sxyuan

Executives aren't exactly the ones doing all the manufacturing. If you want to look at employment in manufacturing, the most you can say is that's it's stabilized after the first year of this administration: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUKx

What looks unusual in this graph is that the line usually spikes rapidly during and after a recession. It's not clear what we're in right now, since recessions are declared after the fact, but the slow trend upwards without a declared recession does look like a break from past decades.

I get the frustration. I hope though that the opinion of the people who matter the most - i.e., your friends and family, and not random Internet strangers - will be based on who you are as a person, not on your identity as an American. Don't worry so much about the noise on social media, it's part of what got us into this mess in the first place.

At the same time, there are things you can do besides voting. Maybe you already know or do these things, but just putting it out there... You can call your representatives (and they might actually listen, if you're a Democrat in California), you can donate to candidates in other races if you have the means (there are probably going to be some pretty consequential senate races this year), you can join a protest (peacefully, and especially if you don't have any dependents).... And who knows, maybe none of these things will make a difference in the end, but I think the bottom line is that if you truly care about some of these things that are happening right now in the US, it's better to find ways to act on your convictions than to stay frustrated and fume online.

Just my 2 cents.

Not downvoting, but boy is this off the mark. America was the only country to invoke Article 5 of NATO. America has benefited greatly from brain drain, what you call "funding the world's research". Pharma is something like the 7th or 8th largest export for the US.

Military misadventures in the Middle East, trickle up economics, prioritizing corporate profits over things like low cost healthcare, good jobs, or a solid industrial base... These are all products of American culture and politics, not imposed by any other country.

Russia already suspended their participation in Feb. 2023.

If it's about gathering our thoughts, there's meditation. Or journaling. Or prayer. Some have even claimed that there is an all-powerful being listening to you on the other side with that last one. (One might even call it an intelligence, just not an artificial one.)

There's also talking to a friend. Sure, they could also steer you wrong, but at least they won't be impersonating a therapist, and they won't be doing it to try to please their investors.

A couple of interesting graphs:

Personal spending is up relative to GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DWC7

Household net worth is up relative to GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DWCd

This might be chalked up to population growth, but then again so could increased GDP or government spending.

It sounds like you have a fair bit of pride in the US, and a fair number of grievances as well. Goodness knows there's plenty of grievances to go around, and I can hardly fault you for having pride in your country and desiring to see better days for it.

So, I suppose I'll just hope (against hope) that you're right in your optimism about these changes.

I'm a Canadian expat who's lived in the US for many years, partly for work and partly because of the relationships built up over these years. I can only laugh a little and shake my head at your notion that Canada is authoritarian. I suppose it all depends on how you define freedom, and whose freedom ultimately matters.

Your claims seem to be directly contradicted by the data here: https://www.irs.gov/statistics/irs-budget-and-workforce

According to this, FTEs are down, and operating costs are only up ~30% compared to 2010. Average cost of collection is down.

And consider the decline in audit rate for millionaires from 2010-2019 described here: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-need-to-rebuil...

I guess the onus is now on you to provide support for your claims.

> I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country.

The word "unaccountable" gets thrown around a lot in these discussions. The leaders of these bureaucracies are ultimately appointed by and accountable to the President, who is in turn elected by and accountable to the public. In what sense are they unaccountable?

> Historically, no country in the world would have spent 36% of its budget "taking care of the elderly" because families, churches, and charities served that function, when necessary.

I'm talking about both Social Security (21%) and Medicare (15%). Historically, families were much bigger; you'd have many children who could all pitch in to help take care of their parents. Historically, people also didn't get treated for cancer, heart disease, etc.

Families, churches, and charities still exist, and still can help in this capacity. As a person with gradually aging parents, I fully intend to help my parents however possible, but I'm also glad that society (well, for them, Canadian society) sees fit to provide them some support too. And as a Christian, I'm both happy when I see churches serving the poor and elderly, and happy when I see society agreeing with these Christian values and also collectively striving to serve the poor and elderly.

