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Comment by rainsford | Hacker News Reader

> Turns out all the cuts are only a fraction of a percent of the federal budget.

Looking at it another way, the cuts are actually decreasing overall efficiency since they're cutting things that deliver decent benefits given that they only cost a small fraction of federal spending. Maintaining things like hiking trails and parks is incredibly cheap compared to the benefits they produce in terms of intangibles like well being and related economic activity. The National Parks Service for example helps generate a huge amount of tourism dollars that exceeds their budget several times over.

> It's an ideological purge...

See that's the part I really struggle with. Cratering foreign aid has an obvious ideological component, but who hates hiking trails? Like I'm sure there are a few people who hate the outdoors and a handful of oligarchs who want to privatize everything, but where's the constituency for it?

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Sub out “who hates hiking trails?” and sub in “who hates having popular government programs?”

Answer: people who don’t want constituents to believe that the government can be effective and deliver good services. That’s the ideological component.

“Government bad” is amazing platform to run on because it’s pretty easy to deliver.

Other countries are issuing travel advisories for the US and I know at least two Canadians who have said that not only are they not buying anything made in the US, but everyone they know has declared they will be crossing the border - both because of the danger but also as part of their boycotting the states. Lawful border crossings between the US and Canada have plunged. Canadian tourism is a significant part of the economy, though the effect won't really be felt until summertime.

I don't blame them in the slightest for either.

The tariff situation is a disaster that will only further increase the tax burden and cost of living on the poor and middle class. For rich people, a 30-50% increase in their grocery costs is barely a drop in the bucket of their budget they won't feel beyond getting annoyed.

The low income energy assistance program LIHEAP just got shut down, not even with any notice so states can try to spool up something. If this had happened a month or two ago we'd be seeing news stories about seniors freezing to death in the midwest and northeast. Soon we're going to see hyperthemia stories. In some areas AC isn't a luxury, it's a necessity as much as heating is in the cold winter states, if not more so. You can't "bundle up" from the heat.

For a large swath of America, this will mean people going hungry. And turning to property crime to try to make ends meet....or to get into jail where conditions might really suck, but at least their most basic needs are (kind of) being met.

As an Australian I would avoid any travel to the US at the moment. Especially after reading about the MMA coach who got detained and jailed on entry to the country.

It's one thing to be denied entry and put on a plane back to your original country, entirely another to be put into federal prison for an indefinite amount of time before being sent back.

America clearly doesn't want visitors at the moment.

I think all of the high profile detentions have happened at land borders. For this MMA coach, Renato Subotic, I can't quite tell, he says he was stopped at the border, which could be at an airport, but sounds more like at a land border.

It's a lot easier to put you on a return flight if you're at the airport.

It might be reasonable to consider visiting the US but being sure to arrive by air, and not by land. But it's understandable if you choose to visit somewhere that's more friendly.

It's even easier to send someone back across the land border, surely?

Not if the person isn't a national of either country. At least currently for the US and Mexico and the US and Canada, if a person crosses the land border and is refused entry to the other country, there's no procedure to act as if they never left the first one; it's treated as a new entry, which may likely be refused (having been refused by another country is a risk factor for refusal).

Both countries can't refuse, so one will have to detain.

> Looking at it another way, the cuts are actually decreasing overall efficiency since they're cutting things that deliver decent benefits given that they only cost a small fraction of federal spending.

And especially when they're targeting the IRS. What use is it cutting 1% if you lose 10% of your revenue because you don't have the resources to pursue outright cheats or lawyered-up people.

The IRS makes a huge profit margin on average from audits on the 1%-and-up folks because so many of them are cheating on their taxes.

Even before all this, the IRS was spending most of its auditing resources on auditing the poor - especially people using the earned income credit - and losing thousands of dollars or more on each audit because they either didn't find anything, or it was an inconsequential amount of money.

The IRS cuts are the most obvious ones, since they will clearly end up losing the government far more money than they save. But it would be an interesting, if challenging, project to try to do the same kind of thing with other government agencies. And unlike the IRS, most federal agencies don't generate revenue directly for the government but likely have indirect economic benefits.

National parks generate tourism dollars, funding for science research leads to new advances with economic impact, etc. The "savings" from the cuts assumes the money is being set on fire with no economic benefits, but even if you disregard the obvious direct impacts like federal employees or recipients of federal dollars buying stuff just like everyone else, the impact of the service being provided is almost certainly non-trivial if admittedly harder to measure. Any reasonable approach to efficiency and cost cutting needs to take that into account.

The IRS is political - the Republicans have made cutting (some say eliminating) the IRS a priority for many years now.

> See that's the part I really struggle with. Cratering foreign aid has an obvious ideological component, but who hates hiking trails? Like I'm sure there are a few people who hate the outdoors and a handful of oligarchs who want to privatize everything, but where's the constituency for it?

They don't care about constituency. They could pass these cuts as part of a deal but choose not to specifically because it wouldn't be popular. They are trying to sell national parks to oligarchs.

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