Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal, rather than saving money. DOGE was highly effective in harming the entities meant to oversee Musk's companies, stealing information about union organizing and labor complaints, reducing the government's ability to collect taxes, and destroying its regulatory capacity.
Because there wasn't that much to save, compared to the sheer size of the budget? Because it's much easier to destroy than to build, generally? Because it's always been more of an ideological exercise and a revenge vehicle than a real cost-saving venture?
Many of the people they cut were able to negotiate a full year severance, then were hired back as contractors effectively earning double pay.
consulting company i work at hired a grip of these people for construction and public land projects. struggle with guilt that our success is the result of capitalizing on incompetence and lies
we certainly charge at least 3x cost for gov to employ them on top of whatever severance they might have received. the work still needs to be done and specific people know how to do it. sort of becoming a staffing agency because theres so much profit in it. makes my stomach sick writing this out
If you're seeing that much money, imagine how much is flowing to the big preexisting staffing firms...
Almost enough to make you think that gutting then offering employees back at higher cost and pocketing part of the difference was the goal.
McKinsey and other consulting firms are built on this principle. Lobby for “retiring” or deskilling people in organisation and then replace them with your own contractors once problems arise.
Good for them.
Not so good for taxpayers.
Basically irrelevant to taxpayers. Their salaries or triple their salaries will add up to a difference of a couple dollars on the average tax bill. Doge didn't actually cut any of the big expenses. It was only intended to cut the effective things.
It was never about saving money for the tax payers! They voted for this.
It was but the system is too corrupt
Which is also them
> Please forward your next raise to me, since it will only raise your taxes.
Joking aside that's not really how taxes work (in the USA anyway).
A raise might move you into a higher top marginal tax rate, but only the money you earn above that new bracket threshold gets taxed at the higher rate, everything below the threshold continues to get taxed at the same rate as before.
Raises don't increase your taxes (though you might end up with a slightly higher top tax rate solely on the new money you weren't making at all before).
Meh, false; the cost of the disruption will almost certainly be comparable, if not outweigh, the money paid.
They will also be paying somewhere around 50k a year soon for heath insurance because contractors don't get benefits. Fun!
I work in state government and while contractors don’t get benefits that FTEs receive, they are usually paid close to double in salary.
That sounds like something DOGE should investigate as corrupt
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I don’t buy that it was ever aimed at saving any more than RFK is about running a competent health dept
The US is being run by a hostile regime which is intent on destroying wealth, health, stability, and credibility.
The people who have convinced themselves government is evil and taxes are bad are useful idiots. They're being used by others who very much want to destroy the US as a superpower.
Musk is between the two. He's acting to keep his ass out of jail, and he's a True Believer in certain senses.
But ultimately he's disposable, and will be removed when he's no longer useful.
Evidence? You can’t make outlandish claims and don’t back it up
Because of the sheer idiocy of all involved.
There was no plan, no thought process behind any of the cuts.
Unless they thought appearing to be complete morons would distract from their actual mission of stealing all the Federal data they could.
The whole operation of black hats need to be investigated.
> Unless they thought appearing to be complete morons would distract from their actual mission of stealing all the Federal data they could.
That and the fact that many of the targeted organizations were regulating Musk's companies or even investigating them for serious violations. I don't think that I've seen such a blatant display of conflict of interest quite like this one.
The goal was to disrupt government bureaucracy. Saving money was never the real objective, even though it was marketed that way.
Anyone who knows how to use Excel understands that entitlements and defense are the biggest issue (60%) when it comes to government spending.
On top of that 60% is ~13% on net interest payments.
Because it was really about serving red meat to the MAGA base. My relatives in Kentucky cheered because they believed the “all those lazy blacks are getting fired” narrative. It’s so strange to me as they are deeply religious and some of the kindest folks I know, but also the most racist.
Some religious people play their kind persona at church, to excuse the unkind persona in other situations.
Religiosity, egomaniac libertarians, racists, etc. all suffer from an identity based cognitive bias revolving around their own or groups well being. These tribal members dont think critically about the $symbol related to their own or group identity, and the scary part is, these symbols could be anything and not just define their own ingroup but their opposing outgroup too, like eg. being vegetarian, riding a bicycle or showing broad empathy.
IMO in severe cases it requires serious therapy to teach them to face social media or group gatherings with a different/critical mindset, that naturally comes after some unpleasant disillusionment but is needed before mistakes are made. If your realtive is not treatable, completely shut, you will talk to a brick wall.
I hate to say it but Musk had a point, when he talked about twitter and his attempt "to cure the mind virus" (but as usual, he was clueless or biased). This identity based cognitive bias or identity politics is present on both political sides. The right/conservatives are just more susceptible, thats why religion, racism, libertarianism, etc. are often comorbid.
Seemed like it was more about an ideological purge and possibly exfiltrating data than saving money.
I predicted it would net cost money if you did a full accounting. May end up being true.
> I predicted it would net cost money if you did a full accounting. May end up being true.
People don't appreciate the role of a working executive branch and government bureaucracy in keeping the nation working, stable and relatively free from unfair practices, no matter how inefficient they may seem. In most cases, they are inefficient and have other problems because they're understaffed.
That's because tech billionaires don't need all of that. They live in a bubble.
It's the same with Trump. Do you think he has ever been inside a grocery store?