> Even if you remove all the outright fraud, reasonable people wonder why a healthy, wealthy country should incentive people not to seek work or to have families out of wedlock and become perpetual wards of the state, as the programs (as currently constituted) promote.

If you're talking about welfare traps where government benefits disappear when your income increases over a (fairly low) threshold, disincentivizing extra work or raises, I fully agree that there are changes to be made.

On the other hand, if you think people don't work because they think they can live off government handouts, I'm curious if you've ever tried that, or put yourself in the shoes of someone who has.

> If Medicare can't negotiate costs by law (remember that battle?) the it is hard to bring down prices. If you want to have a good morbid laugh, take a look at the pricing sheet from a hospital one day.

Fully agree on Medicare negotiation. I've seen my fair share of hospital bills, and believe me, I wasn't laughing...

> The political motivation for shrinking the federal government is as American as apple pie.

Only if you pretend that FDR, LBJ, etc. are not "American" (or perhaps, as American as apple pie - but maybe pumpkin?). Yes, there's always been a strain of rugged individualism in American political thought. We'll see where it leads, I guess.

> They don't want to be "pay pigs" for a vast patronage network... Is that so hard to understand?

What's hard to understand is how this (IMO) distorted view of the government has taken hold. The government may be slow at times, may be wasteful at times, but, til now, it's worked. Old people get health care. Social Security checks get cashed. National parks stay open. Science gets funded. Planes stay in the air. The US university system is the envy of the world. And so on.

What hasn't worked is that people's lives haven't really improved that much. Jobs have gotten worse - more part time, more "gig economy". Housing prices have shot up. Health care costs are out of control. Etc. But please, help me draw the line between excess government spending and all of these problems, because I can't seem to see the connection.

People voted for change, and now they're going to get it I guess. Let's see if it's the kind of change they wanted.

Thanks for the response. I think we agree on a fair amount - in particular, I absolutely think Medicare and Medicaid can and should be made more efficient. I'm doubtful, however, that an administration that tries to antagonize its civil servants at every turn and an organization like DOGE is going to do the kinds of things you're suggesting. At the end of the day, I don't efficiency is really even the goal for them.

Regarding insurance companies, I was writing a bit hastily - my train of thought is that providers are able to charge obscene amounts largely because insurance companies pass on these costs to consumers, who have little choice (and only see the result as steadily rising premiums). Meanwhile, these government programs end up paying the same kind of increasing costs to health care providers.

On your first point, I think sibling comment threads already have some good discussion about why it may make sense for spending to keep pace with GDP.

I think you're only half right. Yes, the nominal rate is far from the only thing that determines corporate income tax receipts. But in practice, what you see is that the effective tax rate has been steadily dropping. That is, corporations are more and more profitable, and contributing a smaller and smaller fraction of those profits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...

I don't have time to dig into the history of US corporate tax rates, but two things:

1. The effective corporate tax rate has been decreasing over time. Corporations are enormously profitable, and contributing a smaller and smaller share of those profits over time. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...

2. The corporate tax rate was cut by the last Trump administration in 2017, which also removed tax brackets and made the rate uniform. So even the nominal rate hasn't been flat.

But at the end of the day, I actually agree with you. There are other ways to raise revenue, and the US needs to decide if it wants to pay to support its old people, its poor people, and its military. Right now, it seems like the answer is trending towards "no".

I have the same concerns as you regarding the constitutionality of everything that's been going on. The thing is, the judicial branch interprets the constitution, and while the Supreme Court likes to maintain a pretense of cold impartiality, in practice they try not to run too far out of step with popular opinion.

Which is to say, the opinion of your old high school classmate matters, for better or for worse. And I'd like to believe that our conversations matter, in so far as we can talk civilly with each other, and perhaps, just perhaps, change each others' views over time. We need to reverse this trend of shouting at each other over the Internet and hating "the other side" that we've been on for the past 10, 20 years. Our democracy depends on it.

