I agree with this. I don’t like how Presidents have grabbed more power for themselves over the years. I posted an article a few weeks ago (I think in a different thread - I’d have to find it) about this.
The fact that foreign aid is a drop in the bucket doesn’t mean all that much to me. I think we need to cut spending where we can - and things benefitting people who aren’t US citizens should be first on the chopping block.
I’m also not in favor of massive tax cuts. I think our system is broken, and needs to be completely re-structured.
I really believe that our national debt is the biggest threat our country faces now, and it needs to be addressed ASAP. We may already be past the tipping point.
If you do care about the deficit, going for the tiny amounts won’t do squat. You have to tackle the big items. They are doing the opposite, going for culture warfare items that don’t add up to anything while going for record deficit spending. They aren’t looking for waste, fraud, or abuse as claimed. I’m not sure the cuts so far will create any savings at all as there will be lots of lawsuits over improper executive power, failure to pay executed contracts, firing people under false pretenses…
It should be remembered that most US aid actually benefits Americans as well. The aid money is largely used to pay for US-sourced products and the administrators of the programs are mostly Americans.
Military aid should be decided based on whether the US has a vested interest in having a country being able to defend itself.
Obviously you’re referring to Israel with your post. The US gains a lot from Israel - they are leaders in medical research, technology advancements, and also give the US a stable presence in an unstable region.
If another country can show the same benefits, I’d have no issues with it.
The answer to “what benefit is there?” Is actually buried in this very issue.
The US$ is the world’s currency reserve. In practice it means you get to enjoy goods and services from around the world. But you don’t have to give them much in return. In practice you get to “pay” for it by handing over pieces of paper of your own design (US bonds) in exchange for their stuff. Using your framework, imagine you could go shopping and instead of using a credit card, you could just pay with slips of paper on which you had written “FA Bucks…1,000”. That would be quite the benefit, I should think.
Sure ya do. But once you notice that you can even pay the interest with more notes…whoopie!
So you may ask, how did the US get such a privileged seat? And there is a simple answer to that. Because you issue the world’s currency reserve. When two nations trade, say Turkey and Chile" each wants to get paid in their own currency. So Turkey has to have “Chile bucks” and Chile has to have some “Turk bucks”. Those are held at the respective national banks. Now it is unwieldy for Turkey to hold slices of very one of the world’s currency. Same for Chile. So instead, they hold US$ and swap those around. Way more efficient, yes?
There are other currencies held of course. And a big issue for China today is they want to become what the US$ is today. Srsly, who wouldn’t
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the whole DOGE thing recently. I have a friend who works for the VA as a mental health professional, and he’s shared some crazy things that are going on with his team.
I agree with most people here, that Musk’s way of doing things is just crazy. I’m just curious as to the overall view here. I firmly believe that the government is horribly inefficient, and that it does need to be overhauled to stop wasting so much money.
Do others here agree with that? Or are there people here who think the government is fine the way it is?
I think there is always room for improvement, but that’s true of any large organization. The myth that the government is uniquely inefficient is nonsense imo.
Many of the functions of government would be vastly more expensive if they were replicated by private companies, simply due to their need to extract profit. You can’t “run the government like a business” because most of its functions aren’t profitable. We pay taxes to get the benefits.
I suspect there is some waste, and some outright fraud. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some money being funneled into some random NSA skunkworks project. I think there should be a good level of transparency in how tax dollars are spent. And there are definitely things that aren’t waste or fraud, but reasonable people might disagree on whether we should be doing them.
But just blindly firing people isn’t the answer, or freezing all credit cards. I don’t know exactly what the right way forward is, but this is a wrong way.
Also, it’s clear their goal isn’t to make things more efficient when their first step was to get rid of the people trying to eliminate the fraud and waste.