You seem to not understand that the government made a contract with the American people. WE give THEM lots of money every year for 60+ years and then THEY give it back to help to support us when we are old. Either the actuaries who do the calculations to determine how much money they need to collect NOW to pay ME in the FUTURE are complete morons or Congress is stealing the money and redirecting it to other projects. If Congress convinced itself that the actuaries were wrong and we didn't need all that money, then I say we cut their salaries and use that money to pay SS and Medicare benefits for the rest of us.
There is lots of waste and fraud in both programs. Some estimates are as high as 30%. I can attest to the waste personally. I can also tell you that the government workers just don't care. For TEN months in a row, I spent 1-2 hours on the phone with Medicare, my private insurance, and my doctor's office each month trying to correct what was almost certainly a mistake. We'll give the doctor's office the benefit of the doubt and not accuse them of fraud. Somebody simply typed in the wrong ICD code. It happens more than you think. It also happened to be a large mistake and so I took it upon myself to try to get the money back for the Medicare since they were unlikely to discover the error. My doctor had billed for an office procedure he did not do and the charge was $2800. Not life or death money but enough for me to bother to try to make it right. I never succeeded. There is a limit to the number of hours I want to spend talking with people who don't care. How many people do you know who compare the doctor's billing when they get the Medicare statement? Of those, how many would bother to try to rectify a problem? If more people did, Medicare would be more used to correcting mistakes and probably be better at it.
Presidents technically do not control spending although they can certainly veto bills. Unfortunately, the way Congress writes bills, there are always poison pills in every bill and the President doesn't have line item veto. So, it is yeah or nay and the pork belly spending continues. And the stupid, useless program spending continues. Congress really needs to clean up their act. And the President needs to just let the government shut down. And NOT pay people who get temporary layoffs. AND we need a Convention of States to propose Amendments, one of which should be line item veto.