I absolutely agree about the billionaires. Not just because they're out of touch with reality, those government agencies are big hurdles to their pursuit of unlimited wealth by any means necessary. This was splendidly evident in the way Musk targeted the agencies that were either regulating or investigating his companies.
But what perplexes me is the hostility against government bureaucrats shown by ordinary people who are getting impoverished. I see them routinely complaining online that government workers are lazy parasites who live off their tax money. Some people take it further, saying that these workers are part of the 'deep state' out to enslave them.
Sure! Any bureaucracy will have some bad apples and corruption. But how do they miss the part that the government bureaucracy is the last line of defense blocking their all out exploitation? Like others point out, most government workers are too qualified and work too hard for what they are paid. They often take a pay cut to work on their passion and help everyone in the process. You can see this in the numerous bureaucrats who strongly resisted illegal and/or anti constitutional orders from the regime. Why are the people so oblivious to these?
Makes sense. But why is that? Are they not educated enough to realize it? Or don't they bother to apply their common sense to such topics? Also, where do they get these weird alternative explanations from?
PS: I'm not from the US. What I know is from both mainstream and social media. I'm curious about the fundamental reasons on the ground too.
No, that's just going to reinforce that government doesn't work, which justifies starving the beast further. I don't know how one party has so successfully created this feedback loop, where the more they lose, the more they win. I guess its simply that destruction is easier than creation
> It's the same with Trump. Do you think he has ever been inside a grocery store?
I mean, he's literally been quoted as thinking you need photo ID to go in a supermarket.
Because politics is about short term social media hype and not lasting change. Everybody who has ever studied the budget know that social services, debt payment and the military are the budget. Trying to effect any change with a major overall of these, or massive now broad taxes will not solve the problem.
And politically the right can't increase taxes and the can't serously reform social services either. But likely it would lead to that eventially.
So its literally just two parties fighting over trivial social media wins while debt pill and yearly debt upkeeep spending grows.
The intent was never savings. Hackers and Accountants are completely different specialties. If you send in hackers, the intent is obviously to hack, not conduct forensic accounting. (The inverse would also be true of course)
It was a smash & grab.
Or smash and delete. If you needed to infiltrate government to cover something up you wouldn’t go straight for it. You would infiltrate many points at once and create chaos and misdirection to obfuscate what you’re really doing.
Backdoors. US government privacy is now compromised at most levels.
Nitpick. Governments don't have privacy. They have opacity. Don't anthropomorphize governments, especially not to that extent.
destroying things is extremely easy. there are typically a few ways for something to be working well and countless ways for it to be broken.
It seems very little could be saved without an act of Congress.
I recall there was an interview of Bessent early on, on the All in One podcast where they laid out the plan for DOGE to cut 1 trillion. I don't think they even came close to a fraction of that.
Even if removing corruption was an actual goal, the big corrupt whales that do exist were/are just like Elon himself, all well-connected and had already paid their bribes to the current regime, making them untouchable.
Politics ensures that nobody will know what was actually saved and lost.
Because the whole thing wasn't actually wanted. They just needed some theatre to make it look like they were fulfilling their campaign promise.
Trying to get a government to reduce its spending from within is stupid and naive.
There is no scenario, no matter who is voted in, where government spending goes down. They just talk about it, and then increase spending on the things they like (e.g. the last "big beautiful bill").
This was the primary cause of the Trump-Musk spat: former promised the latter a cost cutting campaign, but it was just a trick, used only to destroy those parts of the government he disliked like USAID, after which he promptly neutered it and signed a massive spending bill, basically having conned him.
If it has actually been wanted - something that's literally impossible unless it was say created through an Article 5 convention - it would have been effective.
doge went in to crack the internal records of huge government silos, in order to leverage the inevitable evidence of wholsale,corruption, nepotism, vice, and illegal political involvments. and lo and behold, everybody lined up and is doing whatever tumpy says, which will be to hand over, most....but not all, of the stolen money, useing the same mechanisms to move it as before.
I remember people citing the All-In podcast about "you can always cut 10% without affecting things negatively" or something silly like that. Or thinking that $1T/year of cuts is something that's possible without taking out social security and medicare and tons of defense spending.
I can not tell you how much respect I have lost for anybody involved with the All-In podcast. They sold out all credibility for political wins for wanna-be fascists.
These jokers all got lucky, obviously. They can not perform basic analysis of organizations, clearly. What a joke of a result!
PJ O'Rourke had a line in his book "Parliament of Whores" when he, as a layman, ham-fistedly cuts a bunch of stuff from the federal budget, and then just subtracts 10% from it at the end. Probably not the originator, but a quote I think about often.
"Add it all together, and I've cut $282.8 billion, leaving a federal budget of $950.5 billion, to which I apply O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of anything. This gives me another $95 billion in cuts for a grand total of $337.8 billion in budget liposuction."
Parliament of Whores, page 103.
I have never worked for the government, but have worked in industry that deals with government employees. One thing that is very different in industry than in government budgets is that industry budgets do have that 10% of waste. But the budgets of all government orgs I have seen are incredibly lean, especially on the salary side. The government gets mission-driven folks that are willing to give up income in order to accomplish the things they want in the world. I saw this most clearly at CDC, all the scientists I interacted with could double their salary over night by going to private industry, but they stayed where they were because they were more interested in doing meaningful and impactful work. And when it came to the budgets that CDC used to accomplish scientific work, they were even more frugal and effective than the most penny-pinching academic labs I saw. Industry is awash in waste in comparison to how effective the dollars were that were spent at CDC.
