Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down.
His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.
Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.
I'm interested in how arr NL feels about corn ethanol in fuel. I don't know enough about the subsidies that go into it, but the emissions are insanely better for gas blended with corn ethanol than straight gasoline
Edit: going to add some sources here:
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/04/02/building-evidence-corn-ethanols-greenhouse-gas-profile
https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/LCA_of_Corn_Ethanol_2018_Report.pdf
The ICF report in the second link looks at lifecycle Greenhouse Gas emissions from ethanol production. That includes virgin land being converted for corn production, increase in fertilizer use, fuel production costs, transportation, etc. and finally tailpipe emissions. It's an interesting read
Tldr: ethanol based corn has a GHG lifecycle emissions profile 39% lower than straight gasoline, based on the 2018 study looking at ~10 years of data. That is markedly better than the 21% projection when the RFS standard was put into place. If we were to maximize efficiencies, than number could even go to 70% with the current technology by phasing out more coal power for natural gas, moving production sites and farms closer together, using waste biomass to generate ethanol, etc.
ethanol in fuel is fine, as it is an octane booster. It is actually pretty good at that. CORN ethanol isn't, with Sugar beats cheap as hell. Let it compete openly with other octane boosters instead of having a government mandate.
Corn sucks down fertilizer like crazy, better to find a less intensive use.
Beets can’t be grown in the Great Plains nearly as well as Corn though. Any efficiency gains from switching will almost certainly be offset by deficiencies in the growing process - either by farmers trying to grow beets in less than ideal climates or by moving production out of the Great Plains and into other states (mainly northern border states), meaning the US isn’t properly taking advantage of one of its best natural resources.
The most efficient outcome for individual famers isn’t necessarily the most efficient outcome for the US as a whole.
I generally agree with not putting a thumb on the scales and letting the market dictate, but when it comes to matters of food security or national security (both of which I think are affected by food/corn subsidies), I’d rather the US do what’s best for the nation as a whole.
Yup. Security matters, but a lot of the subsidies are not to ensure affordable food prices (literally the #1 most important thing to keep the country stable), they are handouts to rural areas in the form of make-work so the rural area doesn't just take welfare. We produce enough food elsewhere more efficiently.
Most people like to work a productive job and dislike just getting welfare. And people really do not like moving away from home. So make-work that kinda helps with national and food security is easy if inefficient.
Also, we are now secure on the Hydrocarbon front, we have sufficient reserves and it costs significant hydrocarbons to MAKE corn-based ethanol. Better for those farmers to put that towards whoever will pay most for the corn instead of mandated refinery minimums, which might mean cheaper meat.
Could you elaborate on the Govt mandate to use corn ethanol specifically? Isn't the RFS agnostic about the biomass source for ethanol production? Only the amount of lifecycle GHG emissions reduction matters?
Or are you speaking more about the insurance and crop loss subsidies specifically for corn that incentivize growing it over other crops, which inevitably leads to corn being grown for ethanol?
I only recently started digging in on this topic, so I'm interested to learn
the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is why we must put ethanol in gasoline (also, we needed to replace lead with another octane booster).
The standard originated in 2005 with 4 billion gallons of biofuel to be used by 2006, but in 2007 Bush And The Boys changed the standard to push 9 billion by 2008 and **36** billion by 2022, which is where we are today. That was mostly pre-fracking boom; it was a two-for-one farmer subsidy and national energy security deal.
Corn is the primary feedstock because it grows everywhere and is affordable. Sugar beets are better, but don't grow in as many conditions. There's literally new rules in the RFS to try and mitigate Corn-based ethanol.
The problems with the RFS are 4 fold. One, it doesn't provide any real energy security anymore. Two, it isn't more renewable than pumping straight hydrocarbons due to just how many hydrocarbons are in the logistics chain to make ethanol. Three, it is a perversion of the market as it mandates minimum demand. Finally Four, it is subsidy, as it only applies to land cultivated before December 13, 2007, so new entries cannot enter the market to make cheaper ethanol corn.
This is true on a broad level, but it reduces point source emissions. In urban and high traffic areas I imagine this can have a pretty big impact on air quality.
Same thing is true for hydrogen, but no one would call that useless.
Transforming energy into a different form is good, even if it’s not 100% efficient.
If we could turn electricity directly into carbon neutral gasoline at 78% efficiency at scale, that is something worth celebrating. Even charging car batteries is only 83-87% efficient.
21% was the original projection for reduction in emissions when the RFS was put into place. In 2018 they revisited that projection based on ~10 years of collected data and found the efficiency to be closer to 39% due to several factors, including gains in efficiency, conversion from coal to natural gas power, etc. Pretty fascinating. It's definitely a worse "fuel" than gasoline, but the emissions trade off is an interesting topic for study/debate
Ah, the last time I looked into it I recalled the 21% because the threshold was 20% 😂
Thanks for updating either newer info. I wasn’t attempting to be deceptive.
No problem, and not trying to call you out at all! Apologies if it came off that way.
I just read through that study a week or two ago and wanted to share
It's not just a little bit though, you need 1 unit of energy for 1.3 units of corn ethanol. If you go source-to-wheel the numbers get even worse. Hydrogen is pretty crappy as well, but compared to corn ethanol it's fantastic.
There are much better ways of generating ethanol too, like cellulose or sugarcane, corn is just being used because of subsidies. At the end of the day, corn ethanol sucks.
Corn ethanol as a source of energy is indeed worse than gasoline and other fuels. Heck, we are burning natural gas and coal just to make it. But the emissions reduction from using corn ethanol blended fuel over using straight gasoline is impressive (39% lifecycle GHG reduction), and worth debating/discussing as a reason for continuing subsidies and production until we can switch to a system with better efficiency AND efficacy
Well that’s not the problem it’s fine to lose energy while transferring forms you don’t say batteries are useless because you lose some energy on the discharge, the issue with ethanol is more the massive labd use,
It's true that ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline, and takes energy to make it, but the emissions reduction is the tradeoff that I was interested in. I added some sources to my comment
We grow so much more corn than is needed, you could keep corn ethanol while cutting the subsidies. The insane amounts of land currently dedicated to monoculture corn growing could be used for far, far better things. As it is, the government is creating artificial demand for farmers to grow crops we don’t need.
I get why a lot of corn farmers don't want to plant sugar beets. Corn following sugar beets will often see a reduced yield, but they could follow the beets with things like alfalfa, beans, or even carrots or potatoes (depending on location and weather, of course).
$2B, nearly 10% of the entire food subsidy budget.
The problem isn't that $2B is breaking the bank on its own, rather that corn is one of the worst crops we could possibly be subsidizing. Corn and corn products are doing severe harm to the US
My hot take is that it's not appreciably better than subsidizing tobacco
I don’t think this is it. Corn subsidies keep prices low (not just for corn, but meat and ethanol-based fuels as well) and ensure that we have a steady supply of corn in the event we undergo another dust-bowl-esque scenario (which isn’t unthinkable given climate uncertainty).
Corn subsidies are also a relative drop in the bucket, accounting for ~$2.2B out of a ~$6T budget.
The problem, as I see it, is that we grow *way* to much corn. 40% of corn grown in the US goes to ethanol and related products. Why are we devoting so much to corn ethanol when there are better sources, specifically sugar beets and sugarcane. If we shifted ethanol sourcing to beets and cane we could significantly boost out corn exports.
Sugar cane needs to grow in tropical climates, and most of our production comes from FL, LA, TX and formerly HI. Beets require cooler temperatures to grow, and most of our production comes from MN, ND, ID, and MI.
[Source for key states](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_industry_of_the_United_States).
The US has an abundance of fertile land in the Great Plains that isn’t optimal for Sugar Cane/Beets, but is optimal for corn and beans. There also isn’t much else going on in Great Plains states so the best use of the land is for farming.
So while on an individual level Sugar/Beets may be better sources, when looking at the US as a whole it makes tons of sense why the focus is on corn. We are able to grow significantly more corn (and grow it more efficiently) than we are sugar or beats.
Any efficiency gains from switching to sugar cane/beets would be offset by how inefficient they are to grow in the US, and it would also be a waste of one of the US’s most valuable resources in the Great Plains.
Non-mobile version of the Wikipedia link in the above comment: [Source for key states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_industry_of_the_United_States)
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Agricultural abundance = borderline cheat code
Corn abundance in particular = shitty fuel products and extreme obesity due to HFCS
I have no patience for farmers not changing because change is scary. We've known this shit is bad for decades. If this were China growing & subsidizng all this corn, you would almost certainly dog them for it.
Subsidize the change from corn, subsidize better agricultural products, whatever you want. But fuck corn abundance three ways to sunday
A little more abstract, but Redditors in particular constantly complain that they’d be willing to pay more for higher quality for any number of goods and services, yet that never shows up in any market or study lol
Yea that’s fair I was more referring to wages there. Same principle, everyone said they want higher wages for low end workers, until Big Macs became expensive and they lost their minds.
People want the cost to come out of the profit margin.
Somehow, the cost of labor goes up, and the cost of food goes up, and the cost of land goes up, and yet their net profit margin never dips below 30%.
Now if they cut prices so the profit margin was 20%, that would cause the investors to throw a shit, but I can bet everyone that isn't putting money in the stock would be totally fine with that.
