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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

I'm ok with reduced taxes in general. An extraordinarily small percentage of our tax money goes to essential services: police, fire, EMS, etc. The efficiency of the US government (deliverable per dollar) is very poor. It may not be like this in every country, but for now, it's likely best to keep those dollars in the hands of individuals and businesses rather than a forced transfer elsewhere.

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Over and over, government corruption is extremely valuable.

I see my "Defense" counterparts are significantly worse programmers and claim to work less/never, but get paid 20k more per year than me.

These people don't create value, they destroy value.

They don't contribute to our roads/schools/local services that are actually useful.

As much as everyone is afraid of Google and Amazon, I don't see them getting bigger. They have hit a beaurcratic celling that will cause them to act too slow or too expensive.

The only reason government keeps growing is because they are not affected by profit.

Just raise taxes.

Government is all about stability. Being over worked and under paid is a recipe for burn out. Burnout leads to turn over which leads to instability. A reliable system needs to have knowledgeable, available, long time workers.

The efficiency of government is pretty high when it comes to IRS collection, to Medicare, to many systems. Defense spending I'd agree is extraordinarily inefficient.

Does it: it costs 100's of billions to comply with tax law.

There are other factors there, like corporations lobbying to block the IRS doing simple preparations of personal returns (like other nations do).

> to Medicare

This is most definitely not true. Doctors that take medicare know fully well the medicare reimbursement rates will not cover the patient's bills, and raise privately insured rates to cover the gap.

And how will individuals and businesses address infrastructure and other necessary expenditures?

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