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Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-payer.

The Covid bailout last year was about $60,000 per tax payer (https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/). How much of your $60,000 did you see?

I'm not arguing for or against these programs; I'm arguing for expressing them in comprehensible terms. $6,000,000,000,000 societal total; or $60,000 for you. Do you expect to receive $15,000 of value from the F35 program? I'm not sure I won't: perhaps it'll keep oil/energy prices stable and I spent well more than $300/year on energy...

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I think the stats for COVID site are very misleading, particularly when you compare them to defense spending. The majority of "COVID bailout" according to that website is "Federal Reserve Actions"-- just the vagueness of that statement should give you pause.

I am not saying Federal Reserve actions don't have a cost, but comparing that to defense spending is apples to oranges. The federal reserve buys securities and created SPVs. You could say that is a cost but by some measures the money the Federal Reserve "spent" made money in the 2009 crises. If that were true this time your cost per tax payer is way, way off.

Or to put it in more plain language, you are comparing the cost to tax payers if the US government bought $60,000 of Lockheed martin stock as opposed to paying Lockheed Martin $15,000 for a fighter that doesn't seem to work well. It's more complicated than that even, but still it is a terrible and biased comparison that you are making.

> How much of your $60,000 did you see?

For that, you need to calculate the cost of every US govt program and calculate usage costs. Very complicated.

However, this statement is confusing to me. Do you agree to a bailout, as a society, to eventually get all of it back?

And, I also take issue with 100M tax payers. Are these Individual Income Tax payers? If so, what about all the non income tax payers and companiss that pay taxes? For every item you buy, some amount goes to the government in the form of sales tax.

And ultimately, what does the govt spend money on? You and your fellow citizens. Sure, now you are in a position to say you pay more taxes than the govt provides services, but if your kid turns out to be poor and homeless, the govt ought to take care of them, and they pay no taxes while enjoying govt services. So if you compute what you get back, would it be fair to say you have to take multi generational values?

For the most part, sales tax is a state and local tax and so doesn't affect federal receipts.

I agree that it could get fairly complicated but these seem like the two propositions to me:

Un-normalized: $6T + interpretation + understanding + doubt that it's really $6T.

Normalized: $60k (get the GAO to provide a standardized number) + interpretation + understanding.

I get that it's imperfect but I have a hard time understanding how the "un-normalized" version is more-perfect or more comprehensible than the "normalized" version.

I suspect politicians would hate my suggestion: they've acclimated us to nonsense numbers. Per Dirksen (maybe): “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Again, I'm not pro/con high-speed rail but: CA probably has 15M taxpayers; estimates of high-speed rail ranged from $30,000M-$100,000M; how in the world was a CA taxpayer to recoup $3,000-$10,000 of cost? Put in those terms, it's a lot easier for me to think about the proposition.

I definitely think a Covid bailout was necessary. I do have some questions about where my $60k went...

Very interesting proposition. Small side note - a lot of this $300/year/tax-payer is flowing back into paying US salaries in various states... which is probably recursively why the ticket price is so high in the first place (cost-plus, politicians and all).

Also, the $60,000/tax-payer Covid ticket price (though I find that source questionable) is missing averaging out over multiple years as you said yourself. Needs to be consistent with the other number.

I take issue with comparing a single project to a generic relief. A fair comparison would be to only compare a single stimulus effort (say the $1000 one). Or if you want to compare the total covid effort, compare it with the total military budget.

This type of comparison reminds me of how people abuse statistics by comparing a city (or even a neighborhood) to another state (or even a country); say the average New Yorker vs. the average Swede.

That's a flawed way of looking at tax statistics.

Sure, it's $60k per tax payer by just dividing the total paid by the tax payer cardinality. And in that sense, that much of the federal budget that you have a voice for was allocated in that way.

However, comparing that number to how much tax you're paying in a given year is wildly inaccurate. The mean income tax paid in the US last year was ~$15k, but the median is closer to ~$5k [0] The ultra wealthy pay very disproportionately more of the total income tax and skew the mean upward significantly.

Therefore, the average US tax payer would have contributed likely far less than $300/year at something more like <$100/year.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-fed...

I've always wished for (and wanted to develop) a calculator which would take in your taxes paid, and calculate exactly how many dollars and cents of your tax bill went to which programs. I'm sure the results would shock most Americans.

Here in Australia, after my tax return is lodged, I receive an income tax receipt with a breakdown of where my tax dollars went.

It's only broken down by category though (e.g. Health, Defence, Education), except for Welfare, which has subcategories (e.g. Aged, Disability, etc).

There's an example and further explanation here on the ATO website: https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-return/I...

There's a certain sense of satisfaction in being able to see in slightly more real terms what my tax is being spent on.

