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It's not necessarily just nibbling around the edges. There are some indications that the amount of fraud in the larger programs such as SSI, Medicare/caid, and defense might be significant. If so, the savings could easily amount to $1 trillion per year. I guess we'll see.
DOGE started with USAID because the spending was so ludicrous and so obviously geared towards sinecures for the uniparty political machine.
It's been what, 3 weeks. They've cut $100 billion so far. Give it time. If they're allowed to cook, it's going to be a lot, lot more.
Here's the doom loop chart
For those of you too lazy to click on the link; the CBO has crunched the numbers and the net effect on income due to transfers (i.e. medicare, medicaid, SS, etc.) beings to be a net negative starting at the middle quintile.
Phrased differently: the top 60% of Americans have less income, on net, because of the massive transfers to the bottom 40%.
Culture war angle: Which quintiles are the sources of new business formation, full time employment, responsible family practices etc?
60+ years of Great Society-ism and horrific perverse incentives for family formation and work mean that we now have a situation where 40% of the population can be - indelicately - called a drag on growth and prosperity. 40%.
Even Sarah McLaughlin can't save this DOGE, and this DOGE can't save America.
What is surprising about that chart? What did you expect? Obviously the transfers benefitting the poor come from the rich. People have been voting for this for the last century, and will keep voting for it. The state's share of the economy will keep growing, first to european levels, then beyond. And it doesn't matter to people how rich in absolute terms "the poor" are, or how much wealth gets destroyed in the process. I find the impulse difficult to understand, perhaps an extreme rawlsian risk aversion (like an insurance against relative poverty) coupled with the egalitarian ideal of equal social status leading to a demand of equal income.
Did you intend to offer a serious reply, or just use my comment as a way to jerk the spotlight towards yourself?
The former. Of course there's always a status element in the background, but in the spirit of collaborative discussion, it should be ignored. Pretend I'm not a person, just a collection of positions, and I will do the same for you.
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Even if they do find $1 trillion in fraud, he’s proposed five trillion in tax cuts. That math is harsh.
Total government revenue is less than 5 trillion. You are comparing annual vs total numbers.
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doge-tracker.com/ gives 45.6 billion, of which 37.5 billion comes from counting the full annual salary and benefits of the staff accepting the voluntary retirement scheme as a saving, even though they are still being paid for another 8 months. Given the number of staff involved compared to normal Federal employee turnover, the real saving here may be negative. And of course, this saving goes away if the government can't eliminate the work the retired employees were doing.
That leaves about $8 billion in unambiguously real savings, of which $4 billion is the illegal cut to the overhead on NIH grants.
I think the difference between the $100 billion being bandied about and the doge-tracker numbers comes from assuming that the entire USAID budget is zeroed out, and that this counts as a DOGE saving.
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SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense amount to amount to $3.5T. do you really believe that "easily" 30% of that is waste?
Have they cut or have they just put a temporary stop on expenditures? How many programs have actually been durably cancelled, either by the executive or by Congress?
The US is definitely getting as least bang for their buck with military contracts. Any reason to believe that the other are different?
The military presumably wastes money on slow rolling procurement and other things of that nature. A full quarter of defense spending is salaries, and perhaps there are people drawing a salary that don't need to be there.
SS is a cash transfer program that spends less than one percent on administrative overhead, so savings from firing useless employees would be minimal. The only possible avenue for waste would be actual fraud on the part of the recipients. I doubt that this is anywhere near 30%, but I don't expect either of us could convince the other on this point. However, the longer DOGE goes on without announcing finding this fraud, the more skeptical we should be.
I would go the other way. Salaries should be a bigger fraction of the military budget.
There could be massive savings also in Medicare and Medicaid if they only stomp their feet and use their massive scale to cut costs.
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