So, Biden released his FY2023 budget today and while I won't gloss on too many of the details as this thing is massive and the size of a book, I do want to discuss it broadly. Now, to be fair, it should be stated that over time, budgets grow. We have commitments from previous programs, and often the previous year's budget is adjusted to be the new year's budget.
But then you gotta keep in mind, I've read shorter books than this. And this is kind of why I feel like people on the right lose faith in government. They keep trying to do too many things in peacemeal type ways and honestly? NO ONE NOTICES. While some of this stuff is likely needed, some of it seems like complicated ways to address things. So we're just adding complexity on top of complexity, we're spending nearly $6 trillion, and some of it is on stuff we don't really need. It just makes our life incrementally better in ways we don't notice. I mean the funding for some things seems to be way higher than inflation and I'm not sure it's justified.
Anyway, just to hit some of the basics:
Medicare and medicaid were $1.382 trillion.
Social security is $1.313 trillion
And let's be honest, these are the biggest items and necessary. I wouldn't mind reforming social security long term into part of my UBI (with an additional earnings based supplement for seniors) as it starts to hit sustainability walls, but given current recipients wouldn't accept a benefits cut, I support my current plan of simply taxing it like income and clawing it back that way.
Medicare and medicaid, well, that's healthcare. And we should have a single payer system if anything. We spend as much as some single payer systems cost just on our inefficient system that takes up 18% of our GDP and going another $1.75-2 billion would plug all holes and ensure everyone has healthcare.
Other mandatory programs dropped to $993 billion. I'm assuming that includes stuff like unemployment and welfare. I base this on the fact that spending was insane in 2020, and in 2021 dropped in half, and dropped further into 2022.
Defense is going up to $795 billion, when if anything we already are spending overkill, but it mentioned wanting to stay ahead of Russia and China and I agree with that.
There's a lot of nondefense stuff, $915 billion in various government agencies, and some of the stuff looked useful, but other stuff I probably would cut if it were me.
But all in all, this comes out to $5.8 trillion. This is slightly less than last year, with some sectors going up and some going down. Generally speaking the automatic increases to social security and medicare just offset the cuts to welfare.
Can I complain too much? Not really. I do feel like some stuff is unnecessary here, but I don't know how much we could realistically cut. I would rather do a few things well, like UBI and M4A, rather than doing a lot of things in a half ###ed way though. All in all, given our $21 trillion GDP, this is only like 28%. If we implemented my spending cuts as per my recent UBI budget, we could cut the base spending back to $4.6 trillion, but then we'd be increasing it by $3.9 trillion for UBI and $1.9 trillion or so for medicare for all. That would mean a $10.4 trillion budget or roughly 50% of GDP, although replacing a lot of stuff in the current private sector with the public sector and having tons of redundant UBI transfers in that. It would actually be smaller in practice with M4A leading to savings. And if we viewed UBI as more like a NIT, it would be a fraction of the size in practice, so this isn't as oppressive as it seems.
But yeah. Idk. To me, I'd rather have a bigger government that does less things. Democrats like smaller governments to appease conservatives, but tend to prefer complicated governments that do tons of things and are wasteful. So I tend to have a bit of an ideological difference from conservatives. In some ways I'm actually more like a Nixonian republican ideologically. I guess this is why the left treats me like a right winger.
But still, a right winger in the new deal era is, in my opinion, far more progressive than a "new democrat" in the post reagan environment. Because the right is having to work within the left wing paradigm of government doing things. Whereas now the left works within the right wing paradigm of cutting government in harsh ways.
Nixon republicans actually proposed valid alternatives at times to the democrats, being like "yeah, let's have government programs, but instead of a trillion programs all doing different things, why dont we have a handful of really big programs that simply do the job while minimizing intervention in peoples' lives?"
Meanwhile, centrist dems these days are like "gee, the republicans want no government and we want bloated and inefficient government, why dont we meet them half way?" So they cut bloated programs and make them anemic without actually improving things. It's the worst of both worlds.
And yeah. That's why I dont like democrats. While I'll take the democrats over republicans simply because I'm more on the side of "some government" rather than "no government", i would rather have "efficient but large government" over "smaller but inefficient government".
And yeah. This is why to an extent the left right paradigm is BS. The left seems to be defined by bloat and inefficiency, and me simply saying "let's accomplish similar goals but in a more straightforward way" makes me a right winger. I do want to increase the size of government, but do it in a way that makes government more efficient and less interventionist in their lives.
But yeah, i digress, I'm going of rambling more about my ideological differences with the dems at this point.
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