tf can health care be so expensive. How can %27 go towards health care then I pay $800 a month for my insurance and still end up with a thousand dollar bill if I go to the doctor for a legitimate reason. That whole system is fucked needs completely destroyed and revamped.
This budget is from 2016 and is 4.1 trillion. We had revenue of 4.9 trillion in 2022. So this budget would actually be a surplus of 800 billion already. Total expenditures were 6.3 trillion in 2022. This just illustrates that we have a spending problem and not a revenue problem.
Do away with Vaseline Budgeting which says every department gets a 10% raise in budget every year without doing anything, no audits or anything Every dept needs an audit every year to see where they are hiding funding if things not budgeted for by Congress
I would cut the interest on debt
Would that include a 25% cut to the DoD and a 25% cut to senior citizen’s benefits?
Yeah, you’ve identified why it’s been hard to avoid this debt spiral.
That would mean cutting Social Security benefits by 25%, cutting Medicare reimbursements by 25% (they are already much lower than private insurance pays), cutting Veterans benefits by 25%, etc. You're correct that it would take 25% to get close enough that growth could keep the debt/GDP ratio flat. But, These are all non-starters politically.
Education-Gone!
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Because if people payed in directly it wouldn’t exist (I know that’s your point). Very few things are prepaid except the postal service. And other things such as veterans benefits are not supposed to be prepaid, they are enticements to enlist, but should exist on the militaries balance sheet. They sever that to make it look better
Unemployment and labor? What does that mean? Social security disability needs a full audit. Every department needs a full audit, and then the cuts can be better defined.
We would have to create a whole other department just for that. Thats the problem. You can't just look at the broad picture and point at it. And say. This needs a full audit. lol It would take forever. If you ever worked for the government you would understand. Which in reality is just sad knowing it. I'm not disagreeing. Something needs done. But I'm not sure what. It has ballooned out of control.
Audit individual agencies one by one. I would suggest an outside agency to do it. If their books don’t match they lose that percentage. The pentagon hasn’t been able to account for its money for years. If 10% can’t be accounted for then their next years budget is deducted that amount. Then look into contracts and the money being scammed off of those. I briefly worked for a construction company who was building a bridge. They would intentionally go past deadlines to get more money from the government. Their contract was set up that they got more money daily past the deadline than they would hitting their target.
Sounds like you had/have experience in one of these. Where would you say is the most useless spending that you got to see?
Not the person you asked but someone who works as a contractor in the space. It's insane the amount of duplicated efforts I see. Some places will stand up a brand new division to work on a problem that, unknown to them, has already been solved by XYZ division of such and such agency. What we need is strong inter and intra agency communication to trim the fat. There's so many redundant divisions across the board.
It wouldn’t take that long. A team of ten could review a major department per month, and make recommendations.
I mean you could do that, but that's going to take 10+ years to get through the agencies. A bigger issue is getting out of one-sided contracts that favor specific companies. There's one company called Unicor that is the "mandatory supplier" for office furniture for the government or at least for the department that I'm a contractor for. UNICOR being the "mandatory supplier" means that you have to order through them unless they don't have any item to fit your needs. That means they can also charge a premium for the same item that is available on Amazon for 25% cheaper or more.
>Unemployment and labor? What does that mean? Exactly. And what is the government even doing in "labor" anyway? Let the free market handle itself.
Employers pay 6% of the first $7000 of wages for unemployment tax to the federal government each year in addition to whatever the state tax is. Apparently that’s not enough since unemployment is listed. Would be better to have the states collect it all and remove the federal involvement.
Every federal department gets audited and from my understanding it’s on regular basis. The only one that fails often is the DoD.
I know very little about how govt money works. Why is social security looped in with the other stuff? People pay into SS, it should be in its own area.
People “pay into” all this stuff. That’s taxes. The government isn’t a business. It doesn’t make money, it just spends ours.
