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Comment by ahmeneeroe-v2 | Hacker News Reader

How much are you willing to pay for this?

If Congress voted for 50% taxation and could somehow prove to you that it was all going to care for those less fortunate than you, would you be okay with that? 75%? 90%?

What quality of life are you aiming for the recipients? Do they each get a cot in a shelter? Their own room? Their own apartment or house? Do they get it with no strings attached or do they have to try to improve their own lot while the taxpayer helps them?

How long do we want to extend lives for? Surely we all agree on medication and life-saving care for children. Should a 95 year old get hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend their lives for 6 months?

These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.

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> Surely we all agree on medication and life-saving care for children.

That is absolutely not a given. The currently in-power minority earnestly believe that people are only due the level of healthcare they can personally fund and afford, period.

> These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.

Which Americans? There's no grand debate happening right now, just a table-flipping tantrum.

It's a fun exercise to do the chin-stroking thing of asking about efficiency and tax rates and so on, but it's so disconnected from the reality of the federal budget that it's hard to believe it's anything other than a cynical tactic.

Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending, and there are effectively no limits to it. Meanwhile, extremely high-leverage foreign aid (like the HIV-related treatments that have been mentioned) are always first on the chopping block, along with things like school lunches and early childhood education that have been demonstrated to be effectively free in terms of how much spending on remediating bad outcomes later in peoples' lives.

The "grand debate" happened, Americans voted, and now the guy who won is delivering on his campaign promises. Whether you agree with Trump or not, this should not be a surprising outcome. He told us he was going to do this.

>Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending

This is so wildly wrong and easily disproven that I really can't take the rest of what you say seriously.

But he isn't. This isn't framed as a "we need to bring down costs and stop paying for things and that's just going to be hard" initiative. This is framed as a mechanism of eliminating DEI programs.

In the US spending is controlled by Congress. The Congress was voted on by the people. The idea that Trump throwing bombs into the federal budget is democracy but following Congress' passed budget isn't is ridiculous.

The idea you have is nice, but congress doesn't pass real budgets any more. That means that there is a lot more ability to make the money slosh around.

Like it or not, the budgets passed by congress are budgets from the perspective of the constitution.

We are wildly far beyond strict constitutionalism. This has been a trap for conservative causes for a very long time. We are now playing the game the same way the left does: win and govern.

You'll have to excuse me for being mortally terrified of "we are unencumbered by the law and will do whatever we want with power."

Laws have never encumbered humans. We're governed by social norms and those have been destroyed: massive immigration, sexual mutilation of children, and wanton spending of US taxpayer dollars.

This ends with you shooting me in the head.

deeply weird of you to say this.

>This is framed as a mechanism of eliminating DEI programs.

Did we watch the same campaign? Trump absolutely campaigned on ending DEI too. The electorate hates DEI programs. Cutting spending and DEI programs is what got him the popular vote.

Right, but that's not what this order does. People were locked out of Medicaid payment portals today because of this, how is that shutting down DEI? It seems that they really had no idea what they were shutting down with this, order.

Maslow's hierarchy would tend to suggest that when you shut down the trough to progressive leaning aid recipients they and their reps will tend to negotiate away other mere desires. Not saying you should do that, but Trump is transactional and not above using blunt tactics.

Yeah but red states and his own voters are the biggest beneficiaries of Medicaid so...

Their sacrifice is one he's willing to make.

Fox brainwashed viewers hate DEI. 1% (vote margin of win, roughly) electing a person to an office does NOT equal a popular mandate for any particular policy and its silly to claim that the voters hate what you apparently hate.

Keeping thinking this way and keep losing elections.

>> Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending > > This is so wildly wrong and easily disproven that I really can't take the rest of what you say seriously.

sigh

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59729

Defense accounted for $805B out of a total discretionary budget of $1.7T. The next largest category (using the CBO's classifications, not mine) are veteran's benefits @ $131B, and it goes down from there. If you want to quibble with what "overwhelming majority" means, I guess you can do that, but I doubt that's interesting to anyone.

I'll wait for you to 'disprove' the above.

tbc, I am not surprised by any of this (as you say, he was very clear about his intentions), but let's not pretend that there is any policy-specific valence to the outcome of any vote in the current electoral system. People vote as they do for their own (usually terrible, and usually unrelated to policy) reasons, and the people that win get to do what they will with the power bestowed upon them. Insofar as Trump's and Republicans' actions make life for the bottom ~80% harder, don't be surprised as buyers' remorse sets in pretty heavily. And so goes the "debate".

You clearly wrote "non-discretionary". Now I see you meant "discretionary", but even so you're still wrong. It is not even a simple majority.

805/1722 = 0.467

Ah, indeed, I was sloppy in my wording in that prior message.

I should have said is that defense is the largest single category of discretionary spending, by a large margin. The thrust of the point remains.

Okay, addressing the main thrust:

Defense spending is absolutely a priority of this administration. SecDef Hegseth's whole thing is about reorienting the Pentagon back to American defense as the priority. Remember that getting Hegseth confirmed was a major push for the brand new admin.

So spending won't go down but will hopefully be spent more effectively.

"Effective for what?" is always the key question. Various unhinged "proposals" (invading greenland, invading panama, an iron dome-like system to cover basically all of north america to shoot down...whatever Canada and Cuba will launch at us??) suggest nothing other than full funding++, used in dumb ways (which I suppose is better than circa 2002 WoT defense spending?).