And the CDC work is all pre-competitive work that boosts the efficacy of everything else in the economy. A tiny amount of money that results in so much more economic activity and savings than could be imagined in most private industry. And all the numbers for the public savings on, say, food safety are all clearly laid out in long reports. Reports that nobody at DOGE would ever read because they don't believe than anything good could be produced by people who accept lower salaries for higher impact.
I've seen private companies cutting down on logging expenses that would completely fund my friend's whole research department at Stockholm's University.
There's absurd waste in private companies which always makes me laugh when people say the government is inefficient.
This is the fairy tale as it’s often told. Doesn’t match up with my experience. The incompetence and waste in private organizations is staggering. The free market efficiency and competency of the free market is greatly overstated.
The GP made an assertion and cited some evidence(even if anecdotal). Do you have any evidence for your claims?
That's a very US-centric viewpoint though, it doesn't apply to every government or society.
If the US government is more inefficient than others then there's something to be said about how it works, how it could be improved, instead there's only this rhetoric that doesn't invite at all the discussion about what are its failures and paths to improve, just recycled catchphrases supported by a cliché.
Private companies are also inefficient in many ways even with competition, why is that if competition is supposed to make inefficient companies uncompetitive? Maybe there's something else to discuss rather than these thought-terminating clichés...
My understanding of what you say is true, and NASA is a common example of high value cultural and economic outcomes for the pittance the US government budgets/allocates for it.
O'Rourke's take is an interesting read; it is commentary that is meant to be more humorous and entertaining than political, I think he excelled at that in the entirety of Parliament of Whores. It was published in 1991 in a different political climate. He does admit he's doing this for fun, that the takes he express are mostly uninformed about the nature of many of these government departments and programs, and takes a (traditional) conservative (high level, and ahem, naive) view of many government programs. For example, additional quotes from that PoW chapter:
> Training and employment is properly the concern of trainees and employers: $5.7 billion.
> Insurance companies should gladly pay for consumer and occupational health and safety: $1.5 billion.
> If unemployment insurance is really insurance, it ought to at least break even: $18.6 billion.
I shared this for the Circumcision Precept bit; the portions of the quote surrounding that were context.
Yes, certain government agencies appeal to professionals as vocations rather than jobs. I have a friend who joined the FBI straight out of college. They don't EVER chat about their job, but I GUARANTEE you a private-industry offer at a significant bump in pay wouldn't make them flinch.
CDC? Every day you go home believing that you are part of a machine saving thousands of lives. BATF? Keeping guns away from terrorists.
And it's not a self-delusion. They ARE doing good things, even if the agency isn't perfect.
O'Rourke also said “The Republicans are the party that says that government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it,” which I've thought about a lot this year.
I saw first hand the damage that was done by Elon's little purge. I saw people who were actively trying to make the world better - heal the sick, feed the hungry, and help the unfortunate - blindly struck down from doing those goals by a tiny egotistical mans joke of a initiative.
I will personally never purchase or use anything from any of Elon Musk's companies ever again for the rest of my life and I push others to do the same and share their stories. This selfishness from a man with so much money and yet he only uses it for his own personal gain and to hurt others is disgusting.
“If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation.”
― Carl Jung
Because what they wanted was to "disrupt" and "saving" wasn't what they wanted.
Evil people, corruption, and very stupid voters.
Hubris, greed, corruption and contempt for four.
2nd law of thermodynamics is what makes destructiveness so costly. It is much easier and cheaper to destroy than to build or rebuild. The Trump administration is devaluing the United States at an alarming rate.
As I understand it, this is to wreck the government oversight on the conduct of the rich and the powerful. They really want to establish a full blown oligarchy. And they managed to convince the poor people that the government is bad for them too.
Immune systems of all interested triggered.
Systematic of so much clown techbro thought; idiots only see the obvious nicks and problems -- and even occasional absurdity -- in large institutions, and think they can come in fix everything.
It's just an extension of good ol' Chesterton's fence.
Because that was the point.
If musk, Trump, or any of their allies had any interest in cutting spending, they wouldn't have passed budgets increasing the deficit every chance they've had.
Must got what he wanted: some minor disruption to agencies that regulate him personally, the fear of god put into thousands of federal employees, and ostensibly federal data to help him bust unions.
The side effect of disrupting thousands of normal hard working people's lives it's just icing on the cake for a miserable prick like him, even if he did have to hire most of them back.
But if they could destroy the regulatory state while ALSO doubling the deficit with federal spending on defense, space, and oil, i don't doubt for a second they would do so.
The disruption was the point — it was all distraction while Trump worked on setting up his second term.
A few comments here touching on "disruption" (especially considering SV's historical mantras about "disruption" and "easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission").
So I think a good renaming is in order: Disruption of Government Efficiency
Slows it down to give them time to catch up, especially in this new tech era.
I read Wired in the 90s, I remember the Libertarian Logic.
The best part is "Oh gee, we might doom society, we should think about these things... hmm. OK, guys, let's keep building it."
Fuck it, let's straight up Stalin it, not just remove restrictions but FORCE these fuckers into slave camps building it all out, industrializing (Siliconizing? LLM-izing?) the future landscape.
We've already bent our "conservative principles" in the name of corporate expediency and fascistic tendencies (who doesn't love a little "public/private" co-operation).