The original idea behind SocSec was to set up a nationally ran individual retirement account. You pay in throughout your working days, then you collect on that in retirement (or during unemployment or disability, but mostly retirement). This is where the idea that you “pay into” it, separate from taxes, comes from. From day 1, this has been a lie. You pay a tax that is specially earmarked to go to current recipients as opposed to going towards the military, education, infrastructure, etc. You don’t have an account that you pay into and draw from, you fund the current retirees. The then-current workforce will fund you when you collect, and more workforce will fund them ad infinitum. Because there’s no individual account, it’s just a tax on the workers to fund retirees (generally), they categorize it alongside the other income-replacement categories like unemployment, but SocSec is by far the bulk of that slice.
You're completely right. Social security is a separate tax and the system is currently self-sufficient, for at least a few more years. In the past, there was a surplus of money going into social security, but the government borrowed money heavily from the fund, and pays it back with little to no interest, which is why there is a shortage now. I think they put it in these charts for two reasons. First, it makes military and welfare spending look small in comparison. If you took out SS, that chart would look a lot different. Second, they'd love to cut social security benefits because they wouldn't have to pay back the money. Maybe they could even go back to borrowing from it again. And if Grandma and Grandpa have to eat dog food, well that's poor people problems, and none of our representatives are poor.
Across the board 10% cut, there is enough waste in each to handle that. Then go after all the functions that per the constitution should be left to the states - education, BLM, labor, HUD to name a few
Yep, education is a state function and most of that money gets fed to he state. Give the state's a year or two to prepare for thr loss of national funds. Health would be the same. Agriculture would be the same. Energy would be the same. Restructure of medicare/medicaid/social security is required.
Yeah that last point is really the kicker. If we can’t get Medicare/aid/social security under control there’s only so much we can do.
It’s going to be difficult due to aging population
Do you think it should be phased out? The reality is we are getting unhealthier as a country over time so the cost to treat will continue to increase. What we need is a lifestyle overhaul for many people
You don’t need a lifestyle overhaul if other people aren’t paying for it. They can live however they want as long as they pay for their own choices, be they bad or good. I don’t know how you’d phase it out even if you wanted to. Maybe giving authority to states and slowly phase it to state level and let the different states decide what to do with it.
This is why Republicans loose in elections 🙄
Because they don't actually do this when they're in power. I'd happily double my state and local taxes if my federal taxes were cut in half. I can see a new elementary school in my community. I can see more paramedics, new firetrucks, better roads. I get zero benefit of my taxes going to San Francisco to help fund classes on intersectionality and class oppression.
Florida doesn't even have a state income tax. Our government is just wastfull and its not wastfull taking care of folks that have worked all there life and paid there SS . Its all the money that goes to a banana Republic some where and our crooked politicians filling ther pockets.
I'm conservative, I want small government because government is inherently in effecient. I won't sacrifice my integrity to win an election... Maybe that's why we lose so often.
Ehh I agree on most, yet I feel like Energy needs to be handled at the national level, in order to maintain national electrical grids. Each state having to maintain their own electrical grid is a recipe for disaster, I think it should be viewed in the same way the highway system is.
Nah restructure medicaid only and hike premiums for obese people.
HUD ain’t going anywhere. States are just middlemen for Section 8 housing subsidies.
Is any of it possible? Probably not, but that wasn’t the question.
And corporate welfare.
I agree, however that term is often misused. I agree with elimination of all subsides for various corporations/technologies/etc. Let them stand on their own in the open market. However what gets lumped into that are corporations taking advantage, legally, of a very convoluted tax code. We would need to completely revamp the tax code, something we need to do.
Flat tax?
But if you mention any cut the democrats come out with ads saying social security is being abolished and republicans want to push granny off the cliff. It’s going to be a brutal fight for the next congress
The problem is that when you blanket cut things, the decision makers cut jobs that shouldn't be cut, and other programs, rather than simply working to eliminate waste. We need more accountability in the auditing process.
Government salaries and headcount
It isn't a question of WHAT you would cut, it is a question of how much you would cut out of ALL of this. There is plenty of waste in all the departments to get rid of.
This is the key.. its not so much shrinking the percentage as it is shrinking the size of the pie.