1. Agreed.

2/3. Then perhaps the US should elect representatives who will expand Medicare to more people. (Or go back in time and get the public option added back to Obamacare.) Unfortunately, instead we have an increasing number of people using Medicare Advantage, essentially a private wrapper around a public insurance plan, which costs taxpayers 22% more per participant.

4. Are we looking at the same graph? The ratio is almost half of what it was in the '70s. The economy has grown substantially; corporate tax contributions, not so much.

I agree with your sentiment that we should talk about what spending achieves and not just the dollar amounts. Hopefully, now that a lot of things are being cut, more people will appreciate what the government has been quietly providing for us all this time. I just hope that the rebuilding won't be as slow and painful as I fear it will be.

See my third point. :)

Article from 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/upshot/medicare-advantage...

In short, yes there's fraud, yes it's a problem, and the biggest offenders are probably insurance companies. This shouldn't surprise anyone who has dealt with the US health insurance scam, er, I mean system.

P.S. To clarify for others who may not bother to click into the links, the parent post mentions the social security administration but the numbers and sources are specifically referring to Medicare, which is what I'm responding to.

1. I actually mostly agree with you (and the other reply that said something along the same lines). IMO, the debt situation isn't great, and it's getting worse. Bringing down spending as a percentage of GDP doesn't necessarily require trimming the budget, though - it could also be done by keeping the budget flat and letting GDP growth catch up.

2. Personally, I'm not opposed to trimming defense spending. However, how do we square that with the current security environment (an increasingly antagonistic Russia, China, etc.) and the fact that defense spending is also essentially a domestic jobs program?

4. The share that corporations have been paying has been falling over time. I'm not saying we should stick it to rich people - but what about making corporate taxes more in line with what they've paid in the past, instead of having employees (those same consumers you're talking about) pick up the slack?

Thank you for responding. I'm glad we agreed in principle on #3. I'm afraid we'll have to disagree on the other points though:

1. The claim that spending / GDP is at WWII levels is simply wrong: please take a look at the link in my original comment.

2. 9% isn't nothing, agreed. It does, however, pay for: scientific and other research (mostly medical, then much smaller slice for general science, then a much much smaller slice for everything else); keeping national parks running smoothly; keeping planes in the air; shutting down financial scams; and other wonderful things like that. Like you said, it comes down to what we get for that spending. I think there's bound to be some waste here and there, but I rather like all these things our tax dollars are paying for. Oh, and funny you mention USAID - I rather like the idea of feeding starving children around the world too, with a triple whammy of moral impact, winning hearts and minds in other countries, and putting money into the pockets of US farmers. Would love to hear properly sourced arguments on why USAID is as terrible as you seem to think it is.

4. You forgot about the shareholders. Corporations mostly get taxed on profits, not revenues, so it's hard to see how consumers are part of the equation. (We're not talking about consumption taxes, which tend to be state level anyway.) And employees pay income tax - the only part that the corporation covers is the employer end of payroll taxes. Wikipedia has a nice breakdown and comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax

(Yay, thanks to whoever saved the parent post so my thumb exercise wasn't entirely wasted.)

I agree. I actually typed up a whole response to that post (which I vehemently disagreed with, but appreciated nonetheless) but by the time I hit submit it was already dead. Vouching wasn't enough to bring it back. I understand the temperature is running hot, but I hope that at least on HN we can strive to have civil discussions about these issues. I say this even though I am personally quite distraught about the current state of affairs.

Y'all, original poster here - please don't downvote or flag kill responses to this that are good-faith attempts to discuss the issue, even if the response seems misinformed to you. I don't think anyone will change their minds when that happens.

For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread):

1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]

2. Federal spending largely falls into a few categories: taking care of the elderly (36%), defense and veterans (20%), taking care of the poor or disabled (22%), and interest on existing debt (13%). [2] This adds up to 91% of the budget. The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how?