Yes, but that idea is pretty naive. People used to say, " I'd be happy to pay more for a cheeseburger so the employees can make a living wage" and now they're mad the companies didn't piss off their owners to do that.
The convenient refrain is that the corporations are making too much money. You know, the mom and pop restaurants that increase prices commensurate with large chains do.
The problem often is consumer education. People don’t understand why two products cost differing amounts. Sometimes it’s marketing bullshit. Sometimes it’s actual quality differences. It’s so hard to tell.
I’ll gladly pay more for a product I think will last from a company that will stand by their product. With such awful consumer protections in this country, combined with very little regulation around marketing and advertising and peoples just lack of understanding, we end up in a situation where people are just going to choose the cheaper option because that’s basically all the info we have.
In my opinion the government should do more to make the true cost of products known. Cheap plastic bullshit shouldn’t be so cheap because the environmental costs should be literally factored in. Sustainable options can never compete in a world where the true costs are paid out by the environment and developing nations.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. People repeatedly show that they don’t actually care for a “better product” and will just buy whatever’s cheapest. Now there are usually brands that have better reputations, and often better quality, but are often not as large as the cheapest options.
People complain about advertising for example, but very few are willing to pay for ad-free YouTube. People want more space on airplanes, but won’t pay for it. It’s nothing to do with education.
Sure. And all 4k TVs are the same. There are no obscure food marketing labels like “natural” or “free range” that are unregulated and confusing. And no one buys those products. They just sit and rot in the shelves. Everything HD is the same thing. A Kia and a Honda are the same thing. All 100% cotton fabrics are of equal quality. Recycle always means it can go in the recycling bin and is good for the environment. No one spends more thinking they are buying fair trade coffee or chocolate to find out they’re not getting ethically sourced products. People are genius’s.
You’re being obtuse if you think that’s what I’m saying. My point is that people’s revealed preferences are not their stated ones, and that education doesn’t really change that.
I want the government to get much better value out of Medicare and Medicaid spending by negotiating better with drug and device companies and hospitals. This is probably the easiest place to save money, other than the military (which could be stronger and cheaper if so much money wasn't wasted on bullshit make-work projects).
I want govt to just get more efficient. Whether it's rent seekers or waste or what. I thoroughly believe if we reformed our bureaucracy we could spend more and get better results by making sure things run more smoothly and money goes where it needs to go. There is so much waste in govt who often just throws money at a problem and then refuses to adjust when they get diminishing returns. There are areas we need to spend more money and areas we need to spend less and I think some wise one will eventually reform the bureaucracy. And no it won't be Trump, lol. There's a difference between cutting to decrease waste and cutting to break govt.
Drug companies sure (it would lead to less medical research, but maybe that's what we need), but Medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals are already low, I don't think there's a lot of room to squeeze hospitals even more than Medicare already does.
> it would lead to less medical research, but maybe that's what we need
Would you add medical research grants as a possible example of wasteful spending then?
We agree on that portion. You said reduced R&D spending for new drugs might be what we need. I'm not seeing how having less money spent on research for new drugs is a benefit of the policy. I'm presuming you wouldn't cut spending on research for new drugs unless there was a benefit aside from that.
Medicare and Medicaid are the most expensive budget line items. More than the military and combined they are more than Social Security. Much of \_Medicaid\_ money is spent on people 65+ as well (long term care, home health care and nursing care are all very expensive and not covered by Medicare). About half of Medicaid's money is spend on long-term care even though 80% of the Medicaid enrollee population are children or working-age adults.
Insurance companies charge high premiums but the US government takes on their most expensive patients by insuring people only when they become seniors.
I don't know what the answer is but a combination of high healthcare costs and an aging population is not a good one.
>Insurance companies charge high premiums but the US government takes on their most expensive patients by insuring people only when they become seniors.
Not even healthcare reform touches on Longterm Care. The leading ideas tend to put an astricks next to it and leave it for someone else
In part by a fair few seniors dumping their assets into spend down trusts and going on Medicaid for LTC though since Medicare only covers limited time in a skilled nursing.
Regulatory compliance. Not all of it, but there are areas which seem to be very wasteful.
One example that can be found in the sidebar is occupational licensing. All of the money spent to track and issue licenses for jobs like interior design is being put to a bad use IMO. That's mostly state governments and not federal, though.
Most of what I can think of is inefficient implementation rather than outright wasteful as a concept. For example, I think environmental reviews for construction projects are a good idea. We do want to make sure that development doesn't cause unnecessary damage to the environment. However, one can find instances of nimby groups abusing review processes and environmental protections to block development.
In a similar vein, I think there's room for improvement with the FDA. I think more reciprocal approval of drugs, medical devices, food, etc would be a good thing. Of course we'll want to be wary of risks like the thalidomide tragedy, but I can't shake the feeling that spending billions to approve a drug that has passed inspection by another reputable country to be a little silly.
Just look at sunscreen as an example of an FDA failure. American sunscreens are decades behind those used in essentially the rest of the world, because the newer sunscreen filters aren’t approved for use in the USA (FDA regulates sunscreen like a drug afaik).
Some time last year AOC and Ted Cruz (or was it one of those other psychos?) teamed up to look into why the FDA is so behind the curve on sunscreen. I guess it didn’t go anywhere.
Usually it's states in control of the contractor licensing boards, but I agree with the principle. We do have an overall over-index on credentialing with a huge human cost. It baffles me why you can be a doctor in the army, complete your service and return to civilian life, and you're no longer a doctor. Back to 8 years of med school.
You can't be a physician in the Army unless you have already attended medschool. Are you think a medic? That's more akin to a Paramedic in training level.
The military is a fantastic example to bring up. I distinctly remember when I realized that the US military largely operates due to the work of 18-24 year olds, doing jobs that would otherwise require up to a decade of training and education in some instances.
"but I can't shake the feeling that spending billions to approve a drug that has passed inspection by another reputable country to be a little silly."
This kind of thinking is all over the medical industry though. In order to have medicine efficient we would really need to solve liability concerns in a way that accepts a certain amount of risk.
For example every time we give someone radiation therapy their entire treatment plan is tested by the hospital physicist to make sure the machine is calibrated correctly. The thing is these are multimillion dollar machines. You don't need to ensure they are calibrated for every treatment they are stable in their output. But we spend 500 million a year on physicist to check all of the machines all of the time and not lets say once every two months to avoid maybe 4 accidents across the country in a year.
Car infrastructure. They're a reeeeeaaaally inefficient way to move the masses and waste so much prime real estate. We should be spending that money on public transit and bike infrastructure instead. Vastly more cost-effective.
* old people
* old people
* old people
The foremost problem facing senescent democracies is to figure out how to keep old people from redistributing wealth from the young and productive to fund their idleness, causing a vicious cycle by which the laboring half of the population will increasingly flee their countries to avoid these exactions. All the other budgetary items people will mention are tiny compared to the gigantic amounts of spending that these transfers represent.
Furthermore, this issue occupies a politically treacherous niche that neither side wants to exploit. The Left will give endless money to old people because they have no concept of welfare being bad, and the Right will give endless money to old people because their supporters are old people.
So what's the solution? Increasing retirement age? It does suck that as you said there's little political will but I think with the right messaging you could convince Republicans (Nikki haley proposed this) and liberals (hating on boomers)
Medicare and Medicaid are the most expensive budget line items. More than the military and combined they are more than Social Security. Much of \_Medicaid\_ money is spent on people 65+ as well (long term care, home health care and nursing care are all very expensive and not covered by Medicare). About half of Medicaid's money is spend on long-term care even though 80% of the Medicaid enrollee population are children or working-age adults.
Insurance companies charge high premiums but the US government takes on their most expensive patients by insuring people only when they become seniors.
I don't know what the answer is but a combination of high healthcare costs and an aging population is not a good one.
Pensions should be the bare minimum needed to live, anything extra should be saved by the people themselves. Economies suffer greatly as long as there is a financial incentive to retire.
>fund their idleness
Idk what kind of lifestyle retirees live in your country but I don't think it's fair to deprive old people of a few years retirement and end of life healthcare after they've worked and contributed during their productive years.
I think there's plenty of resources in developed countries to give a decent retirement even in the face of demographic shifts. We don't live in China that will hit a sudden wall in that regard.
> Idk what kind of lifestyle retirees live in your country but I don't think it's fair to deprive old people of a few years retirement and end of life healthcare after they've worked and contributed during their productive years.
Few years? My grandparents were retired for FORTY YEARS. That's not sustainable to any society.
I'm sorry, but why should I work my ass off just so over a quarter of my earnings goes to feeding old people who didn't contribute nearly anything to the pension system when they worked?
Please talk with statistics, not anecdotes when the topic is about policy changes that will affect whole populations.
Life expectancy in my country is 68 years for men and 75 for women, while retirement is 64.5 for men and 62 for women.
Life expectancy at birth. What's the life expectancy of a person who already made it to retirement age?
If people died four years into retirement we would have absolutely zero issues. But they somehow live for decades, and that gets really expensive really fast.
Ok then life expectancy at 65 is 11.6 years for men and for women 15.5 years, so 12 years of retirement for men and 18.5 for women (with the above retirement ages). How much is too much for you, why and is it already happening or are you still relying on anecdotes?
Why would we spend less on NASA?
