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by ericmay·16d ago·view on hn ↗
"All organizations waste money, therefore organizations should keep wasting money and it's actually fine" doesn't sound very compelling to me.
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the talk of waste is in service of thw question "is the government well funded enough?"

and so far it does not appear that reducing waste would properly fund the government? a couple patriot missiles worth is not the debt, and would not allow for much more efficient single payer health care - the single biggest opportunity the US government has to reduce waste in american society

Again you can do both - you can cut these wasteful programs, you can have a well-funded government that's already well-funded with trillions of dollars, and then also reform healthcare all without raising taxes. Use your imagination.
My imagination is indeed very capable of magical thinking.

However, if this was something that worked in the real world, we wouldn't be having this conversation because e.g. DOGE would have been successful.

That sounds nice in a perfectly spherical world but we live in reality.

Getting bogged down in line item spending is a trick politicians use to divide us. Net discretionary spending is only 27% of the budget, social security, Medicare, and military spending make up the other 73%. If you eliminated all discretionary spending, we’d still be running a budget deficit.

> Getting bogged down in line item spending is a trick politicians use to divide us.

Politicians? You're sitting here arguing about the line item spending instead of just admitting we should cut obviously bad spending. That's the division that's taking place and it's happening right here in this thread and it's your doing! lol