Occupy Rants, Flames, and NSFW

[Shiftin]

Originally Posted by aresprophet [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

None of this is true. Not a sentence of it. The money spent on defense and welfare is largely a fixed amount (at the federal level anyway), federal government programs often outperform the private sector in terms of administrative overhead, and the "efficiency" of government is a non-issue when you consider that it is meant to fill roles that the private sector will not, cannot, and should not. It's not there to make money, it's there to perform certain essential functions regardless of efficiency.

Hi. Actual accountant here. This is horribly false, and will never change while governments use a method of accounting that discourages having leftover money (what we would deem profit in the real world).

NFP and government accounting is done in "funds". When you have leftover money at the end of the year in your "fund" it is moved to the government's "general fund" and used for other shortfalls, and it usually means your budget is reduced for the following year, which completely disincentivizes leaders of cost centers in government and NFP accounting from doing things efficiently. "Hey, thanks for saving us some money. We're not allowed to share profits with you because we're not allowed to have profits, but we will make sure you have to do things at least as cheaply next year! Good luck getting everything to work out this well again!"

Also, if people could quit calling things that were explicitly passed into the tax law to encourage certain behaviors "loopholes", that would be fantastic. You can't completely rewrite the tax code without a meltdown of our economy. The easiest piece to explain is the mortgage interest deduction. If you eliminate that, you eliminate the reason a lot of people who just pop over the rent/buy decision from the individual housing market. What that market shrinks, it affects virtually every facet of our economy.