> who are the "wrong people" that massive social programs enrich? Can you give an example? Most of federal spending is medicare, medicaid and social security; which are immensely popular with voters of all kind.
If you ask people if they support the abstract idea of having a military so we're not invaded by foreign forces, or having a program to prevent the elderly from dying in the streets, they say yes.
But then you ask them whether social security should send a larger check to a retired Jeff Bezos than a retired firefighter on a fixed income, or the government should spend billions of dollars on equipment the military itself says it doesn't need but the Congressman from the district which is getting the contract to build it says that it does, and the public support for that falls off pretty fast.
And those "features" cause those programs to cost hundreds of billions of dollars more than they need to, which money could otherwise go to infrastructure and schools and tax cuts for the middle class, all of which are also immensely popular with voters of all kinds. But won't happen when the programs absorbing more than three quarters of the total budget are administered in a federal system where the Congressmen are rewarded for bringing home the pork and Florida is an important swing state full of retirees.
Military is like 15% of federal spending, social security and healthcare is 50+% of federal spending.
I agree that there is military excess, but I'm skeptical that reducing it would make THAT much difference.
The military used to be a significantly larger percentage of the budget than it is now, but it's not because the military is any smaller. It's because spending on retirees is exploding. Nobody really wants to admit this because the reason the costs are exploding is that there are so many more people over retirement age, which also means that there are more voters over retirement age, which makes it politically very difficult to do anything about it. But it's a serious problem -- how are we supposed to sustain spending more than half of the government budget on retirees?
And the DoD and the VA are also considered separately, but let's not pretend they're unrelated. If you have twice as many soldiers today then you need twice the VA budget tomorrow.
If you ask people if they support the abstract idea of having a military so we're not invaded by foreign forces, or having a program to prevent the elderly from dying in the streets, they say yes.
But then you ask them whether social security should send a larger check to a retired Jeff Bezos than a retired firefighter on a fixed income, or the government should spend billions of dollars on equipment the military itself says it doesn't need but the Congressman from the district which is getting the contract to build it says that it does, and the public support for that falls off pretty fast.
And those "features" cause those programs to cost hundreds of billions of dollars more than they need to, which money could otherwise go to infrastructure and schools and tax cuts for the middle class, all of which are also immensely popular with voters of all kinds. But won't happen when the programs absorbing more than three quarters of the total budget are administered in a federal system where the Congressmen are rewarded for bringing home the pork and Florida is an important swing state full of retirees.