3. The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if you include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?

4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DUdb

You really think that reducing IRS funding will reduce audits on the bottom 80%, and not the top 20%? If you're going to go around telling people they've been gaslit (using a straw man, I might add), you might want to check your own biases first.

Thanks for the discussion, and for agreeing to not let partisanship get in the way. This will be my last reply in this thread, but I'll still check back and read your reply if you'd like to get in the last word.

> I find it funny to say "appeal to the authority of courts", when in fact the court are the authority.

You're taking my words out of context and omitting a critical "future". My point is threefold:

(1) Courts are already issuing injunctions (e.g., [1]) and in at least one case having to double down because the administration is failing to comply with an earlier injunction [2], which indicates which way they are leaning.

(2) Because the courts haven't made any sort of final ruling yet, there's no way to appeal to their present authority (apart from 1), and trying to appeal to their future authority is rather silly.

(3) The courts are indeed the authority, but relying on being able to say "the courts said so" is still a fallacious appeal to authority [3]. We should respect the courts and what judges have to say, but we can also analyze their thought processes critically. We also know that even the Supreme Court has been egregiously wrong in the past (e.g., [4]), never mind lower courts. (Yes, I know this applies to my first point, which is why there are the second and third points. :))

All this to say, you're dodging my question of how DOGE defunding these agencies could possibly be constitutional.

> Every change the government tries to do is a long, drawn out and politically damaging...

I'm not sure what point you were trying to make here. So let me tell you where I think we agree. I agree that Congress has been shamefully dysfunctional for the past, oh, 15 years. I agree there's waste in the government - certainly in the DoD. I agree Trump was elected because the people wants something different. And I agree, the framers would be horrified at the current state of Congress.

Where we disagree is that I see the current administration making the worst assault on the American democratic system since perhaps 1861, with DOGE being the tip of the spear. I too want a more effective, less wasteful, less deadlocked government. But not an autocratic one. The great danger is that autocracy is appealing precisely because it can appear at first to be more efficient, more decisive, cutting through all that democratic nonsense. Never ends well, though.

Sure, we can hope the courts settle these debates. Curious, though, why Vice President Vance and Elon Musk feel the need to already start laying the groundwork for ignoring court orders. [5][6]

> And presumably once we move to budget surpluses...

Thanks for giving me a laugh (not really, I'm still feeling quite grim). Last year's deficit was $1.8T. Tack on some tax cuts and we're looking at $2T or more this year before spending cuts.

> Where does the $2T come from?

That's what Musk was promising, wasn't it? It's also the size of the current deficit. Apologies if I was being confusing there - I was referring to the promised spending cuts, not the size of the anticipated tax cut. I hope you'll agree that if Trump cuts taxes by $300B and cuts spending by, say, $500B, that's not a meaningful dent in the deficit.

Anyway, time for closing arguments - I'd like to think these as fact-based arguments, but you'll probably accuse me of only offering opinions regardless. :)

- Shutting off funding to agencies established by Congress, where the money has already been appropriated by Congress, is unlawful. There have been multiple injunctions against Trump and DOGE, and they are already floating the idea of defying court orders. It remains to be seen how judges rule in the end, but the law and the constitution are there for all to read; I've made my arguments, but I've yet to hear yours (besides "I don't agree").

- US federal spending has hovered around 20% of GDP since ~1975 (see my original post). Running a persistent and growing deficit is not great (just my opinion - some economists think it's fine) but it's not a five-alarm fire that justifies unconstitutional actions.

- Letting unvetted members of Musk's circle get access to sensitive code and data carries a lot of risks that are neither justified by their goals (see previous point) nor by their current results.

- Based on the top-level breakdown of the federal budget, it's hard to see how this administration can turn a budget surplus without raising taxes, never mind if they go through with cutting taxes. Defense, health, and "everything else" as I mentioned adds up to 38%, or about $2.6T. If you think we can dial defense spending down to $0...

