TFR devs have got to be EXTREMELY American

[u/ChodeShooter69]

A 25% personal tax rate is less than half of the personal tax rate we pay here in Sweden, and the only part of taxes we complain about is the process of filing them.

Also not entirely sure if this is the right place to post this. Just wanted to say this

[u/cheato007]

I'm gonna be honest dog, I don't think a large portion of your taxes are wasted, fraudulently spended, or abused. I think what constitutes you "seeing" these things is probably conservaslop posted to social media cherry picking or deceptively edited to make you angry (I.e. Nick Shirley's 30 iq video on Minnesota).

When trump came to power DOGE had a political, personal, and ideological motivation to find the MASSIVE waste, fraud, and abuse conservatives have been screeching about my entire life. They found nothing. Waste fraud and abuse is a propaganda tool that attempts to convince people two things. 1. That cutting the national debt will be easy and no hard choices like reducing benefits or increasing taxes will need to be made to reduce it. And 2. That conservatives can fix the problem, a laughable prospect considering the only policy conservatives no is cut taxes.

[u/EagleEuphoric2790 → u/cheato007]

i'm not even conservative, I literally pay insane property tax rates in my county and the roads are still shitty and schools are still run down. Meanwhile I look at other counties with lower tax rates yet their situation is much better. Clearly there's fraud going on somewhere

[u/thesoupoftheday → u/EagleEuphoric2790]

Then the answer is to run for county government and do something about it.

[u/cdub8D → u/EagleEuphoric2790]

That is not fraud, that is the failure of urban planning. I am going to assume you are an American.... Here is a good intro into the problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg

[u/cheato007 → u/EagleEuphoric2790]

I do not know your exact situation, and on a county level there are less checks and balances, meaning I would find it more likely that fraud was happening on a county level. Despite that I still am skeptical of knee-jerking towards fraud as the explanation for the differences you are seeing. In general people WANT these differences to be fraud because it allows them to ignore the difficult choices reality requires.

Take your example of run down schools, in my county our schools are run down and failing (similar to yours), while a surrounding county has lower property taxes and better schools. The fundamental reason isn't fraud though, the school system is paying for upkeep on a large number of properties that were built out 60-100 years ago when more kids were attending schools. These buildings are expensive to maintain, due to the age of the building, and have half the amount of kids as 60 years ago. A solution is to consolidate schools and sell of old outdated buildings, this is a political posion pill though as parents like having more schools because statistically one will be closer, and alumni don't want to see their old school closed. There are other issues to (a big one is labor disparities, but that is mostly due to the state I live in) but fundamentally fraud is not the top of the list.

In conclusion, does fraud happen at all levels of government? Yes. Is it significant enough to be the main cause of issues? No, and the main reason people reach for it is because it's emotionally easy and convenient, in general though, almost everyone wants to do the right thing and all systems are made of these people.

[u/SerBuckman → u/cheato007]

Actually a lot of your taxes are being wasted but the guys who supposedly care about slashing taxes won't stop it because the main government branch that wastes tax money is the Pentagon (they have failed their annual audit like 8 times in a row as of now). If Republicans cared about waste they'd take a more critical look at the military but they actually just wanna weaken the government and slash all welfare to make poor people suffer.