BoFox! Ocre! iRollo!

[BenSkywalker]

I can’t believe your government spends *more* than ours and you have way less social and government services.

This is what 'the right' in the US bitches about the most, and are frequently called uncaring greedy bastards who don't want to help the poor. Most of the people on 'the right' are capable of seeing the obvious- we waste obscene amounts of money at the federal level. 'The left' in the US pushes that any changes to how the money is spent is an attack by 'the rich' against 'the poor'. 

I'd wager if you ask 'the right' to pay double their taxes for a couple of years for a 100% guaranteed way to reduce poverty in the US in half, you'd find a hell of a lot more support then the press would leave you to believe. 

Where is the money going in the USA? A vacuum? Your government is burning it?

A few different areas are where most of the waste goes. As an anecdote of direct witnessing of one of the problems- I have three people that I am related to, none of whom I have spoken to for many years, haven't had jobs since they were teenagers, one is about to turn 50 and the other two are in their late 30s. Between them they have eight children, none of them have anything wrong with them whatsoever- and yet they have all been collecting disability benefits, housing assistance, food stamps and rent subsidies for decades. Beyond that, they also registered their children as 'disabled' and started collecting checks for them as well. To give proper framing, one of their children ended up in so much trouble I ended up with custody of her at the age of 13. She was failing everything in school and had been arrested for assaulting a police officer. She graduated with a 4.0 and now works in the oncology center we have in town. Absolutely nothing wrong with her, but her mother was collecting disability payments for her for three years *after* I had custody(I refused to take a penny of that money) before they finally caught on that she didn't even have custody of her(nor was there ever anything 'wrong' with her).

That is obviously anecdotal, but spending time around these people will show you there are a *lot* of them, and while their numbers may not be comparable to the actual poor, the amount of funding that goes to them is disproportionately high. In the article I linked earlier they were discussing how a single mother could get up to ~$40K worth of benefits with one child. That is for doing absolutely nothing. Rent and food paid for and a check from the government every month. These people, and there are *a lot* of them, are what the right calls 'welfare queens'. The people who play the system and milk it out, that contribute nothing to society. They are commonplace, and they are the type of people you hear Rollo bitch about the most. 

Does he bitch because he hates to poor? Absolutely not. But if you witness these people for long enough it sickens you. So many people are trying to work hard to get themselves ahead- and these drains on society take so much funding from the system we aren't helping out the people that just need a boost up to take care of themselves as much as we should and could be, for less then we are spending now. 

Another area is administrative costs. Because of the way we do things at the federal level, administration overhead runs close to 10% of the total budget. Now that may not sound like a lot, but when dealing with something on the scale of US social spending- the largest single revenue pot in the world, that is a *HUGE* chunk of money. It significantly exceeds what any private sector administration costs are, and it is an area 'the left' fights like a dog to protect. The employees are almost entirely union, heavily back the Democratic political machine and furiously fight against any attempts to increase efficiency. 

For proper perspective, almost 3% of our entire GDP is given to administration costs for the poor. None of that actually goes to the poor- it goes to the people who are paid to 'help' them. Now, if our social services were a model of effectiveness, that may be reasonable. But as you have noted, the amount we spend for what we get is an absolute joke.


So, when you hear Rollo and I bitch about the government realize that while yes, we are to 'the right' of where the US government is at, in *NO WAY* does that mean we hate the poor. We have both been 'the poor', we want those that are doing everything they can to get out of poverty to get more help. I can't speak for Rollo on this one, but I don't care if the welfare queens freeze/starve to death.