Where is this money actually going? Does anybody see it in their day to day? It all feels like it's spent maintain a fragile status quo, fragile peace, fragile health, (not so) fragile roads but still.
Something doesn't sit right, if Clinton got the deficit under control while maintaining a strong economy it should be easier with modern technology. Lots of fraud going on I guess.
health&pharma, oil&gas, defense have seen major year on year profit increases since then when at best improvements should be very marginal due to the nature of the businesses. They are also large portions of the budget. In general any industry that has exploded in profits that can't be explained by increased market share should be looked into very closely.
If you ever go outside of the US it is shocking how much other countries do with so little. Countires with a tenth of our population and an even smaller fraction of our GDP have cheap, efficient, high quality health care systems and clean, convenient public transportation. They have well equipped classrooms with teachers who don't have to work two jobs to get by. They have highly skilled police forces whose training is measured in years, not weeks. These countries are not perfect, but they seem to govern far nore effectively than the richest country on that planet. I'm not even talking about an idealized Europe; some southeast asian countries are like this too.
So yeah, where is the money going? When you combine state, local, and federal, the US spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on education (more than our military!) but where does it go? We regularly churn out illiterate graduates and teachers have to commute from another state away in order to find somewhere affordable to live. We spend more money per capita on healthcare than anyone else in the world for worse coverage and worse outcomes.
I hypothesize that the dollar's status as the world reserve currency is actually a bad thing. It makes it cheap for us to borrow money and as a result encourages all kinds of social pathologies associated with ZIRP
The money is going to rent seeking middle man corporations. Our system is basically a jobs program for lawyers, defense contractors and insurance companies. They contribute nothing to the country but absorb so much money.
Their talents would be better used if we cut out the middle layer.
The TLDR is: Social Security, Interest payments, Medicare, Defense, Medicaid, Income Security Programs, and then a whole hodgepodge of Other. Politicians can try to cut a bit in Other or maybe Income Security, but the other big blocks are nearly untouchable Third Rails.
FTC didn't go through with their plan on abolishing noncompetes... for doctors... facepalm WHY DO DOCTORS NEED NONCOMPETES!? To keep prices artificially high is the answer
Something doesn't sit right, if Clinton got the deficit under control while maintaining a strong economy it should be easier with modern technology. Lots of fraud going on I guess.
health&pharma, oil&gas, defense have seen major year on year profit increases since then when at best improvements should be very marginal due to the nature of the businesses. They are also large portions of the budget. In general any industry that has exploded in profits that can't be explained by increased market share should be looked into very closely.