Honestly I thought your original comment was refering to basic science so the 10% would be huge.

But we spend nearly $200 billion just paying salaries. We spend the most because we are also an expensive country to live in and that means paying the folks who volunteer a decent wage.

We would have to significantly downsize the military personnel and pretty much operate as homeland defense only.

I don't think even a purely defensive military could be that small for the US. We have a lot of coastline on two oceans, plus distant holdings in Alaska and Hawaii. Even discharging Guam and the like would still be a lot of ground and ocean to cover.

Don't disassemble Venus. That planet is far too easy to terraform. Disassemble Mars, asteroids, and the various otherwise useless moons, comets, asteroids, and proto-planets in the heliosphere

Take a look at my other comment in this thread.

https://lemmy.world/comment/5171378

Mars is roughly a single order of magnitude larger than The Moon, in mass. The Earth is roughly 81 times the mass of The Moon. Mars doesn't have a magnetic field protecting it, and can't unless we add a significant amount of metals, and mass to the planet. It also doesn't have an atmosphere due to the two previous facts.

Meanwhile, Venus is roughly the size of The Earth at a scale of 4.8673 : 5.97222. It doesn't have enough water though. It also doesn't have a large iron core to create a magnetic field to protect the inhabitants. However, we could re-route several comets fairly easily to impact Venus giving it a small amount of mass, but also all the water that is needed to start the bacteria creating a Nitrogen rich atmosphere that has a large percentage of Oxygen, turning Venus into a tropical planet that will lose its atmosphere in a few billion years. To counteract this, as we throw 20-30 comets at Venus, we should also throw 100-200 Iron rich asteroids at Venus so that they will be absorbed into the molten core and form a magnetic field for Venus.

Now we have 2 Earth-like planets in a few hundred to thousand years.

To create such a gravitational well on Mars, so that we aren't constantly losing both our normal skeletural muscles, but also more importantly, our organ muscles, you would have to create a stable black hole in the core of Mars, or you would have to bombard Mars, and its pathetic moons, with millions of asteroids.

To create a long term naturally stable, new earth, Venus is just closer to the masses that we actually need. By dropping just the comets onto Venus you just added a lot of mass, and that gets Venus even closer to being "Earth-like." We will have to give Venus a comparative moon, but with asteroid mining, and starlifting, that shouldn't be an issue.

By using Mercury to create a solar thruster, we gain access to unlimited space dust, that will form unlimited asteroids for us, in the Kuiper Belt.

You make the patents too easy to get and it fucks the little guy over as the big corps hoover up all the ideas. You make them difficult or impossible to get then that also benefits the big guys over the little guys as they will just steal people's ideas and produce them for cheaper with their existing infrastructure which creates an even bigger monopoly.

There is a sweet spot that society is trying to reach. It's imperfect like any system but it's far far better than having no system.

You've not even considered that in order to get a patent granted you have to disclose your invention to the public which stops big corporations hoarding too many trade secrets.

All in all, the idea that patents shouldn't exist benefits nobody except the large corporations. Say goodbye to start ups growing in size if that is the case.

Just because big tech does these things doesn't mean we should remove any pretense of rules against it. If they want something a little guy has, they should buy it, not take it for free.