Holy hell, they hired 83,000 people since 2019? Does no one care we are $36T in debt? 40% of our income taxes go to paying just the interest on our debt!
Cutting the people without cutting the programs won't do much and is (IMO) a problem in that you should be able to access government services in a way that the writers of the laws (house/senate) have clearly agreed to. When you're cutting this widely, it's hard to believe you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Spending cuts have to start SOMEWHERE. Saying $24 billion is ignorable is insane. We are in a critical debt situation and my children's future is at stake.
* Social Security
* Medicare
* National Defense
* Interest payments
* Health
* Income Security
* VA Benefits
Which of those categories are we overspending on? Which specific cuts do you want to make? It's impossible for one to claim they're serious about saving money without talking about slashing Social Security, Medicare, and the military, which together make 40% of the budgets, so... which are you in favor of reducing?
When you've cut your budget as far as you can and you're still losing money, the only solution is to make more money. Here, that means taxes, and specifically that we must start taxing the rich. I'm not saying that as some far-left "eat the rich" kind of thing, but as basic arithmetic and economics. We need more revenue, and it has to come from somewhere.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
The American middle and lower class are the least taxed individuals in the developed world. The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.
I'm certainly open to changing how things like dividend income are treated, but the rich don't have enough money to solve our budget problems.
I think your question about what spending to reduce was intended to be rhetorical, but the answer is: everything.
Math and history. One example explainer: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/80552/total-tax...
> The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.
Citation urgently needed. That doesn't jibe with literally any report I've read about such things, except from anti-tax extremist organizations.
I honestly have no idea why you think information about aggregate tax revenue over time is relevant to your original claim. If you want to see the tax rate increased on the upper extremes (like the top 400 mentioned at that link), I would too but it's a drop in the bucket.
> Citation urgently needed. That doesn't jibe with literally any report I've read about such things, except from anti-tax extremist organizations.
From https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/top-personal-income-ta...
The average statutory top personal income tax rate in the EU is 42.8%.
"For comparison, the average combined state and federal top income tax rate for the 50 US states and the District of Columbia lies at 42.14 percent as of January 2025, with rates ranging from 37 percent in states without a state income tax to 50.3 percent in California."
Feel free to call the Tax Foundation an "anti-tax extremist organization" if you'd like, but I wouldn't agree and they are just reporting facts here.
Even if you are a single person in California making $400k/year (which I would call pretty rich!), you are only paying 8.38% of your income in state tax (you don't even hit the 13.3% bracket until a million dollars or so?). In total, you are paying 39.22% of your income in taxes (including federal and payroll). As a baseline, if you are in Texas which doesn't have state income tax, you are paying around 31% for the same income.
Your example of a CA resident who is making $400k is paying a marginal rate of 35% at the federal level and 10.30% at the state level (not 8.38%), which is above the EU average.
That's why poor wind up paying more in flat tax states, it is simply WAI.
Marginal rates don't matter as much as how much you actually pay. On paper, CA has a top rate of 12.3%...on income over 720k dollars. It exists, but it doesn't seem like a thing we should ponder too much.
States only have so much power in setting tax rates, given that people are somewhat mobile. California being overpopulated for so long gave them some latitude here, but honestly income inequality isn't going to be handled at any level below federal.
But the point about Europe is right, but only in the sense that Europeans don't pay nearly as much in income taxes as most Americans think they do.
Why do you say this? Middle class Europeans pay significantly higher taxes than middle class Americans.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-co...
Denmark is the highest at 45%, compared to America's 27%. Switzerland, the only European country I've lived in, is just a hair above the USA at 28/29%. UK is only a few points above that, while France is just below Denmark. So I guess it really depends?
Also, the US has a more progressive federal income tax code than Europe (or every other developed country), so the tax burden in the US is carried more by the upper class than it is in those other countries, resulting in the average middle class American paying significantly lower taxes than a peer in Europe.
You keep comparing the US to Switzerland, which is a giant outlier in Europe and probably the most like the US in many ways (as you pointed out), when you should be comparing it to France, Germany, and all the other larger EU states with a stagnant economy and populations that have gotten substantially poorer relative to the US over the last 20+ years.
Also, because healthcare in the US is such a disaster, we do pay about what many other countries pay for socialized medicine via taxes, and then basically everyone under 65 (aka the people who cost way less to insure) have to pay for it again in the private sector.
If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
> If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
I don't think America would be the same if it did, and I don't think Europeans are pining for "American success" even if you discount our broken healthcare system.
And?
They can afford more, and taxation is a way to reintroduce actual risk of financial ruin for the wealthy. If financial ruin is a good motivator for the rest of us, it should be for them, too.
