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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

The more we remove supermajority protections, the closer we move to 50% of the people thinking it isn't used well.

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

I think they're being downvoted, in part, because a lot of people here either assume it is being spent well, or justify it as a necessary evil.

What might be valuable would be for someone to whip up an app that allows you to input the taxes you paid and breaks it down by the federal budget. Kinda like a receipt, but for government.

I did it with a few odd items, once, and it was pretty interesting.

For example, I found that I paid $7/mo for each of our aircraft carriers and $0.02/mo for the president's salary and secret service protection.

It might help people gain better perspective where their money goes. I'm not quite sure why this kind of thing isn't mandatory, frankly. An itemized "bill" may change people's opinions on taxes, especially the most favorable.

I mean, this already exists - there are tons of sites that slice and dice US spending with nice visuals etc. etc. Sure, I didn't see an itemized "bill" on page 1 of Google, but such a thing would be insanely incomprehensible for most people given that if you itemized the budget down to the level of the president's secret service protection, you'd end up with millions of line items.

It doesn't have to be incomprehensible. Just diggable.

Click through to finer and finer granularity. Searchable.

It's just ("just") a data vis problem. I'd work on it but too busy.

Maybe for the future. Could be fun.

This is literally the first search result on DDG: https://www.usaspending.gov

> The more we remove supermajority protections, the closer we move to 50% of the people thinking it isn't used well

I assume you're talking -- primarily -- about the Senate and the filibuster? If so, you'll be pleased to hear the UK has managed OK for the last 400-500 years in having a parliament that can do _literally anything_ it wants with a majority of 1 person[0] including deciding to pick on a single person individually without trial and subject them to whatever it pleases[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder

Not just the filibuster. The senate has eroded 60 vote rules on other things like confirmations. I think this is detrimental to the integrity of the system - how can a vote of less than 60 be used to ammend a rule requiring 60 or more? It's definitely a violation of the spirit of the law.

It might work for the UK, but the UK is quite different from the US. For one, the house of lords was supposed to represent the wealthy whereas the Senate is supposed to represent the states.

Secondly, there are far greater geographic distances and differences between the members of the country. This usually means there are great differences in needs and priorities. This was kind of the point of reserving most rights for the states. If using simple majority, the smaller and more rural states will eventually get tired of things being crammed down their throats. We are starting to see this already with an increasing number of sanctuary city/states and multiple topics.

Lastly, does it actually work well? It seems that almost 2/3rds of people in the UK think the rural areas are neglected.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/7587/government_neglec...

Poor reasoning since the systems are so different, and intentionally so.

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