I’ve got an idea: take some good economics courses so that you learn how government spending actually works.
I wonder what will happen to all these Signal conversations when the inevitable scandals/lawsuits/inquiries happen. Surely the public will be able to scrutinize them right?
Policy wonks and lawyers have run America into the ground with reckless spending and forever wars.
I would venture that introducing fresh ideas and technologists with first principles thinking will yield better results.
Scottish Government bans use of WhatsApp for official business (2024)
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-government-b...
> The decision follows a fierce backlash over the mass deletion of messages by ministers and officials during the Covid pandemic.
I have no interest in defending Elon, but this assessment is unfair. Recall how during the Obama transition, a bunch of Silicon Valley'ers got hired in to help modernize government tech (and doubly so after the disastrous obamacare website rollout). Very few of those people had experience in govt, civics, etc.
https://changelog.com/gotime/154
I knew contractors in their wake working at companies that grew out of their work in CMS, such as Ad Hoc (a name of the original team to not be called WHITE HOUSE HOT SHOTS or DOGE or something similarly jarring to thereby take agency away from the people who had to you know do the work once they knew they'd roll off) and Nava as they expanded beyond that one system 5 years later.
Let's see how the braggadocios we'll solve all the problems at once flavor of the moment goes, then judge the healthcare.gov teams.
I think running successful companies and making lots of money like this is just random luck sometimes. how did a person with no ability to introspect, surrounds him self with people that like and cant critically think manage to make so much money.
[1] often ghostwritten
People who watched Europe through the Great Recession and walk away thinking "I guess austerity works" are not people seriously consuming information, they are ideologues.
The basic position is that a government should raise enough taxes to cover its expenses. You can call that ideological and suggest there are superior options if you want to. Maybe there are, a little debt can be a good thing. But to suggest it won't work is a bit out there. It works. It is one of those simple strategies that is too boring to fail.
Also, if the strategy switches from spending more than you earn to less, obviously there will be a period where people are worse off. It is the same with paying back any obligation. Overspending foolishly obviously increases living standards while it is happening - the problem is the part where people no longer fund the debtor and said debtor didn't invest in productive capital. You need an argument that accounts for that to claim austerity fails. It is expected to do worse than the status quo for a while. Saving money isn't much fun on Day 1 either, it can take a decade to pay off.
If he arms himself with the right mathematical tools, he might just discover that the default he’s expecting is actually not imminent.
Even if the US has a bunch of runway before shit actually hits the fan, 2024 saw over a trillion dollars servicing the debt. That could be funding a lot of government programs instead.
This is assuming you never get to the stage of hyperinflation, but you can probably just print a whole bunch of new physical currency as well.
For example, I wish someone could convince my city to stop planting a specific high maintenance tree on my street that constantly clog sewers and crushes cars.
Policy is far from perfect and there is plenty of room for improvement.
None of that can be said for making a facile observation about US government spending.
I think the salient observation is that there are abundant opportunities for improvement and cost saving if there is a stakeholder that actually cares about cost savings.
Which I doubt many politicians have it.
Not just him, but the other 'smart people' who he mentions in the post who also work at DOGE (for like the 4 weeks he can dedicate his brilliance to solving the worlds burning issues, sorry world, if it takes longer than that).
Arguably positive budget categories like Education, research, and infrastructure make up a miniscule part of the overall pie.
A pitfall for experts in one field to assume their skills are transferable.
That appears to be the premise of DOGE.
This sentence also killed me:
>working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about
It's not because they're classified. It's because a bunch of unaccountable private citizens are plotting behind closed doors to tear down the government.
Of course, DOGE isn't really going to do anything to fix this either. Complete theater that the fixes will low and behold happen to work in the financial interest of those running DOGE.
The young who don't think the debt matters are almost guaranteed at this point to have to deal with US fiscal dominance in their lifetime. That is going to be a brutal lesson in youthful ignorance and stupidity.
He states he learned that hiking without training was dumb and acknowledges it was dangerous. Good. Lesson learned?
No. Still has no clue GOVERNMENT - y'know, the most complicated thing in the world to do right - may be, bear with me here, just a tad bit more complicated than elementary hiking safety training (recall: the very basics of the thing he just learned he should have learned, and risked dying for not learning)
I'm sorry if I'm a bit harsh but god damned if this doesn't sound like a completely clueless person.
Get it? There is no limit... so long as we don't go past the limit!
We already spend ~20% of federal revenue on debt service. How high would that percentage need to get before you would consider it a problem?
Civilian bureaucrats - in fact pretty much all discretionary spending - are line noise in the federal budget.
By far the largest components of spending are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defence.
Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
By American standards, Medicaid and Medicare are pretty efficient. So any cuts are going to mean that either doctors get paid less or fewer health services are provided. Yes, politically, Republicans can get away with cutting Medicaid, but it’s the much smaller piece of the pie compared to Medicare. Good luck with either one of the options above with Medicare.
As for defence, procurement is a giant money tree for defence contractors, but a large part of the reason why it remains a giant money tree for contractors is that they build plants in every single congressional district there is, so trying to apply some sanity to the defence procurement process is politically untenable. Beyond that, are you going to be the one to tell the Marines they don’t need their own aircraft carriers?
Of course, tanking the American economy by removing a significant chunk of its labor force (undocumented immigrants) and increasing costs (by putting tariffs on things) is just going to make the problem harder by crunching revenue.
The right of politics has forever claimed that they can painlessly cut taxes, and it’s always nonsense.
It took me years to understand that this line of reasoning is why Trump won (twice). I noticed in my own job, that whenever someone would propose an moderate but still-obvious improvement, someone else would smack them down saying "that's not the highest priority!" In the end, nothing ever gets fixed.
I think people see Trump as that guy who steamrolls the naysayers and gets shit done.
Now, I disagree that Trump really gets any useful thing done, but I definitely recognize that constant naysaying against any improvement is a real actual problem.
Some ppl collecting SSI have other income over $400k. They won't miss $30k of SSI. The dem's plan was to tax that overage - not even remove it altogether - to maintain SSI, but "they're eating the dogs and cats" won and now the unelected guy who made his fortune on government contracts is in charge of choosing who to cut off from that government money supply.
Are you suggesting there is no possible way to make the government more efficient in a way that reduces costs by some significant amount?
That seems like an extreme statement.
But surely that’s the only way out? Figure out some sane taper scheme by age or something. Social security was created when the old people population was a tiny fraction of what it is now, no way it would have ever passed it with today’s numbers. We’ll have to rip off the bandaid or face the consequences.
Sure..and all hidden waste projects can be fit into those 3 categories. Things like federal funding on hotels for illegal immigrants, including many millions on unused hotel rooms. ~$400 per person per night for illegal aliens. ~$80+ million USD in a few months.
> DOGE is BS.
Basically DOGE is only BS if you think fraud and waste are not BS. Why don't you actually look at the large number of waste projects on https://x.com/DOGE before saying it is BS ?