Until last November, Hegseth's "whole thing" was being a frat anchor / defense witness for Fox. Talking about him being anything like a serious figure is absurd.

You are ignoring the Veterans Benefit part to skew your numbers. Its 55% when you lump that in. You don't get to simply write that off.

That's a definition of defense spending that no one except you uses, so no I don't have to use your made up definition

I would gladly pay 75% taxes if they went to the right thing.

I’d rather be at the mean income wise in a society with low inequality than in the top percentile of a society that has large inequality. I’ve been both.

I can agree that overspending is not a good thing, but I don’t think the solution is cutting out public programs altogether, I think we should focus on making those programs efficient, eg not making them a charity for multinational corporations that are in great part owned by the very states we consider our “enemies”. Maybe we shouldn’t be lining the pockets of the oil and gas industry, big pharma, etc and instead be lining the pockets of the American people with value through education, opportunity, etc.

What's the right thing? Are you sure that you and I agree on that? Do you and Elon Musk agree? The tax pool is taken from everyone. In practice, I believe you would find a 50% tax distasteful because it's pretty much guaranteed that it's not going to be spent exactly as you direct.

What used to happen before vast income tax regimes and welfare states arose was that people who were wealthy would donate huge amounts of money to charities that did what they thought were the right thing. Even the working class donated 10-20% of their income to charities that did the right thing. The way you guarantee that money is spent on the right thing is by having the power to spend it, which means lower taxes.

What specific time period and location before "vast income tax regimes and welfare states" are you talking about? And who gave money to what?

I'm referring to much of the Western world prior to 1950, and you see this behavior in the middle east today (obviously, they disagree with you about "the right thing"). This is usually enforced socially, by communities and churches.

The social safety net that governments provide today used to be a function of community charities and churches. Even modern healthcare has an analogue here.

Okay campaign on that and let the electorate decide. When you win you can tax all of us at 75% and spend it on "the right thing"

These are questions with long standing answers arrived at iteratively over decades. Should those answers continue to be questioned and iterated upon? Absolutely. Is throwing the baby out with the bathwater all at once while crying "taxes bad!" likely to be an iteration that results in net improvement to American society? Probably not.

These questions have not been answered, that's why Americans just voted for someone who vowed to decrease spending

It's not like we rolled dice to get the spending we had. Decisions were made based on information available. There are detailed explanations available for all sorts of spending.

Refusing to seek that out isn't the same as it not existing.

That's not to say the decisions were perfect, far from it. But thinking we can arrive at better outcomes by just throwing it all away and ignoring all we've learned is the height of insecurity and arrogance, not a sign of strength.

Edit:

> that's why Americans just voted for someone who vowed to decrease spending

The number of people that voted as they did that would switch their vote if only someone would explain where their taxes went in more detail is extremely small.

New information is available, we've incorporated it and decided the spending isn't worth the cost.

We will find a new equilibrium. It will likely not be 0 spending and will hopefully not be the spending regime we have today.

Yep, and we could have gotten there with a lot fewer people being hurt in the process.

In theory, maybe? In reality, no it has never worked before.

I'm sure this what your gut told you. Why don't you explain the plan to the rest of us, using facts. This is a technical site. Last time I checked, 25% of the current debt is caused by the current guy conducting the largest wealth transfer in history from the young to the old. But somehow that translates to "Fed government too big." Try selling that to people that don't read, anyone here can read the CBO reports.

Good point, here are the technical details of the plan:

   1- Campaign on promise of mass deportations and massive cuts to Fed gov 
   2- Win the election 
   3- Begin presidency 
   4- Deliver campaign promises to cut spending & deport illegal immigrants <--*We are here*

It's not more complicated than that.

And somehow politicizing the federal government is cutting spending? When 95% of that spending is the military and two social insurance programs, and most of the debt is caused by a tax cut for the super wealthy? That's just a failure to understand math.

If this is the response to the president cutting free meds for Africa, you really think he has the support to cut healthcare for Americans?

Non Sequitur. You get zero points.

You don't have the data nor the right to claim WHY 1% marginally preferred candidate x to candidate y.

I don't have the right to make a claim on an internet opinion board?

> These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.

No they’re actually not. You made those questions up as absurd examples, and they’re absurd.

Llama! I was wondering when you'd show up. We comment on all the same stories

> would you be okay with that? 75%? 90%?

Why ask about raising individual American taxes while turning a blind eye to Trump gunning at lower corp taxes even more than he already had? And we know it will happen because he gets it done, for America *cough oilarchs*

I would be okay with Trump raising the corporate tax rate, instead of saving some 296 of the largest US companies $240B in taxes between 2018-2021[0]. Though this time should be even more, right? He's going to take it to a whole new level of lowest tax rate for Corporates than "any nation on earth". Can't wait for him to lower the tax burden on Big Corp even more, Those C-suites, investors, have such a hard life scrapping by the way they do. No wonder they can't afford better wages for the workers. Let's keep the tax burden on the middle class where it belongs so we can Make America Great Again.

[0] https://itep.org/corporate-taxes-before-and-after-the-trump-...

These FUD arguments are ridiculous.

Americans are already paying far more in privatised taxation - tribute - to healthcare companies, landlords, fossil fuel companies, and loan sharks of various kinds - than they would pay with higher federal tax rates investing in R&D, infrastructure, education, clean energy, and public health.

There's nothing hypothetical about pointing out that the billionaire economy is massively distorted and extractive, and is caused huge public harm which will literally remain visible for geological timescales.

50% of billionaires wealth? Hell yeah.

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