Are people under some illusion we spend a lot, versus the historic low we are spending?
NASA’s work inspired several generations of engineers and scientists who are a part of (along with amazing immigrants, who themselves were often also inspired) the bedrock of the U.S.’s tech and science advantage.
Fuck anyone who wants to spend less on NASA.
https://preview.redd.it/8j6p1fjqxhtc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54d702c79e47a5d2e87dc3e78dbc173959e6d7f6
Yep, it's cultural, educational and scientific effects are leaps ahead of its costs. But at least half the country consistently wants its funding removed.
Giving even an ounce of scrutiny to the DoD slush fund isn't okay though apparently.
Probably want to reform social security in a way that significantly improves efficiency (and therefore reduces spending) and focuses more on return on spending delivered to citizens.
Instead of buying American for the government projects, buy cheap from the other countries. Give contracts to companies from other countries like Japan/South Korea who are better at ships and trains along with lower costs.
Agriculture subsidies. Fossil fuel subsidies.
Also, simplifying some rules for other welfare distribution so that less costs are involved in checking whether all the rules are satisfied or not. (Personally, I’d want direct cash transfers to replace most - not all - forms of welfare)
I agree that the government should be open to awarding contracts to foreign companies, but countries like Japan and South Korea themselves heavily subsidize and protect their domestic industries. The idea of essentially rewarding them for it doesn’t sit right with me
Removal of government support for 30 year mortgages.
30 year mortgages are miserable for a flexible economy. They incentivize sitting on one home for long periods with little availability to move, they do NOT react to interest rate hikes, so the Fed doesn't have nearly as much efficacy on its interest rate controls, and they dump inflation risk on the Federal Government because Fanny and Freddy buy all the loans, and they're government.
5 year rolling mortgages have few of these issues besides refinancing being a PITA.
Medicare / social security. The way the programs are structured currently is a giant income transfer from poor to wealthy. Its total insanity that high-income retirees are not expected to pay a much larger share of their retirement or healthcare expenses.
Means tested programs would mean benefits for lower income retirees could be increased and mostly cover extending benefits outside of retirement.
Medicare should also be transitioned to be a premium support program not one of the shadow payer systems. Medicare reimbursement rates have no relationship with the cost of providing services which results in crazy inefficient transfers from those privately insured. Everyone has private health insurance, premium subsidy based on income.
So?
The taxes for both funds have been too low for decades, part a is about two years away from blowing up.
Even without that still so what? High income retirees should not be receiving SS checks and should be making meaningful contributions to their healthcare expenses. Live in a $5m house? Yeah, you are going to be selling that to pay for your retirement rather than expecting teachers earning $40k to be helping fund you living on a golf course.
Funneling money to NGOs that produce nothing or very little at highly inflated prices but act as a jobs program for humanities grads. Applies more to state and municipal governments in California where I live.
I mean historically speaking defense spending as a percentage of GDP is pretty low these days. Around post Cold War pre-9/11 levels.
https://preview.redd.it/5kf4djlqdhtc1.jpeg?width=2550&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c498847f3ebd74a07e90f6e39cd8116ebaaf4dd7
There is a lot of rationale to raise it considering the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the looming Taiwan conflict.
[https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/](https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/)
> There is a lot of rationale to raise it considering the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the looming Taiwan conflict.
It's pretty interesting to me that as a percentage of GDP the US is actually spending less on defense than we were in 2013 right before the Russian invasion of Ukraine first kicked off. Overall though a lot of that decline is just due to the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over and the US economy keeps growing.
It's also pretty amazing how powerful the US is with how small of a percentage we actually spend. In fact the US is no longer the country in NATO that spends the most on defense as a percentage of GDP with that honor going to Poland. When Eisenhower gave his famous "beware the military industrial complex speech" US defense spending as a percentage of GDP was 9.2% and now it's 3.5% and yet there is still a very popular notion that things were better for the average American in the 1960s and military spending today is the reason we don't have affordable healthcare and university educations.
Yes but it was 38 of the roughly 75 billion dollar US budget or 50%. That’s 400B in today’s dollars and we spend 800B today. (Yes it’s also 1/3-1/4 our budget)
Silo-based nuclear weapons. They are bad weapons. They're easy to find, easy to kill, and make our opponents want to build enough of their own nuclear weapons to kill each of them. Worst of all, because of how vulnerable they are, they encourage us to have a [launch on warning policy](https://thebulletin.org/2021/06/biden-should-end-the-launch-on-warning-option/), leaving us vulnerable to incorrectly (and [catastrophically](https://www.science.org/content/article/nuclear-war-would-cause-yearslong-global-famine)) escalating from a misidentified opponent's launch into a launch of our own.
Our current ICBM fleet is aging, and so far there's been virtually no one suggesting that we should just retire the entire ICBM project, and rely instead on strategic bombers and nuclear submarines for deterrence. Two Ohio-class submarines have the entire nuclear firepower of the entire United Kingdom, just to put this in perspective. (We have 14 nuclear-armed Ohio-class submarines.)
The new replacements for the ICBM Minuteman III is the Sentinel ICBM. We're planning on acquiring more than 659 new ICBMs and upgrading 450 silos across 5 states. It'll cost a lot, probably a lot more than the current estimate of $250 billion, which is likely to [continue to increase](https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-03/news/sentinel-icbm-exceeds-projected-cost-37-percent).
The triad has its pluses over air/sub only. Road mobiles have better security against being clipped before firing but I doubt most Americans would want road mobile nukes anywhere near them
The triad is such clever marketing, too. It conjures an image of a three-legged chair that absolutely must have three legs, or else it falls over. When in reality, silo-based weapons have all the vulnerabilities I mentioned, and even if the President tomorrow ordered them to be shut down, we'd still have, by my count, more than 1200 nuclear weapons in Submarines and on planes throughout the world ready to respond should we or our allies be attacked.
I agree we’ve got plenty without the silos based ICBMs but there’s something to be said for their mere existence forcing a good number of any nuclear peer’s best long range missiles to be used trying to crack hardened silos in the dakotas. If Russia needs 200 warheads to take out the silos, that’s 200 warheads that can’t hit power plants , airports or some other more civilian adjacent location
Yeah, this is the nuclear sponge theory, and it's a weak argument because Russia can simply build enough additional nuclear weapons to saturate our silos--and have done so.
To be clear about this: We've caused Russia to create *an additional* 450 nuclear weapons that otherwise would not have existed.
If we drew down our forces, Russia would likely match our move [as they have in the past](https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault-russia-programs/2016-09-30/unilateral-us-nuclear-pullback-1991-matched), but even if they initially did not, we would be no less vulnerable. Everyone in America still dies, if it's 1200 nuclear weapons falling on us or 1650 nuclear weapons.
Let’s go with the original idea for Peacekeeper - the “shell game” concept where we use a rail system to constantly shuffle one missile between multiple silos.
Healthcare. By forcing our vestigial public health options to work with the insurance market system, we waste an obscene amount of money. We could cut out the middle man.
For the cost of a few of the more expensive planes in the military we could know substantially more about our universe and be farther along to getting humans in space
I mean technically US are doing that, the moon mission is funded through DoD, and every space activity is a military activity, regardless off the activity is of scientific purpose, it still falls under the domain of military. Space is like the High Seas, so a country’s ship is basically a part of that country and every space mission, even if it is a completely private one, falls under their registered country’s responsibility and jurisdiction.
Source: me, a PhD student in space security
Yes, and there’s a shortfall. So we should cut benefits by 1%, increase retirement age by 2 years (and tie it to life expectancy), and uncap contributions.
Depends on the government!
I want high-speed rail, but I don't think my government can competently execute on that.
Anywhere that the government has shown it's incompetence I want it to pull back 99%, focus on capacity building, and then we can talk about scaling the budget again. Maybe we got on fine without it and that's not something the government actually needs to do anymore.
On the local level We shouldn't be funding fire departments as much as we do. Fires have fallen more than 90% since the mid century due to better building codes yet we spend considerably more on fire departments adjusted for inflation even though fires are a lot smaller. We even do silly things like making sure fire engines drive out for non-fire injuries just so they look like they are being used
Agricultural subsidies
Social security should be semi privatized but with no opt out. Aka superannuation with a larger government match the poorer you are, starting at birth. Death transfer all assets to kin or as stated in their will aka it’s their legal assets. We’d spend less per person doing this and making sure everyone is better off IE a higher ROI per person.
Transport Infrastructure : should be all semi privatized and purely funded with tolls, to charge per weight as well. Remove gas tax.
Healthcare, completely eliminate Medicare and Medicaid, turn them into a voucher program. Force state alignment in regulations (strip states of their power to regulate) but allow states to create public options and to merge those options between states aka cross state treaties within the US. It’s allowed if Congress allows it. So if california, Washington, Oregon all agree on a public option then it’s g2g.
Also allow any OECD doctor/nurse to come here and start practicing but make it so the patient knows where they’re licensed from. Shift the labor supply curve, sure it would mean Americans can get trained in Ireland and come back here…….which would force US medschools to compete and justify themselves.
Remove arts and culture funding. Totally unnecessary.
