is your position really that wasteful spending isn't rampant in government?
Yes. First of all, I was actually talking about fraud, not waste. Fraud is the word right wingers use because it sounds ominous, but as soon as they find their hands on the steering wheel they somehow are unable to figure out where it is. That’s why, despite DOGE bragging endlessly about how much fraud they eliminated, they still haven’t made any notable arrests yet. Because it was always bullshit. Which is not to say it’s not happening anywhere, but that it’s no where near as pervasive as the propaganda arm of this administration alleges.
But when it comes to waste, that’s kind of a pointless conversation because waste turns out to be any form of government spending you don’t like. And when your political ideology is basically “government = bad”, it becomes meaningless to even bother using the word.
examples of government waste you claim is non existent despite evidence that the government is imperfect
I know you really thought you were flexing right here, but you only proved my point. Trump created an entire department whose sole mission in life was to find fraud and waste. They found no fraud, and with regards to waste, your list includes something like $15M in a budget of almost $7T. If your point was to prove how efficient the government is, the fact that this was the most impactful list you could come up with certainly proves it.
Moreover, most of the examples provided are not nearly as wasteful as you all pretend. You guys like to use buzzwords to describe them while having no idea what they actually do or why we have an interest in it. That’s exactly the ignorance I was talking about. Pick any one item on this list and we can look at it together to assess just how wasteful it was.
it's always been the position its better to cut too deep and make some mistakes since that is easily reversible than it is to not go deep enough considering how rare government spending cuts are.
Said no responsible governing party, ever. This philosophy is absurd on its face, cutting agencies and laying off workers by the thousands, only to have to recall them wastes significant resources both during and after the occurrence as it is extremely chaotic. It causes delays in the system which have to be rectified, it causes progress to be lost which then has to be gain all over again, and the workers in those cases often get back pay so you can end up paying triple for what turns out to be less than what you would have gotten if you just left it alone.
But what these blunders really demonstrate is that this wasn’ta matter of DOGE “cutting too deep”, it means they had no idea what they were doing at all. It would be one thing to lay off workers and find yourself dealing with unintended consequences of those layoffs, but that’s not what this is. What this shows is that they themselves didn’t have any idea what the people they were firing even do. That is unforgivable stupidity. Do not try and spin that into a virtue, that just shows you to be fundamentally unserious.
also it was a Biden official who demanded the pointless slaughter of poultry to artificially raise prices.
It wasn’t pointless, that’s just your ignorance showing… again. The purpose of killing a portion of the stock was to prevent the spread of avian flu, which has the potential to be FAR more catastrophic than the price increases we we ended up seeing.
Illegals can't pay taxes because employers have to pay them off the books and yet still use american resources also per the law of supply and demand artificially deflate wages while simultaneously increasing housing costs.
Illegals pay taxes through ITIN’s or borrowed social security numbers, not to mention sales and gas taxes. It’s a fact that undocumented immigrants contribute tens of billions of dollars to federal state and local taxes, while they cannot collect the benefits their native born counterparts do. Every study on this finds them to be a net positive or at the very least self sufficient.
Then can drive down wages in specific sectors, but to the extent that is true it translates to lower prices for the rest of us and in most cases these are the jobs Americans don’t even want to do in the first place.
Housing is one of those examples. Who do you think is building them? Getting rid of all undocumented workers will cause construction costs to rise.
No serious study on any of this finds that our economy will benefit from getting rid of these people.
Let me tell you we can simultaneously remove lazy employees and reward good ones with good pay increases while also creating computer programs to implement zero trust architecture to increase due diligence and make fraud less likely.
Yeah, technological advancements can help make us more efficient. Ground breaking thinking there.
What I was responding to was the idea that you’re just going to walk into an agency, fire half the staff, and think that by doing so you’ve made everything more efficient. That’s just plain stupid. Technology adaptation happens gradually as your team learns and effectuates its implementation. Doesn’t matter how advanced it is, you have to build it into your operating procedures. That takes people.