The worst part is, most of these people have no principle and are merely opportunistic rent seekers bent on bending the rules for me, not for thee.
Because it was about Elon musk’s companies getting out of being investigated. His pay off for helping Trump.
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Why would you believe any numbers coming out of DOGE? The entire article is about their clear lies about their own numbers. Posting a number from the DOGE website and believing it is not rational behavior.
Further, there is nothing that will make the US poorer than ending the Fed or fiat money. The US has blown past all other economies in the world because of fiat money and its special status.
> revealed corruption in the NGO's.
No, it absolutely did not. DOGE revealed the corruption of DOGE. It's all political corruption, eliminating the regulators for Musk's empire, cover it up with lies about other things.
> Doge helped a lot of people come to that conclusion, so that's helpful.
The only thing that DOGE convinced people of is that Musk is a fraud. Nobody lost trust in the government because of anything Musk did, nobody thought "Oh I used to think that USAID was good, now I think it's bad!" Musk's popularity has hit rock-bottom, he has ruined some of the most valuable consumer brands in the world.
It's odd to see so many words that are directly contradicted by plain reality. One must be in a very very very deep information bubble to see your post
> It's all political corruption, eliminating the regulators for Musk's empire, cover it up with lies about other things.
I just don't see the world this way, and I don't think my being argumentative about it is healthy for either of us.
> deep information bubble
The same could be said for you. You've left very little room for nuance.
I am not a direct investor in any of his businesses, and my opinions are my own. Musk was and is the largest military contractor, bought and paid for. He's a genius marketer, autistic, and gets his hands dirty on projects technically. He's not an idiot and he is socially awkward. I believe whatever big projects Musk starts are at the urging and partly the direction of the US military.
It seems clear (to me) that Musk is crushing it in most of his businesses. It's clear (to me) that the on again, off again relationship he has with the Trump administration was just pro wrestling kayfabe. It is impossible for me to impute motives to Musk, he says pro-human things and he works (potentially) very anti-human projects. I am apprehensive about everything he has his paws in.
My worldview is to pursue truth above all else. If that results in arguments, fine, it's a price I'm willing to pay for honesty and reality!
If there was nuance, please provide it. I don't see any in your comment at all, but I dos see lots of generalizations and a very narrow take on the world and where wealth comes from.
I would love nothing more than to improve my world view through argumentation, but that requires providing facts rather than trafficking in the falsehoods of others, like those of DOGE.
If this is the best you got, it's a huge fucking indictment of DOGE. I'm supposed to be happy about thousands of children starving to death because I'm only consuming Russian language propaganda and prefer dictators to children living?
If you read your comment with clear eyes I think you will find it as a huge indictment of Doge cutting USAID.
Musk being a "bad guy" or "good guy" has zero to do with my comment, that's not adding any nuance. Also, "betrayal" of views has noting to do with my comment.
I think you were reaching for the word "nuance" without even reading my comment for what it says and the claims within.
> I don't believe it is possible to change anyone's deep set ideas. I have come to the conclusion that trying to is hurtful/spiteful.
That is a deeply pernicious belief. People change their deeply held views all the time. I have mostly consistent values, but those values lead to changing my views quite often.
Anybody that doesn't change their views is not worth talking to on any matter. What's the point? If a person's views can't change they can't share anything true because the chances of happening across the right views from the start is zero, so there's practically zero that can be learned from the person. And there's no changing their views either!
Strong views, loosely held...
i wouldn't consider his longtermism thinking as pro-human. instead its very inhumane and detached from humans
I share your concerns. He says pro-human things, mostly. What he actually works on probably has dreadful consequences.
> The same could be said for you. You've left very little room for nuance.
That's because not every issue has room for nuance. There's no nuance that the sky is blue, or pigs cannot fly. That's just... that.
Musk is a conman and liar, proven so many times that, even if you choose to close your ears, that reality is undeniable. Obviously, we have to conclude that Doge was a scam. There's no other interpretation that makes any sense.
The goals were obvious, it was a money grab and an attempt to dodge accountability. Because that's 99% of what musk does and that's literally all doge did. It didn't save us any money.
Any other interpretation is just willfully stupid, unfortunately. We have a lot of track record to work with. Ignoring track record isn't being unbiased. It's exactly the opposite, actually.
Where are the prosecutions? Where are the announced investigations into this corruption? They don't exist because the found 'fraud' doesn't exist.
I agree fully on the prosecutions. It's long since time for scoundrels to be frog marched off to jail.
I am of the opinion that there was corruption (waste and fraud and abuse) in pre-doge government. If you think everyone was clean and good, well ... I disagree.
IMO, post-doge things are "better" only because we saw some of the inside of the sausage factory. Nothing got materially any better.
The frog marching should start at the top.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil...
Like who, for what?
Somehow every single MAGA supporter takes the first opportunity to engage in pure whataboutism.
Pray tell, what corruption did DOGE reveal in the NGOs?
Here's one of the big public hearings in the aftermath. D's got their digs in if that helps encourage you to watch.
https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/public-funds-private-age...
I'm not willing to spend my time watching your video. Summarize, please: how many corrupt people were uncovered and convicted due to DOGE's groundbreaking work?