What a nice idea, wish we had something like this in Germany - not digging on websites but a tax receipt.

I’ve gotten this before in the mail as a US resident. It’s quite interesting regardless of your thoughts on the budget

There's a certain sense of satisfaction in being able to see in slightly more real terms what my tax is being spent on.

But it's misleading, perhaps deliberately so. The money is not being spent on "Health" but on the "Health department". What percentage of that money actually delivers health, and what merely funds the bureaucracy?

Here in the UK only about a third of defence spending goes on the armed forces themselves. Another third goes on service pensions, which is fine, but running the MoD itself is a full third of the budget! It wouldn’t surprise me if the same was true of the NHS.

> Federal Reserve Actions

Printing dollars what means high inflation what is basically a hidden tax that screws lower and medium class the most?

That’s pretty theoretical at this point, though; it’s been quite a while since we had high inflation.

Maybe the inflation is high housing, healthcare, and education costs.

I beleive this is part of the tax systems of a few nordic countries at least.

The problem with that is that there is no direct correlation between tax receipts and budget outlays. Money being spent in 2021 is not being "paid for" by taxes received in 2021, or for that matter in 2022, 2023, or any other particular year. That's the theoretical problem; the practical problems you encounter as a result include how you deal with programs that are technically 'paid for' by specific taxes (do you try to present those separately or exclude them?), how you account for budget deficits (do you present a breakdown that adds up to >100% of the tax bill?), and how you deal with tax expenditures.

I mean, forgive me for being obtuse, but...why do we even pay taxes at all? Like, I understand the "prole logic" of a balance between income and expenditures, but if the government doesn't seem to care, why should I?

Paying taxes is a form of civic participation. Sounds crazy, but reading about the system Russia uses makes me leery of forcing the government to make itself financially independent of its citizenry.

Theirs is a system called "tributary taxation." How it works is, anybody who is anybody in Russia has a boss. Not a boss like you have a boss, a political boss, think Boss Tweed back in the day. That boss has a boss, who has a boss, and so on until you have the one person in Russia all this money flows to, President Putin.

How much do you pay to your boss? As much as you wish/can. This isn't the mob. The price for falling behind isn't Ivan turning your knees into baseballs. You simply find yourself slowly forced out of political relevance. Pay to play at it's highest and finest. At a certain level you become untouchable by low-level cops and the like.

The government getting its operating budget from us makes the government accountable to citizens in the end. What we call 'corruption' becomes the norm otherwise.

More here: https://www.quora.com/Will-Russia-abandon-the-tributary-taxa...

In the longer term, the ability of taxpayers to pay taxes is a signal of the nation's ability to produce enough to meet its debt. It's just spread over an extended period.

There’s something similar for the UK here[0], but my guess is that most people don’t care beyond “defence”, which in the UK is 5% and the US is 15%. As others have mentioned though, there’s potentially a pretty good multiplier effect [1] on military hardware acquisition.

0: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-public-spendi...

1: https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Managing_the_economy/The_m...

That would be great to see.

Not exactly what you're describing, but here's where someone did a fairly detailed analysis of which federal, state, and local programs their salary goes to using a Sankey diagram:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/lkfjea/oc_...

The Obama White House did this, at least at a high level (basically as a education tool, not a detailed invoice): https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/2014-taxreceipt

I think most people might be shocked that Government uses nearly a whopping 40% of GDP, at least in the US.

> Do you expect to receive $15,000 of value from the F35 program? I'm not sure I won't: perhaps it'll keep oil/energy prices stable and I spent well more than $300/year on energy...

But from the article

> The Air Force alone wanted nearly 1,800 F-35s to replace aging F-16s and A-10s and constitute the low end of a low-high fighter mix, with 180 twin-engine F-22s making up the high end.

> Fifteen years after the F-35’s first flight, the Air Force has just 250 of the jets.

I'd say it's just as valid of an argument to make in this case that I'm not sure I won't see more than $60,000 of value out of efforts to prevent the economic infrastructure of the U.S. from crumbling, especially amortized over 50 years ($1,200/yr in preserved income or purchasing power).

I don't disagree that it's a decent frame of reference to use when looking at government programs...but it's important to apply the same level of rigor to measuring output value.

An excessively over powered military with a bloated budget can definitely use some crumbling

yeah, but you're cleverly (or nefariously) pitching this as both a neutral unit of measure - say, $/square meter in the US - then right away using it as a non-neutral measurement based on the individual (/your/ $60k - as if it was "ours" to begin with). that's not really appropriate.

For the COVID bailout one, depends on how much 401k you have.

If you have a decent amount, then yeah, the asset price inflation came from a fire hose none other.

Where did the other 40 million people go?