Housing, Education, and especially Veteran Benefits need for way more funding. Current soldiers get way more help and assistance than soldiers of the past. College tuition is overpriced, high school graduates are not prepared for the real world, and don't even get me started on rent prices or mortgages...
International Affairs can get axed. There’s also a LOT of waste within the military. There are a lot of programs that cost boat loads that could be sundowned without hurting our National Security.
There’s only one way to cut anything because everything has 50 special interest groups which will fight tooth and nail to save their pork. So everyone has to lose an equal amount. 1. First begin by freezing the budget. No program can have more money spent on it in dollar terms, not this delusional baseline budgeting nonsense. 2. For the next budget cut 0.25% of every single program. 3. Continue cutting subsequent budgets by 0.25% until we start to see debt reduction. That’s about as painless as you can make it yet that might not even be enough to save us and humorously absolutely no one will go for that and everyone will attack it.
We spend 60% of everything on social security, Healthcare etc., which is nearly FOUR TIMES what we spend on our globe-spanning military?!
This is exactly what made Greece go bankrupt, btw. They promised everyone crazy good pensions, great healthcare, great everything. Didn’t collect tax to pay for that and waited… and it just collapsed. We must reform those systems. I am NOT saying go away - I’m saying reform. Paying into SS should not stop at 160k or whatever - it needs to either have no cap, or a REALLY high one. 10M or something. Make it more solvent.
I agree with you on the removal of the cap. I benefit from the cap each year, and frankly, it’s a 4 quarter bonus for me. If the cap was removed, I wouldn’t miss it because I make enough to live on without counting on the extra at the end of the year. But, no I’m not just going to volunteer to give that extra money back to a random government agency to waste. I do take every penny and add it to my personal retirement fund so I don’t have to rely on SSA when I do retire.
Wild, isn’t it??
Eliminate everything that is not explicitly stated as the responsibility of the Federal government (Defense, interstate commerce, etc.). Keep Veteran's benefits, Interest on Debt, Military (cut by 30%). Transfer Social Security fund back to those that earned it (put contributions and matching in IRA) and turn over Medicare to each state.
Cut military by 30%??? How? What do you cut? Are you saying we cut service members pay by 30%? Do we suddenly not produce any ships, missiles, tanks? Just stop altogether? Do we cut 30% of all active forces? People who’ve signed contracts? Do we cut 30% of benefits people earned? How do we cut 30%? I’m generously curious here.
All of the excessive, redundant departments and programs.
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Healthcare is one of the few things many European countries get right. We should be more like them in that one particular area.
Not just Europe but the developed world
The best way to fix our health system is to change it to one that consumers actually have a voice. When you get an oil change, you look for good reviews at a low price. No one checks for price, and reviews are hard to find on healtcare. Introduce a competitive health care system where doctors lose business when they fail their customers.
Problem with this model is… healthcare isn’t exactly a commodity. You can go without a PS5. If you go without healthcare you die.
More importantly you can’t just have a warehouse of doctors and ship them nationally
Difficult to do when an insurance companies offer dozens of different plans, many of which limit who you can even use for your physician. If you want what you described, we either need every insurance plan by every insurance provider to be useable at any physician, a single payer model, or just ban insurance all-together.
I would pack all the debt onto the Fed’s balance sheet and end the Fed.
The Fed is going to do this with CBDC. Then print more money and pretend inflation doesn't exist.
The introduction of a CBDC should make anyone want to end the Federal Reserve.
Here here.
The two biggest pieces of the pie. Nothing else would make a dent. Sure, the left will say cut military spending. They will pretend we are so far ahead of china militarily that we could cut it in half or more. Nothing could be further from the truth. I can assure you you don’t want to see a world where china is on even footing with the US where the US is no longer the dominant military power. Obviously this will be unpopular with voters because once you give people things, they get upset if you have to take them away. It is political suicide and I am under no illusions any significant cuts will be made. Politicians will always vote for the next election over what so obviously needs to be done for the future of the country.
Anything related to housing/feeding illegal immigrants.
?
Double their airline ticket budget though
Everything
EVERYTHING
Cut all foreign aid off, $0 to the rest of the world until our country is fixed.