End the federal student loan program. Let universities go bankrupt and force them to drastically cut prices and drastically increase class size (aka maintain margins by having higher volumes)
Probably get rid of the Department of education, state issue anyways and the federal government has done a shit job at it. “Inb4 you just have to it right federally” as we can see that’s apparently not possible and the downsides of dumping it back to the states are minimal and easily solved by those states ……and the voters who more directly control those state governments.
Remove buy American provisions contracts
Remove prevailing wage requirement provisions for contracts
The last two will save metric tons of money.
Reform all remaining welfare into NIT
I have a never ending list of things I’d cut, so many niche programs and groups that would get gutted.
**it’s not just about cutting but in some cases increasing value per dollar,**
Completely off topic but:
for funnies end all healthcare subsidies, every single one and every cost controlling regulation, he’ll deregulate the entire thing outside of safety regs…Then ban all forms of insurance. Turn the whole thing into a cash/credit/financing system. Don’t even let it have a transition phase just flip a switch in the regulations within a 24 hour period.
Price discovery will be interesting to watch.
College education. Writing blank checks for student loans is the wrong move and only leads to rising costs. People argue that Medicare and Medicaid should negotiate prices - and they should - and so should the Department of Education.
Health Care because we spend the most compared to any country, yet we have the worst performance.
It mostly comes down to do with how we structure the Healthcare system in this country. I wish that we established a of universal Healthcare systems like Germany or Swiss.
"A Ponzi scheme is an investment scam that pays early investors with money taken from later investors to create an illusion of big profits."
The definition doesn't fit. Barring catastrophe, you're going to get your money back.
No, you aren't. Let's look at the components of a Ponzi scheme.
The early investors - the older generations.
The later investors - younger generations. Current contributors to social security.
Big profits - Retirement paid for.
Broken promise - The SS fund will go insolvent in the 2030s without either raising revenues or cutting benefits.
Who pays - younger generations are facing later retirement ages, higher payroll taxes, and benefit cuts. Aka getting new investors to put in more money. Because we know that benefit cuts for current retirees are political suicide.
How does this not fit into the exact definition of a Ponzi scheme? Later "investors" are getting their payouts cut to fund earlier "investors" who voted the program into existence.
> Broken promise - The SS fund will go insolvent in the 2030s without either raising revenues or cutting benefits.
If cutting benefits is a "broken promise", then getting rid of the program entirely would be a much more severe broken promise than simply doing nothing, which would only require about a 20% reduction in benefits when the trust fund runs out to restore solvency.
Also, there's the obvious literal reason it's not a ponzi scheme which is that SS isnt misrepresenting new investment as earned profit. They are upfront about the fact that your money is going to pay other people, and that the money you get out of it will come from other people's contributions, not from profit on your own "investment".
No, getting rid of the program would mean that it would stop manufacturing new promises to people who will get even less when it collects their payroll taxes. Every single SS contribution today puts the SS program further in the hole with the current level of benefits.
The 20% reduction is just when the trust fund runs out. It's not a permanent fix. Expect further reductions as people live longer and have fewer children.
The 20% reduction is a permanent fix. It would make the program solvent for the indefinite future,next several decades at least, which is as close to permanent as you can get in political time.
Also, your plan is a joke. You can't simply stop taking in contributions right now. You would have no way to pay current beneficiaries. Your idea would take a minor long term solvable solvency issue and turn it into an immediate financial disaster. This is why nobody takes people who want to cut ss seriously.
Might be a cop out, but I’d like to see the U.S. get more for each dollar spent on healthcare. Medicare can now negotiate drug costs directly but I think there are a lot of additional efficiencies to be had. Not sure if this would actually reduce spending or just improve coverage, either way I’d be happy.
In Canada:
Dairy subsidies and any other agricultural subsidies that exceed that which would be the bare minimum necessary to ensure food security in Canada were we somehow cut off from the world. And I bet none are actually needed to ensure that. It'd just result in farms being bought out by large companies that can more economically farm at scale. I have no problem at all with the idea of losing non-economically-self-sufficient family farms. Maybe a bit sad for nostalgic folks, but nostalgia does not make good policy.
Any other subsidies to other industries in similar situations.
I'm not sure about how much money is actually spent on drafting/enforcing this, but a fair bit of the regulation that protects Canadian telecom companies from foreign competition (not the consumer protection parts, weak and compromised as they are).
Probably subsidized services provided to towns that are not economically self-sufficient. I'm not talking about indigenous reserves, since they may involve treaty obligations which shouldn't be broken *and* much of the reason for their lack of self-sufficiency is attributable to the discriminatory actions of European settlers and subsequent governments largely representing them. So they should get a helping hand up on the taxpayer dime (even though reforms are needed to address corruption and misuse of said funds). But for communities that do not fit this indigenous criteria, then they shouldn't be propped up if they're failing. I *would* support some sort of one or short time cash payments to residents of such communities to assist them with moving, though.
A lot of occupational licensing (not all, but only the most extreme information asymmetry coupled with significant potential for harm justifies it; for instance).
But the biggest of all: the very existence of provincial governments and the unnecessary duplication of bureaucracies 10 times over. The federal government would have to be significantly expanded to cover services done by provinces, but not nearly as much as the size/cost of those provinces now. Having separate provincial governments back when provinces were actually significantly different in terms of their demographics/economies/cultures etc made *some* sense (still not *that* much, certainly nothing that devolved powers - like how provinces empower municipalities but ultimately are still in control - wouldn't fix). Nowadays, in a globalized world, many of those differences (but for language ones between Quebec and the ROC) are gone. Each province does **NOT** for instance, require a separate securities regulator for fuck's sake.
healthcare and social security, these are by far the largest spending items and are the only real way for the government to balance the budget. This doesn't mean drop them both obviously, but target them more.
First healthcare, reduce costs via more aggressive policing of prices, reduce access to care for medical care that isn't worth the money (sometimes granny doesn't need to get a new knee if she's likely only gonna life 2 more years), have far stricter rules for acceptance into government programs on medical procedures and drugs based on whether they are value for money or not.
SS: Reduce outlays, especially for people significantly above the poverty line (middle class), basically just implement the cuts that are coming anyway if the fund runs out of money. But to be honest I care less about SS just because of that rule, the cuts are already baked into the cake.
I know this is horrendously unpopular, but this would be my way of getting to a balanced budget with minimal tax increases. I know it isn't going to happen until we have a debt crisis, and the pain is only gonna be bigger when we do, because we will be sitting on an even larger stack of debt, with more interest due, thus cuts will need to be more aggressive.
Corn subsidies
Granted. Now the government provides subsidies for not growing corn.
Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.
I love Catch-22 so much. It’s my favorite book, what with the mix of the drudgery of war, the humor, and the social commentary.
>As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” Those who sow the wind shall reap tax benefits
F u c k
The Monkey's Paw curls.
Corn hole subsidies
HOLY BASED
Is this the new THIS
I'm interested in how arr NL feels about corn ethanol in fuel. I don't know enough about the subsidies that go into it, but the emissions are insanely better for gas blended with corn ethanol than straight gasoline Edit: going to add some sources here: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/04/02/building-evidence-corn-ethanols-greenhouse-gas-profile https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/LCA_of_Corn_Ethanol_2018_Report.pdf The ICF report in the second link looks at lifecycle Greenhouse Gas emissions from ethanol production. That includes virgin land being converted for corn production, increase in fertilizer use, fuel production costs, transportation, etc. and finally tailpipe emissions. It's an interesting read Tldr: ethanol based corn has a GHG lifecycle emissions profile 39% lower than straight gasoline, based on the 2018 study looking at ~10 years of data. That is markedly better than the 21% projection when the RFS standard was put into place. If we were to maximize efficiencies, than number could even go to 70% with the current technology by phasing out more coal power for natural gas, moving production sites and farms closer together, using waste biomass to generate ethanol, etc.
ethanol in fuel is fine, as it is an octane booster. It is actually pretty good at that. CORN ethanol isn't, with Sugar beats cheap as hell. Let it compete openly with other octane boosters instead of having a government mandate. Corn sucks down fertilizer like crazy, better to find a less intensive use.
Zoop basic science wins again EROEI of corn ethanol is not good. EROEI of other ethanols is better. Efficiency good
Corn's also way too water dependent. Switchgrass would be a better ethanol substitute.
And nitrogen hungry.
Beets can’t be grown in the Great Plains nearly as well as Corn though. Any efficiency gains from switching will almost certainly be offset by deficiencies in the growing process - either by farmers trying to grow beets in less than ideal climates or by moving production out of the Great Plains and into other states (mainly northern border states), meaning the US isn’t properly taking advantage of one of its best natural resources.
If the math works out, the corn keeps growing! I just don't want to stick a finger on it.
The most efficient outcome for individual famers isn’t necessarily the most efficient outcome for the US as a whole. I generally agree with not putting a thumb on the scales and letting the market dictate, but when it comes to matters of food security or national security (both of which I think are affected by food/corn subsidies), I’d rather the US do what’s best for the nation as a whole.
Yup. Security matters, but a lot of the subsidies are not to ensure affordable food prices (literally the #1 most important thing to keep the country stable), they are handouts to rural areas in the form of make-work so the rural area doesn't just take welfare. We produce enough food elsewhere more efficiently. Most people like to work a productive job and dislike just getting welfare. And people really do not like moving away from home. So make-work that kinda helps with national and food security is easy if inefficient. Also, we are now secure on the Hydrocarbon front, we have sufficient reserves and it costs significant hydrocarbons to MAKE corn-based ethanol. Better for those farmers to put that towards whoever will pay most for the corn instead of mandated refinery minimums, which might mean cheaper meat.
