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Comment by tmikaeld | Hacker News Reader

As an outsider trying to make sense of all this.

Is America taking the hammer down on all types of spending because America is desperate to bring down debt from 120% of GDP?

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Not at all, it's mostly optics. The US DOD spends like $900 BILLION a year, and you don't see DOGE even attempting to touch that money.

adding to this, they can't even pass an internal audit to account for where all that money is going. 7 years in a row they failed an audit.

It has nothing to do with cutting expenses or even optics as other's have said.

It's about power, and how much you can have. This presidency is pushing the limits well past where they are, with the intention they will be reeled back, but not all the way. "Shoot for the moon, you'll land among the stars" strategy.

There isn't enough spending for them to cut the $2 trillion deficit. The federal spending is $6.75 trillion. Discretionary spending is $1.7 trillion, that is most of the departments and all of the military. The rest is entitlement spending that hard to be touched.

The only way to balance budget is to cut taxes, but Trump wants tax cuts.

On your last bullet, I think you mean raise taxes. Is that right?

Yeah, have to raise taxes to balance budget.

Not really. It's about cutting expenses so that he can pass a large tax cut (primarily benefiting corporations and the wealthy). No one is worried about the deficit anymore.

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