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You can’t significantly reduce the deficit without cutting “legitimate” Medicare, Medicaid, social security and pork-barrel defense spending, by which I mean spending that is not on the surface fraudulent and is doing ‘what it was intended to do’ by congress (give money to electorally valuable constituencies and create jobs in valuable districts).
Trump apparently just put the DOGE team in charge of auditing defense, so I think your constant drumbeat of "nothing ever happens" may need to be updated just a bit here.
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People say this but more and more it is looking like that might not be true. What if there is a lot of waste and fraud in those programs? What if they can cut them without harming grandma? And again, they don’t need to get to a balanced budget. They need to slow the deficit enough to get out of a debt spiral.
How? Medicare likely has lots of fraud on the provider end but social security would have an unusual number of people too old to be alive if there was widespread fraud.
What if 2% is fraud? What if Medicare is 5%-10%? You don’t need a large percentage to be fraud to start having a meaningful impact.
Agreed that investigating social security checks to 120 year olds is likely a net positive. But America having far fewer 120 year olds than countries with known largescale pension fraud problems like Italy and Japan indicates that it's probably a small net positive more than outweighed by population aging.
I'm totally in agreement about medicare. Just think we should temper our expectations.
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Is it looking that way? Fiscal 'hawks' have been promising for decades that they're going to lower costs without impacting services by cutting fraud and waste and it keeps failing to manifest. What new indicators have surfaced to suggest that This Time Is Different and we really have uncovered the massive fraud that's going to save us hundreds of billions per year? Because penny-wise cuts in the civil service ain't it.
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This exactly. Let's put aside the DoD for a second because everyone knows about the waste there.
Many people are nakedly asserting that there is close to zero fraud in SSI and Medicare/Medicaid. I have no idea where this belief comes from. We haven't even looked! USAID was riddled with waste and fraud. It was just sitting in the open for anyone to see. But no one bothered to check until now.
Similarly, the government forgave tens of billions in fraudulent PPI loans.
They let murderers and rapists who were illegal aliens stay in the country when they knew about their crimes and had their addresses.
Would it really be a surprise if they also let illegal aliens, dead people, and scammers collect social security?
Yes. If interest rates go down and inflation runs a little hot, then it won't be hard reduce the size of the debt relative to GDP. If DOGE is allowed to work, Trump could end his term having made a significant reduction in debt/GDP. This is not an impossible task.
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