Politicians, billionaires, the military industrial complex. Also businesses should be actively financially penalized for putting profit over people. Good luck with that though.
What could the US get rid of to balance the budget and make prices drop very quickly? How is some trash or misspent money on thing we no longer need?
Submitted 1 day ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
hexdream@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Ariselas@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Billionares
DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They basically invested all of that money in the opposite direction for climate change.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 19 hours ago
The US military sucks about $1T a year, but twice that is spent on the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Also, Boomers are sucking more out of social security, and healthcare than they ever paid in.
All could be paid for if they stopped taxing “income” and started taxing net worth. But that would mean taxing boomers, which is not allowed. If they stopped income tax the economy would boom with trillions in spending, not hoarding.
BussyCat@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
The military budget isn’t even the whole story because it doesn’t include the hundreds of billions that go to DHS and the hundreds of billions that’s go to veterans affairs which only exists because of the military budget
Witchfire@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Bring back pre-Raegan tax rates
CombatWombat@feddit.online 1 day ago
You’ve gotta raise revenues. We’ve tried cutting our way out of this, and it just doesn’t work. Thinking of “how do we reduce government spending” is fundamentally the wrong mentality; we should reduce overall spending by increasing government revenues and expenditures. If we implemented socialized healthcare, as a nation we’d save in excess of $1T even though as a state we’d spend considerably more than we do currently.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Raise corporate taxes. They’re not hiring anyway. Wealth tax. Cut military spending. Cut subsidies.
GarboDog@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Oh cuts? Cut off the oligarchy, push socialist policies like free dental and health care, make colleges free, re-initiate DEI programs and support, force landlords/housing associations to have a limited amount of owned homes, build more affordable homes, nationalize rail and standardize public transit and bike infrastructure, wealth cap via wealth tax, remove all barriers of immigration and emigration, support international trade, eliminate monopolies and fine them for every community they’ve affected (the money fires to local businesses and new local stores) make slap/useless law suits illegal, ban use of baseless AI, fix redrawn gerrymandered maps, tear down borders between usa, Canada and Mexico and allow free and open travel, work with Canada and Mexico with peace not segregation, de-criminalize non violent crimes, release non violent prisoners, make prisons learning/re-habitation facilities with support - not torture facilities, mandate pentagon a full and thorough Audit (including classified projects, only need to know the amount of money not what the project is), stop any and all proxy wars, heavily regulate businesses, standardize worker unions, and ensure news and news like channels are speaking true and non biased information.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
Honestly, cuts alone wouldn’t do it. You could cut all defense spending, fire the Department of Defense in its entirety, and the Federal Government would still run a deficit. Include all non-mandatory civilian spending as well and you’ll barely be above water.
The best things to do would be to increase revenue and enact policies which will allow for savings in existing Medicare programs like allowing for drug price negotiation. There is nowhere near the level of waste in the Federal Government that a lot of politicians claim in how existing programs work.
9point6@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Prices will only increase, and at a rate faster than average salaries, until billionaires are removed from society
gastroglizzy@piefed.social 1 day ago
We don’t need to get rid of anything. All we need is for billionaires to pay as much taxes as the rest of us.
newton@piefed.social 1 day ago
Dump trump,its a beginning
crispbacon99@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Not just trump, it’ll give Republicans a scapegoat for all the policies they pass. Trump is just a symptom of the Epstein billionaire class corruption
theneverfox@pawb.social 1 day ago
Nothing. It’d be funny if it wasn’t sad. The math isn’t mathing, the debt repayment is so high it’ll never be paid off normally
Plus you have private debt, which has also grown to an untenable level
There’s only three ways out of this historically. First, a jubilee… We just say fuck it, all debts are forgiven and we move forward. Second is a revolution where the new government doesn’t acknowledge the past debt
Finally, we have the option that’s actually going to happen, hyperinflation. Through devaluation of the currency, most debt will shrink until we get back to a manageable level and hopefully things stabilize
But dropping prices as well? Yeah, that’s just not happening. We could drop the prices of necessities through government intervention, but we’re going to have to take the socialism pill for that (which might happen, it’s looking appealing to more and more Americans these days)
But there’s no world where we both balance the budget and drop prices. Just a few years ago, we could’ve raised taxes and took a hatchet to defense spending and slowly worked it off while keeping inflation at a high but manageable level to whittle it down… But at this point, the debt is just too large
Bwaz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Oil subsidies. And military spending. Those two alond would fund anything that would help people in general.
Venator@lemmy.nz 1 hour ago
Also corn subsidies.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Cut back on the military budget and tax everyone with more than 120 millions (random number) in assets hard.
You can’t get money circulating in the economy if it gets pooled in the hands of a selected few.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Just to add emphasis on how much we could cut from the military:
The US is ranked #1 globally in military spending, and we spend more than all of the countries ranked #2-#8 (China, Russia, Germany, India, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Ukraine) COMBINED.
Which means we either have way more shit than we need to protect ourselves, or, we’re being incredibly wasteful and need to reassess that spending.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I was expecting someone to put the numbers down. Thank you. I can never retain that part.
My personal take, as a non military expert, is that the US has too many branches, with conflicting interests, and not enough coordination and joint command, geared towards force projection and occupation, instead of a highly coordinated, intertwined, cohesive military set for threat deterrence and strategic defense operations.
In my understanding, that was the goal of NATO: having a very large number of countries combined to pool resources, know-how, means of production and, in a dire event, human resources. No country was supposed to drain it’s coffers to be capable to hold off threats.
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
Keep in mind that the US military is a giant welfare program. Sure, it’s a lot of money, but a lot of that money is keeping the last vestiges of manufacturing alive in bumfuck nowhere, Middle America, where they still weld tanks together.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
You don’t believe part of those workshops can be converted to other use?
Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Image
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Well, it should be done.