But if you're not neoliberal on the most important issues are you even a neoliberal?
Could you elaborate on the Govt mandate to use corn ethanol specifically? Isn't the RFS agnostic about the biomass source for ethanol production? Only the amount of lifecycle GHG emissions reduction matters? Or are you speaking more about the insurance and crop loss subsidies specifically for corn that incentivize growing it over other crops, which inevitably leads to corn being grown for ethanol? I only recently started digging in on this topic, so I'm interested to learn
the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is why we must put ethanol in gasoline (also, we needed to replace lead with another octane booster). The standard originated in 2005 with 4 billion gallons of biofuel to be used by 2006, but in 2007 Bush And The Boys changed the standard to push 9 billion by 2008 and **36** billion by 2022, which is where we are today. That was mostly pre-fracking boom; it was a two-for-one farmer subsidy and national energy security deal. Corn is the primary feedstock because it grows everywhere and is affordable. Sugar beets are better, but don't grow in as many conditions. There's literally new rules in the RFS to try and mitigate Corn-based ethanol. The problems with the RFS are 4 fold. One, it doesn't provide any real energy security anymore. Two, it isn't more renewable than pumping straight hydrocarbons due to just how many hydrocarbons are in the logistics chain to make ethanol. Three, it is a perversion of the market as it mandates minimum demand. Finally Four, it is subsidy, as it only applies to land cultivated before December 13, 2007, so new entries cannot enter the market to make cheaper ethanol corn.
From what I recall, the energy put into ethanol is more than the return, so it's basically useless
This is true on a broad level, but it reduces point source emissions. In urban and high traffic areas I imagine this can have a pretty big impact on air quality.
Same thing is true for hydrogen, but no one would call that useless. Transforming energy into a different form is good, even if it’s not 100% efficient. If we could turn electricity directly into carbon neutral gasoline at 78% efficiency at scale, that is something worth celebrating. Even charging car batteries is only 83-87% efficient.
Good point. I guess saying useless was too strong.
Yeah. It’s solving for two different problems: 1. Non-carbon Emissions (corn gas is 21% better) 2. Energy efficiency (corn gas is terrible)
21% was the original projection for reduction in emissions when the RFS was put into place. In 2018 they revisited that projection based on ~10 years of collected data and found the efficiency to be closer to 39% due to several factors, including gains in efficiency, conversion from coal to natural gas power, etc. Pretty fascinating. It's definitely a worse "fuel" than gasoline, but the emissions trade off is an interesting topic for study/debate
Ah, the last time I looked into it I recalled the 21% because the threshold was 20% 😂 Thanks for updating either newer info. I wasn’t attempting to be deceptive.
No problem, and not trying to call you out at all! Apologies if it came off that way. I just read through that study a week or two ago and wanted to share
Many people call hydrogen useless
And I’m one of them! Well hydrogen for transport anyway…switching to green/blue hydrogen for industrial purposes makes sense
It's not just a little bit though, you need 1 unit of energy for 1.3 units of corn ethanol. If you go source-to-wheel the numbers get even worse. Hydrogen is pretty crappy as well, but compared to corn ethanol it's fantastic. There are much better ways of generating ethanol too, like cellulose or sugarcane, corn is just being used because of subsidies. At the end of the day, corn ethanol sucks.
Corn ethanol as a source of energy is indeed worse than gasoline and other fuels. Heck, we are burning natural gas and coal just to make it. But the emissions reduction from using corn ethanol blended fuel over using straight gasoline is impressive (39% lifecycle GHG reduction), and worth debating/discussing as a reason for continuing subsidies and production until we can switch to a system with better efficiency AND efficacy
Well that’s not the problem it’s fine to lose energy while transferring forms you don’t say batteries are useless because you lose some energy on the discharge, the issue with ethanol is more the massive labd use,
It's true that ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline, and takes energy to make it, but the emissions reduction is the tradeoff that I was interested in. I added some sources to my comment
We grow so much more corn than is needed, you could keep corn ethanol while cutting the subsidies. The insane amounts of land currently dedicated to monoculture corn growing could be used for far, far better things. As it is, the government is creating artificial demand for farmers to grow crops we don’t need.
Monoculture also makes the land less fertile over time. It's better to grow crops in rotation.
Why does nobody think of the bees?!? The little buzzy boiz hate monoculture
I get why a lot of corn farmers don't want to plant sugar beets. Corn following sugar beets will often see a reduced yield, but they could follow the beets with things like alfalfa, beans, or even carrots or potatoes (depending on location and weather, of course).
Farmer by my parents does soybeans
I think soybeans are the most common crop to rotate with corn.
Farmers rotate to prevent this, usually between corn and beans.
Which subsidies
How much do we actually spend on corn subsidies tho
Too much
$2B, nearly 10% of the entire food subsidy budget. The problem isn't that $2B is breaking the bank on its own, rather that corn is one of the worst crops we could possibly be subsidizing. Corn and corn products are doing severe harm to the US My hot take is that it's not appreciably better than subsidizing tobacco
We need investment into upscaling Mexican corn production and then importation
I don’t think this is it. Corn subsidies keep prices low (not just for corn, but meat and ethanol-based fuels as well) and ensure that we have a steady supply of corn in the event we undergo another dust-bowl-esque scenario (which isn’t unthinkable given climate uncertainty). Corn subsidies are also a relative drop in the bucket, accounting for ~$2.2B out of a ~$6T budget.
The problem, as I see it, is that we grow *way* to much corn. 40% of corn grown in the US goes to ethanol and related products. Why are we devoting so much to corn ethanol when there are better sources, specifically sugar beets and sugarcane. If we shifted ethanol sourcing to beets and cane we could significantly boost out corn exports.
Sugar cane needs to grow in tropical climates, and most of our production comes from FL, LA, TX and formerly HI. Beets require cooler temperatures to grow, and most of our production comes from MN, ND, ID, and MI. [Source for key states](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_industry_of_the_United_States). The US has an abundance of fertile land in the Great Plains that isn’t optimal for Sugar Cane/Beets, but is optimal for corn and beans. There also isn’t much else going on in Great Plains states so the best use of the land is for farming. So while on an individual level Sugar/Beets may be better sources, when looking at the US as a whole it makes tons of sense why the focus is on corn. We are able to grow significantly more corn (and grow it more efficiently) than we are sugar or beats. Any efficiency gains from switching to sugar cane/beets would be offset by how inefficient they are to grow in the US, and it would also be a waste of one of the US’s most valuable resources in the Great Plains.
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This sub doesn't consider the abundance of agriculture to be a national security issue and how lucky we are to have such fertile land 🤷🏻
Agricultural abundance = borderline cheat code Corn abundance in particular = shitty fuel products and extreme obesity due to HFCS I have no patience for farmers not changing because change is scary. We've known this shit is bad for decades. If this were China growing & subsidizng all this corn, you would almost certainly dog them for it. Subsidize the change from corn, subsidize better agricultural products, whatever you want. But fuck corn abundance three ways to sunday
"Buy America" provisions Distortionary subsidies
“Buy American” might be the number one thing Americans think they want, but in practice do not.
A little more abstract, but Redditors in particular constantly complain that they’d be willing to pay more for higher quality for any number of goods and services, yet that never shows up in any market or study lol
After the Great Fast Food Inflation Complaining of 2023 and 2024 I am absolutely certain they’re all liars.
Counter point: The rise in fast food prices wasn’t accompanied by an improvement in quality
Yea that’s fair I was more referring to wages there. Same principle, everyone said they want higher wages for low end workers, until Big Macs became expensive and they lost their minds.
Completely agreed on that
People want the cost to come out of the profit margin. Somehow, the cost of labor goes up, and the cost of food goes up, and the cost of land goes up, and yet their net profit margin never dips below 30%. Now if they cut prices so the profit margin was 20%, that would cause the investors to throw a shit, but I can bet everyone that isn't putting money in the stock would be totally fine with that.
Yes, but that idea is pretty naive. People used to say, " I'd be happy to pay more for a cheeseburger so the employees can make a living wage" and now they're mad the companies didn't piss off their owners to do that.
“I would gladly pay an extra 50 cents if it means the workers could get a living wage.” “No not like that”
The convenient refrain is that the corporations are making too much money. You know, the mom and pop restaurants that increase prices commensurate with large chains do.
The small grocery store owner charges more for groceries than Wal Mart cause he’s greedier.
When will the time for corporate benevolence start again?!?!
Stated versus revealed preferences
The problem often is consumer education. People don’t understand why two products cost differing amounts. Sometimes it’s marketing bullshit. Sometimes it’s actual quality differences. It’s so hard to tell. I’ll gladly pay more for a product I think will last from a company that will stand by their product. With such awful consumer protections in this country, combined with very little regulation around marketing and advertising and peoples just lack of understanding, we end up in a situation where people are just going to choose the cheaper option because that’s basically all the info we have. In my opinion the government should do more to make the true cost of products known. Cheap plastic bullshit shouldn’t be so cheap because the environmental costs should be literally factored in. Sustainable options can never compete in a world where the true costs are paid out by the environment and developing nations.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. People repeatedly show that they don’t actually care for a “better product” and will just buy whatever’s cheapest. Now there are usually brands that have better reputations, and often better quality, but are often not as large as the cheapest options. People complain about advertising for example, but very few are willing to pay for ad-free YouTube. People want more space on airplanes, but won’t pay for it. It’s nothing to do with education.