Also, the Federal Reserve spending is not backed by taxes.

but why in the world does it need to cost that much?

what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.

Because the U.S. military basically runs a massive socialized jobs program and every politician works to get a piece of it for their state.

No politician wants to be the one to make the case to shut down the factories that produce these things, even when the military has advised Congress to do so [1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...

What I’ve always found strange about this is that there would be far better areas to spend money that would directly benefit society. Education, rail, manufacturing modernization, health.

Instead we have jets we don’t need, and tanks sitting in a desert unused.

Additional housing would even pay itself back on its own. Yes the government would take on debt but it would also receive rent payments that pay the debt off. The economic benefit of more housing in large cities is undeniable. Lots of people move to the city to work there, the end result is that you have employed both the construction industry and the future resident. There would be a net tax gain even though its a jobs stimulus program.

> what's wrong with just using the jets we already have.

The problems with the F-15/F-16/F-18 is that Chinese and Russian missiles might be able to shoot them down more easily than the F-22 or F-35, since the F-22 and F-35 are stealthed.

The problem with the F-22 and F-35 is high unit cost, so they can't have as many as they'd like.

It's also possible that their stealth might not work so well on future Russian/Chinese radars, for example they might use different frequencies. You can be sure both those countries are working on countermeasures to stealth aircraft.

Possibly the solution will be an unmanned aircraft. This would be able to pull >10g manouvers, which aircraft with a pilot in can't.

Restarting production, long after all the workers have been laid off and moved to other cities, would take decades. If those workers don't keep working, the capability is lost. The timeframe for recovery makes this dangerous.

what's wrong with just using the jets we already have.

Two words: metal fatigue. Every airframe only has a finite amount of hours it can fly before its structure becomes too weak. Fighters in particular that regularly perform high-g manoeuvres. So they have to be replaced anyway.

The war in Afghanistan saw Western militaries burning off airframe-hours at a phenomenal rate using expensive fighters designed for neer-peer conflicts to drop dumb bombs, when you could have done the job for a fraction of the cost with simple propeller planes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano

Income tax is only half of federal government income though, the other half is mostly taxes levied on corporations.

You need to baseline with the cost of no COVID bailout: economic collapse, breadlines, etc.

I'll pay $300/year for global security any day of the week. Honestly, I don't give a shit if it costs $10,000/year, I want the U.S. being the global police because I am most comfortable with the status quo.

Simple as that.

As a hardcore leftist, even I have to admit there are benefits of neoliberal policy to a strong internationally present military that at least pretends to uphold human rights and has a bunch of other countries that also pretend the same. It’s better than the alternative.

The alternative being... the same invasion of sovereign nations to keep the industry-military complex going, just without the pretense of caring for human rights?

I think the war in Yemen is a good case study of the downsides of the US as global police. It is a war that was only possible through the US and UK supplying arms, and was prosecuted by a nation that doesn't even pretend to uphold human rights.

This is also pretty typical - while many western nations 'care' about human rights, they don't see any problem with arming client regimes who are often gratuitously sadistic, genocidal, etc.

I'm also not sure where human rights come into the picture when you consider the various US wars in the last century. All of them (especially the Korean war) were extremely brutal to civilian populations, and the prosecution of all of them (except maybe the 1990 gulf war?) skirted very close to the line on war crimes, or crossed that line entirely. I don't think there was even lip service paid to human rights in this period.

The human rights track record of the USA military should for sure include:

* Arming the Saudi regime with intent to sustain the horrors in Yemen

* Extrajudicial killings with drones in various sovereign non-warring nations such as Pakistan and Libya often with far more civilian casualties then combatant.

* Illegal indefinite detention and torture in offshore prison such as Guantanamo.

Those are the human rights horrors which the USA military is currently engaging in. History shows us that it is capable of far worse and there is no reason to believe it won’t engage in in the near future.

As far as security goes there is little reason to believe that it extends any further then to secure the interest of private companies engaging in foreign affairs. It seems to me that the human rights narrative of GPs is entirely fiction.

How is 9/11'ing an Afgan goat farmer or a Pakistani wedding "global security"?

Are you serious? Global security for whom exactly?

Yemeni people celebrating weddings?

Pretty clearly unsustainable, isn't it?

No, why?

Money stays in the system... of course with a bit of a bias in what direction it goes.

how much is not getting your throat slit by our enemies worth?

> The Covid bailout last year was about $60,000 per tax payer (https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/). How much of your $60,000 did you see?

My stonks went up by way more than $60k (that figure is completely wrong and inflated anyway), so I saw plenty of it.

I'm sorry, were you fishing for a different answer?

your stonks liquidity is dependent on constant injection, so your "making" more than $60k may be temporary

That’s not how liquidity works.

yes it is.

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