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> Need to start by not 1) serving as the worlds policeman 2) building double the aircraft carrier tonnage of the rest of the world combined. 3) spending a trillion dollars on newest latest fighters not ready for service when we aren't at war, 4) staging US troops and ships in the Middle East or Europe when both are immensely wealthy and able to defend themselves. 5) pouring $40B into a launch system design based on obsolete technologies and an overweight deep space capsule that needs a year to replace a single bad power unit. 6) Not subsidizing professional sports leagues paying millions a year per employee. etc, etc.

Have you looked at the federal budget? The expenditures you mention are insignificant. Social security and medical assistance programs make up 48% [1] of the federal budget. Defense only makes up 16%, and of that, only 27% goes to the navy. Another 8% is various assistance programs. 8% is interest on debt. 0.5% is all of NASA.

You can't really reduce the government's expenditure levels by cutting a few high-profile programs that some consider wasteful. The majority of the budget goes to supporting the most vulnerable in society. Cutting these programs is politically impossible.

> thousand page earmarked pork funding bills and focus their responsibilities on legitimate national interests.

Earmarks are dead already. But they shouldn't be: earmarks let lawmakers swap favors in a way that promotes the smooth operation of government and compromise in lawmaking. Yes, there's some corruption, but that corruption was a small price to pay for decreasing the overall level of hostility in the legislature and promoting compromise.

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-w...

LOL Earmarks clearly still exist, just under different names, and have always been used solely for corrupt purposes. Pork barrel spending is a huge price to pay for enabling national legislators to agree to legislation that's clearly bad for the country as a whole, in order to fund projects for their political supports.

And most social security payments go to people with living standards at or above the US median.

Earmarks and pork funding is not even corruption. It is a representative's duty to advocate on behalf of their constituents. And constituents want spending programs in their communities.

Earmarks and pork are nothing other than corruption. The SLS is the clearest example.

US taxpayers have invested close to $20B in a launch system that was outdated the day it was designed and will literally cost 100 times more per pound than commercially available launch systems.

The first reason it's so costly is that the US congress required it to use solid rocket boosters, which increase launch risks, and substantially increase launch costs.

The second reason the SLS is so costly is that congress required it to use RS-25 engines, which were some of the most expensive rocket engines ever designed, originally costing $45M a pop. They were so expensive because they were used on the Shuttle and had to be refurbished between launches instead of expended (destroyed) every launch.

But not only will the RS-25s used on the SLS be expended every launch, Aeroject is getting $100M(!) each to build new ones. And it forced the SLS to use one of the worst possible first stage fuels, Hydrogen, which requires carrying a massively heavy cryogenic tank, construction of has held up launches for years,

By contrast, each SpaceX Merlin which has roughly half the thrust of an RS-25 costs around $500,000 to build, 200 TIMES LESS! And uses a far more compact and effective first stage fuel.

There is a sense in which pork wastes money: distributed production is less efficient than centralized production. And you could call a congressman wasting the public's money to get something for this district a kind of corruption. But like I said, I think this inefficiency is a small price to pay for peace.

It doesn't lead to peace, it leads to terrible legislation hundreds of pages deep in special gifts to special interests at a huge cost to our economy.

Defence is 12% of federal spending -- or around ~2.5% of GDP, or a whopping 0.5% more than the NATO threshold.

It takes some tricky math to get where military spending is only 12% of federal spending.

First, a soldier wounded in Afghanistan and being treated in a VA hospital would have to have that cost excluded from the budget.

The department of energy dealing with nuclear weapon waste is excluded from that budget.

The office of a foreign US embassy serving as cover for a CIA case officer is excluded from that budget.

Interest on military deficit spending from last year is excluded from that budget.

In fact, add all these things up which don't fall within this theoretical 12% and it comes to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Military spending is $934 billion in the 2021 budget. It's spread out among different agencies and budget categories, so you must add it all together. It includes:

    Defense Department base budget: $636 billion.
    DoD Overseas Contingency Operations: $69 billion.
    Departments that support defense: $228 billion. They include the Department of Veterans Affairs ($93 billion), State Department ($48 billion), Homeland Security ($48 billion), FBI and Cybersecurity ($10 billion), and the National Nuclear Security Administration ($17 billion).

This is 63% of all the discretionary spending in the budget, i.e. the budget outside of mandatory payments such as Social Security.

It's actually over 3% of GDP.

NATO is an organization of countries near the Russian border. The US could easily get by with 2% or less to defend it's own borders. If Russia invades Germany we can ship and airlift troops and meet them in France (given that Germany won't spend enough to defend itself).

Pork barrel spending has not been a thing since 2011 when the House banned earmarks.

This info is woefully out of date, and at least some attribute the sharp increase in partisanship and gridlock to the ban on earmarks preventing horse trading.

LOL. No longer not using the term "earmarks" in financing legislation is not the same as ending pork barrel spending.

If it is, please explain the SLS. It's entire design was dictated by Congress to use specific components from specific contractors.

Do you have a source for your assertions about the SLS? I can't seem to pull anything up.

The SLS reuses liquid hydrogen engines and solid rocket boosters from Shuttle by law, which has made it antiquated, massively expensive and paradoxically five years late.

“ In 2011, Rep. Tom McClintock and other groups called on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate possible violations of the Competition in Contracting Act (CICA), arguing that Congressional mandates forcing NASA to use Space Shuttle components for SLS are de facto non-competitive, single source requirements assuring contracts to existing Shuttle suppliers.”

“ In the summer of 2019, a former ULA employee claimed that Boeing, NASA's prime contractor for SLS, viewed orbital refueling technology as a threat to SLS and blocked further investment in it.”

“ In 2019, the Government Accountability Office found that NASA had awarded Boeing over US$200 million for service with ratings of good to excellent despite cost overruns and delays”

“ On 1 May 2020, NASA awarded a US$1.79 billion contract extension for the manufacture of 18 additional RS-25 engines. Ars Technica, in an article published on the same day, highlighted that over the entire RS-25 contract the price of each engine works out to US$146 million, and that the total price for the four expendable engines used in each SLS launch will be more than US$580 million. They critically commented that for the cost of just one engine, six more powerful RD-180 engines could be purchased, or nearly an entire Falcon Heavy launch with two thirds of the SLS lift capacity.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

http://www.competitivespace.org/issues/the-senate-launch-sys...

It seems US Government spending is less than 20% and has been since the 1970s? [1]. Curious if I am mis-understanding you here. 2013-2018 is also roughly in line with the spending % of the Clinton presidency according to that source as well.

[1] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/usa/government_size/