[blindriver]

I really hate this attitude. "$24 billion a year is nothing compared to the deficit so we should just ignore it and keep spending."

Spending cuts have to start SOMEWHERE. Saying $24 billion is ignorable is insane. We are in a critical debt situation and my children's future is at stake.

[efnx]

The attitude comes from a point of analysis, and the argument that follows is that we can save by cutting spending in specific areas that we overspend in (military) and we could rake in lots more in taxes by making the rich _pay their fare share_.

The current firing of government workers is about political alignment, not about cost. Cost is a pretext.

[blindriver]

I believe we should gut military spending. That doesn't mean that hiring 82,000 employees in 5 years is justified. I'm happy to see spending cuts straight across the board.

[buttercraft]

What would be the appropriate number to hire, and how do arrive at the answer?

[blindriver]

No new headcount. Layoff the bottom 5% of the institution per year based on performance reviews and replace them with new hires. When someone leaves, replace every 3 people leaving with 1 new hire.

[acdha]

This is a good way to destroy productivity and morale, but if that’s not your goal you need to expect your managers to earn their pay.

Laying off the bottom 5% presumes that you’re measuring that accurately and that individual workers have control over their productivity, both of which are unlikely to be true - and if you get either wrong, you just incentivized playing political games and shying away from work which is hard, uncertain, or under-weighted by your metrics. Stack ranking almost destroyed the ability of Microsoft and Google to make anything people love, and you can see its cost in the unperformed maintenance work people know won’t juice their metrics.

Similarly, if people are leaving because you have too much work, poor working conditions, don't pay well enough, etc. capping rehiring is just going to make the situation worse.

If you’re not a PE guy looking to juice a company before dumping it, cost cutting has to be a process of understanding and identifying your true goals first. If you’ve truly over-hired, the first lesson to draw is that you have a management problem which you need to deal with first since it will make everything else likely to fail as well.

[blindriver]

This is false. It's a great way to INCREASE productivity and morale. Good workers HATE working with lazy, dumb and inefficient workers. But constantly getting rid of the low performers and replacing them with better people, you are instilling confidence in the system.

If your entire org is filled with lazy low performers, then it doesn't matter if productivity and morale is destroyed, because they don't have high productivity or morale in the first place.

[efnx]

This is known as "death by attrition". It's generally not a successful strategy.

[kstrauser]

Here are the official spending numbers[0]. The largest categories are:

* Social Security

* Medicare

* National Defense

* Interest payments

* Health

* Income Security

* VA Benefits

Which of those categories are we overspending on? Which specific cuts do you want to make? It's impossible for one to claim they're serious about saving money without talking about slashing Social Security, Medicare, and the military, which together make 40% of the budgets, so... which are you in favor of reducing?

When you've cut your budget as far as you can and you're still losing money, the only solution is to make more money. Here, that means taxes, and specifically that we must start taxing the rich. I'm not saying that as some far-left "eat the rich" kind of thing, but as basic arithmetic and economics. We need more revenue, and it has to come from somewhere.

[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[bpt3]

What gives you the impression we don't tax the rich?

The American middle and lower class are the least taxed individuals in the developed world. The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.

I'm certainly open to changing how things like dividend income are treated, but the rich don't have enough money to solve our budget problems.

I think your question about what spending to reduce was intended to be rhetorical, but the answer is: everything.

[kstrauser]

> What gives you the impression we don't tax the rich?

Math and history. One example explainer: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/80552/total-tax...

> The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.

Citation urgently needed. That doesn't jibe with literally any report I've read about such things, except from anti-tax extremist organizations.

[bpt3]

> Math and history. One example explainer: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/80552/total-tax...

I honestly have no idea why you think information about aggregate tax revenue over time is relevant to your original claim. If you want to see the tax rate increased on the upper extremes (like the top 400 mentioned at that link), I would too but it's a drop in the bucket.

> Citation urgently needed. That doesn't jibe with literally any report I've read about such things, except from anti-tax extremist organizations.

From https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/top-personal-income-ta...

The average statutory top personal income tax rate in the EU is 42.8%.

"For comparison, the average combined state and federal top income tax rate for the 50 US states and the District of Columbia lies at 42.14 percent as of January 2025, with rates ranging from 37 percent in states without a state income tax to 50.3 percent in California."

Feel free to call the Tax Foundation an "anti-tax extremist organization" if you'd like, but I wouldn't agree and they are just reporting facts here.

[seanmcdirmid]

Could we stop talking about top marginal income tax rates as if graduated income taxation wasn't a thing? You will pay less taxes in California than Mississippi or Alabama if you are poor.

Even if you are a single person in California making $400k/year (which I would call pretty rich!), you are only paying 8.38% of your income in state tax (you don't even hit the 13.3% bracket until a million dollars or so?). In total, you are paying 39.22% of your income in taxes (including federal and payroll). As a baseline, if you are in Texas which doesn't have state income tax, you are paying around 31% for the same income.

[bpt3]

The OP of this thread wants to keep spending the same and says that taxing the rich is the solution to our budget woes, so that's why the top marginal rates are relevant, and most state income taxes aren't as progressive as the ones in CA.

Your example of a CA resident who is making $400k is paying a marginal rate of 35% at the federal level and 10.30% at the state level (not 8.38%), which is above the EU average.