Also, we can directly trace thousands of deaths to the USAID shutdown: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund..., https://www.propublica.org/article/kenya-trump-usaid-world-f...
if its just reeing, it sounds like it didnt actually unearth anything.
do you have anyone who's got a trial pending for this corruption?
> Doge dealt well-deserved shocks to the comfy bureaucracy and revealed corruption in the NGO's
Ah, the classic “let’s hurt others because we don’t understand them” routine.
Ever heard of Bullshit Jobs? It describes most of the private sector - maybe look inward rather than outward?
Are you arguing there are no bullshit, make-work government jobs? What a strange thing to bring up, a bit of a slip.
Then again, of course there are good, hard working people in government. Lots of them. Does it need to be said?
Then again, of course there are 0% contribution parasites, evil Machiavellian scoundrels, and power mad bureaucrats in government. Lots of them. Does it need to be said?
"Government can do some good" is, in my opinion, grug philosophy. It assumes people in government are upstanding like they insist they are, have fine intentions and won't be bought or compromised, or have ethical standards that are same as ours.
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Perhaps, if reviewing and reducing spending is the goal, it should be an actual earnest effort. One that starts with collecting data, analyzing spending, and making recommendations instead of knee-jerk attempting to cancel things and lay off workers before understanding what they do.
There are also ways to reduce spending or improve spending efficiency without simply cutting spending on existing programs. A major point of spending is on health care, and I have seen analyses that the US spends much more per capita for health care with worse outcomes than some other western countries.
Careful, considered, data-driven healthcare reform that focuses on improved outcomes and reduced costs could make a much bigger impact than whatever it was that DOGE was trying to do.
> such an effort is necessary
DOGE gave cover for the GOP to blow out our deficit by trillions of dollars. The net effect of the whole system was to massively increase our debt.
I’ll gladly vote for any politician that pledges to cut spending and raise taxes. Democrat or Republican, either is fine.
If I recall, they went after GAO first and cut the people who audit federal agencies for waste and overspending.
no, it wasn't even a real effort. A REAL effort would have been to collect what all is being done, and seeing where things should be removed, processes changed, etc. This was a slash and burn.
Yes because government employees are famously good at judging how to spend taxpayer money.
The idea that they aren’t is nothing more than a right wing meme, presented without evidence while corporate wastefulness is ignored entirely.
In my experience at the DMV they process a large number of clients per hour; they appear quite efficient. The problem is that there aren't enough customer service agents to handle the volume so the lines are massive.
Cutting their budget makes things worse, not better.
Yes. I've been twice in the 9 years that I've been living here. Total time in the DMV in 9 years is under an hour. Last time I went, I spent under 5 minutes inside the building, less than a minute at the desk getting my registration done (I usually do it online, had a weird one-off situation).
I've never experienced customer service half that good from ANY corporation.
> It’s likely tax increases will be needed besides [budget] cuts.
Not just likely. It's certain. But instead, we got tax cuts.
Things that make you go "hmm..."
One thing about being the world reserve currency is that there needs to be enough currency out in the world to circulate. When there's not enough currency of a certain type, people switch to other things. As the world has become much richer, it has a huge demand for US dollars, mostly in the form of T-bills. That's "free money" for the US government to take from others in the world.
The USD as reserve currency has enabled lots of extra spending and growth in the US, in a virtuous cycle of being the reserve currency because the US has the strongest and greatest economy, and then the reserve status increases our economic strength. Over the past 75 years the US spent a huge amount of effort to place itself into such a privileged and lucky position.
There will be some point where the currency might be devalued on the world stage because of spending. But what is happening right now because of Trump is a huge devaluing of the currency because of loss of trust in the US:
https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...
The true death spiral will happen when the rest of the world fully loses trust in the US. Right now we are too big to fail, but it doesn't have to be that way if we keep on pulling back from the rest of the world. The biggest losers from this pull back is the US itself, and the enormous economic privilege it gave us.
That big spike in deficit spending came from the initial Trump tax cuts in term one, and it looks like we'll be getting an even bigger spike in deficit spending now in term 2 with even bigger tax cuts for the wealthiest in the US, with zero relief for regular people (except those in real estate.... let me tell you about all the special tax benefits for real estate investors you see when you start doing your taxes as a sole proprietor, whew....)
Anyway, we will have to wait for another Democratic president before there's any addressing the deficit, if history is any guide. We only see deficit reduction under Democratic presidents and massive deficit increases under Republican presidents. But as I started, it remains to be seen if deficits are a bad thing inherently; it's more about the quantity of the deficit and whether we lose power or gain power economically from the deficit. Military spending is mostly "dead" money that does nothing to expand the economy, but research and funding the poor ends up increasing economic activity and growth.
Edit: and destroying small things like USAID greatly lessens trust in the US, and costs us far far more in dollars than we spend on it. And that's ignoring all the good for humanity that feeding starving people does.
Sorry, there are some things that are not true there.
Presidents that had a surplus include Coolidge (R), Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Johnson (D) and Clinton (D).
Clinton is strong in my memory, he was working with Newt Gingrich’s Republican congress. The two seemed to work well together. Some suggest that Clinton’s stances on gay marriage, immigration, incarceration, etc. give him a right-leaning stance in today’s world.
It is 100% necessary, but without the backing of Congress to enforce the spending cuts and reductions in administrative bloat, the efforts will matter little in the grand scheme of things. Trump himself really didn't get behind the DOGE stuff the way he needed to to influence real lasting change.
