Was a Deacon at a church that bought a strip mall (fire sale price). They had to pay regular taxes on income from the other businesses. Even the church's own thrift and book sales had to collect and pay sales tax.
Perhaps that church is committing tax fraud?
Perhaps it’s the third-or-fourth-hand story telling.
Likely after having passed through several motivated reasoning filters along the way.
That seems fraudulent.
I was a member of a non-profit org that owned a building and rented out some of it. We paid no taxes on the parts that were used for the non-profit, but owed property taxes on the rental.
The individual agencies collectively spend only around $100b.
Likewise the other large fraction of the total budget outside the DoD is healthcare spending. We spend a huge amount of money and we don't seem to have healthcare outcomes which justify these costs.
Right now 1 out of every 5 dollars of spent GDP comes from the government. 85% of that money comes from individual tax payers and only 7% from businesses. The system is flailing from top to bottom.
Why prefix with "Right now"? It's been roughly 20% since 1975, and only marginally lower for the 25 years before that.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
The other side of that (taxes) has changed much more substantially during that time (lower).
I'm probably just a bit older than you might assume.
> and only marginally lower for the 25 years before that.
Really I was doing a bad job of highlighting this problem:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSGDA188S
> has changed much more substantially during that time (lower).
The burden has shifted /more/ onto individual tax payers and less from business and excise taxes was the particular point I was driving at. It suggests more clearly who actually got those "lower" taxes and why our linked graphs paint a bad future.
Imagine the benefits to defense if the US reduced health care costs from the 2x-3x it spends relative to peers. I've thought that would be an appealing way to sell healthcare reform to Republicans.
It never stood - what facts and reasons have you provided to support it?
Dollars spent on “defense” are dollars we could spend on healthcare, education, infrastructure, housing, the arts and more.
Give me reasons we should spend nearly $1T on our military.
Clinton's cuts were ultimately only temporary, since the military-industrial complex got fat again in the post 9/11 gold rush. A correction is long overdue.
That this isn't really even considered is pretty telling about the real motivations of the current regime.
I'm not sure they have the authority to do this anyway they lack power of the purse and all that.
Why do you think that? I would think the technological advantage the US military currently has doesn’t need more money to maintain, but maybe I’m missing something.
Most of the airframes are in their twilight years. The Navy is in a conundrum... the surface fleet strategy is probably not strategically sound, and we slowed down submarine production at one point so many of those assets are also aging and in need of maintenance.
The Ukraine war is full of learnings that should be driving transformation and investment. Reality is that a rogue billionaire could probably build drones that could threaten strategic military assets in the field. As time goes on, that capability will likely get cheaper and better.
The technological edge is unknown against a near peer.
Any edge has a non-zero maintenance cost.
Adversaries are not going to stop improving their capabilities so any advantage naturally decays.
The US Military directly employs a couple million people.
Our current military industrial complex is highly reliant on free trade agreements with allies.
Probably more by improving how other functions perform and identifying people like a guy I worked with a decade ago who literally slept at his desk all day and never got fired for it (not even a union shop, just supervisors refusing to do their job).
What is that based on? Just suspicion? (At least that honest!)
DoD before the rise of China (and Russia) could afford to cut back. But China is an enormous problem, and an enormous problem of resources.
Wealth drives victory in war more than anything else, except maybe population. Obviously China far exceeds the US and allies in population. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union's economy was (much, I think) smaller than the US, and the Warsaw Pact's was smaller than NATOs. By 2050, with four times the population, if China is only half as wealthy as the US per capita, it would have an economy twice as large. The US has never faced a threat like that.
DoD already cuts and restricts many programs because they can't afford them. For example, the NGAD fighter plane - the next generation fighter plane, a big deal - faces great uncertainty (despite Trump's showboating) because the US can't really afford it. That's just one program of many.
Allies help share the burden, but we are alienating all of them.
> There are a lot of programs that are failing to execute and have for years
Which ones? And programs exist to solve problems - what better ways do you have for solving the problems? The problems don't go away.
> if they're already late then we aren't getting any value from them at this point
We should cancel every late program? Again, what better solutions do you have? Start a new program and lose the progress of the existing one?