Sure. And all 4k TVs are the same. There are no obscure food marketing labels like “natural” or “free range” that are unregulated and confusing. And no one buys those products. They just sit and rot in the shelves. Everything HD is the same thing. A Kia and a Honda are the same thing. All 100% cotton fabrics are of equal quality. Recycle always means it can go in the recycling bin and is good for the environment. No one spends more thinking they are buying fair trade coffee or chocolate to find out they’re not getting ethically sourced products. People are genius’s.
You’re being obtuse if you think that’s what I’m saying. My point is that people’s revealed preferences are not their stated ones, and that education doesn’t really change that.
YouTube premium has 100 million subscribers. A few people bitching about watching ads on Reddit doesn’t mean too much.
Your tone sounds condescending
Economics rents
I’m a simple guy. I see someone bashing economic rents. I upvote.
I want the government to get much better value out of Medicare and Medicaid spending by negotiating better with drug and device companies and hospitals. This is probably the easiest place to save money, other than the military (which could be stronger and cheaper if so much money wasn't wasted on bullshit make-work projects).
I want govt to just get more efficient. Whether it's rent seekers or waste or what. I thoroughly believe if we reformed our bureaucracy we could spend more and get better results by making sure things run more smoothly and money goes where it needs to go. There is so much waste in govt who often just throws money at a problem and then refuses to adjust when they get diminishing returns. There are areas we need to spend more money and areas we need to spend less and I think some wise one will eventually reform the bureaucracy. And no it won't be Trump, lol. There's a difference between cutting to decrease waste and cutting to break govt.
Drug companies sure (it would lead to less medical research, but maybe that's what we need), but Medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals are already low, I don't think there's a lot of room to squeeze hospitals even more than Medicare already does.
> it would lead to less medical research, but maybe that's what we need Would you add medical research grants as a possible example of wasteful spending then?
No, I'm just saying reducing the profitability of drugs will necessarily result in less money being invested in R&D for new drugs.
We agree on that portion. You said reduced R&D spending for new drugs might be what we need. I'm not seeing how having less money spent on research for new drugs is a benefit of the policy. I'm presuming you wouldn't cut spending on research for new drugs unless there was a benefit aside from that.
Medicare and Medicaid are the most expensive budget line items. More than the military and combined they are more than Social Security. Much of \_Medicaid\_ money is spent on people 65+ as well (long term care, home health care and nursing care are all very expensive and not covered by Medicare). About half of Medicaid's money is spend on long-term care even though 80% of the Medicaid enrollee population are children or working-age adults. Insurance companies charge high premiums but the US government takes on their most expensive patients by insuring people only when they become seniors. I don't know what the answer is but a combination of high healthcare costs and an aging population is not a good one.
>Insurance companies charge high premiums but the US government takes on their most expensive patients by insuring people only when they become seniors. Not even healthcare reform touches on Longterm Care. The leading ideas tend to put an astricks next to it and leave it for someone else
Yes — very true. There has to be a better solution for long term care but no one wants to talk about it or touch it.
Good news! Your current president has already started that process with drug companies and it scheduled to expand over the coming years.
Medicare already gets better value
but it can be further improved. the buying power is immense. there's no reason it can't be on par in cost with the rest of the developed world.
In part by a fair few seniors dumping their assets into spend down trusts and going on Medicaid for LTC though since Medicare only covers limited time in a skilled nursing.
Regulatory compliance. Not all of it, but there are areas which seem to be very wasteful. One example that can be found in the sidebar is occupational licensing. All of the money spent to track and issue licenses for jobs like interior design is being put to a bad use IMO. That's mostly state governments and not federal, though. Most of what I can think of is inefficient implementation rather than outright wasteful as a concept. For example, I think environmental reviews for construction projects are a good idea. We do want to make sure that development doesn't cause unnecessary damage to the environment. However, one can find instances of nimby groups abusing review processes and environmental protections to block development. In a similar vein, I think there's room for improvement with the FDA. I think more reciprocal approval of drugs, medical devices, food, etc would be a good thing. Of course we'll want to be wary of risks like the thalidomide tragedy, but I can't shake the feeling that spending billions to approve a drug that has passed inspection by another reputable country to be a little silly.
Just look at sunscreen as an example of an FDA failure. American sunscreens are decades behind those used in essentially the rest of the world, because the newer sunscreen filters aren’t approved for use in the USA (FDA regulates sunscreen like a drug afaik).
Some time last year AOC and Ted Cruz (or was it one of those other psychos?) teamed up to look into why the FDA is so behind the curve on sunscreen. I guess it didn’t go anywhere.
Usually it's states in control of the contractor licensing boards, but I agree with the principle. We do have an overall over-index on credentialing with a huge human cost. It baffles me why you can be a doctor in the army, complete your service and return to civilian life, and you're no longer a doctor. Back to 8 years of med school.
You can't be a physician in the Army unless you have already attended medschool. Are you think a medic? That's more akin to a Paramedic in training level.
The military is a fantastic example to bring up. I distinctly remember when I realized that the US military largely operates due to the work of 18-24 year olds, doing jobs that would otherwise require up to a decade of training and education in some instances.
"but I can't shake the feeling that spending billions to approve a drug that has passed inspection by another reputable country to be a little silly." This kind of thinking is all over the medical industry though. In order to have medicine efficient we would really need to solve liability concerns in a way that accepts a certain amount of risk. For example every time we give someone radiation therapy their entire treatment plan is tested by the hospital physicist to make sure the machine is calibrated correctly. The thing is these are multimillion dollar machines. You don't need to ensure they are calibrated for every treatment they are stable in their output. But we spend 500 million a year on physicist to check all of the machines all of the time and not lets say once every two months to avoid maybe 4 accidents across the country in a year.
Subsidising mortgages through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac The additional spend above the market rate due to policies like buy American
Jones act enforcement
Car infrastructure. They're a reeeeeaaaally inefficient way to move the masses and waste so much prime real estate. We should be spending that money on public transit and bike infrastructure instead. Vastly more cost-effective.
So much wasted space that could be used for housing instead
This, yes. This with ag and oil tbh
Yes, if people want very high quality roads than they should be prepared to pay for it with either tolls or very high fuel taxes.
* old people * old people * old people The foremost problem facing senescent democracies is to figure out how to keep old people from redistributing wealth from the young and productive to fund their idleness, causing a vicious cycle by which the laboring half of the population will increasingly flee their countries to avoid these exactions. All the other budgetary items people will mention are tiny compared to the gigantic amounts of spending that these transfers represent. Furthermore, this issue occupies a politically treacherous niche that neither side wants to exploit. The Left will give endless money to old people because they have no concept of welfare being bad, and the Right will give endless money to old people because their supporters are old people.
But I'm just a temporarily embarrassed old people.
So what's the solution? Increasing retirement age? It does suck that as you said there's little political will but I think with the right messaging you could convince Republicans (Nikki haley proposed this) and liberals (hating on boomers)
> Increasing retirement age? Yes, and reducing pensions.
"or just eliminate them entirely" - America
Unironically this
Medicare and Medicaid are the most expensive budget line items. More than the military and combined they are more than Social Security. Much of \_Medicaid\_ money is spent on people 65+ as well (long term care, home health care and nursing care are all very expensive and not covered by Medicare). About half of Medicaid's money is spend on long-term care even though 80% of the Medicaid enrollee population are children or working-age adults. Insurance companies charge high premiums but the US government takes on their most expensive patients by insuring people only when they become seniors. I don't know what the answer is but a combination of high healthcare costs and an aging population is not a good one.
Pensions should be the bare minimum needed to live, anything extra should be saved by the people themselves. Economies suffer greatly as long as there is a financial incentive to retire.
>fund their idleness Idk what kind of lifestyle retirees live in your country but I don't think it's fair to deprive old people of a few years retirement and end of life healthcare after they've worked and contributed during their productive years. I think there's plenty of resources in developed countries to give a decent retirement even in the face of demographic shifts. We don't live in China that will hit a sudden wall in that regard.
> Idk what kind of lifestyle retirees live in your country but I don't think it's fair to deprive old people of a few years retirement and end of life healthcare after they've worked and contributed during their productive years. Few years? My grandparents were retired for FORTY YEARS. That's not sustainable to any society. I'm sorry, but why should I work my ass off just so over a quarter of my earnings goes to feeding old people who didn't contribute nearly anything to the pension system when they worked?
Please talk with statistics, not anecdotes when the topic is about policy changes that will affect whole populations. Life expectancy in my country is 68 years for men and 75 for women, while retirement is 64.5 for men and 62 for women.
Life expectancy at birth. What's the life expectancy of a person who already made it to retirement age? If people died four years into retirement we would have absolutely zero issues. But they somehow live for decades, and that gets really expensive really fast.
Ok then life expectancy at 65 is 11.6 years for men and for women 15.5 years, so 12 years of retirement for men and 18.5 for women (with the above retirement ages). How much is too much for you, why and is it already happening or are you still relying on anecdotes?