It is not "100%" necessary. Worst case, we just print dollars to pay off the debt. The US Government is not a business in the sense dollars, it's a business in the sense of issuing equity out in the world. And just as a company can print more equity at any time, the US government prints equity, equivalently, by either printing dollars or by issuing Treasury Bills (debt), which are merely more complicated dollars. T-bills are more complicated dollars in two ways 1) they throw off a small amount of interest making them more attractive than regular dollars, 2) their value can be retroactively changed whenever the US changes interest rates. That second point, they dynamic revaluation of previously issued T-bills by interest rate changes, is what gives a lot more monetary control than if we just printed dollars.
But if we are in a situation where there's been a bond investor revolt, and there's nothing else to be done, we just give dollars to everyone as T-bills mature rather than issuing more debt, and we retract from the world stage, and become like other countries in the world.
We are a loooooong ways away from that position, but this presidential administration is behaving so erratically that the US dollar is closer to losing its privileged status than I ever thought possible. It's such irrational, damaging, and erratic behavior going on right now that everything could topple if it continues for much longer.
Biased article behind a paywall.
We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.
The problem is that Elon Musk has power (in the form of money) and was able to buy his way into the government.
Elon Musk is a smart salesman but that's about it. He has little deep knowledge in a lot of what he does.
> We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.
It took me a while to learn this lesson about complex systems.
First week at a new job? It’s easy to identify all the ways things are done wrong. Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.
Or often: 6 months you realize how hard/expensive it is to correct even if it is wrong.
Or: you realise that it was the pet project of someone who is now in charge and no matter how wrong/broken/costly it is, there will never be political will to allow change until they're gone.
> First week at a new job? It’s easy to identify all the ways things are done wrong. Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.
> Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.
It is hard to say whether it is really understanding, or just stockholm syndrome of local optimum.
> We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.
I do not think we all have the level of hubris required to shit all over large governmental organizations as Musk did. I think maybe even the majority of people would say woah hold up let’s take look at what’s going on before tearing it down.
And of course that’s under the charitable assumption his actions weren’t malicious.
> Elon Musk is a smart salesman but that's about it. He has little deep knowledge in a lot of what he does.
No, I think it's the opposite — he's extremely knowledgeable about engineering and science [1], but quite hopeless at social things. If he was ignorant of technical stuff then SpaceX and Tesla would not have succeeded, and conversely if he was a good salesman he would have foreseen how badly his political actions would hurt Twitter and Tesla.
It's quite foolish to think someone is stupid or ignorant just because you don't agree with their politics.
1. see these quotes: https://x.com/yatharthmaan/status/2001313180644266478
He's been on public twitter calls before and his engineering knowledge is pathetic. I'm sorry but he's not knowledgeable about engineering or science, he's marketable about those things. People conflate the two often, but one will fall apart like a jenga tower the moment you push it even a little.
And a bunch of out of context quotes from folks that are either buddies with him or don't know shit is not convincing.
> Elon Musk is a smart salesman but that's about it.
How is it that most people here can see through it, but people in power can't?
> but people in power can't?
Why do you presume they can’t? Musk failed phenomenally to sell DOGE to the public, the President or the Congress. The expectation was that he’d have been better at that.
Can you tell me more? I was already familiar with The Butterfly Revolution and RAGE before the inauguration, but it sounds like most people weren't?
The way most of our governments are set up, the people in power typically arrive on the backs of the people with money. Elon Musk has a great deal of wealth, so everyone in power is going to listen to him.
Power respects power, ultimately. If you have wealth and power, those in power assume it was earned, because otherwise it's admitting that their own power could be through luck.
I will say that there are a few billionaires out there that do not get respect because everybody else assumes they "got lucky," but it's certainly not many billionaires. And those that people assume "got lucky" have mostly had terrible PR management on their way up, and not bothered to try to clean up their image. I have taken investment from one such billionaire that people would tell me "he got lucky," and though I don't think he got lucky to make his billions, he was also really terrible in his judgement and could not make the switch to investing even in similar industries successfully.
Money and power are all that matters. Musk is a dipshit but he's a rich and powerful dipshit and that's all that matters
"Why do companies hire consultancies?"
Because they don't have a permanent need to hire the expertise.
Very different idea.
I'd be interested who here commenting negatively on DOGE actually has skin in the game (an American taxpayer)
Because "government efficiency" is an oxymoron?
We all knew this would fail. Any leader worth their salt would know massive reorganizations are failures even when they aren’t unconstitutional and worthy of the death penalty.
Or maybe the unelected moronic clown running it went in with a chainsaw like when he took over twitter.
Giving zero f*cks for the massive harm caused or the legality of it.
Well, for Twitter it's fine. It's a private company, and the shareholders can only blame themselves for the management they put in charge.
(From a broader society point of view, I'm a bit sad that they didn't actually manage to run Twitter into the ground. I think Twitter's a net-negative for humanity. But that's a different topic. People obviously like using it.)
Not just Twitter almost all of social media apps are net negative for humanity.
Social control media.
yes. precisely.
The things that make social media net-negative--advertising, infinite scroll, global scale--aren't part of HN. Facebook wasn't net-negative when it was just a website that a few million people used to post semi-publicly with their community.
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Musk is uniquely stupid and arrogant for refusing to understand very complex systems before making radical changes to them. This behavior directly led to outages at Twitter after he bought it.
