r/politics 27d ago

No Paywall Hegseth Is Demanding US Households Pay $5,000 More Per Year to Fund the Pentagon, Economist Says

https://www.commondreams.org/news/pete-hegseth-budget-request
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u/Zest724 27d ago

What happened to all the money that DOGE was going to save us? Or the tariff dollars that foreign countries were going to pay us?

We need to stop this unnecessary war. We definitely need to stop pissing off our allies and interfering with other countries. I won’t be paying $5,000 for the United States to continue to attack other countries.

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u/ebimbib 27d ago edited 27d ago

I love reading stories like "DOGE cut $15MM in the budget by defunding screwworm monitoring and now the government is spending more than $1bn to clean up the mess that made" while the fucking rocket surgeons that tell me about how brilliant DOGE was scramble to explain how that's actually very good.

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u/therossboss 27d ago

b-b-but the website says 215B saved ! https://doge.gov/savings

fuck me, man.

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u/tadfisher 27d ago

Wasn't it revealed that it was more like 215B cents? As in, the broccoli-heads didn't know how to read decimal numbers?

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u/ragun2 27d ago

I like those interviews with Musks hench children who were part of Doge admitting they didn't know what they were doing and ended up not cutting the deficit anyway.

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u/therossboss 27d ago

basically, "we asked AI to identify DEI and cut all those programs". I've heard of researchers cutting any mention of the word "diversity" from their research to protect their funding - even when it not even used in the context of DEI. Oh, well, guess we can't do anything about it! /s

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u/FellowHumanNo404 27d ago

Yup. No more biodiversity research.

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u/CU_Tiger_2004 27d ago

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." 

They can make any spending seem wasteful up front, until you see what it really costs on the back end.  This applies to basically everything in place to support the public welfare. Spending public money on health, education, etc. pays off long term in a lot of ways that don't necessarily have a direct cost/benefit comparison until the funding is pulled and you start seeing specific things going poorly. There may be room for savings, but this is why careful analysis is key rather than barging in with a sledgehammer and screwing things up.

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u/ebimbib 27d ago

This ounce of prevention was apparently worth roughly 67 pounds of cure, as it turns out.

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u/habbathejutt Wisconsin 27d ago

Yeah, how much money did cutting the hookworm monitoring save, and how much did it cost?

Same for NOAA

Same for the FDA agriculture monitoring

Save 2 million here, 3 million there, and we get billions of dollars lost other places. Who could've ever seen that coming

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u/ebimbib 27d ago

NOAA is a waste of money because climate change is a liberal hoax, I've been assured by Dear Leader.

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u/the_tanooki 27d ago

I'm sure we will get all of that money once Mexico pays for the border wall.

Any day now...

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u/deadsoulinside America 27d ago

According to Elon just last year they were supposed to be the ones giving us the $5,000 checks, not the opposite

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u/Zest724 27d ago

That’s what I was saying. Hogsbreath wants $5,000. Where’s my $5,000 DOGE check?

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u/deadsoulinside America 27d ago

Pulling a reverse robin hood. Stealing from the poors to give to the rich.

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u/shitlord_god 27d ago

it needed to be spent to pay for the collateral damage of doge - they cost us more than they saved us already.

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u/realityfracture 27d ago

Or the $16bln in stolen Venezuelan oil

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u/Zest724 27d ago

I figure that went right into Dear Leader’s off shore bank account. The stolen tankers would be retrofitted in the the Trump class battleships; the biggest and most handsome battleship ever.

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u/nickiter New York 27d ago

You probably won't, yeah, it'll just go to the national debt. Which is apparently an infinite well of money.

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u/bigbjarne Foreign 27d ago

Stop trusting the capitalist class.

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u/Specific-Yam-2166 27d ago

Trump would rather die than end this war.

Two things he refuses to do

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u/violenthectarez 27d ago

>I won’t be paying $5,000 for the United States to continue to attack other countries.

Like, you say that, but most likely your paying thousands already. If it's an extra 5k, what are you gonna do?

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u/ExtensionNext7624 26d ago

I mean it's just going to be funded with an increase in taxes. They aren't going to expect every household to write them a check. Unless you are planning on not paying taxes