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Comment by hahamrfunnyguy | Hacker News Reader

tldr: There are a number of US defense programs that are boondoggles and are a waste of taxpayer dollars.

What can be done to fix it and make it more efficient? Well, the big problem is that congress loves boondoggles like this. The politicians are also delighted to take the money to help fund their campaigns. Now they owe some favors. As a bonus, they also get to brag to their constituents about how many jobs they're helping to create.

The US system of government perpetuates this. Unfortunately, things are just going to get worse until we make some changes like establishing term limits and preventing politicians from becoming lobbyists.

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Term limits and limiting lobbying won’t help.

US Military is a massive jobs program and supports a huge section of the population if you include all it’s vendors. This is especially true in the heartland. Unless the amount of non-defense jobs all over US expand to such a level that people aren’t as dependent, they will always have people’s support and politicians will keep funding these.

I'd love to see more choices come elections besides the lesser of two evils.

Most people dont vote in primaries. That is only time choice is really an option for same party candidates. Since CU basically makes bribery legal its that much harder to remove bad incumbants since they have more campaign funds.

CU?

Citizens United

Citizens United vs FEC [1] is a Supreme Court ruling, overturning limits on the amount of money corporations can spend supporting politicians' re-election attempts (i.e. bribes) because it's "freedom of speech"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Citizens United was really determined by how badly the FEC f'd their argument: which was that there was no limiting principle on how far the FEC could use their power to limit non-candidate speech. They ruled the way the did because the alternative was worse.

If they'd decided the alternative, then any 501(c) organization could find itself muzzled during election season (which is roughly 90% of the year at this point). This include organizations like: EFF, ACLU, and Planned Parenthood. All of these are technically corporations.

I wish we had a way to channel a lot of the electoral anger into electoral reform — e.g. how many people complain about Joe Manchin but never mention the odds of someone more to their taste getting elected in WV? — but it's hard to see that getting off the ground at the moment when we're fighting a rearguard campaign simply to preserve the existing level of access to voting. It's hard to convince people that the answer to disliking the available choices is to get more involved with things like local elections, propositions, etc. but we really need to figure out how to make that happen.

Term limits are a deceptive idea: they sound good but part of why they get so much support as the go-to electoral reform idea from industry-backed groups is that they're either long enough not have much effect or shift more power to the lobbyists. If you are regularly forcing your most experienced people out, you're going to need more new candidates and those groups run programs which help identify and coach candidates, give them drafts of legislation to propose, and their media teams can make sure everyone hears about those proposals (not to mention punishing someone if they get too independent).

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