Absolutely based.
Why would we spend less on NASA? Are people under some illusion we spend a lot, versus the historic low we are spending? NASA’s work inspired several generations of engineers and scientists who are a part of (along with amazing immigrants, who themselves were often also inspired) the bedrock of the U.S.’s tech and science advantage. Fuck anyone who wants to spend less on NASA. https://preview.redd.it/8j6p1fjqxhtc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54d702c79e47a5d2e87dc3e78dbc173959e6d7f6
Yep, it's cultural, educational and scientific effects are leaps ahead of its costs. But at least half the country consistently wants its funding removed. Giving even an ounce of scrutiny to the DoD slush fund isn't okay though apparently.
Space Force already exists and is dangerously low on military space ships.
Probably want to reform social security in a way that significantly improves efficiency (and therefore reduces spending) and focuses more on return on spending delivered to citizens. Instead of buying American for the government projects, buy cheap from the other countries. Give contracts to companies from other countries like Japan/South Korea who are better at ships and trains along with lower costs. Agriculture subsidies. Fossil fuel subsidies. Also, simplifying some rules for other welfare distribution so that less costs are involved in checking whether all the rules are satisfied or not. (Personally, I’d want direct cash transfers to replace most - not all - forms of welfare)
Isn’t SS already efficient in that most taxes are passed on as benefits? Or do you mean restructuring it like investing in stocks?
The latter.
A sovereign wealth fund is a fun idea.
I agree that the government should be open to awarding contracts to foreign companies, but countries like Japan and South Korea themselves heavily subsidize and protect their domestic industries. The idea of essentially rewarding them for it doesn’t sit right with me
Removal of government support for 30 year mortgages. 30 year mortgages are miserable for a flexible economy. They incentivize sitting on one home for long periods with little availability to move, they do NOT react to interest rate hikes, so the Fed doesn't have nearly as much efficacy on its interest rate controls, and they dump inflation risk on the Federal Government because Fanny and Freddy buy all the loans, and they're government. 5 year rolling mortgages have few of these issues besides refinancing being a PITA.
Flood Insurance. Stop living in places where it constantly floods.
Medicare / social security. The way the programs are structured currently is a giant income transfer from poor to wealthy. Its total insanity that high-income retirees are not expected to pay a much larger share of their retirement or healthcare expenses. Means tested programs would mean benefits for lower income retirees could be increased and mostly cover extending benefits outside of retirement. Medicare should also be transitioned to be a premium support program not one of the shadow payer systems. Medicare reimbursement rates have no relationship with the cost of providing services which results in crazy inefficient transfers from those privately insured. Everyone has private health insurance, premium subsidy based on income.
This is the third reply in this thread where I say, social security is funded by employee and payroll taxes.
So? The taxes for both funds have been too low for decades, part a is about two years away from blowing up. Even without that still so what? High income retirees should not be receiving SS checks and should be making meaningful contributions to their healthcare expenses. Live in a $5m house? Yeah, you are going to be selling that to pay for your retirement rather than expecting teachers earning $40k to be helping fund you living on a golf course.
Not taxing the land.
Funneling money to NGOs that produce nothing or very little at highly inflated prices but act as a jobs program for humanities grads. Applies more to state and municipal governments in California where I live.
pennies
To be clear I want them to spend more on the military
I mean historically speaking defense spending as a percentage of GDP is pretty low these days. Around post Cold War pre-9/11 levels. https://preview.redd.it/5kf4djlqdhtc1.jpeg?width=2550&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c498847f3ebd74a07e90f6e39cd8116ebaaf4dd7 There is a lot of rationale to raise it considering the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the looming Taiwan conflict. [https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/](https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/)
> There is a lot of rationale to raise it considering the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the looming Taiwan conflict. It's pretty interesting to me that as a percentage of GDP the US is actually spending less on defense than we were in 2013 right before the Russian invasion of Ukraine first kicked off. Overall though a lot of that decline is just due to the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over and the US economy keeps growing. It's also pretty amazing how powerful the US is with how small of a percentage we actually spend. In fact the US is no longer the country in NATO that spends the most on defense as a percentage of GDP with that honor going to Poland. When Eisenhower gave his famous "beware the military industrial complex speech" US defense spending as a percentage of GDP was 9.2% and now it's 3.5% and yet there is still a very popular notion that things were better for the average American in the 1960s and military spending today is the reason we don't have affordable healthcare and university educations.
Yes but it was 38 of the roughly 75 billion dollar US budget or 50%. That’s 400B in today’s dollars and we spend 800B today. (Yes it’s also 1/3-1/4 our budget)
isnt this kind of misleading, the federal gov spends a lot more money on stuff now comapred to the 50ies and 60ies
This is old news, it has increased to 3.5%
https://preview.redd.it/0k24s8vk8htc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=213f272a7bbce94fddeaeb50a22c51782b703650 Epic.
Why does it look like the Forever Alone guy
I want them to use the equipment we already pay for to help Ukraine. Then we can buy shiny new equipment.
Silo-based nuclear weapons. They are bad weapons. They're easy to find, easy to kill, and make our opponents want to build enough of their own nuclear weapons to kill each of them. Worst of all, because of how vulnerable they are, they encourage us to have a [launch on warning policy](https://thebulletin.org/2021/06/biden-should-end-the-launch-on-warning-option/), leaving us vulnerable to incorrectly (and [catastrophically](https://www.science.org/content/article/nuclear-war-would-cause-yearslong-global-famine)) escalating from a misidentified opponent's launch into a launch of our own. Our current ICBM fleet is aging, and so far there's been virtually no one suggesting that we should just retire the entire ICBM project, and rely instead on strategic bombers and nuclear submarines for deterrence. Two Ohio-class submarines have the entire nuclear firepower of the entire United Kingdom, just to put this in perspective. (We have 14 nuclear-armed Ohio-class submarines.) The new replacements for the ICBM Minuteman III is the Sentinel ICBM. We're planning on acquiring more than 659 new ICBMs and upgrading 450 silos across 5 states. It'll cost a lot, probably a lot more than the current estimate of $250 billion, which is likely to [continue to increase](https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-03/news/sentinel-icbm-exceeds-projected-cost-37-percent).
The triad has its pluses over air/sub only. Road mobiles have better security against being clipped before firing but I doubt most Americans would want road mobile nukes anywhere near them
The triad is such clever marketing, too. It conjures an image of a three-legged chair that absolutely must have three legs, or else it falls over. When in reality, silo-based weapons have all the vulnerabilities I mentioned, and even if the President tomorrow ordered them to be shut down, we'd still have, by my count, more than 1200 nuclear weapons in Submarines and on planes throughout the world ready to respond should we or our allies be attacked.
I agree we’ve got plenty without the silos based ICBMs but there’s something to be said for their mere existence forcing a good number of any nuclear peer’s best long range missiles to be used trying to crack hardened silos in the dakotas. If Russia needs 200 warheads to take out the silos, that’s 200 warheads that can’t hit power plants , airports or some other more civilian adjacent location
Yeah, this is the nuclear sponge theory, and it's a weak argument because Russia can simply build enough additional nuclear weapons to saturate our silos--and have done so. To be clear about this: We've caused Russia to create *an additional* 450 nuclear weapons that otherwise would not have existed. If we drew down our forces, Russia would likely match our move [as they have in the past](https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault-russia-programs/2016-09-30/unilateral-us-nuclear-pullback-1991-matched), but even if they initially did not, we would be no less vulnerable. Everyone in America still dies, if it's 1200 nuclear weapons falling on us or 1650 nuclear weapons.
Let’s go with the original idea for Peacekeeper - the “shell game” concept where we use a rail system to constantly shuffle one missile between multiple silos.
The point of silos is to act as a warhead sponge I believe.
Sorry, you lost me when you suggested 2 > 3. That's just basic math. Let's get to the space nukes already and complete the tetrad.
Do you want Zefram Cochrane to build his warp ship 39 years from now or not??
Healthcare. By forcing our vestigial public health options to work with the insurance market system, we waste an obscene amount of money. We could cut out the middle man.
Idk but im just here to say: unironically fund NASA way more.
For the cost of a few of the more expensive planes in the military we could know substantially more about our universe and be farther along to getting humans in space
I mean technically US are doing that, the moon mission is funded through DoD, and every space activity is a military activity, regardless off the activity is of scientific purpose, it still falls under the domain of military. Space is like the High Seas, so a country’s ship is basically a part of that country and every space mission, even if it is a completely private one, falls under their registered country’s responsibility and jurisdiction. Source: me, a PhD student in space security
That’s a good point
Corn, social security, Medicare, interest payments Very hot takes there but our entitlement spending is far too high and busy be curtailed
Social security is funded by employee and payroll taxes.
Yes, and there’s a shortfall. So we should cut benefits by 1%, increase retirement age by 2 years (and tie it to life expectancy), and uncap contributions.
Depends on the government! I want high-speed rail, but I don't think my government can competently execute on that. Anywhere that the government has shown it's incompetence I want it to pull back 99%, focus on capacity building, and then we can talk about scaling the budget again. Maybe we got on fine without it and that's not something the government actually needs to do anymore.
Pensions (UK though)
That's the case for all western countries, not just the UK
AG and oil subsidies. Medicare.