It's not about percentage, it's about the reality that taxation brings about for you. When you have a net worth that's equal to the entire economic output of a major American city, you can endure massive tax bills because you make enough off of your holdings to equal the average lifetime earnings of dozens of Americans.
There's a reason nearly every developed nation has a VAT.
Other people sign me up to pay for their preferred government services all the time. It's called living in a civilization. And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.
I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?
Unless you're one of the wealthy you're talking about (which would be odd to say the least), no one is asking you to pay for government services for somewhere between dozens to thousands of your fellow citizens who pay approximately $0 federal income tax on average, so it's not the same.
> And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.
Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.
> I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?
Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.
Really? You think I don't pay for services I don't use?
> Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.
Do they? What do they know of the company? If I asked the beneficiary of a pension fund what the company does and where it was headquartered, would they know?
> Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.
It's not far left to want general stability in your society. People with too much money and a government with too much debt are destabilizing forces.
The world is literally filled with examples of how this works, if you'd stop pretending that the current system in the US is working.
The top tax rate perhaps:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IITTRHB
Maybe just a coïncidence that inequality started going up around 1980, when it was cut the most.
The US has the most progressive tax code in the developed world, and the average American has more disposable income than their peers anywhere else on Earth. Why is it that the upper class is the only one that needs to kick in more?
The current firing of government workers is about political alignment, not about cost. Cost is a pretext.
Laying off the bottom 5% presumes that you’re measuring that accurately and that individual workers have control over their productivity, both of which are unlikely to be true - and if you get either wrong, you just incentivized playing political games and shying away from work which is hard, uncertain, or under-weighted by your metrics. Stack ranking almost destroyed the ability of Microsoft and Google to make anything people love, and you can see its cost in the unperformed maintenance work people know won’t juice their metrics.
Similarly, if people are leaving because you have too much work, poor working conditions, don't pay well enough, etc. capping rehiring is just going to make the situation worse.
If you’re not a PE guy looking to juice a company before dumping it, cost cutting has to be a process of understanding and identifying your true goals first. If you’ve truly over-hired, the first lesson to draw is that you have a management problem which you need to deal with first since it will make everything else likely to fail as well.
If your entire org is filled with lazy low performers, then it doesn't matter if productivity and morale is destroyed, because they don't have high productivity or morale in the first place.
This is why we end up with indiscriminate and thoughtless cuts, because the alternative is people who seem to believe that every penny of government spending is absolutely essential the second after the line item is conceived, and the only way to fix any issues that exist is with more spending.
If you wanted to cut things responsibly, you’d plan it in advance and think about how to avoid shocking the economy into a recession.
Absolutely. I in no way support what DOGE is doing.
But when people think cuts are needed (and the majority of Americans seem to think that's the case), and the options are your position that the country would seemingly collapse if a single job was cut and someone who is going to take a figurative chainsaw to the federal budget, don't be surprised when the chainsaw wins due to your refusal to compromise on your unreasonable and largely unpopular position.
If you want to cancel it out, there are many easier ways to do it, including things like more IRS auditing for tax evasion. There’s roughly a 10:1 return rate for enforcement, with an estimated gap of over half a trillion dollars.
A billion here, a billion there, soon it adds up to real money.
These people are irreplaceable. And I know one of these forecasters very well, he's an old friend of mine. He is done with the federal government; even if they offer him his job back he's not going back, because his trust that his job as a meteorologist was safe is smashed to pieces. That's irreparable harm.
All businesses above a certain size do that, because there's no other practical way.
You can be mad about the government spending money on things you believe are unnecessary, and you can even want to fire the people related to that program! But across the board personnel cuts don't fix the appropriations issues and will waste money in inefficiency, waste and loss as the folks that are left have to pick up the pieces.
Does the federal government employ too many people? I dunno, maybe. Do we fund too many programs? Yeah, probably. But these cuts are _fucking insane_.
The Defense part especially seems crazy. Per USASpending.gov [1], last year the federal government spent $9,700,000,000,000. Despite all the talk that Covid budgets were short term event, they never actually went back down. Dropped to $9T in 2022, and then started rising again. Post-Covid surge was $6.6T in 2019, then jumped to $9.1T in 2020. $10.1 in 2021.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
At the same time, post-Covid, the Defense Department budget has been rising at about $100,000,000,000 / yr for the last three years. 2021: $1.1T 2022: $1.2T 2023: $1.3T 2024: $1.4T
(To be fair in comparison though, the largest other single items, Medicare / Social Security, have also been rising fast. 2021: 1.4 / 1.2, 2022: 1.5 / 1.3, 2023: 1.6 / 1.4, 2024: 1.6 / 1.5 )
However, with the DoD, what have we got from that much spending? Incredibly depressing slides from The War on the Rocks like this one about the incomprehensible gap in shipbuilding capacity? A factor of 232x? The US only has 100,000 tons of shipbuilding? That's a single neo-Panamax cargo ship. [1]
[2] https://www.twz.com/alarming-navy-intel-slide-warns-of-china...