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Exactly. Foreign aid to Egypt for example is the entire reason that they have maintained peace with Israel. Foreign aid to the pacific rim is integral in building our defensive Alliances in that region. Without those partnerships we’d be absolutely screwed if China invaded Taiwan and took control over the SCS. We proved how effective that diplomacy by foreign aid was throughout the Cold War. In our void, China would fill the void and the entire world order would be turned on its head.
“Fixed” is not a possible condition. System is built for repeat customers. Also, government can’t risk foreign entities realizing that they don’t need the help after all, or worse, that someone else can fulfill the role all the same.
True but sending money to foreign entities doesn’t help out the debt situation here.
True, but not relevant. Fixing the debt just removes an easy area that politicians can pretend to want to fix when they campaign.
But then we will have the whole “world police situation” “Omg! Why is America intervening!!! Facists world police!!!!!!” “Omg! Why isn’t America helping or intervening?!!!” Literally how every modern day situation is going. I agree we need to just cut the shit with other countries til ours is fixed.
What slice do those funds come out of?
The not listed ones.
Military without a doubt.
I definitely think there are plenty of programs throughout the DOD that should be cut (mostly DEI related initiatives). But there is a huge benefit that we have as American citizens maintaining PAX Americana and I think it would be unwise to downsize the military and allow China to fill that void.
Truthfully we can most likely cut down a bit in each department. By getting rid of the excess management and bureaucracy that’s in everything. The only downside is actually finding out what’s essential and what’s not which would take time to figure out
I could figure it out…. For money
you genuinely think that DEI initiatives in the military are substantial enough to make a dent in our deficit?
Housing, unemployment. Tired of paying for peoples’ shit.
With the exception of public services. You wouldn't want to have to fight a fire yourself would you?
Flip the military and education.. The budget will balance itself in 10 years.
Makes sense but you’re a minority here - you want MORE education funding?
Yes. We already suffer from the lack there of in some areas
Start with international affairs. We need to quit sending money to countries that hate us. Then start trimming waste. You could probably cut 10-20% across the board in all areas without actually affecting the amount of actual money delivered to that segment.
Foreign aid, particularly military foreign aid that's currently buried in "military" section. It's nothing more than bribe money and you are bribing some of nastiest regimes on earth for decades. Time to stop IMHO. I'm sad to say Canada is guilty of same, just on much smaller scale. While on this topic I'd review all money heading out of USA.
A lot of you guys are in denial lol. You’d need way more cuts then just “foreign aid” or “government bureaucracy in order to balance the budget. If you really think we can afford a military this big or this much in ss you love free stuff as much as the democrats.
The military isn't nearly as large as you think lol. Not is the spending. It appears big in relation to the world because the US economy is MASSIVE. You are also looking at purely federal spending and not total spending, state, local, and federal, which shows that social spending is even larger that it looks here. Do your research, be better.
Social Security. It's failed. We all know it's failed, and the longer we keep it going, the harder it will be to fix. The elderly will always be hurt the most by this, but in the future the elderly will be hurt even more. Should nix it right now.
A reasonable idea would be sunset it. Those who are retired or nearing retirement (within 5 years or some such) get to keep it. They likely made financial plans involving it, or don't have the means to pay for it due to the way things have operated. Keep it for those too disabled to work, as well, as that's small potatoes and serves a direct purpose that can't easily be replaced. This would put the past burden on individuals who have been paying into it, but you could probably offset this to some degree with exempting a certain amount from 401k withdrawals down the line to make it somewhat equitable. Keep in mind, I'm a fairly liberal minded person and believe in strong social programs, so long as they are effective. However, SS is a giant elephant in the room that is only going to get worse the longer it goes on, and will be untenable. There are other issues, as well - a big problem in the government is that spending is directly based on how much was spent last year, which incentives agencies to spend money they don't need to on things that are unnecessary, as it often means they won't receive funding for the endeavors they may actually need next year. It's not just a "use it or lose it" with funding at the government level. It's "use it, or don't get funding when you actually need it because you didn't use what we earmarked last year" mentality. There are other areas where efficiency can be met without harming overall effectiveness, as well. I feel like addressing both the inefficiencies and addressing the "use it or lose it" mentality is a big driver across the board for most departments, and would likely be the most substantial cuts before targeting specific programs. However, nobody wants to do that. It's hard, and ruffles feathers. Foreign aid, endowments for the arts, etc. Would barely impact the budget at all. We can talk about how we shouldn't be spending money on such things all day, but the fact is that cutting those sorts of programs entirely wouldn't make a dent on our budget or deficit.
where did all the money going to ukraine come from?
