One might think that people who claim their priority is reducing the budget deficit would strongly support spending tens of billions to increase revenues by hundreds of billions.
But when we observe that people's actions contradict their claims, we should stop believing their claims.
First, even if the recovered money exceeds the budget, the amount of recoverable money tends to be fixed to a first approximation. Audits already tend to follow the 80/20 rule. The marginal increase in recovered money quickly becomes less than the marginal increase in budget. You might find a new seam of recoverable money but those tend to dry up quickly while agency budget increases are forever.
Second, the indirect compliance costs to the government can exceed the directly recovered money, even ignoring the economy at large. The government may find $75M in new money for an audit cost of $25M if they start auditing something they have historically ignored and therefore tends to have sloppy compliance. This will create a lot of compliance activity in the private sector. On the surface, this looks like a free $50M to the government. However, these compliance costs can increase government procurement costs in excess of the direct recovery. The US government is aware of this and is therefore circumspect about over-auditing for diminishing returns as that can show up as a net cost elsewhere in the budget.
Most money recovered in audits is from sloppy record-keeping, ignorance, ambiguity, etc and not fraudulent intent at scale. There is always some fraud but that isn't the meat-and-potatoes of it. Increases in auditing incentivizes more rigorous processes in the private sector, which comes at a cost to the economy, but also reduces future audit recoveries. Increasing audits isn't an infinite money glitch.
There's a strong belief that somehow rich people are uniquely capable of "creating jobs", while jobs the government creates don't count. Surely if we let the rich get richer, that money will trickle down on the rest of us. It's not totally inconsistent, if you overlook the fact that it never actually works that way.
Still... this one does have a strong note of "laws for thee, but not for me". Or even more weirdly, "... but not for the person I imagine I'm going to be some day, even if it's worse for the person I actually am and almost certainly will remain."
Conservatives want the government cut down significantly, not to find creative ways to get more money.
“RESOLVED, That the Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention.”
https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_202...
Strictly, that meant that the 2016 platform remained in force, and they blamed the inability to derive a new one on COVID. But it doesn't speak particularly well of them not to be seriously considering the fundamental statement of what it is the party wants to do.
Actually cutting spending is hard. It's easy to decry the overall number, but you have to cut actual programs. The vast majority of it goes to things like social security, medicare, and the military -- things people are reluctant to cut. Of what's left, it's a lot harder to find "waste" than people think. At most they zero in on programs that matter a lot to other people... and comprise a trivial fraction of the overall budget.
The budget is big because people want it to be big. Actually reducing the size of it is hard. Meantime, there is zero reason why we should allow people to break the law to avoid paying for the money that Congress appropriates.
I've had major frustrations precisely because conservatives do not cut down on the government when they finally get elected. Spending always goes up.
What we have, at least in the US, are tax and spend big "liberals" on one side. And don't tax, but spend even bigger anyway "conservatives" on the other.
Please don't try to sell us on the myth of conservatives being good financial stewards because the recent historical data clearly bears all that out to be nonsense. There is currently no option in the US for you to vote for if you believe we need, for instance, a drawdown in spending.
A. A lot of them definitely are grifters
B. The ones that aren’t have to deal with political realities that make slashing income easier than slashing spending.
Yet another claim trivially refuted by actions.
We should stop repeating transparently bogus claims like this.
The fact is they have been very successful at stopping democratic policy over the years and just this year they have forced concessions on spending out of democrats, including the president after he stated that wouldn’t happen.