It's pretty easy to cut $2T from the federal budget | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty easy to cut $2T from the federal budget

pluralistic.net

21 pointskeepit10 comments

We regularly have the same here in the UK - "let's go after £1.7b in benefits fraud" but never "lets go after the £120b in taxes that are evaded". We lost more to COVID fraud than we did to benefits fraud, but seem to have just written that off largely - it even seems to have been committed by people in our House of Lords.

I am all for doing both these things - but let's go after the biggest prize(s) first.

You idiot! You fool! You're supposed to enrich the robber barons.

Not like that

huh. reading the piece it seems pretty reasonable relatively (we clearly are living in an interesting moment...) speaking.

what exactly are you commenting 'not like that' about? or are you (e.g.,) a federal contractor yourself?

Its that old trope where a powerful group lobbies something in a screeching way until discussion turns to the aspects of doing exactly that which actually affect those same powerful people and the joke is "we didnt mean like that"

If you eliminate the contractors, the work doesn't get done. So either you give up on getting the things done (which is illegal, since the things are federal law) or you nationalize the contractors (which will save some money, but not the entire current budget).

We can definitely save some money if we stop demonizing federal employees, and imagining that we can improve it by creating a new layer of middle-men by privatizing the same work. But for that matter, we could save a lot of money by taking what the government does seriously, instead of as a combination football, whipping-boy, and trough.

The title of the article says “easy”, while the text says “straightforward”.

Those are not synonyms.

Collins dictionary disagrees:

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaur...

and

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaur...

They are each their others 2nd top synonyms

The article even uses them interchangeably between the title and the first paragraph

I agree that the spectrum of "effort needed" is not the same as "clarity of process", and ideally people wouldn't blur the lines... But it happens anyway.

For example: Moving a heavy exercise-weight one mile in a straight line through an open field field is very straightforward... but not necessarily easy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com