Because they don't know where the small sources of waste are, and it takes time to fix them. If you need an immediate reduction right this second, the only thing you can do is surgical cuts, which means laying people off. Fixing the small sources of waste has to be an ongoing process that continues forever, and most of the interesting fixes actually cost *more* money in the short term to save money in the long term.

They might, if it happens to be at the end of the year when they do the cuts, and if that spending happens to be enough, but most of the time when this happens, they're looking for 30% cuts, not 1%. And finding thousands of fractional-percent cuts takes too long.

Not really, no. Inflation changes the value of the dollar. That means the government's debt also becomes less expensive every year, assuming all else is equal. And inflation causes increases in income, both for businesses and individuals, which means revenue should be increasing roughly proportionally. If it isn't, then that means the tax code is failing to properly capture percentages of actual gains, and this is something that needs to be fixed structurally.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, treasury revenue is going up, at least on average. From 2015 to 2025, tax revenue increased by 18.3%. Meanwhile, assuming Gemini isn't gaslighting me, the U.S. population increased by only about 6.6% in that time. So not only is revenue increasing after adjusting for inflation, it is also increasing relative to the population size after adjusting for inflation.

I can't tell you why service seems to always be getting worse. Maybe it is because we're spending rapidly increasing amounts of money on the most inefficient healthcare system in the first world, driven by a combination of lack of a public option or single payer system, poor auditing of payments, massively delayed payments that cause small healthcare providers to struggle to survive and force consolidation into giant regional monopolies, and probably a lot of other things that I don't know about because I don't work in that field.

When you end up having hyperinflation of your medical insurance costs, it eats a bigger and bigger piece of every other part of the budget. And the federal government is not immune to that.

There are probably other reasons as well. That's just the first one that comes to mind.

This is moot, because as you can see from the chart, inflation-adjusted revenue increased rather rapidly during that same period.

Well, I think Trump would be immediately stopped by the courts, too. Probably faster than they stopped Biden, since they've very reasonably gotten intensely skeptical of almost everything this administration does.

Partisanship aside, presidents really should obey the law. If the law is bad, the solution is to change it, not to break it. Yes, that means we need a functioning Congress, something we haven't had for quite some time, but that's still no reason to break the law.

Maybe a percent or two, but with a budget is big enough, that's still a lot of money that could be used for something else.

The point is not that any of these things individually will result in big gains. The point is that there are a lot of different small inefficiencies that add up to a bigger inefficiency.

For example, for some reason, when the IRS sent out their findings for tax exempt status, a group that I work with never got the determination letter. And the IRS had no straightforward mechanism to resend the letter. Fixing it involved hundreds of phone calls before we reached a person who could help, and then waiting for someone to print it and mail it to us. All of this stuff should be in electronic records, and it should have been trivial for us to directly get a new copy electronically from their computer systems without requiring a person at the IRS to intervene.

Every time a person has to do something because a computer lacks code to do it, that is an example of government waste. It probably isn't worth fixing all of them, because sufficiently rare things could take decades to recover the cost of coding them, but that doesn't mean that someone shouldn't triage them, catalog them, prioritize them so that the scope is fully understood, because when you do that, you may find other people coming in later and saying, "If you do that, it will save me time on related task [x]," and that might then turn out to push it into "implement this ASAP" territory. Without documenting the state of things, those discoveries won't ever get made, and nothing will improve.

And the IRS has multiple incompatible login systems that use different credentials, multiple sites that expose different parts of the same access to information about your business/charity, etc. all of which have to be maintained, resulting in massive levels of redundancy, not to mention causing massive confusion for anyone who ever has to access them, wondering why it says they don't have an account even though they had to have one to fill out previous IRS paperwork. Replacing them with different views into the same data (with access right limits, presumably) in the same online system would likely save significant money, both in terms of software maintenance costs and server operation costs.

And how much auditor time could be saved if they trained AI models on previous audits and used that as a starting point for flagging suspicious returns and/or filtering suspicious returns flagged by existing automation? I don't have any idea, but I would not be surprised if that approach eventually produced meaningful long-term savings.

And every time they send out tax forms, what manual processes have to happen to distribute advance copies to companies like TurboTax, and how much time would be saved if we had a centralized, modern electronic version of all of the forms, rather than PDFs, with an open source implementation, complete with code to populate one form from another, etc.? Maybe it would cost more initially, but would save money in some other areas, like making it easier for auditors to recompute the taxes after fixing errors in data entry. I'm not sure, but these are the sorts of efficiency wins that should be looked at.

So in that one division alone, there are glaringly obvious inefficiencies that, if fixed, could result in considerable cost reduction. Similarly, every time you deal with someone at the Social Security Administration or (at the state level) the DMV and they tell you that the computer system is down and they'll try again in a minute, that's an example of government waste. It's a system that isn't working correctly, which as a result, wastes the time of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of government workers on an ongoing basis.

There's no reason to believe any other part of the government is any better. Government IT is known for being disastrously slow at modernization, and it costs taxpayers a lot of money because our government doesn't spend the money to bring those systems up to date in a timely manner.

