As I said in another comment we could slash Medicare spending by 40+% without reduicing care. But, as you did not bother to read my comment I can't help but think your being disingenuous.
PS: I don't run the country so any change I or you suggest has the same problem of never going to be implemented. Stopping rational discussion at that point kills all political discussions period.
Concluding disingenuous is more than a stretch. I'm reading & responding to more than a dozen posts in this same thread.
Claiming we could reduce Medicare spending by 40% is a very, very dramatic claim. We could reduce general healthcare spending by a similar amount: the consequences of doing so are profound, involving vast job loss, pay cuts, and tax base loss. What's your near-term fix for that immense dislocation that would take decades to play out? Just tell the millions of people that will be negatively affected by it to suck it up and deal with it? Or do you plan to significantly boost welfare programs, unemployment benefits, retraining spending, etc. - and how do you plan to pay for that (cutting Medicare spending by 40% wouldn't even balance the budget deficit, which is set to balloon massively due to entitlement costs)?
Yes, all the inefficiencies would have to go, and that would mean people would have to get jobs that are more efficient and produce more bang for buck. That's life.
I'm not aware of any cases when people are denied chaemotheropy on the NHS, yet I am aware of people in the Us struggling to pay $50k a year for something as basic as insulin.
The Texas triangle (Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio) has a combined metropolitan population of 17 million.
However, once the northeast networks expands eventually adding Texas would be reasonable, just not from day 1.
And keep in mind that the terrain between Dallas and Houston is basically all flat and sparsely populated, so building rail there would be a lot cheaper than the northeast.
Sure, if Texas wants to spemd their money go for it, but this would be a relative ware of federal funds.
The big problem is that whole categories of the military budget are waste. They are job programs in the shape of a weapon, but are overkill in our current asymmetric wars and likely useless against an equal adversary. The LCS & F-35 are trillions of dollars in waste.
Even when you are talking about a decent system, the internal level of waste is insane. I was an engineer for nuclear submarines. We were cited as an example for all other programs because we were on time and under budget. There was still a waste in every direction I could see.
I think things would get better with a switch to fixed priced contracts instead of cost plus. It requires the service to nail down their requirements up front, but at least you get the cost incentives right. Until then, the saying "first time half time, second time overtime" was pretty apt.
I don't know how many troops one needs to defend the country and fulfill our obligations abroad (though I wish it were zero), but a military job lost surely pays for a civilian job building infrastructure. Especially considering overhead for the two relatively, the civilian job could certainly even pay better.
I'm sure there is a balance in there, but I don't think jobs would be one -- rather readiness requirements alone. And god knows I'm not qualified to guess as to that one, but it does seem likely we're going a bit overboard at present.
> Second US gets almost nothing per dollar from it's military spending due to inefficiencies
Most US military spending is on human soldiers, not on weapons programs. The waste you're referring to is a few tens of billions of dollars per year. It's not hundreds of billions. Your premise of somehow saving a lot of money by reducing waste, doesn't pan out under any scrutiny accordingly. Unless your plan is to slash hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their associated costs (even if we close half our foreign bases, which would save tens of billions of dollars, we would then need to significantly increase the spending on our domestic base capabilities to handle those soldiers; or we have to dramatically slash our soldier numbers).