I do think Musk correctly identified excess staff and irresponsible spending, but where he screwed up was being his toxic self which drove away even more of the audience and almost every big advertiser.
I mean, I don’t think it makes money and it is a cesspool of misinformation, hate, porn, and bots, but technically, it is fine.
Musk fired people before understanding what they did at Twitter. The best example is how he fired a Twitter employee who criticized him but it turned out to be the owner of a company Twitter bought and he had enormous legal protection and when Musk found this out he was suddenly much nicer to him.
If only that truly was a unique trait…
It was staffed with walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who knew very little about the departments or the work that they were cutting but enough to assume they knew more than people who had spent their life working there. That requires a special level of arrogance. They went in with the idea that all of these people at this organization are lazy and stupid and so everything they didn’t understand must be a result of one of those things or the other.
I don't think hanlon's razor applies to billionaires , unless the peter principle holds true all the way to the very top
Why wouldn't Peter Principle apply just because the magical financial threshold is crossed? This is Peter Principle in a textbook way, a promotion from managing companies to managing the government.
my original thesis is wrong - while musk may have petered up to the top, that doesnt imply his actions must also be attributed to stupidity. the error in the thesis is conflation of stupidity with the raw brutal strength of cancer
Ah. That would be the Dilbert Principle:
> Unlike the Peter principle, the promoted individuals were not particularly good at any job they previously had, so awarding them a supervisory position is a way to remove them from the productive workflow.
> An earlier formulation of this effect was known as Putt's Law (1981), credited to the pseudonymous author Archibald Putt ("Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
The purpose of a system is what it does
I like how in today’s world and especially when it comes to Musk things cannot be as simple as incompetence. It has to be some 4D chess move. Like a reverse Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which might be/maybe/perhaps explained by 4D chess move. It’s like 4chan leaking all over the Internet. And Musk can keep his genius legacy alive.
is it really 4D chess to imagine that a man under investigation by the federal government would desire to benefit from being given express permission to reduce force and efficacy of agencies directly threatening him?
I don't think Musk having bad faith intent shows him to be intelligent, more just greedy and selfish, but I think it's actually more irresponsible to believe that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing
Under investigation for what? Like the self driving claims thing or something nefarious?
That falls under “dishonest stuff companies do all the time”. Unless there are major political points to be scored by nailing him (which there may be now, don’t get me wrong), this would get a slap on the wrist. The cars do drive themselves, they have for awhile, Tesla never claimed it was perfect, they only claimed it would be perfect in the near future and musk plausibly could have (delusionally) thought this so there is no case (not saying he isn’t dishonest, though, that’s just not how the legal system works).
So I don’t think being looked at for the kind of stuff many companies do all the time explains <checks notes> infiltrating the government and personally disrupting the people investigating him, in public. If he’s worried about a financial hit, souring Tesla’s reputation as he has is obviously not worth it. If he’s worried about prosecution, surely he would be better off being nice to everyone in politics, not pissing anyone off and strongly supporting choice causes off the mainstream radar that happen to be in the interest of politicians.
So if he is doing it on principle, he just needs to be hubristic and reckless and possibly very autistic. If he is doing it to mess with the people investigating him, he needs to be outright stupid.
Hubristic and reckless (and autistic) are much, much more realistic adjectives for Musk than “outright stupid”. I know a lot of people will just assert that he is stupid, but if you yourself are sufficiently intelligent and you listen to the guy talk for a long time, you can at least tell he isn’t stupid. You can tell because he doesn’t do the rhetorical things stupid people need to do in order to mask contradictions or logical holes in what they are saying. They always do it. Even smart people sometimes do it quite a bit, like Steven Pinker for example m. Musk very rarely does it, and when he does it’s so completely obvious you can tell he’s bad at it and didn’t get where he is by being good at it.
Just because he is playing 4d chess, doesn't mean he is good at it.
Hanlon's razor is wrong to suggest an either or scenario when it is just as often some mix of stupidity and malice.
Never attribute to blatant corruption, "4D chess move" . There isn't anything sneaky or smart about what Elon pulled here.
It's not 4D chess to hurt the agencies that regulate and investigate you. It's the opposite of 4D chess. There is no secret plan, not conspiracy theory, no clever chess move.
Elon's still pumping his DOGE work and the Cybertruck daily on his X account.
Cybertruck may have a big customer with $100million+ orders, wouldn't count them out:
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/spacex-buying-unfath...
Big NASA money involved like the earlier bonds the same company bought from SolarCity.
Less than 2000 trucks is 100 million dollars? And even then, this is meaningless for a Ponzi scheme “worth” $1.5 trillion.
0.0067%
Do you still think your claim makes sense?
They said they only sold around 5000 of the trucks in the quarter. Was only responding to the stuff about Cybertruck. It seems like a material portion of its sales are to his own other company.
It's not meaningless, because the stock price is based on vibes.
Losing a big CT sale is bad vibes. If the finances don't matter on the way up, why would they matter on the way down?
I really wonder how Musk will fare when the tides turn because they eventually will
They've already turned, and turned back, since he left DOGE.
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I don't think that's right - although of course we are speculating about what's happening inside the head of Musk.
Musk strikes me as an juvenile and naive man, precisely the kind of man that would take a hatchet to a complex system while believing he is competently reforming. His experience with taking over Twitter probably reinforced his belief that you can move fast and break organisations and, despite all the moaning from liberals, nothing bad will happen in the end.