At the end of the day, honestly, I hope I'm wrong, and history proves you right. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

[1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/court-filings/state-of...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.rid.589...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford

[5] https://x.com/JDVance/status/1888607143030391287

[6] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888403715767337282

$8M is across the entire executive branch: https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=9820ddd102202d0a46b...

USAID only spent 24,000: https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=7d6ee070efa2439992b...

Please stop repeating misinformation. For your own sake, and for the sake of those around you, please also consider where you're getting information from.

As I said in the beginning, "feel free to disagree", so thanks for taking me up on that. As for coming across as one-sided, I didn't feel the need to represent both sides - I don't think I can fairly represent your point of view, and that's the value in having a discussion after all. However, I disagree with your implication that my viewpoint is partisan. Truth is neither Democratic nor Republican. If the facts line up on one side, then perhaps one side is right on a particular issue (while they could still be wrong on another issue). Again, feel free to disagree about what the facts are, but let's not make this about partisanship.

As to your response, I'll try to describe your points and then reply. Let me know if I mischaracterized anything you said.

1. Spending cuts shouldn't necessarily be a small-d democratic exercise.

Yes, they should. I am well aware that the President is the chief of the executive branch and its agencies. On the other hand, these agencies are also established by laws passed by Congress (e.g., the Department of Education was established by a 1979 law [1]). Sure, judges can rule on the division of powers; judges can also issue injunctions to halt what the administration is trying to do, until it has had time to consider its rulings. In the meantime, DOGE is still in government servers, and it's not even clear to me if DOGE will always follow court orders.

And for the purposes of discussion, instead of solely appealing to the future authority of the courts, we can also reason about what happens if all of this is deemed constitutional. If Congress can establish agencies, through laws signed by the Nth president, but the N+1-th president can simply ignore Congress and tell the agency to cease and desist... what exactly is the role of Congress?

And pray tell, why can't spending cuts be a democratic exercise? Trump is a democratically elected president with a House and Senate controlled by his own party. He can absolutely pass spending cuts that are agreed to by Congress, especially given that no congress member in the Republican party seems to have any backbone to stand up against President Trump. Here's my answer: it will be long, drawn out, and politically damaging, because too many people will have a chance to realize what these spending cuts are really taking away. Trump, Musk, and the crew are trying to pull a fast one on the American people, and this kind of anti-democratic maneuver is exactly what the framers were worried about when they wrote the Constitution in the first place.

2. DOGE wants to cut 1B or 10B times 100.

Umm, okay, good luck. Here's a breakdown of YTD US federal spending according to treasury.gov [2]: - Social security (21%) - National defense (15%) - Health (14%) - Net interest (13%) - Medicare (13%) - Income security, i.e., various financial assistance programs for the poor (9%) - Veteran benefits and services (6%) - Everything else (9%)

Cut "everything else", and that's ~600B off the budget. Great. See A1 in my original post: that's not going to pay for the tax cut Trump wants. And what do you give up? All science funding? All "education, training, employment, and social services"? (All while AI might start to displace more and more jobs?)

Or should we cut one of the other items? Sure, let's hear some proposals. My original point was, there's a cost-benefit analysis to be made, and DOGE is circumventing that cost-benefit discussion completely undemocratically. Spending 10B or even 100B isn't "too much" or "too little" unless we know what we're buying.

3. You can cut taxes and still trim the deficit.

Sure, please do the math and show me how this is going to happen. Where are $2T in spending cuts going to come from? I can reduce power usage in a datacenter by 50% by randomly unplugging half the machines, but I'm pretty sure that will get me fired. Show me what you think should be cut, and we can have a discussion. And again, why can't this go through a Republican- (and in reality, Trump-) controlled Congress?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Education_Organi... [2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Here's my attempt at contributing something meaningful to this discussion, since I'm tired of seeing the same kinds of responses to these threads over and over again. Feel free to disagree, the idea is to try to move the conversation past knee-jerk reactions.

