It's not the hiring people that's the problem. Assuming those people "cost" 300k a year all in (benefits/offices,etc) which is probably high, that's $24 billion. The government spent $6.8 trillion, cutting these jobs cuts spending by .3891%.
Cutting the people without cutting the programs won't do much and is (IMO) a problem in that you should be able to access government services in a way that the writers of the laws (house/senate) have clearly agreed to. When you're cutting this widely, it's hard to believe you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is the thing that keeps making me so angry when I hear so called "budget hawks" get mad about the number of federal employees. Payroll is _not the problem_!! All of the federal payroll is something like 10-15% of the government's expenditure. Firing _everyone_ would only cut costs by 10-15%. There are plenty of programs (read: bloated defense contracts and corporate subsidies) that we could cut to save costs instead, and we wouldn't crater the federal workforce like we are now.
You can be mad about the government spending money on things you believe are unnecessary, and you can even want to fire the people related to that program! But across the board personnel cuts don't fix the appropriations issues and will waste money in inefficiency, waste and loss as the folks that are left have to pick up the pieces.
Does the federal government employ too many people? I dunno, maybe. Do we fund too many programs? Yeah, probably. But these cuts are _fucking insane_.
Part of the personal issue also. Notably, not especially Democrat or Republican related. Both administration groups for years.
The Defense part especially seems crazy. Per USASpending.gov [1], last year the federal government spent $9,700,000,000,000. Despite all the talk that Covid budgets were short term event, they never actually went back down. Dropped to $9T in 2022, and then started rising again. Post-Covid surge was $6.6T in 2019, then jumped to $9.1T in 2020. $10.1 in 2021.
At the same time, post-Covid, the Defense Department budget has been rising at about $100,000,000,000 / yr for the last three years. 2021: $1.1T 2022: $1.2T 2023: $1.3T 2024: $1.4T
(To be fair in comparison though, the largest other single items, Medicare / Social Security, have also been rising fast. 2021: 1.4 / 1.2, 2022: 1.5 / 1.3, 2023: 1.6 / 1.4, 2024: 1.6 / 1.5 )
However, with the DoD, what have we got from that much spending? Incredibly depressing slides from The War on the Rocks like this one about the incomprehensible gap in shipbuilding capacity? A factor of 232x? The US only has 100,000 tons of shipbuilding? That's a single neo-Panamax cargo ship. [1]
Or this one from Military.com, that the government does not know where $151 million of $225 million collected from soldiers for food supplies on garrisons was actually spent. [3] Fort Stewart, 87% of funds redirected. Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, 63% redirected. All but two bases left more than half of the money for food unspent. $225 million doesn't mean almost anything to the government, yet $460 of mandatory / month deduction in paycheck for a Basic Allowance for Subsistence that then goes "somewhere" matters quite a bit to individual soldiers. And the defense budget rose $100B every year for years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Again, the real world isn’t that simplistic. Look at the way that’s worked in the past, and remind yourself that all of those guys thought they were also smart and onto a brilliant move.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> and most state income taxes aren't as progressive as the ones in CA.
That's why poor wind up paying more in flat tax states, it is simply WAI.
Marginal rates don't matter as much as how much you actually pay. On paper, CA has a top rate of 12.3%...on income over 720k dollars. It exists, but it doesn't seem like a thing we should ponder too much.
States only have so much power in setting tax rates, given that people are somewhat mobile. California being overpopulated for so long gave them some latitude here, but honestly income inequality isn't going to be handled at any level below federal.
But the point about Europe is right, but only in the sense that Europeans don't pay nearly as much in income taxes as most Americans think they do.
Denmark is the highest at 45%, compared to America's 27%. Switzerland, the only European country I've lived in, is just a hair above the USA at 28/29%. UK is only a few points above that, while France is just below Denmark. So I guess it really depends?
Yes, it depends on the country. but the European average is well above the US.
Also, the US has a more progressive federal income tax code than Europe (or every other developed country), so the tax burden in the US is carried more by the upper class than it is in those other countries, resulting in the average middle class American paying significantly lower taxes than a peer in Europe.