These are just some examples that are obvious from the outside looking in; there are probably many less obvious examples that would be obvious to someone who works there every day. And that's the point. The people at the top can't see what wastes the time of the people at the bottom, because they don't have visibility into their minute-by-minute activities (and even if they could, they would have a hard time filtering the flood of data into something useful). So you have to drive efficiency from the bottom up, and our government does not do this, so we can never really know whether that inefficiency adds up to half a percent or ten percent.

We can't get a complete picture without going to the people at the bottom of the org chart and asking them what could be done to make them more efficient, what could reduce waste, etc. It's a relatively easy low-hanging-fruit task, so we should do this. :-)

I hope that makes my position clearer.

Indeed, truth and accuracy is important to me, and I think it should be important to everyone. It baffles me that so many people don't seem to care about whether what they believe or say is true. I recognize that those people who care are often in the minority, but that just makes it harder to understand, not easier.

It doesn't seem that bad anyway. They can run arbitrary code, for that boot... But the flash encryption key is in the secure enclave, right? So all the user's data is safe, the OS can't be tampered with, and since it's only in memory a power cycle or probably even just a reboot will clear it.

I'm sure some Israeli company is working on a chained exploit as we speak, but I think if you are concerned about that you probably want to avoid Apple devices anyway. They are a very popular target for those companies.

Most people had pretty crappy soundcards back then. Credit to him that he came up with tunes that sounded decent even with the naff guitar and drum sounds on a typical Soundblaster compatible card.

Could also be interesting for cold brew iced coffee.

But this is all looking at the past. Now we have renewables and storage on a scale that was unimaginable even a few years ago, and especially given that new nuclear takes at least 20 years to build in Europe, even when factoring in climate change as a risk, it still loses.

They have everything they need, land and water and electricity and tons and tons and tons of money. The billionaires can go anytime they want. California doesn't need them.

You're right about one thing though keep taxing billionaires and there won't be any, just citizens. And I think that's a good thing.

You're an Inbred Dumb Fucking Traitor to America, RightWingTreasonTrashBitchCuntbag.

Not what they did. You're a Lying Constitution Hating Cunt, RightWingTreasonShitbag.

You have to consolidate your loans into private loans to do this and as soon as you do that you lose all the protections that come from having public loans. You will then have your wages immediately garnished by the private company that owns your loans

Trump is a crook and everyone knows it. Every single thing he does has to be scrutinized for the angle. Meanwhile they just retired Air Force One and replaced it with a foreign made plane that is probably stuffed full of listening devices. It was also a 1 billion dollar bribe to Trump and he plans to take the plane when he leaves office, if he leaves office, and use it as his personal taxpayer funded jet.

I used to think the baby boomers could burn everything to the ground for everybody else and get away with it but Trump is accelerating the pace so fast I don't think they're going to get away with it. The older ones of course will die before the shit hits the fan but if you're under 60 you're in for a world of hurt and maybe even the under 65 set isn't going to get away with it

Slashdot doesn't need this clickbait.

A stupid rich vain asshole killed people so intensely silly they cared about Titanic, whose sole claim to fame IS fame. The world is slightly wiser in consequence.

Think about it. There is no reason a functioning adult should be morbidly fascinated by a mere shipwreck but people crave to masturbate to drama, and romantic death appeals to the bitch-made (a perfect hood term for a much wider degeneracy) mind.

The other casualties were so cravenly silly they utterly failed to perform THEIR OWN due diligence before becoming someone else's suicidal beta testers. They were sufficiently educated to understand the basics, including that ZERO reason exists not to copy proven hull designs zero reason existed to change let alone use an utterly absurd choice of hull.

Rush had Alvin--tier money but pure vanity is why he chose a childishly silly hull design no reason existed to want because nothing about it was better. His loss is as minor as a common auto accident. Ditto the "collateral damage" who knew what they signed up for.

We really should abandon the Student Loan idea.
1) It is not reasonable to expect people that by definition have NOT had a college education to make good decisions about student loans. Some of their parents may have collage degrees, but not all.

2) They are long term loans that cannot be refinanced. If interest rates rise, the borrowers make out like a bandit. But if they fall, they get screwed.

3) Scholarships are better ideas.

Why scholarships are better:

You can quite easily pick the person who really needs it and/OR the person that most benefits from it.

You can get much stricter on which education institutions qualify for them. This will end a bunch of scams, such as the schools that if graduate from get a $60,000 per year job but cost $900,000 to go to.

You can put in grade requirements for continuing them for next year.

Scholarships fight educational inflation, while loans encourage it. If schools know the main government scholarships only pay Y on average, they will have immense pressure to keep their costs below Y. The government can easily set the values of the scholarships to discourage inflation because they do not want to pay more.

But banks will always be willing to increase the amount they loan to the students. To them, the cost of education is a GOOD thing because larger loans means larger profits.

Well, you Klansucking Sisterhumping America Hating ReCUNTlicans already packed the court to try to destroy our Constitutional rights. So I reject your claim that speaking out on matters of public importance as an equal citizen is "corporate sabotage," you neonazi inbred bitchtrash.