> GAO estimated total direct annual financial losses to the government from fraud to be between $233 billion and $521 billion, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022. The range reflects the different risk environments during this period
That is just fraud. Wastage will be probably be higher lol.
It is morally wrong to pour more water into a container with holes in the middle of water shortage.
So in a fantasy world where we could eliminate all fraud without spending a single dollar on enforcement[1], we could cut the deficit by somewhere between 1/7 and 1/3, and would still have to find over $1T more money somehow.
The deficit is so absurdly high at this point that we need to both cut spending (and yes, any obviously wasteful spending is a good place to start) and increase revenue.
> It is morally wrong to pour more water into a container with holes in the middle of water shortage.
I have no clue what you are trying to say with this analogy, so I'll just take it at face value and point out that a human being is a container with holes.
Not only that, you can separate the waste into several different categories.
The first is purposeful waste. That is, a corrupt program that diverts tax dollars into the coffers of some corporation with lobbyists. This is extremely common in the DoD, for example, and identifying these has extremely high gains because the program can be deleted wholesale.
Then there is simple inefficiency. The government's website is incapable of doing something it should be capable of doing and then the government has to employ an army of clerks to do it by hand. These can be pretty big gains too. If you can reduce the number of clerks by 80%, that's a lot of money.
Then there is unnecessary complexity. Most of this comes directly from Congress. Somebody needs to go through all the existing laws and do a cost/benefit analysis to see which ones are still relevant and have a net positive effect, and get rid of the ones that don't. More than that, look at the laws as a whole and see if they make sense. We have a slew of programs that all have the same ostensible purpose, e.g. to provide assistance to the poor, but then they all have different applications and qualification conditions and phase outs and benefits. Combine them all into a single system that provides a cash benefit and you can eliminate a lot of bureaucracy. And for both of these, the savings isn't just to the government -- it's also to the citizens who have to interact with the government. So even though the savings in terms of tax dollars might be smaller than the other categories, the value here gets doubled because it's also a savings to the public in time and paperwork.
Yeah, there's a lot of inefficiency with handling stuff for the poor. But I suspect a lot of it is deliberate, the more friction in the system the more people get improperly denied or are unable to jump through the hoops. And look at what has been happening in some red states--they're in a rush to kick people off welfare and the system can't handle the load. And since they fail to prove eligibility they're kicked off.
While I think the system is in a major need of a cleanup I don't expect it to free up money.
I also agree our legal system needs a rewrite. Unfortunately, it's an impossible task because things change. To *some* extent it could be handled by having judges actually change the law (provisional while appeals are pending) but sometimes one judicial ruling will invalidate many laws. (The one that I think probably changed the most laws was the 10th Circuit Court's ruling on top equality. Six states became topfree with the stroke of a pen and there's an awful lot of local laws involved. Roe affected more people but since those were generally state laws there probably were fewer jurisdictions involved.)
I would like to see a system in which unclear law is automatically unconstitutional. The defendant should get to choose the most favorable interpretation of what the law says. And if it's not clear to the average person to whom it applies (thus, for example, a law regulating doctors needs to be clear to doctors, but need not be clear to the average person) it's also unconstitutional.
And, in addition to the purposeful waste you refer to there is purposeful exploitation. A nice chunk of change could be freed up from the Medicaid system this way. The problem is the federal government pays a *percentage* of the Medicaid costs. Thus you see drug companies colluding with states. Cover our expensive drug X but don't cover the generic, we will rebate you more than the state share of the price difference.
> While I think the system is in a major need of a cleanup I don't expect it to free up money.
The scenario you're laying out is one in which, for example, a program is currently dispensing $100B in benefits but if everyone who qualified for it actually received the benefits it would be dispensing $200B. A platonic ideal would then have the program costing $200B (i.e. more), but we don't have to beat the platonic ideal, we only have to beat the status quo.
And that program dispensing $100B is spending another e.g. $10B just doing the eligibility determinations. Moreover, the program is then dispensing vouchers that can only be used for specific things, which are less valuable than money.
So if we take the $100B and distribute it as unconditional cash (i.e. a tax credit) instead, the intended recipients get the same $100B as they get now. But the government saves $10B in administrative costs, the recipients save all the time and effort of applying for the program, and $100B in cash is worth more than $100B in vouchers because it e.g. gives you the option to live with your parents while using the money to eventually save up a down payment on your own home rather than being required to use the subsidy to pay rent to a landlord forever.
> I also agree our legal system needs a rewrite. Unfortunately, it's an impossible task because things change.
That doesn't make it an impossible task, it makes it a continuous task. The problem is we haven't been doing it at all, so laws keep accumulating rather than anyone going through and removing the bad ones after things change or we realize that the law was ill-conceived to begin with.
It would probably help quite a bit to make laws expire and have to be renewed every e.g. 10 years. Not only would it invite reconsideration of dusty rules, it would get Congress to spend some time arguing over whether those rules should stay instead of spending all of their time accumulating new ones.
> I would like to see a system in which unclear law is automatically unconstitutional. The defendant should get to choose the most favorable interpretation of what the law says.
This is nominally already the case. There is a rule of interpretation that ambiguous laws are to be construed in favor of a criminal defendant. The problem is judges are human and prosecutors are not, so the prosecutor will purposely bring the precedent-setting case against the most vile scum in the dungeon and force the judge to choose between resolving the ambiguity in favor of the prosecution or letting the child-murderering cartel hitman go free. Then the same precedent gets used against everybody whenever the prosecution couldn't otherwise prove a case against them.
> And, in addition to the purposeful waste you refer to there is purposeful exploitation.
The best solution to this would be to stop forcing the states to fund half of federal programs and let each program be funded entirely by one or the other. The existing system is the federal government screwing the states out of billions of dollars because the states either have to fund a federal program they may not even like or they don't get the federal program but their people still have to pay the taxes that fund it. A ruling that the existing arrangement is unconstitutional wouldn't do a lick of harm.
You don't think that is possible? Why?
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-105833#:~:text=What%20GA....
> GAO estimated total direct annual financial losses to the government from fraud to be between $233 billion and $521 billion, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022. The range reflects the different risk environments during this period
That is just fraud. Wastage will be probably be higher lol.
It is morally wrong to pour more water into a container with holes in the middle of water shortage.