Most of that difference disappears when you consider insurance premiums and retirement, however. I compared a few countries when a Danish mentioned that they weren’t really seeing a huge difference and you have to be in the top few percentiles for high American healthcare costs not to cancel out the tax savings, and by their account it was a far less stressful process to get care as well.
You've got to compute the entire package. One reason Switzerland comes in around the USA is that they require health insurance and retirement to be funded by the user (mandatory, this system is what Obama/RomneyCare was actually based off of). Denmark uses taxes instead, so their rate looks higher. You can't just make broad assumptions that taxation is for the same thing.
People do. Americans come out well ahead on disposable income.
You keep comparing the US to Switzerland, which is a giant outlier in Europe and probably the most like the US in many ways (as you pointed out), when you should be comparing it to France, Germany, and all the other larger EU states with a stagnant economy and populations that have gotten substantially poorer relative to the US over the last 20+ years.
Also, because healthcare in the US is such a disaster, we do pay about what many other countries pay for socialized medicine via taxes, and then basically everyone under 65 (aka the people who cost way less to insure) have to pay for it again in the private sector.
If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
I've only ever lived in Switzerland and none of the other European countries. But I remember visiting France and Germany...things are so cheap there compared to Swiss! You could eat out and not pay 100CHF per person. I do have friends in other parts of Europe (e.g. NL, DE, DK, FR) and while they like our salaries, they don't really like our costs.
> If we could get that under control, there would be no competition economically.
I don't think America would be the same if it did, and I don't think Europeans are pining for "American success" even if you discount our broken healthcare system.
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?
> 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.
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.
>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?
> 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.
> 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.
Really? You think I don't pay for services I don't use?
> Hint: it's not actually your company. Those people actually employ you.
Do they? What do they know of the company? If I asked the beneficiary of a pension fund what the company does and where it was headquartered, would they know?
> Confiscatory tax rates are counterproductive, other than making the envious far left feel better about themselves.
It's not far left to want general stability in your society. People with too much money and a government with too much debt are destabilizing forces.
The world is literally filled with examples of how this works, if you'd stop pretending that the current system in the US is working.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
$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.
very fraction of a percent counts... small things add up quickly...
Idk why this is a political issue? As a progressive I also support firing people who aren't producing effective outcomes for veterans. With all we save that money SHOULD be used to actually help veterans.
Why do you think they aren't producing effective outcomes?
The administration's track record is that it cuts indiscriminately, without considering the impact, and then sometimes tries to backtrack and rehire people when critical things break.
But how much extra waste will be generated by losing the experts in these bureaucracies? Of course some of them are redundant, but some of them have the proverbial bathroom codes and are irreplaceable. These cuts are incredibly irresponsible; cutting _programs_, along with the staff associated with those programs, is IMO wrong but at least workable as a long term cost reduction strategy. Just slashing staff left and right is malpractice.
NOAA just fired hundreds of weather forecasters. World class ones, literally some of the best meteorologists in the world. And they knew how to interact with NOAA's systems to gather data and publish forecasts, issue realtime watches and warnings, and a thousand other things. Realtime forecasts are _vital_ to hundreds of different industries and save thousands of lives a year, and part of that is because they are able to quickly issue new forecasts when the situation changes. We get tornado warnings, fire forecasts, tsunami warnings, and a whole bunch else with enough time to get to safety because of these extremely talented folks.
These people are irreplaceable. And I know one of these forecasters very well, he's an old friend of mine. He is done with the federal government; even if they offer him his job back he's not going back, because his trust that his job as a meteorologist was safe is smashed to pieces. That's irreparable harm.
I worked in government. I know exactly what it looks like and how 33% of workers could be cut with no effect besides the rest being scared of losing their cushy jobs.
It's a very large organization, much much larger than a business. If business can't cut with a scalpel, it would be even less possible with government.
In a softly held defense of those words, they basically are an escalation level.
If someone asks you for something, it could be something with undefined scope or priority. An "ask" signals "this is official". Same thing with learnings: lesson is personal, learnings means ways things are changing.
