Social Security - The Supreme Court ruled in Fleming v. Nestor that people who pay into the system have no contractual right to receive benefits. Payments due are not "property," so it's fully within Congress' authority to reduce or eliminate it, despite how politically unpopular that would be. A reduction in benefits will happen automatically in a few years anyway, and none of the current popular proposals (raising the retirement age, raising the income limit, etc.) don't do more than kick the can down the road for a few years. The system relies on a growing population, and the US' population growth has stalled and is starting to shrink. SS needs to either be eliminated or undergo a massive overhaul in order to even be viable in future years.
Medicare / Medicaid / ACA - These three programs constitute the bulk of what's causing the increase in medical costs. When the government subsidizes something, the companies supplying it will raise prices because they know they will get whatever the government pays + whatever the customer is willing to pay. Compare that to before, when they received whatever the customer was willing to pay alone. Since this increase is across the board for everybody, those without significant government assistance sees higher costs that still must be paid.
A better solution: a voucher system. Each person gets $5,000 from the government to spend a-la-carte on medical costs for the year. How they spend it is up to them: buy an insurance policy, pay cash for every visit, bank the savings, whatever. Companies, hospitals, and clinics would be forced to compete and offer better value for the voucher dollars, thus lowering costs. By doing this we can eliminate the Medicare / Medicare / ACA programs and save tons of money. Government has no responsibility to care for the well-being of any individual except veterans, and that's only because the veteran served the nation as a whole and so deserves care provided by the nation as a whole. This gets government out of healthcare.
Hiring more IRS - This approach is supply-side, meaning more tax dollars, but it's done in a "two steps forward, one step back" kind of way. Hiring more IRS people means paying more salaries / retirement / benefits - all while government continues growing and causing more debt. While I agree that everybody should pay, the amount gained would be a drop in the bucket compared to what is spent on the budget as a whole. Once all the loopholes / scofflaws are found and closed / punished, there's no more to find - yet we still have to pay for all those IRS people. It's a losing proposition in the long run.
An easier solution: a flat tax on all income from all sources, no exemptions, no write-offs, no massive tomes of legal rules full of loopholes. The tax code should be no longer than the Constitution itself, and it can be calculated on a single page (unless someone has many income streams). Everybody pays X amount of their annual income from all sources (so even those who don't receive a salary have to pay their share), and everybody suffers equally.
Tax the rich / higher taxes on businesses - This won't work. First, if we tax businesses at higher rates, the costs will simply get passed on to customers. We're seeing this in California right now with the $20 minimum wage that was just enacted on certain kinds of restaurants - businesses have to either cut hours, cut staff, raise prices, or close up shop.
As for soaking the rich, a decade ago Bill Whittle explained how this wouldn't work in 2011 dollars. Yes, I know he's right-wing, but give him a few minutes because he has a point here: the numbers just don't add up, and we can't tax our way out of it, no matter how many IRS agents we hire. The problem isn't revenue, it's spending.
To save some time (and avoid some off-putting remarks at the beginning), he starts seizing all 2010 profits of ExxonMobile and WalMart at 2:50 and goes until 8:40, just killing off the rich to pay for a single year of spending.
https://youtu.be/661pi6K-8WQ?t=172
We have to face reality: we spend far too much. Until we admit that problem, we can't start fixing it. Nobody's pet program, favorite agency, or policy darling can be spared - everything has to be cut back, eliminated, or funding frozen at current levels (ideally, cut back to at least pre-COVID levels). It's going to hurt, but the longer we wait the worse it's going to be.
If govt decides to cut entire agencies filled with 10s of thousands of employees to save costs, it should start there.
