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Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my language but where the f** is all this money going? Is it even humanly possible for a group of regular joes to audit where all the money is going? I think thats the first thing that HAS to happen, a clear transparent audit down to the penny. As a coder, this kind of complexity just drives me up the wall.

Also on a side note, I love how sneaky that NY Times article leaves out the option to cut defense. After all we can NEVER reduce our military industrial complex, only cut everything else to the bone.

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The top 3 chunks of spending are social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The majority of that spending is payments to individuals or on behalf of individuals for medical bills. You can probably find the exact fraction of overhead for each program somewhere.

> The top 3 chunks of spending

After national defense, you mean.

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

According to the link in the parent I replied to, social security and Medicare are larger, by more than 0.7%

Hmmm, so do I trust a media source, or the gov't themselves. Decisions, decisions!

On the site you link, 2020 and 2021 tell a different story, though only on the margin.

If you assume that most government programs have on the order of a very few % misspending or outright fraud (which is the case, aside from fiascos like the pandemic stimulus payments) then you just have to assume that the real decisions to be made are the "should we have this program at all" or "do rates need to increase / benefits need to decrease". The auditing and details will get worked out by an existing government apparatus designed to ensure this. You cannot let yourself get lost from the bigger picture believing that what is missing is the audit. The big questions are what need to be solved.

There is no reason to believe government programs are ran efficiently or without large amounts of fraud and corruption. There has to be a reason it costs governments (including government contracts) several times as much to do things compared to the private sector and non-profits.

I didn't say efficiently. I said fraud, which is a different thing.

If you want to attack efficiency, you have a lot of work to deeply change how the government, and in fact many aspects of our public / government works. How they use contractors, the kinds of contracts they're allowed to enter into, the reviews and permitting and public commenting they need to engage in, unions, labor rates, etc. That would be as big a challenge as the above debate.

Maybe I should not have said efficiently, as it really understates it. It's like if someone gets hired to work full time and then only works 20 minutes per week. Is that person committing fraud or just inefficient? What if the person gives part of their salary to their boss to look the other way? What if the person is a company, their boss is a politician, and the money is given to campaign organisation?

I don't know what case you're alluding to or what program that has such examples. But those examples sound like fraud and corruption.

I'm not alluding to a specific case, but I think it's a pretty good analogy for how contracted government projects are run in general (at least in the UK, but I don't see why it would be different elsewhere).

Citizens hold their government to a higher standard. As an analogy, the government can't just go to the hardware store to buy a hammer. It needs to buy a hammer from an American using a drawn out bidding process that preferences veterans and minorities, etc etc. Iterate this for evey little thing.

That isn't fraud or corruption as most folks understand those terms. It is more simply not designing for efficiency. People are more concerned with other factors like fairness transparent process.

More realistically, it needs to buy the hammer from a political donor, a family member or friend of a politician, or some other politically connected person. The hammer will cost many times as much as anyone else would pay for it, and may well be the wrong kind of hammer or otherwise defective, assuming it's delivered at all. If a bidding process is used, the criteria will usually have been designed to favour a predetermined winner.

Is there data on how widespread the phenomenon you are concerned about is?

This isn't building houses, designing drugs, or developing software. It's collecting and distributing money, which the government is fine at.

> There has to be a reason it costs governments (including government contracts) several times as much to do things compared to the private sector and non-profits.

I've dealt with both commercial contracts and government contracts.

Commercial contracts are more lucrative with overhead rates that are truly illegal on govt contracts.

> Pardon my language but where the f* is all this money going? Is it even humanly possible for a group of regular joes to audit where all the money is going?

Not really, but for as bearish as I am on the government in general, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a bright spot, and they do very good work at forecasting, auditing, and evaluating tax cuts, tax increases, budget cuts, and so forth. The average person can have faith that the CBO does mostly good work because politicians on both sides of the aisle really dislike the department when they tell the truth about their plans.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...

For states and cities, see local government websites for reports. Or you can start here:

https://www.truthinaccounting.org/

On the state/city level, all the money is going to former employees for labor performed in previous decades. The scheme is voters today purchase government employee labor for lower cash outlay today hence lower taxes today, then subsequent taxpayers pay higher and higher taxes as the can gets kicked down the road.

The reason this is different from regular old debt is that via questionable accounting methods and actuarial assumptions, the cost of the deferred compensation is presented as absurdly low compared to what it really is. So it does not show up on any official figures anywhere, just greater and greater portions of the government budget go to paying benefits.

> On the state/city level, all the money is going to former employees for labor performed in previous decades. The scheme is voters today purchase government employee labor for lower cash outlay today hence lower taxes today, then subsequent taxpayers pay higher and higher taxes as the can gets kicked down the road.

This is why contracting out services makes public sector CFOs so happy.

Replace a large % of your civil servant workforce with a company that specializes in that one function, eat potentially higher or inflated OPEX, but no long-term costs regarding pensions. If the requirement for services change, scale down the contract.

The graphic lets you include defense cuts. It doesn't originally because republicans have pledged to block any cuts in defense spending.

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer

This site puts you in a dead end. I followed one thread to figure out Air Force spending and this is the most granularity that it offers. OK I know that 1.9 billion was spent....on what?

[1]:https://i.imgur.com/73vv6oK.png

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