This is an FAQ of sorts.

Q1: What's wrong with making the government more efficient? My tax dollars are being wasted by Agency X, spending billions of dollars a year on who knows what.

A1: There's nothing wrong with making the government more efficient, but (1) there are good and bad ways of cutting spending (and DOGE, IMO, is really bad), (2) the federal budget is massive [1], 1B or even 10B USD is practically peanuts, so a real cost-benefit analysis is critical while knee-jerk "that's too much money" reactions are usually short-sighted, and (3) the Trump administration is planning to spend FAR MORE on massive tax cuts - a government that's serious about reducing the deficit would not spend 5-10 trillion USD on tax cuts.

Q2: What's wrong with how DOGE is trying to cut spending? Government is filled with red tape, and they're taking a hacker approach to circumvent the things that prevented past governments from fixing things.

A2: Any time a large group of people need to agree on something, it takes time. Small-d democratic governance doesn't prioritize getting things done quickly in normal times, it prioritizes reaching consensus and respecting individual liberties. Occasionally war-time governments will temporarily suspend normal procedures (and rights), but there's good reason why things (mostly) go back to normal after the war ends. And whatever you may be seeing in your news feeds, America is NOT AT WAR.

A2 (pt. 2): The HN community usually (and rightly, IMO) gets very upset and concerned when companies or the government infringe on our privacy. The situation this article brings to light seems analogous to a big tech company bringing in consultants who are later found to have cybercriminal connections, without any safeguards or auditing around access of employee or user data. If that happened, there would be a huge uproar.

A2 (pt. 3): Except, it's worse, because the government is not the same as any old company. The US government was designed with checks and balances precisely to avoid concentrating too much power in the hands of any individual, including the president. Remember, America was establishing a democracy in a time when most countries were monarchies - a monarchical president was something the framers desperately wanted to avoid. There's too much to get into here, but this ongoing story is not just about privacy/security, but also about breaking legal and constitutional safeguards.

Q3: You admit that the federal budget is massive, so it's obvious that it's spending too much money. Sometimes it's hard to fix an old system with lots of parts - we need a ground-up rewrite! Cut first, then add spending back later - what's wrong with that?

A3: What's wrong with that is that people will get hurt. Ordinary people (no, not "woke leftists" - they're real people) will lose their jobs. People who were getting HIV treatment will stop getting treatment. Poor children will lose school lunches. And on it goes. To play along with the analogy, even if you think the only option is a ground-up rewrite, you don't run around the data center unplugging machines that you don't like. But that's also buying into a false premise. The federal budget as a percentage of GDP really hasn't grown all that much [2], and a huge part of that spending is on things that are really hard to cut (because most people don't want to cut it): social security, Medicare, defense.

Q4: Well, tax cuts aren't spending, it's just giving money back to the people! It's too bad you want the US government to spend so much, but that's my tax dollars you're talking about.

A4: Well, unfortunately, we live in a society, one that has historically agreed through democratic processes to care for its elderly, (sometimes) its sick or disabled, and (occasionally) its poor, because our ancestors wisely realized that those are elements of a stable societ where its people can flourish. Feel free to disagree.

Q5: Why report on the identities of these young people? And what's wrong with being young - many startup founders are college dropouts, right?

A5: Founding a startup isn't the same as running a mature company, and even running a mature company isn't necessarily the best preparation for civil service IMO. Youth has its advantages - fearlessness, energy - but wisdom comes with age. On the other hand, youth are impressionable, and can be easily led (or rather, misled) into doing illegal and/or immoral things. That's a pattern we've seen throughout history, and I see no reason to believe that the folks at DOGE are any different. As for making their names and identities public, they were the ones who made the decision to participate in actions that affect millions of people. Anonymity is for Internet commentators, not for supposed public servants cutting off funding to aid workers or scientists (you know, the actual public servants).