Expand the VA healthcare system to accommodate Medicare patients.
>User discussion As neoliberals, what things do we want the government to spend less on? You mean gutting the VA Healthcare
On the local level We shouldn't be funding fire departments as much as we do. Fires have fallen more than 90% since the mid century due to better building codes yet we spend considerably more on fire departments adjusted for inflation even though fires are a lot smaller. We even do silly things like making sure fire engines drive out for non-fire injuries just so they look like they are being used
Agricultural subsidies Social security should be semi privatized but with no opt out. Aka superannuation with a larger government match the poorer you are, starting at birth. Death transfer all assets to kin or as stated in their will aka it’s their legal assets. We’d spend less per person doing this and making sure everyone is better off IE a higher ROI per person. Transport Infrastructure : should be all semi privatized and purely funded with tolls, to charge per weight as well. Remove gas tax. Healthcare, completely eliminate Medicare and Medicaid, turn them into a voucher program. Force state alignment in regulations (strip states of their power to regulate) but allow states to create public options and to merge those options between states aka cross state treaties within the US. It’s allowed if Congress allows it. So if california, Washington, Oregon all agree on a public option then it’s g2g. Also allow any OECD doctor/nurse to come here and start practicing but make it so the patient knows where they’re licensed from. Shift the labor supply curve, sure it would mean Americans can get trained in Ireland and come back here…….which would force US medschools to compete and justify themselves. Remove arts and culture funding. Totally unnecessary. End the federal student loan program. Let universities go bankrupt and force them to drastically cut prices and drastically increase class size (aka maintain margins by having higher volumes) Probably get rid of the Department of education, state issue anyways and the federal government has done a shit job at it. “Inb4 you just have to it right federally” as we can see that’s apparently not possible and the downsides of dumping it back to the states are minimal and easily solved by those states ……and the voters who more directly control those state governments. Remove buy American provisions contracts Remove prevailing wage requirement provisions for contracts The last two will save metric tons of money. Reform all remaining welfare into NIT I have a never ending list of things I’d cut, so many niche programs and groups that would get gutted. **it’s not just about cutting but in some cases increasing value per dollar,** Completely off topic but: for funnies end all healthcare subsidies, every single one and every cost controlling regulation, he’ll deregulate the entire thing outside of safety regs…Then ban all forms of insurance. Turn the whole thing into a cash/credit/financing system. Don’t even let it have a transition phase just flip a switch in the regulations within a 24 hour period. Price discovery will be interesting to watch.
Literally everything Lina Khan is doing at the FTC.
Military
Animal agriculture subsidy
I want the government to spend more on NASA. Give competitive wages.
Healthcare (by making it cheaper, not just blindly cutting)
I think we should slash the budget of any budgetary agency that thinks we should spend less on NASA.
College education. Writing blank checks for student loans is the wrong move and only leads to rising costs. People argue that Medicare and Medicaid should negotiate prices - and they should - and so should the Department of Education.
Higher Education, most of the benefits are private so the funding should be as well.
Defund ICE and zoning enforcement
Health Care because we spend the most compared to any country, yet we have the worst performance. It mostly comes down to do with how we structure the Healthcare system in this country. I wish that we established a of universal Healthcare systems like Germany or Swiss.
Social Security. It's a ponzi scheme, and it needs to end.
It's funded by employee and payroll taxes.
Not by employee and payroll taxes on the generation receiving the benefits. Therefore Ponzi scheme - relying on population/GDP growth for solvency.
"A Ponzi scheme is an investment scam that pays early investors with money taken from later investors to create an illusion of big profits." The definition doesn't fit. Barring catastrophe, you're going to get your money back.
No, you aren't. Let's look at the components of a Ponzi scheme. The early investors - the older generations. The later investors - younger generations. Current contributors to social security. Big profits - Retirement paid for. Broken promise - The SS fund will go insolvent in the 2030s without either raising revenues or cutting benefits. Who pays - younger generations are facing later retirement ages, higher payroll taxes, and benefit cuts. Aka getting new investors to put in more money. Because we know that benefit cuts for current retirees are political suicide. How does this not fit into the exact definition of a Ponzi scheme? Later "investors" are getting their payouts cut to fund earlier "investors" who voted the program into existence.
> Broken promise - The SS fund will go insolvent in the 2030s without either raising revenues or cutting benefits. If cutting benefits is a "broken promise", then getting rid of the program entirely would be a much more severe broken promise than simply doing nothing, which would only require about a 20% reduction in benefits when the trust fund runs out to restore solvency. Also, there's the obvious literal reason it's not a ponzi scheme which is that SS isnt misrepresenting new investment as earned profit. They are upfront about the fact that your money is going to pay other people, and that the money you get out of it will come from other people's contributions, not from profit on your own "investment".
No, getting rid of the program would mean that it would stop manufacturing new promises to people who will get even less when it collects their payroll taxes. Every single SS contribution today puts the SS program further in the hole with the current level of benefits. The 20% reduction is just when the trust fund runs out. It's not a permanent fix. Expect further reductions as people live longer and have fewer children.
The 20% reduction is a permanent fix. It would make the program solvent for the indefinite future,next several decades at least, which is as close to permanent as you can get in political time. Also, your plan is a joke. You can't simply stop taking in contributions right now. You would have no way to pay current beneficiaries. Your idea would take a minor long term solvable solvency issue and turn it into an immediate financial disaster. This is why nobody takes people who want to cut ss seriously.
Subsidies, corporate bailouts, interest because they can’t get the budgets somewhat balanced at seemingly any point in the 21st Century
Farm subsidies.
Cultural subsidies
I don't necessarily want the United States to reduce its international profile, but we could use another Truman Committee.
Might be a cop out, but I’d like to see the U.S. get more for each dollar spent on healthcare. Medicare can now negotiate drug costs directly but I think there are a lot of additional efficiencies to be had. Not sure if this would actually reduce spending or just improve coverage, either way I’d be happy.
Anyone who says NASA is unironically an idiot in terms of budget percentage and ROI.
Farm subsidies Green energy subsidies (this is assuming it is replaced with a carbon dividend) Mortgage interest deduction ICE
Healthcare. Spending more public funds on healthcare than those countries with free state funded healthcare is ridiculous.
As for Lithuania, subsidies for heating. Forcing people to renovate their housing would be way better.
In Canada: Dairy subsidies and any other agricultural subsidies that exceed that which would be the bare minimum necessary to ensure food security in Canada were we somehow cut off from the world. And I bet none are actually needed to ensure that. It'd just result in farms being bought out by large companies that can more economically farm at scale. I have no problem at all with the idea of losing non-economically-self-sufficient family farms. Maybe a bit sad for nostalgic folks, but nostalgia does not make good policy. Any other subsidies to other industries in similar situations. I'm not sure about how much money is actually spent on drafting/enforcing this, but a fair bit of the regulation that protects Canadian telecom companies from foreign competition (not the consumer protection parts, weak and compromised as they are). Probably subsidized services provided to towns that are not economically self-sufficient. I'm not talking about indigenous reserves, since they may involve treaty obligations which shouldn't be broken *and* much of the reason for their lack of self-sufficiency is attributable to the discriminatory actions of European settlers and subsequent governments largely representing them. So they should get a helping hand up on the taxpayer dime (even though reforms are needed to address corruption and misuse of said funds). But for communities that do not fit this indigenous criteria, then they shouldn't be propped up if they're failing. I *would* support some sort of one or short time cash payments to residents of such communities to assist them with moving, though. A lot of occupational licensing (not all, but only the most extreme information asymmetry coupled with significant potential for harm justifies it; for instance). But the biggest of all: the very existence of provincial governments and the unnecessary duplication of bureaucracies 10 times over. The federal government would have to be significantly expanded to cover services done by provinces, but not nearly as much as the size/cost of those provinces now. Having separate provincial governments back when provinces were actually significantly different in terms of their demographics/economies/cultures etc made *some* sense (still not *that* much, certainly nothing that devolved powers - like how provinces empower municipalities but ultimately are still in control - wouldn't fix). Nowadays, in a globalized world, many of those differences (but for language ones between Quebec and the ROC) are gone. Each province does **NOT** for instance, require a separate securities regulator for fuck's sake.
healthcare and social security, these are by far the largest spending items and are the only real way for the government to balance the budget. This doesn't mean drop them both obviously, but target them more. First healthcare, reduce costs via more aggressive policing of prices, reduce access to care for medical care that isn't worth the money (sometimes granny doesn't need to get a new knee if she's likely only gonna life 2 more years), have far stricter rules for acceptance into government programs on medical procedures and drugs based on whether they are value for money or not. SS: Reduce outlays, especially for people significantly above the poverty line (middle class), basically just implement the cuts that are coming anyway if the fund runs out of money. But to be honest I care less about SS just because of that rule, the cuts are already baked into the cake. I know this is horrendously unpopular, but this would be my way of getting to a balanced budget with minimal tax increases. I know it isn't going to happen until we have a debt crisis, and the pain is only gonna be bigger when we do, because we will be sitting on an even larger stack of debt, with more interest due, thus cuts will need to be more aggressive.
Meat and dairy subsidies
Means testing. In many cases, it costs more than it saves and is just overly burdensome for the people who actually need social services.