it's a straw man argument to say that the average civil servant is the beneficiary of the trillion dollar deficits. No one is making that argument. Very wealthy people, politicians, and corporations are the beneficiary of the government largess.
> After 50 years of cost cutting and wage freezes
It's hard to say the federal government has been cost cutting for 50 years when the budgets have been growing at exponential rates.
> Very wealthy people, politicians, and corporations are the beneficiary of the government largess.
Is the proposal to cut large contracts or replace them with civil service? How do you reclaim these expenditures? My anecdotal observation is that many of these contracts are fundamentally difficult to do correctly. For example, Aircraft Carrier manufacturing has both a monopoly, and a monopsomy. There is only one seller and one buyer. That seller is increasingly having execution challenges due to the overall decline in US ship building but the only real solution would be to either re-shore commercial ship building in the United States, nationalize the seller and see if the government can run it better, or stop buying aircraft carriers.
Unfortunately, a 100% cut to all government defense and discretionary expenditures would only save 1.8 Trillion or roughly ~23% of the Federal budget. Obviously, this would yield problems. The only means available to truly cut the Federal budget at the rate of trillions per year would be a change of entitlement benefits.
It would be expected that the government budget grows as our population ages with current benefit programs. The same programs that the beneficiaries "paid into" for decades.
> After 50 years of cost cutting and wage freezes
It's hard to say the federal government has been cost cutting for 50 years when the budgets have been growing at exponential rates.