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There's plenty of waste in the government - that is to say, government spending that doesn't actually accomplish what it's supposed to be doing.
Most of it's in defense, as medicare and SS have fairly strong anti-waste programs already.
All social spending is a waste because we still have poverty.
Medicare and SS are also not (yet) contributing to our massive national debt, so that largest source of spending, which is presently almost completely paid for by payroll taxes and is cutting into pretty much the only surplus the US government has ever meaningfully sustained, is in fact not the cause of our debt.
Social Security spends more than it takes in. Same for Medicare/Medicaid.
The fact is that decades ago, before taxes for the wealthy were cut massively and defense spending was also raised massively, our government could pay for itself just fine. The variables that have changed massively since are taxation on the wealthy and defense spending, and there's no reason to believe we can't fix the problem by fixing those two points.
Revenue as a percentage of GDP has stayed constant. Those tax breaks did not change much because there were a lot of tax deductions before. Either way, changing the tax rate had very little effect on government revenues.
Now, in order to avoid a later catastrophe in Medicare/SS that is not due to lower birth rates but is in fact due to an old and ongoing miscalculation between individual money in and money out, we should also increase the payroll tax. If I recall correctly, increasing the SS payroll cap should fix the program's problems. I'm not sure what increase Medicare would require, though.
Just get rid of the programs. More taxes will not bring in more money as Hauser's Law has shown.