Q6: Why is this on Hacker News?

A6: See A2, pt. 2. There's no surprise that a news about hackers in on Hacker News. Also, should Elon Musk only be on Hacker News when it's about Tesla or SpaceX, and not when he's off trying to shut off funding to half the government? If you agree with him, fine - let's have a discussion. Don't flag kill everything that's reporting on what might be one of the most consequential events of this century. (Thanks for giving this a chance, dang.)

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

Addendum: Friend, consider reading more substantial reporting on the allegations you led with. Here's a gift link that should get you past the paywall: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/elon-mu...

> Save the Children ... will advance the survival and the health of women, mothers, newborns, and children worldwide.

> The entire premise of a limited republican government is based upon limiting the coercion of the state.

> We should not be voting away property for special causes or partisan journalists.

> If we recall history, the issues around 1776 were in response to an unaccountable parliament taxing colonists without adequate representation.

You're equating taxation with coercion, to justify unelected, unappointed individuals forcibly changing how taxes are spent. Then somehow trying to make a connection to taxation without representation. When, in reality, the spending was made through representation, and this reversal of spending is being made without it. Look, just because you happen to agree with the autocrats doesn't make them any less autocratic.

I believe we can and we should "vote away property for special interests" like providing basic care for mothers and babies who might otherwise die, and therefore have no chance to experience either life or liberty. You're free to disagree on the "should", and we can have civil debate on that resolved through democratic means. But if you disagree on the "can", I'm afraid that's just authoritarianism cloaked in the guise of libertarianism.

Keep in mind that total US foreign aid has been less than 1.5% of the total federal budget going at least as far back as the year 2000. [1]

Since you bring up western liberalism and accuse me of illiteracy, I'll wrap up by quoting none other than J.S. Mill himself:

"Governments and nations have made mistakes in other things, which are not denied to be fit subjects for the exercise of authority: they have laid on bad taxes, made unjust wars. Ought we therefore to lay on no taxes, and, under whatever provocation, make no wars? Men, and governments, must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life." [2]

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/06/what-the-... [2] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm

I would appreciate sources for the first point, to know what precisely you're referring to. In any case, the idea that there is waste and fraud in the government is, I would think, common knowledge. Fighting this is a necessary, admirable, but never-ending battle. Greed has been with us forever. For the better part of the last 160 years, however, America has done this in generally peaceful and democratic ways, with elected leaders passing laws through Congress and delegating power to civil servants. I'm curious if anyone can think of an example where such a small group of unelected, unappointed individuals had such sweeping powers. It seems like technology has had a role in enabling this concentration of power, even as it's been an equalizer in other ways.

As to your second point, I think you're using a rather odd definition of what is political. Anything that requires agreement or compromise between a group of individuals involves politics, whether the context is your work, your neighborhood, or your government. In that sense, "reducing state power" is absolutely political. It took political agreement for the government to do new things, and it should take political agreement for the government to stop doing those things.

There's nothing inherently bad about politics, if we define it this way. I would also disagree that the current environment is hyper-political. We're free to do plenty of things without needing political agreement.

On the other hand, I would agree that the current environment is hyper-partisan. I think we do often judge one another these days based on political (really, party) affiliation, and let everything be tainted by those tribal instincts. I find that unfortunate, but partisanship has little to do with the size of government. Whether one wants change or the status quo, every option should involve politics. The only way out is to live in an autocracy, and history has shown that even then, you're not really free of politics for very long.

Last substantial discussion, on Day 5: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933219

Day 7, morning: https://www.crisesnotes.com/day-seven-of-the-trump-musk-trea...

This ongoing story is in a sense about hackers gaining access to an ancient mainframe that controls trillions of dollars of payments a year, and using that to wield political power. A rather "Hacker News" story if you ask me, even if it comes across as an "are we the baddies" moment.