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Comment by enriquec | Hacker News Reader

Who said the problem is solely deficits? I don't think spending should just "scale" with anything and there is empirical evidence that that is a horrible way to run an economy.

You are literally just suggesting we spend more no matter what. Obviously, there is a massive difference in types of spending right? And we have an incredible amount of bad spending. In fact, in places like public education and health, we continue to spend more to get worse outcomes.

You're making large, sweeping generalizations and most of the positions espoused are more political than scientific.

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"Bad spending", according to who?

Conservatively, 20% of the nation's wealth goes to the top 1%. The people who need it the least.

I can buy the argument that we could be more effective with spending, but not with the idea that we need less wealth transfer from rich to poor.

The entire premise is to cut wasteful, corrupt, and ineffective spending. I’m sure nobody will agree with every single line item cut, but generally throwing money away on ineffective and fraudulent spend isn’t contributing to wealth transfer. Putting “bad spending” in quotes like none of the spend being cut is actually bad is disingenuous. If you tax the wealthy and get $100, but 95 of them end up in landing in other wealthy people’s pockets along the way, the people who need it aren’t winning. if you can remove $90 of waste, give the people who need it $20 instead of $5 and spend $5 to grease the wheels, you’ve cut spending 3 fold while transferring more wealth.

Then why are we talking about personnel at all? That's like 3% of spending. The only way to achieve actual savings is to reduce program spending, which isn't even an executive power.

They aren’t just talking about personnel. And I disagree that 3% isn’t meaningful. And cutting workforce isn’t just about saving money on headcount.

What else does it do?

You understand that firing a program manager doesn't de-obligate the spending of the program he managed, right? Because I'm seeing a lot of people online who don't seem to grasp that.

I believe the expectation is that congress will officially deallocate spending that was deemed wasteful. We shall see.

Congress will be lucky if they can patch together a CR and not default on the national debt. Have you seen these guys?

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