[throw0101a]

> What gives you the impression we don't tax the rich?

The top tax rate perhaps:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IITTRHB

Maybe just a coïncidence that inequality started going up around 1980, when it was cut the most.

[bpt3]

Yes, it's likely it was a coincidence given that many loopholes were closed at the same time and the effective rate wasn't changed much.

The US has the most progressive tax code in the developed world, and the average American has more disposable income than their peers anywhere else on Earth. Why is it that the upper class is the only one that needs to kick in more?

[lenerdenator]

> The upper classes, especially given a disproportionate percentage live in places like NYC and CA, are carrying EU-levels of tax burden already.

And?

They can afford more, and taxation is a way to reintroduce actual risk of financial ruin for the wealthy. If financial ruin is a good motivator for the rest of us, it should be for them, too.

It's not about percentage, it's about the reality that taxation brings about for you. When you have a net worth that's equal to the entire economic output of a major American city, you can endure massive tax bills because you make enough off of your holdings to equal the average lifetime earnings of dozens of Americans.

[bpt3]

It's very convenient to sign other people up to pay for your preferred government services and I'm sure your peers are willing to eagerly pat you on the back for your generosity, but ultimately even taxing the wealthy at 100% won't cover the deficit no matter how good it would make you feel. That's the "And".

There's a reason nearly every developed nation has a VAT.

[lenerdenator]

>It's very convenient to sign other people up to pay for your preferred government services and I'm sure your peers are willing to eagerly pat you on the back for your generosity, but ultimately even taxing the wealthy at 100% won't cover the deficit no matter how good it would make you feel.

Other people sign me up to pay for their preferred government services all the time. It's called living in a civilization. And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.

I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?

[bpt3]

> Other people sign me up to pay for their preferred government services all the time. It's called living in a civilization.

Unless you're one of the wealthy you're talking about (which would be odd to say the least), no one is asking you to pay for government services for somewhere between dozens to thousands of your fellow citizens who pay approximately $0 federal income tax on average, so it's not the same.

> And don't get me started on the retirees getting a slice of my labor because they have a piece of paper saying they own part of my company.

Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.

> I'm under no illusion that taxing at 100% would cover the deficit. It'd probably mean a better financial picture for the government, though, and if this whole national debt thing is the existential threat that fiscal conservatives say it is, well, is any improvement not good?

Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.

[marcusverus]

It's an intentionally deceptive framing, so you should hate it. $24 Billion is $183 per taxpayer per year. I sure as hell think $180/year is a lot of money, and if the government is going to forcibly take 1/4 of my friggin' salary every year, they really ought to be at least as careful with my money as I am!

[jrs235]

I don't think blindly saving $183/year is worth throwing a wrench into our economic engine that provides everyone else an ecocomy that allows us to have jobs and things. I think we we need more thoughtful cuts rather than just thoughtlessly making cuts. Speed doesn't kill, the sudden change in velocity is what kills. All these cuts so quickly is going to kill the economy. This desire for instant gratification/change is like slamming on the brakes, for a dog in the road a mile away, and we don't have seatbelts. People will suffer and die. Depression approaching.

[bpt3]

How exactly is cutting VA headcount back to 2019 numbers "throwing a wrench into our economic engine"?

This is why we end up with indiscriminate and thoughtless cuts, because the alternative is people who seem to believe that every penny of government spending is absolutely essential the second after the line item is conceived, and the only way to fix any issues that exist is with more spending.

[acdha]

That’s 80k people suddenly, thoughtlessly forced to stop contributing to the economy. In some areas, stable federal jobs are the backbone of the local economy and surprise cuts like that mean that small businesses fold and home prices fall because people can’t make mortgage payments without jobs which aren’t there (this was brutal in San Diego in the early 90s because whole neighborhoods near the big defense contractors went from being full of highly-paid engineers to unemployed, and you’d see people with Ph.D’s applying for software QA jobs just to have some income and health insurance).

If you wanted to cut things responsibly, you’d plan it in advance and think about how to avoid shocking the economy into a recession.

[bpt3]

> If you wanted to cut things responsibly, you’d plan it in advance and think about how to avoid shocking the economy into a recession.

Absolutely. I in no way support what DOGE is doing.

But when people think cuts are needed (and the majority of Americans seem to think that's the case), and the options are your position that the country would seemingly collapse if a single job was cut and someone who is going to take a figurative chainsaw to the federal budget, don't be surprised when the chainsaw wins due to your refusal to compromise on your unreasonable and largely unpopular position.

[acdha]

I don’t see anyone taking the position that you can’t cut a single job. Most of what I see is basically saying that should be a legal process and at the program level - like don’t randomly break GSA leases, say that next year you’re closing a particular program so you don’t tell people to go to the office which you closed or have an operating federal courthouse with no building staff (Phoenix, currently).

[acdha]

$0.50/day is well below most people’s discretionary threshold, and it isn’t just money being burnt but keeping a promise. If we want to lower the cost to the taxpayers, we should be shrinking the military first rather than cutting the benefits which were promised to people decades ago.

If you want to cancel it out, there are many easier ways to do it, including things like more IRS auditing for tax evasion. There’s roughly a 10:1 return rate for enforcement, with an estimated gap of over half a trillion dollars.