Or this one from Military.com, that the government does not know where $151 million of $225 million collected from soldiers for food supplies on garrisons was actually spent. [3] Fort Stewart, 87% of funds redirected. Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, 63% redirected. All but two bases left more than half of the money for food unspent. $225 million doesn't mean almost anything to the government, yet $460 of mandatory / month deduction in paycheck for a Basic Allowance for Subsistence that then goes "somewhere" matters quite a bit to individual soldiers. And the defense budget rose $100B every year for years.
[3] https://www.military.com/daily-news/investigations-and-featu...
Anyways, specific examples of the issues I have with current government spending and the way it's allocated.
Idk why this is a political issue? As a progressive I also support firing people who aren't producing effective outcomes for veterans. With all we save that money SHOULD be used to actually help veterans.
These are decades-old problems that the government refused to address until 2022.
As a follower of Austrian economics, monetary creation by the government most certainly does matter. But this myopic focus on "debt" completely hides the actual separate dynamics like domestic people/institutions parking their savings, foreign entities buying treasuries for longer term stability, or the political martingale of accounting for legislative monetary creation as paper "debt" to the Federal Reserve.
The current cries about government spending are basically aiming at killing the goose that lays golden eggs because some people got frustrated by having to spend some of the proceeds of selling the eggs on the goose's own feed.
If so, how can you claim said debt is meaningless?
This is most certainly not to say that the government could just create an unlimited amount of money and expect there to be no repercussions! Rather the overall point is that it's specious to analyze a government budget in terms of "debt", especially while giving a pass to all of the monetary creation that happens outside of the legislative (loans issued/bought by the Fed).
If the government instead switched to simply printing more money, we'd have runaway inflation, and history tells us what happens next (Weimar Republic).
In short: no, no one cares. Particularly not the guys in the party who are carrying out these cuts.
The main reasons we are, in the year 2025, spending so much on interest, are:
1) A financial crisis that required massive bailouts 2) A pandemic crisis that required massive bailouts 3) Two wars in the Middle East that cost a lot of money 4) Perhaps the most important one here: a steadfast refusal by about half of the country to have a realistic, adult conversation about government revenues since George H.W. Bush said "Read my lips: no new taxes", which solidified the Reagan practice of deficit spending and the belief that any and all private holdings of massive amounts of money were still better than giving that money to the government, regardless of the economic reality.
The VA hospital in your nearest city is a drop in the bucket.
Given that there's been a fairly steady ~2.9M federal employees for a few decades now, 83k isn't that much:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
> Does no one care we are $36T in debt?
The GOP certainly doesn't, given that they keep cutting revenue:
Additionally, I question whether attacking the VA's budget, which in its entirety is less than four percent of government spending, is the place to start looking for efficiencies, especially since nearly three percent of the spending budget is unreported.
There are way, way worse things we could be wasting our money on than providing the decent healthcare we promised our veterans.
> Veteran suicide can be massively helped with psilosibin and ketamine therapy, things that I hope RFK Jr will implement quickly.
This take combined with the immediate cuts at the VA when DOGE opened up are reminiscent of when Trump publicly toyed with putting us all on antidepressants [1]. I'm curious when people who hold the opinions you do just pull the wool off and admit you'd prefer (or just be okay with) us drugged up or dead? Are you afraid someone will judge you for saying you'd rather have a dead veteran than doing what the American people promised to the people who fought their wars?
1: https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-veterans-spr...
Unlike SSRIs which changes brain chemistry and you need to be on it for the rest of your lives, most people suffering from PTSD recover after a single treatment. That's why ketamine and psilsobin therapy is being pushed by everyone who cares about veteran suicides.
Educate yourself.
> most people suffering from PTSD recover after a single treatment.
That is incorrect. Ketamine therapy for PTSD or cPTSD (what most at the VA have) requires years of treatment. Psilocybin therapy is the same; I live in Oregon where we have clinics and practitioners for this stuff. None of those clinics claim that one time treatment will cure you.
I am a veteran and obviously do care about veteran suicide otherwise I wouldn't be calling out this gobbledegook you're spreading on a public forum in lieu of all the various different kinds of work the VA does.
Psilosibin only needs 1-2 treatments and is very long lasting. Same as ketamine, which might need up to 6. Both are nothing compared to SSRIs. You are lying when you say it needs years of treatment.
There is no other way out. "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else." -- Churchill
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...