[Dalewyn]

I think that kind of proves my point: These "budgets" are so damn convoluted that nobody actually understands them. Even the House Speaker is surprised at the shit DOGE is digging up, and he's the boss of the people who write and pass the budgets.

And even that aside, anyone who knows how the real world works can understand that what should happen and what does happen are not necessarily the same especially if corruption is involved.

The whole thing needs an audit.

[derstander]

It's not clear to me that administering an entity with as many people and as much land as the United States could be done in a simple enough way that would satisfy these objections (not necessarily yours specifically, but this broad class). Though I certainly don't object to the notion that there's fat to trim and ways to make things less complicated.

I would be interested in an existence proof of this: an entity of similar population and size with a budget that's simple in comparison.

My naive expectations are that more authoritarian countries will hide a lot of budgetary items and countries with coalition-style governments will have even messier budgets than the US. Looking into that would be interesting but it's not going to make it onto my Sunday morning short-list.

My opinion about this remains that if the governed are really interested, they need to put in the ground work to understand the material that's available. Some things just are complicated and require studying to understand.