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Completely hilarious argument because the more asymmetrically wealthy the richest get, the larger proportion of taxes they’ll pay. Then they’ll whine some more about paying such a huge portion of taxes.
Anyway, the US government is designed to be inefficient. It is a purposeful safeguard against autocracy and more pedestrian corruption. It will not be as efficient as private enterprise because private enterprise doesn’t need to be accountable to everyone.
Surely government services can and should be more efficient than they are today, but “I’ve managed things more complex than healthcare.gov” is only true in a world of frictionless spherical cows and a bureaucracy-free government of 380 million people — that is to say: not reality.
I get how inefficiency is a safeguard against autocracy. But how is it a safeguard against pedestrian corruption? Seems like inefficiency is a perfect cover to spin up a 501(c)3, bid on some social contracts and underdeliver. In our city, an audit was performed and homeless services contracts underdelivered by at least 60%. There's good evidence that medicare fraud nationwide is rampant.
How do you combat a culture where people can scam the government under the cover of inefficiency?
When a business finds a vendor they’re happy with and trust, they just keep going with that vendor.
For a government official, “vendor I’m happy with and trust” can be either an excellent, efficient vendor — or the official’s cousin. So we require bidding processes for almost everything. This process is a cost, risk, and delay that gets baked into the “cost of doing [government]” at every level. And yeah, it does open up new avenues of corruption and maladaptation (for example vendors getting better at navigating the bidding processes than they are at delivering outcomes), but that’s the tradeoff that we (and most democratic) governments make.
Medicare fraud is often portrayed as beneficiaries defrauding the government. In reality nearly all of it is committed by healthcare organizations, and the vast majority of it is committed by the mega pay-viders like UnitedHealthGroup.
That has nothing to do with bureaucracy and everything to do with private money in politics.
See: Rick_Scott
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386....
"LARGEST HEALTH CARE FRAUD CASE IN U.S. HISTORY SETTLED HCA INVESTIGATION NETS RECORD TOTAL OF $1.7 BILLION"
The wealthy and the politicians are complicit in this. Take healthcare, wealthy insurance middlemen lobby to cripple any form of public healthcare initiative, politicians go along for some scraps and because their healthcare isn't affected. Suddenly, healthcare.gov is unaffordable and doesn't provide quality service even at unaffordable prices, no one is better off except for private insurers and politicians. Bring in the damn guillotines.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/09/17/top-10-of-earne...
This is the root cause as to why fast food and other companies do not care to keep raising prices, and why fundamentally, even things that "rich people" can enjoy are getting worse, be it media or video games or anything else.
A destruction of the middle class results in a worse society for all, not just the people that earn less, that's not a hard concept to grasp but whatever... I don't think many people will want to change their ways until it is too late.
The top 1% (which includes a lot of people we'd consider to be merely quite well off rather than wealthy) paid 23.9% of all taxes and 25.5% of federal taxes in 2024. That's while making 20.1% of all income, so it's not a massively unfair burden on them.
https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/
Even if you only look at federal income tax, which is more progressive than other American taxes and thus exaggerates how much the wealthy pay, the top 1% pays 40.4% of the taxes.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
Healthcare.gov was widely discussed in the tech community at the time. People were constantly incredulous at how bad it was and how much it cost. Maybe you forgot, or weren't there, or expect people to still be talking about it over a decade later.
In any case, that's not where the money goes. That kind of waste is almost incomprehensibly large to an individual, but it's insignificant in the federal budget. Social Security was $1.6 trillion last year. Medicare was another trillion, Medicaid was two thirds of a trillion. Nearly all of that spending is paid out to recipients/providers. Overhead is low single-digit percentages of the total. Defense is another trillion. Interest on the debt is another trillion. You could wave a magic wand and make every single project similar to Healthcare.gov free and it wouldn't make a noticeable difference in federal spending.
In a progressive tax system that's the way it is supposed to work. People pay what they can afford to is kind of the point.
Anything less than a progressive tax system means the poor pay more and the rich pay less. Is that what we're advocating for?
Why exactly do you feel the need to defend the right to hoard money? What does that extra money do? Buy you a yacht? Buy you a media empire to control propaganda? Buy you a private island for your wealthy friends to "party" on? A measuring stick to satisfy your own incomplete metric of self worth?
What exactly do you need all that money for?
America has some of the lowest tax rates for the ultra wealthy. And since I can tell you're in the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset. The delta between you and "them" is not even close. Even with a tech job even with options and bonuses. 50 million dollars a year is a nearly absurd amount of money.
I support Elizabeth Warren's "2 cent" tax on income above 50 million dollars.
> if we don't have a better way to spend it.
I agree that DOGE was disastrous and ended up costing us money. A pound foolish and a penny wise is not the way to run the government.