I agree with you that I'd rather spend money to acutally take care of people rather than spend money to go bomb people overseas - I am anti-war and can't think of a "good" war that we participated since... well, the Civil War. Because we should never have gotten dragged into WWI - that was all on Woodrow Wilson. If we had stayed out of WWI, we could have avoided WWII. We didn't really have a choice with WWII but we could have avoided it. JMHO What we did to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as well as Dresden - immoral.

I think you are right to some extent about the deficits - Reagan cut taxes but did not cut the spending to match. I am not sure though that Dems have been any better than Republicans. We can argue that, but I think both Eisenhower and Calvin Coolidge did pretty well as far as balancing the budget, as did Harry Truman. And Bill Clinton wasn't so bad. According to the statistics I read from a non-partisan site, both Donald Trump and Barack Obama ran huge deficits, and George Bush was also pretty bad.

I'm not partisan - I really don't care which party someone belongs to.

As far as social programs - they spend tons of money in California compared to other states but the problem keeps getting worse. Throwing money at a problem won't fix it unless you spend the money effectively. If you look up that stats on welfare -out of every $3 that the government spends, only $1 makes it to the intended recipient. What charity would survive with that type of balance sheet?

If you are going to spend money, you need to be accountable. OUr government has no idea where some of the money is. It's a gigantic slush fund for politicians and big business. Agricultural corporations get rich while small farmers lose the farm. Lobbyists essentially write our laws. But who is really talking about removing the influence of big money from our politics?

Until people unite for real change, it won't happen. Meanwhile everyone gets distracted by the partisan politics. Recently LA County decided to ban official travel to Florida and Texas. It's just virtue signaling. It won't change anything, but meanwhile there are still tons of homeless in LA, and the LA board hasn't done a darn thing for them.