Are there dumb business terms, absolutely, but these aren't bad IMO.
So you're saying that "an ask" is "an order" or "a demand", rather than "a request".
Why not use those words?
I don't understand what "an ask" means.
I don't know what the speaker intended with it, and I wouldn't know how a receiver would understand it.
It's just communicating badly, using words with no fixed shared meaning.
Or somebody too afraid to be confrontational to phrase a demand as actually demanded.
And "learnings" is just somebody too lazy to say "lessons learned".
If it actually is stronger than a simple request, I could see saying "an ask" as a way of demanding using softer language. If your boss were to say "I demand ...", everybody is going to say they're a demanding jerk, but if they come to you with "an ask", that could carry the weight of the demand without sounding...demanding.
That said, I've never considered "an ask" to have any stronger meaning than a request. If I hear "an ask", I'm assuming I can push back the same amount I would to any other request.
I think the OP is saying that both nations are banning software because of the risks of the software/data collection posing risks to the political stability of each nation. You can obviously say "our reason is better because X", but the outcomes being the same means that there is justification.
Both sides say it's worth banning "Tiktok/Google for granting the CCP/USA the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Chinese/Americans".
Unfortunately, New York seems to be odd in this respect. Even at lightly used stop lights, such as the lights inside of Central Park when most vehicles can’t use the roads, the police have been known to ticket cyclists.
Then again, I’ve also seen the police ticket cyclists for speeding in the park.
I think in this case the exception is Central Park, not the rest of the city. I've lived here three years and see cyclists blow through red lights every single day, it's more or less expected at this point. For better or worse, the police largely don't enforce traffic laws for bikers in NYC.
I guess jaywalking laws have been used as bandaid for what is the real problem - a complete disregard for pedestrians and cyclists on the road in big North American cities. But instead of putting more onus on the motorists, they’ve offloaded it to the former. I guess you could say the bias extends to the lawmakers. Almost feels like victim shaming, if you ask me.
But the fact is, jaywalking is against the law and when people don’t follow the rules, it just adds to the confusion which can cause more accidents. Just makes one wonder - what’s the point of it?
I work for a company managing a team that has built this for GDPR compliance.
Customer submits a deletion request. We have a fan out process that takes the deletion request and submits it to a bunch of different data locations. All of these must respond within 2 days (though the required time is 72h). Each of those data locations will queue up a job to remove access (soft delete) the data, and schedule a hard delete for 28 days in the future. If the customer says they don't actually want the data to be deleted, we cancel the data hard deletion and revert the soft delete. If nothing happens the hard deletion goes through.
Every SaaS platform with a reasonably cheap offering deals with these. I work for a recognizable SaaS and there are checks that flag both the accounts and reports the credit cards that are used after a fairly low threshold of "add payment method attempts". High levels of fraud usage hurt your reputation with payment processors and that's bad for business.
It doesn't stop the truly determined ones I'm sure, but it does mean that it adds complexity. You don't need to be impossible to test cards on, you just need to be harder to use than someone else (like a lower resource charity). We've even debated "fake accepting" some payment methods after we're confident it's someone trying to find working credit card numbers to add some false positives into the mix.
For me, running is fun, but the real "hook" is the pure escapism. If you don't take a phone, you're unreachable. I have a lot of responsibilities, running is just an amazing way to take 30m-1h+ and just have some time to think and listen to music that also has health benefits.
I do highly recommend a RoadID or other identification. I'll also carry at 20 dollar bill for food or (hypothetically, I've never needed to do it) a tip for whoever gives me an emergency ride home.
Modern Poker Theory by Acevedo was the premier book on this, but I've been out of the game a few years. Idk if I'd fully trust his charts given modern sizing theory, but it's going to improve your game if you understand the concepts. If you're really serious, you want to get a solver: GTO+, PIOSolver, or GTOWizard (online version).
Cutting the people without cutting the programs won't do much and is (IMO) a problem in that you should be able to access government services in a way that the writers of the laws (house/senate) have clearly agreed to. When you're cutting this widely, it's hard to believe you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.