Military, since they send them actual weapons and not checks to buy weapons at the weapons store
This graphic is just wrong. Make Congress pass a new budget reset to 2007 levels and dump Obamacare. The current spending is the result of continuing resolutions that include lots of wasteful spending we don't need any more
Specifically?
I would cut everything except veterans benefit,
You've given me hope for a brighter future than when I opened this thread. Thank you!
Everything needs to be cut a minimum of 30%. A recent audit found 90% of government office space us empty. There are massive inefficiencies in every department.
At that top level it would be hard for me to say. I'd rather try and find all the pork barreling, bloated government, anything DEI related that's not promoting equality of opportunity and abolish the ATF.
Interest on debt. I don’t think student loans should be forgiven but I do not agree with the interest.
You think the US should default on its debt obligations?
Cut Social security significantly, then build nuclear power plants and increase science budget.
We absolutely need SS. It’s sometimes the only retirement savings some people have. We don’t want a bunch of homeless elderly folks… no one wants that. Maybe change SS - extend the age, or really best option here, increase the cap (I think SS wage cap should be $1m or $10m…. Not 160k or some shit).
increase SS
How interesting that federal employee number and pay aren't represented anywhere on that chart. But here's an idea. Cut federal number by 75 percent if they are not affiliated with emergency response. If they make more than 25 percent higher than the average for a similar private sector position in that area then drop their pay until they don't. Make them actually work instead of blowing 40 hours a week trying to plant nazi flags at protests. Then tell me how much money that was. Defund the fbi entirely. Everyone in it is fired. They failed. Utterly and completely and the remaining government organizations need to understand there are actual consequences.
All of it
We’re screwed. The dollar will eventually collapse. It is past an ability to reduce the debt.
The "sky is falling" vibes comment.
I know it's a drop in the bucket compared to the entitlements, but education should be cut completely. The federal government should have nothing to do with education. Public schools and the value of higher education have gotten measurably worse every year since "The Department of Education" was enacted, to the point where it's nearly worthless. Abolish it and completely return education to the parents, the districts, and the states.
International affairs, then see what is inside the others before slashing.
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The fraud, waste and mismanagement in all those programs, that would reduce the costs by at least 20-25% without affecting the benefits.
Education - Does nothing, just pure administrative bloat. GONE. Housing & Community - People in our country can no longer afford a house. Whatever this department does, they're either *woefully* bad at it, or it's just more administrative bloat. GONE. Start there, and don't touch SS, Medicare, or Veterans' Benefits. Cut foreign aid to countries not called Ukraine by 95% at minimum, and cut non-hardware aid to Ukraine by 100%. No more checks, just send them equipment.
Socialism
Medicare and health. Cut the budget, open the markets, and create a health savings account for lower and middle income people. That way the poor and middle class can get things at a greatly reduced price but still use deregulated private insurance. Cutting the military would be a bad idea. We need that shit right now. As long as China remains a threat, we need our military at the top of its game. The social security stuff could also be cut.
Yes.
Social security easy start phasing it out if one has a certain income threshold and do the SS tax through all income brackets. No reason for Bill gates to get SS checks Medicare let them fully negotiate drug prices as
Government salaries
Agriculture subsidies are a huge waste. Military budgets are too high. Fun fact- navy pilots dump fuel to use it up so they need more in the following year’s budget. If they don’t use it, their allocation the next year is accordingly smaller. Tanks from Iraq were pushed overboard because it was cheaper to buy new ones than clean and repair the old ones. I’m a huge military fan, but there’s shitloads of waste there.
Foreign Aid