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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7177 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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There is no way deporting a few million illegals moves the needle enough to generate any significant government savings this soon especially when running ICE is quite expensive. On net how much did we decline the illegals by? 2-3%? It’s better than increasing but that’s not the shrinkage you would need to make it work.

I see 3 big chunks of money that a Doge could get but it’s hard:

  1. Military disability pay. My gut says like 90% of it is fraud and without looking it up it’s like 300b now. Optics would be awful if you did it.

  2. Medicaid fraud. Some of this is illegals I think. Home Health care has boomed and it does seem like a lot of fraud here.

  3. SNAP. 100 billion per year. I have no idea how 12.3% of Americans are now on SNAP….even a large portion of Americans not on Social Security.

Sending checks would be flashy and more like UBI versus our current programs that reward people for doing soft fraud (technically allowed, but programs were designed for far needier people). The better economic management though would be to cut 400B in federal spending and that fiscal drag would collapse interests rates.

Military disability pay. My gut says like 90% of it is fraud

What in the world do you mean by this? Military disability by definition only goes to those who were in the military, and who have documented injuries/disabilities related to that service. Where do you imagine fraud comes in to it?

Some cases of genuinely disabling PTSD exist, but it is easy to fake.

Maybe I am online too much but most people who follow the data collection on military disability pay realize it’s a lot of healthy people getting disability who spent a couple years in the military. To begin to educate you on the issue look at Graham Platner who ran for Senate and runs a farm while getting a 100% military disability rating.

https://www.pressherald.com/2026/05/11/how-can-graham-platner-run-for-senate-with-a-100-va-disability-rating/

If you are serious curious spend a half hour with Google and AI to see why policy wonks consider military disability as semi-legal fraud now.

I'm neither 'curious' nor need to 'begin to educate' myself, I'm in the military and know many people on VA disability. A friend of mine had to fight for years to get 100% disability, he hasn't been able to work since he got out. Another one got blown up and it affects his ability to think - is that fraudulent because it's mental health?

If you want to argue that military servicemembers don't deserve disability payments, or that they should be less, or that standards for medical evidence are too low, then make that case. But calling it 'fraud', even '90% fraud', is simply offensive.

So if someone doesn’t have an actual injury that prevents them from working but gets disability that’s not fraud?

I 100% agree there are real cases of military disability but that in no way contradicts my point that many cases of military disability appear to be essentially fraud.

We currently have 1.85 million Americans with 100% disability rankings in 2026. In 2015 we had 493k veterans with 100% disability ratings. The US withdrew from Iraq in 2011. Afghanistan we only had like max 20k troops since 2014. So where did 1.3 million fully disabled veterans come from? These are massive numbers. Since 9/11 we have 2.7 million Americans who have deployed.

So yes a 50% rate of “fully” disabled is insane. And most people in the military do not serve in combat roles.

Just because a group has a “sympathetic core” does not mean that there aren’t a huge amount of people adjacent to the core abusing the system.

And yes if you are fully capable of running a Senate Campaign then you are not 100% disabled so we even have very high profile cases of obvious fraud.

My 90% fraud might be too high. The 2014 disability numbers are likely mostly true cases.

My understanding is that (now) disabilities include mental disabilities, which are trivial to fake.

No doctor and no government wants to be the guy to say to an angry and potentially violent veteran, "You were in Iraq, but you never actually got into combat. I don't believe that you really have PTSD from that time your buddy's drinking-partner's friend got blown up driving out of Helmand".

It's easier to pay them all off with a lifetime pension.

It's not super strong evidence, but there's this show called Financial Audit by Caleb Hammer, and every time a veteran is on the show, they're on disability, and it doesn't look like they're really disabled.

Here's a video of just four examples from his show:

https://youtube.com/shorts/cJSWeCwIIZQ

Comment from Caleb on the above video:

And to be fully clear, I want those who experienced any issues what so ever to get 150% disability. But the only way to do this, just like any other social system, is to call out those who are abusing that system. 

For example, we have cases of acne getting 100%. We’ve had many instances on my show alone where people have admitted that their injury did not come from anything involving their service, but they claimed it regardless.

Supporting people like that hurts those who deserve to get even MORE.

But will shutting down the various Learing centers graft and other democrat adjacent pork help? Aren't all of those things under the "healthcare" subheading we've been hearing is so overrepresented in the budget?

Shutting these things down is 100% good for me besides simply saving money.

There is no way deporting a few million illegals moves the needle enough to generate any significant government savings this soon especially when running ICE is quite expensive.

I didn't refer to current savings, I referred to future savings and remittances. "... a true statement over the long-term, since illegal immigrants send huge amounts of money overseas, and the children and grandchildren of illegal immigrants are a huge burden in the school systems, healthcare system, and criminal justice system".

Giving voters an upfront reward for making a wise long-term decision makes both political sense and financial sense, to me.

Why do you think sending money overseas is bad?

As long as they get the money through real jobs and not government handouts it's a win win situation for Americans.

In economic terms they are giving us labor and increasing the purchasing power of the US dollar making all foreign goods cheaper for us.

You've got that reversed... Remittances decrease the value of the USD, because they are selling USD to buy their home currency.

The bigger issue is that remittances are money not recirculating in the economy. An American worker will generally spend a significantly higher percentage of their salary on American goods and services, which causes follow-on economic activity. Remittances just vanish out of the economy, creating no follow-on value.

Remittances just vanish out of the economy, creating no follow-on value.

Remittances don't cause money to get moleculaly obliterated.

When dollars are sent overseas they are exchanged for another currency, someone else is buying those dollars.

Those dollars must eventually be used to purchase American goods and services, invest in American stocks and bonds, or be exchanged again with someone who wants dollars.

Foreign demand for dollars and dollar-denominated assets is actually a major economic advantage for the US!!!!

If the dollar goes overseas and someone buys goods from the US, that is because they gain from buying the goods. If the dollar had not gone overseas, someone in the US would have gotten this gain instead.

Ah so I do, but we still keep the labor they provided. Which is lowering the costs of goods and services provided in the US. And foreign workers can send money home but they still have to live here so that means purchasing housing, food, transportation, etc.

I was thinking this was consistent with complaints about Chinese currency manipulation. The complaint against them was that they devalued their currency to give a boost to their manufacturing centers.

But now I'm confused, it's bad for us when China devalued their currency and thus boosts their exports. But also bad when immigrants devalue the US currency and boost US exports?

I would generally just think it's bad to devalue the currency, and that boosting imports is the better thing to do all around since that translates to a higher standard of living.

This doesn’t work since we have high interests rate and above 2% inflation. You can’t transfer savings in 2030 to be spent today because we are resource constrained today. Checks today would just cause higher interests rates and higher inflation and do nothing to boost consumption today. You would just have more money chasing the same amount of goods.

Hypothetically in say 2010 you could do something like that because we had excess capacity, low interests rates and sub 2% inflation.

The best you would get today by sending out checks is a short term mid-term bump as people get money and then pissed off voters in 2027 when inflation jumps back to 5%.

You would just be giving them a fake reward in the current environment.

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