it suddenly occurs to me. can you imagine what would happen if we started paying government employees extra for finding ways to save money?
Such a program already exists in the DoD - it's called the IDEA program, if I recall correctly.
Money awards cap at 1K and your idea has to be used by leadership, so suggestions like "These contractors waste money just fire them already and hire cheaper govt employees" might save money but they won't happen.
Corruption in the DoD is at the level of leadership, not the lower levels of the bureaucracy. Sometimes that's 'middle management', but generally it's at the level of Congress dealing with high-ranking officers. I can't speak for other major federal bureaucracies.
And yet as wasteful as the system is, compared to most private firms, it's not substantially worse in comparison. The government pulls ahead substantially on executive salary alone.
and how much of the stimulus ramp up in government spending was in wage hikes that otherwise wouldn't have been? :roll:
Since a good deal of it was corporate tax cuts, there's quite a bit of CEO salary there.
when we get to the 2020's, Medicare, Medicaid, and SS will suck up every single tax dollar.
I don't believe you. Citation or you're making things up. And please make it a better 'citation' than that obviously wrong military spending by GDP chart.
that's nice. what you didn't do was demonstrate any point in US history where we have even come close to generating 24% of our GDP in tax revenues - even under tax rates far higher than they are today.
Your point is a non-sequitur and not necessary. We aren't even close to 20% of our GDP right now. It's clear our tax rates are exceedingly low. But if I had to demonstrate that, I'd point out all the tax evasion and loopholes.
well, when you make it worth millions or billions to spend hundreds of thousands reducing your tax bill - then yeah.
A problem solvable by making it no longer possible to buy laws through campaign contributions and lobbying. Other wealthy nations manage it, why can't we?
the cost of compliance with our tax code is around $431 Billion due to our idiotic decision to have a regime of high rates with high exemptions. squeeze out those hundreds of billions into productive uses by lowering both rates and exemptions to achieve revenue neutrality, and you will see some impressive growth. that's why the Presidents' Bi-Partisan debt reduction commission proposed exactly that.
Indeed - high rates
with no exemptions would be much more efficient, and would actually address our budget problems.
1. you are correct that military spending has risen over the past 10 years.
2. this in no way alters the fact that we are below our historical average.
Since military spending growth has vastly outpaced GDP growth (
I Demand Answers From the Aggregate Demanders ), your previous chart where Military spending as a percentage of GDP
doesn't skyrocket is false. It is bad data.
Your charts are demonstrably wrong. Get a better source.
:lamo you think that the government interfering in the housing market and then delaying a recovery through massive expansion funded by the withdrawal of liquidity from the private market is capitalism?
In a free market, the law is a commodity.
Capitalism
is corporatism. An unrestrained market is a corrupt market.
Check out the first debate with McCain, and I am trying to find an interview where he is asked what he would cut... Obama couldn't come up with anything.
He since tried to cut wasteful DoD spending. Republicans resisted him, but I think he still managed to drop the ABL.
I can see a problem of personal finance. No individual can borrow increasing amounts indefinitely. Governments aren't like that, though. They can borrow as much as they want and raise taxes to pay the debt. If they've spent wisely, GDP will have grown enough to support higher taxes. It's a win-win.
Strictly speaking, so can people, if the debt in each case constitutes wise decisions and the individual doesn't get fired or the like. In practice, nobody who isn't already rich can count on a steady job, so credit is pretty much a bad idea for everything that isn't college tuition (in which case it's only
probably a bad idea).
But that's irrelevant because that's not what the US government is doing with most of its' spending. Most of the government's budget is measured spending for specific results, which is
why most spending is so hard to cut - most federal dollars can be tied directly to someone who actually does need it.
That's also what makes the DoD by far the easiest place to cut - because the money's not going to people, but tax-fat contracting companies.