Comment by astroid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by astroid | Hacker News Reader

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Hard to say, given I just found out about this situation. I think it's higher than $20 for sure, but probably less than half than a billion. I think a more in depth analysis of the circumstances that led to the need to spend that money in the first place would be in order.

Can you tell me why I am supposed to answer your questions, but you have successfully dodged all of mine while levying personal attacks however? Seems .... a tad imbalanced, dont you think?

Go ahead vel0city, tell us what number you think the threshold is for questioning governments spending of the money they took directly out of our paychecks? You have to have one in mind at this point. How could you not? How else could you backup your claim?

EDIT: Actually I should ask - are you an American citizen? Do you have a dog in this fight? Is this money even coming out of your check? If not, it would explain why you think these budgets are beyond reproach, given that it would mean it's not your friends, family, or neighbors being effectively sacrificed, nor is it your money being spent in that case.

Blame Congress. (1) they control budget and can add the additional funds. They also know that half a billion is being "diverted" from acute disaster relief. The budgeting is on them. (2) Congress needsto amend the asylum law to allow asylum claims at ports of entry or not at all. That congress has a law disallowing asylum claims at ports of entry is why people are crossing deserts and then surrendering to the first authority they see.

On another side, government budgets are not zero sum. Saying we should spend on X before we spend on Y is also saying you don't think money should go to X. A personal household budget is zero sum, government not so.

Addendum: I am not sure to what extent congress controls line item budgets for FEMA. Though, it would be on them to fund something. Second, we should also consider the net taxes of all existing asylum seekers that ever entered the country and are still living, their offspring and any businesses they have set up.

There is plenty of blame to go around, and Congress is certainly at the top of that list. It's a pretty long list though.

Zero sum or not, the attitude you have about budget discussions is why we are about to print ourselves into a depression. If you can't discuss prioritizing spending based on whatever criteria applies to the situation, you simply can't discuss budget concerns.

I do not take the view that the budget our taxes pay for is beyond reproach. I have no problem evaluating it from the perspective of 'money is not infinite, and no specific agencies spending is so inherently special that it can not be discussed under the context of where potential waste or inefficient spending happened, and how it can be adjusted to avoid that in the future."

'X seems like a better use of the money and more representative of what the taxpaying public wants it spent on, to ensure things are prioritized properly while properly representing 'We The People' -- as such it may be worth looking back to determine if this money was allocated in a manner that provides the most benefit to the taxpayers while maintaining consistency with the agencies core responsibilities' -- there is nothing wrong with this type of discussion/analysis, and anyone trying to claim there is has there own agenda they want to impose on you.

Your line of thinking leaves absolutely no room to discuss the budget in a meaningful way, because 'having priorities' is not allowed under that framework.

It's a dialectical trap meant to make people fall in line. I'll pass, thanks.

> Zero sum or not, the attitude you have about budget discussions is why we are about to print ourselves into a depression.

I'll ignore (beyond pointing it out here) that you are putting words into my mouth and conducting a personal attack.

I did mostly want to draw contrast that government budget is unlike household and not zero sum.

Whether we print ourselves into depression is unclear. Particularly since there are other levers and continues to be economic growth.

I agree spending cannot be 100% for every need.

> I have no problem evaluating it from the perspective of 'money is not infinite, and no specific agencies spending is so inherently special that it can not be discussed under the context of where potential waste or inefficient spending happened, and how it can be adjusted to avoid that in the future."

I agree. Though saying we should not spend anything on X until we spend all on Y is not the same as saying we are spending too much X (in part given that we need to spend on Y)

> I do not take the view that the budget our taxes pay for is beyond reproach

Sure, and I have a similar view. Show me what we bought for $640M instead of just saying we spent $640M. How many people did we house for that? How many people weren't living on the streets because of it? What kind of conditions were they in? How many nights did we cover? What was average spent per person per night? Is that a reasonable cost? Just complaining about $640M answers none of these things.

You've got an overly simplistic view of government spending if just looking at a dollar amount (which is peanuts in terms of the overall spending of even this one agency) is enough for you to get upset about it.

We're going to need many, many billions from FEMA for this, which comes from a separate budget entirely. If this disaster costs FEMA $50B in relief (probably a way too low estimate), that migrant cost is only 1.3% of the total outlays of just this one storm. But FEMA has already spent over $20B on disaster relief this year so if this storm does end up costing $50B that's really $70B in disaster relief alone along with the several billion in other spending FEMA usually has. So really more like 640M / 75B == <1% of spending.

Arguing that $640M spent on migrant housing efforts is somehow massively impacting FEMA's responses to disasters is just ignoring reality. Its less than 1% of the money FEMA has to spend. Argue you don't think the migrants deserved the housing, but don't act like FEMA's response would have been materially different to any disaster if that money hadn't been spent. Because that's not based in reality at all.

And if you're upset about FEMA's allegedly poor responses to other disasters (not personally claiming either way here to any specific response), what makes you think just throwing more money at those responses would have solved whatever problems were there? I thought we were wanting to argue for the government to give us more bang for our buck not just throw more money at problems without going into deeper analysis of supposed failures. Maybe those issues were underbudgeting, maybe they were management issues, maybe they were issues outside of FEMA entirely.

Having a really big focus on <0.01% of the spending while seemingly ignoring the 99% of the rest of the spending really makes it seem like it's not the amount that troubles you. Arguing <0.01% of spend is going to spend us into a depression really shows how divorced from actually understanding the numbers one is, if the amount is what truly troubles you.

Any amount of government waste is worth talking about to me. But just throwing out an amount and saying it was spent on migrants isn't telling me its waste. Pointing out that half that was spent at a Ritz-Carlton for a dozen migrants would be, but that's probably not the reality of the spend.

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