Social Security - The government has been taking money from me at gunpoint for 60+ years. It is MY money and I want it back. "They" have permanently "fixed" SS at least three times since the 1980's. Either the actuaries are dumber than rocks or the money is being diverted to other places. You, on the other hand, should never collect SS because you don't believe in it. Congress has looked at privatizing SS but it is too big a slush fund for them to give up. The extended family has gone the way of the dodo bird. Children no longer care for their parents when they get old. They leave it to the government. So, SS was invented. No one was thinking about a population bubble back in the 30's. But WWII happened and what followed was a population bubble. I am at the leading edge of that bubble and its impact will pass in another 15 years which will bring us back to more workers paying in than collecting so the point will be moot at some point. Of course, If Congress hadn't actually spent the "trust fund" on other stuff, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Like all insurance, SS is designed to pay out as little as possible but Congress wasn't paying attention and medical science expanded our life spans to the point where SS is paying out more than the actuaries planned for. But, don't worry about that either, the food industry is making us sick enough that life expectancy is dropping again.
Medicare is rife with fraud. I get several phone calls a month from various companies trying to sell me something that Medicare will pay for. Many of these items are not high cost so they tend to be easy to get approval for. If something costs $50 per month, how much effort should Medicare expend to determine if you need it? The problem is when you multiply that by thousands. We have computers. All we need to do is to use them to find the fraud. It is there in the statistics for all to see.
Defense is also a money pit, largely due to the way the government procurement process. I've worked for a number of large companies in the "military-industrial complex". The government calls up and says, give us a quote to make 100 of these every year for 5 years. And we do. so they order 1 and we charge them for 100% of the tooling to make the one. Using our cost accounting system, I can absolutely prove to you that the toilet seat cost $300. It's the same concept that allows hospitals to charge inpatients $15 each day for new paper slippers. But we won't go into the ridiculous cost of health care.
