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.

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.

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.

It wasn't ugly. I have no opinion on whether painting it blue is an improvement or not (will wait until it's finished to collect visual data), but

I've seen the reflecting pool, and it wasn't ugly.

Most of those people don't care. If you see the world as "us against them," you don't really care how similar "them" is, as long as "us" is on top.

It's clan warfare, not logical fairness.

In the US, you can be fired for freely expressing your opinion (source).

The recourse is to start a union. When employers start policing social media, or opinions in general, it's time to join a union.

It's not fuzzy, it sucks. It is true under the law that a person can be fired for expressing their opinion publicly.

However, it's also true that it sucks. Employees do have a life outside work, and should not have their freedom of speech impinged by a corporation. People have been fired by Google because they disagree with Google working with Israel, for example. Silencing people doesn't change the disagreement, it just breeds dissatisfaction.

Employees do have recourse, and this is when I strongly consider joining a union. Don't want to be fired unfairly? That's what unions are for. Unions have drawbacks, but that is not one of them.

Most businesses over a certain size also waste a f**kton of money. The larger the organization, the harder it is to avoid doing so.

I told you exactly how this practice creates waste. At the end of the year, unspent budget goes away, so the people to whom the budget was assigned look for ways to spend it. Most of that spending was not specifically budgeted for, or else the stuff would have been bought earlier in the cycle. And if it were strictly necessary, it would have been explicitly budgeted, rather than being bought because there just happened to be money left over.

What percentage of that spending provides a real benefit? There's no way to know, because they didn't have to provide a formal justification and ask for more funding to cover it, since there was money left over from something else that didn't cost as much as expected.

Might as well spread the joy around developing challengers (not like that!). It's not like the prime mover in New Space is going to need any part of NASA's whopping $40b annual budget.

The fact that you can't see government waste tells me that either you're not looking closely enough to see the problems or you're benefitting from the waste.

One of the core problems with government waste comes from the budgeting process itself, wherein money that is not spent a the end of a budget year must be given back, and your next year's budget will likely be cut based on the fact that you didn't use your entire budget that year. This sounds like a good idea in theory, until you realize that managers see that as a risk to them being able to do what they need to do the next year, which means they will find ways to spend any unused budget at the end of the year (or worse, the quarter), even if it is for things that could easily be deferred until a later year, or for things that they don't strictly require. And this is how budgets bloat.

To be fair, the same thing happens in businesses, academia, etc.; it is not specific to government. But it is very, very common in government. And while those expenses might not look like a lot at an individual team level, they add up to a lot by the time you look at the organization as a whole.

But no, the hilarious thing is that you're telling me I'm wrong without actually rebutting a single point that I've made, which means you're likely arguing based on blind faith in an ideology or political group, rather than based on an actual understanding of how government budgeting works, which makes your opinion largely irrelevant in practice.

Just saying.

They got immunity for things they published and pushed on people on the grounds that others said it, they were just the promoters and publishers.

We finally figured out how to sue them not for publishing, but for their massive and unethical attempts to push and promote what others said.

So now they ask for immunity.

No.

They are the problem. They are guilty. Note, they didn't HAVE to be the problem. They could have promoted things based on truth and value rather than how much attention they got by being outrageous and dishonest.

The small nuclear reactor people believe:

1) The major business problems with nuclear reactors are caused by the time it takes to get regulatory approval rather than actual safety, actual science, or even by complying with the actual safety regulations.

2) That if they make a nuclear reactor small enough, they can get a generic regulatory approval once and use it multiple times, all while satisfying the regulations and by being safe.

3) That it will be easier to ramp up, ramp down, fix problems, and dispose of after end of life of small nuclear reactors as opposed to large ones.

#1 is probably true. It is clear that nuclear power plants take a LOT of time to satisfy the regulators they are safe, but people can and do succeed in doing it.

#2 is up for debate. A lot of people think that the 'small' nuclear reactors they propose will still be large enough to take a lot of regulatory approval for the geographic locations and they will never get a generic approval to build model 1 and ship it everywhere.

#3 is also questionable. If you have even 4 active reactors, you can probably schedule the ramping up and ramping down on a continuous schedule for maintance. But the fixing of problems may take MORE time because they are shrinking it. And a lot of people think the size they are describing will not be easier to dispose of at end of life.

If they cannot get a generic regulatory approval for use in 'most' places, it may never be a good idea to build small nuclear reactors (except on vehicles like an aircraft carrier, submarines, rockets, etc).

You are either an AI bot, paid to lie or a totally clueless human being.. It is clearly a FIVE percent tax, not a FIFTY percent control.

And they specifically state that no one has to give up any control. You have been reading lies paid for by the billionaires rather than the actual wording of the bill.

You can learn about it here on the far right Fox news:

https://www.foxbusiness.com/po...

They are one of the plutocrats that pretend they are capitalists.

Their products come with anti-capitalist contracts that basically try to own the customer instead of having the customer own the product.

This is why their business is failing. As long as they think they can:

Access any contentâ"published or notâ"that users had created to train its new machine learning AI.

Use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate users creations

Charge huge cancelation fees for subscriptions. ... without notifying them when they sign up ... without informing them they are signing up for a subscriptions.

I do.

No one WANTS a multiple time tax.

If you do it one time and never do it again then:

1) The billionaire flight from California will be small. Some (more) will leave, but not everyone will give up the gorgeous weather, views, and the huge number of pretty young things willing to move to California and do anything the billionaires want.

If you do it multiple times, the rich will flee like rats leaving a sinking ship.

Also note, a lot of people in California would LIKE some of the rich people to leave. It would bring down the real estate prices.

CA has about 125 billionaires (give or take a few), Texas has 73. (NY has about 123)

20 % of 125 = 25. If those 24 leave CA and all go to Texas, then:
CA: has 100 billionaires
Texas has 98