[9x39]

>Look, we spend a lot on things people want, right?

I'd say we spend a lot on things a few people who can maintain/expand power see ROI for power on. Sometimes that's things, sometimes that's just cash for voters and future voters.

The sliders world is more about consent via revenues of the governed, rather than the tax crop they really are.

[doctorpangloss]

we can go into an actual, interesting conversation about government spending. personally, i think your pessimistic, slightly nihilist, "people who can maintain/expand power" POV is just a different side of the same "voters are stupid" coin, in that it is also unelectable (no Mag7 CEO or top-500 billionaire could win an election today, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk even pay huge commissions to study it for them, and anyway, most of the top-500s are heirs, and the ones who are only slightly less wealthy but way, way less powerful lose elections all the time) but appeals to this cynical, conspiracy-minded BS that distracts from hard truths like:

people like paying for medical innovations. people are consenting to that. i mean, they certainly feel it is unfair when they have something they must pay for in order to survive, but in general, people have been choosing "expensive medical innovations" as an alternative to "dying" since the advent of the venture pharmaceutical system.

slider world CANNOT fix the problem that for some people, medical innovations are expensive. people will pay ANY price to cure a terminal illness suffered by their child, for example - there is no MARKET PRICE or AUCTION PRICE or VALID PRICE, i mean you can put a number into the slider, but you can see how "average of current + creditable worth" would be the answer to "what would you pay to cure your kid's terminal illness?"

and this is so, so much more interesting to talk about than taxes or vague nihilism about power. but no. it's too unorthodox. are you getting it? the website is stupid, why is it so hard to say that?

[9x39]

I really wanted to peek at the site, but I came too late and didn't get to see it and still can't get it to load. I'm familiar with the discretionary vs non-discretionary entitlement breakdowns of the first 10-20 line items of the federal budget as you are, and it's uninteresting to me to complain about individual programs' worthiness because the problem is their aggregate bulk and the (unfixable?) incentives involved.

1. do you think slider world depends on the taxed having meaningful influence over spending? im thinking power split btw the diffused tax base vs the concentrated beneficiaries and the interests that allocated the spending

2. terminal illness breaks our price mechanism - what would we pay for our kid, another 20 years of life, to walk again, etc? but are we agreeing or disagreeing that solving things perfectly isn't the goal (with slider world, or today's system), and maybe isn't even possible? Fed gov doesn't have to work perfectly, it just needs to work.