Now these are all just words backed by suspicions. Give us some reason to believe!
It's based on the sections of DOD I worked in, with, and had visibility into around me, along with reading GAO reports (there are too many to read them all, but grab a few and you'll see some remarkable waste and failures). At one point I had a job to help a group become more efficient (in context: delivering on time instead of late, delivering on or at least near budget instead of grossly over), what I saw looking under the hood was exactly what I suspected. A small corner of the DOD that was wasting at least 10-20% of their budget every year because of ineffective coordination across teams often over absolutely stupid things, and that was just the parts I studied relevant to my job at the time. I'm extrapolating from that experience and the other information I've seen over the years.
And, importantly, I'm talking about what can be cut before it impacts capabilities and readiness. Somewhere in this range you'll have to do reorganizations and realignments to continue reducing the DOD budget while maintaining capabilities.
If we went back in time 7 or 8 years I could give you a lot better information than that because I was more actively tracking things. Here are a couple reports though that demonstrate the kinds of things I saw at the time:
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106912
I haven't gone over it all but it's not a pretty picture. Most of the projects they examined are delayed by more than a year, some as much as three, and have had median budget increases of $163 million. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. IT procurement in DOD is fundamentally broken, and accounts for billions in wasted spending.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-106749
$1.84 billion spent on modernizing ships that will never sail.
It's possible that some efforts will start, become OBE and abandoned after spending a lot of money (maybe even billions) but this is normal in DOD, rather than extraordinary.
> I'm talking about what can be cut before it impacts capabilities and readiness. Somewhere in this range you'll have to do reorganizations and realignments to continue reducing the DOD budget while maintaining capabilities.
I see evidence of inefficiencies and some failed programs, but in one of the world's largest organizations with the largest budget, inevitably that will happen. For generations, people have railed against and joked about the inefficiency and waste of large bureaucracies, in government, business, etc. I can't think of one that people have called efficient.
I don't see evidence that you or anyone else has a serious way to improve it; nor that having improved it, we should make cuts rather than reap benefits. And I don't see evidence of your claim about capabilities and readiness (and the latter is already pretty low). Just cutting things isn't a serious solution worth addressing - it's not a plan at all. How could the situation seriously be improved?
And let's be realistic: The GOP wants to cut everything in government and will say anything to rationalize it. One method of rationalizing they do is endlessly repeat things until they become a perceived truth - in these cases that Agency X is corrupt and inefficient. DoD is just the latest target.
theyre stocks to the neighbors but not the host
We’re literally torching two billion dollars a day on the military when we’re not at war and not under threat.
(And it's not like partisans are locking up Congress to spite him.)
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defe...
We were in a (physical) proxy war with Russia via Ukraine until very recently, and we are currently in a digital war against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and probably other nation-states.
Should this be under the purview of the actual military? I don't know, although that arrangement is effective for Israel's cybersecurity command.
Regardless, there is an active need for defense spending now, just not the way we've been spending it.
Not according to this administration - they recently ended "cyber operations" against Russia:
https://apnews.com/article/cyber-command-russia-putin-trump-...
So, we're basically going to just let Russia do whatever they want.
Would you just start spending when the war starts? Then you'll get a war much sooner (the enemy will see your weakness) but you'll save money (the war will end quickly).
> not under threat
China, most of all? Russia? Iran?
If the US is weaker militarily, the risk is less and they are more likely to take it.
> War with Canada is what Trump seems to have in mind. Fentanyl is not the only the big lie. That Canada does not really exist is the other. The way that this fiction is formulated is strangely Putinist. Trump's rhetoric about Canada uncannily echoes that of Russian propagandists towards Ukraine. The claim that the country is not real; that its people really want to join us; that the border is an artificial line; that history must lead to annexation... This is all familiar from Putin, as is Trump’s curious ambiguity about a neighbor: they are our brothers, they are also our enemies; they are doing terrible things to us, they also don’t really exist.
> The imperialist rhetoric has to be seen for what it is, which is preparation not just for trade war but for war itself.
The US is preparing for war. It’s not a joke.
/s, of course.