So Musk is exactly the man to honestly believe in what he was doing, and he was immersed in a right wing echo chamber, which for 50 years has been talking about government waste.
Don't ascribe to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence.
He did so the hyperloop just to stall trains. So there is precedent.
When you are in charge of US government reform, incompetence IS malice.
You don't get to claim incompetence while being one of the richest people alive.
The idea that he is “stupid” or “naive” while also being the world’s wealthiest man by far needs to die
What he really is is a sociopath who uses the idea of “doing good” to infiltrate systems and setup laws and legal structures that benefit him and his companies
I don’t buy any of the goody-two-shoes “for the sake of humanity” persona and neither should you. But the worst thing you can do is dismiss his sociopathy as naivete or stupidity
His behavior after buying Twitter really is stupid though.
I meant the way he fired AND INSULTED all the smart people whore created the Twitter back end
I really think his entire Twitter purchase was a way to get political leverage
Musk is thinking far down the line
Maybe the point of buying Twitter was to help elect Trump and get his fingers into the administration
His net worth figure certainly seems to indicate that it wasn’t stupid
You underestimate Musk too much.
This was years in the making. He basically made a $200 million bet on the USG, one that translated into hundreds of billions. This was all calculated, and the veneer of government inefficiency was good enough to mask his actual objectives.
I can say this confidently because that's what I would have done too, and I'm not half as smart as him (given that I haven't built a Paypal or a SpaceX myself). That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. The upside to doing it that way was just that much massive.
Smart doesn't work like that. I have little doubt that you are as "smart" as Elon.
Usually what people mean when they say "smart" is actually more like meaning of the word "canny," which helps explain the distinction. A canny decision is one that makes you look smart in retrospect.
To put it another way, I might climb to the top of a hill. Climbing the hill doesn't make me taller, but it does get me the benefits of being able to see everything for miles around.
Perhaps after climbing a hill/Ent I see Saruman's army marching off to war, and realize that even though I may be a halfling, right now I could say a particular thing that would be "as the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains." This is a canny moment, and like any canny moment or is filled with surreal possibility. But it isn't because Meriadoc is a tall hobbit and, not because only a tall person could do this thing that involves seeing a great distance.
Musk didn't build PayPal or spacex
Musk knows nothing about rocket design and has very little to do with SpaceX, which is a big reason it is actually successful. If Musk actually TRIED to design a rocket it would go about as well as the CyberTruck because he would just ignore all advice from anyone who actually know how to design rockets.
> That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done.
That’s what anyone who’s self-centered and morally bankrupt enough would do perhaps, but no, not “anyone”. Some people are committed to being good (or at least striving towards it).
Your take strikes me as sociopathic at worst, and misguided at best. Much like musk, to your point.
On the other hand, getting into "such a privileged position" of hundreds of billions has the sociopathy you mention as a prerequisite...
There is a certain class of American that rides the knife edge between credulity and contempt in supporting and accepting the activities and intent of bad actors who pledge to get rid of the things they don't like and they people they detest. They're ever-ready to believe the barest of excuses and to hand-wave the worst excesses in this regard. Today's anti-woke are yesterday's McCarthyists, and history will note the echo.
> There is a certain class of American
The selfish kind. Unfortunately that seems to be the end goal of the American dream: "I got mine, fuck you." I can't tell you how many times I heard the "protect my family" argument from people I never thought would vote for that clown.
Also not exclussively American. Plenty of selfish assholes where I'm at as well, I suspect this is a world-wide phenomenon.
But people do come here specifically to be selfish. They like that they can be selfish here in ways that are socialized away in other countries. They like that they can even socialize their selfishness, forcing poor people to subsidize the rich.
The UK is a good example of this over the last decade (at least.)
They are typically uneducated victims of the largest and most well funded mass propaganda brainwashing campaigns in the history of mankind, to be fair. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. The perpetrators of the misinformation, however, know exactly what they’re doing.
> Many of these people are well-educated and affluent.
That does not preclude them from being uneducated and gullible to brainwashing. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that being well-educated and affluent primes one to become more likely to be uneducated/brainwashed. When you are well-educated and affluent, the "yes men" show up and start to make you feel like you know everything, and it becomes really easy to lose the skepticism and awareness that one normally has.
> It's not poor, rural red-staters listening to his message.
Was there something to suggest that it was? I see no mention of this group anywhere.
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This is the right take
This is disturbing.
They actually had competence at something..?
Disregarding the state, all data protection rules, and running amock; yes they are competent maligners.
the goal is to keep attention.
maybe disrupting things badly is more preferable as that gets more attention, but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all.
> the goal is to keep attention.
A strong claim is severely weakened by lack of evidence. In this case, all evidence points to the claim being untrue.
> but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all.
That's essentially a rewording of the above claim and again without evidence.
In fact, it's detrimental for the perpetrators of disruptive actions to attract attention to them/selves when these actions don't achieve their purported benefits.
If they wanted only to simulate activity, they'd have used less damaging to themselves ways to achieve it without inflicting damage to the system. The latter is so important that it excludes accidental or PR-related actions to that end.
> Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal
It surprises me if anyone thought anything different. I mean, how could you think anything else if yo know what group of cronies there people are?
It's like Americans forgot all about what was wrong with the Rockefeller-era oligarchy. Even the MAGA slogan is just a copy from back then.
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