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Since other people are bragging, I also called this one.
The interesting point is what happened at DOGE. Musk didn't have to call out Trump over the budget and may pay a price for doing so, so we can reasonably conclude that he is genuinely worried about spending. But he didn't run DOGE like a man who is genuinely worried about spending - he ran DOGE like a caricature of someone who wants to look like they are cutting spending without actually doing so. (In particular, he never went after the waste/fraud/abuse in Medicare or military procurement.)
My candidate theories:
In the conspiracy and kayfabe theories, Musk is willing to play ball when Trump tells him that he isn't actually going to be cutting spending because his businesses benefit more than most from a friendly government. Ramaswamy doesn't because he is now an asset manager, not a CEO of an operating business.
Agreed. Any serious plan to cut the US deficit has to tackle head on the three headed hydra: Medicare, Social Security and Military spending. Any plan that ignores all three of these is laughable on the face of it.
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I originally beleived that DOGE was about systems not goals, and was a way to create a pipeline of influence for Musk side of techbro elites and government power.
From the look at what he was cutting, I can believe it was something more like an attempt at a hype-snowball. If they found quick and obvious and indefensible waste/fraud, while also turning over norms of 'you can just do that?!' slashing, the hope was that there's be snowball momentum to tackle bigger things.
In other words, you come in and start trying to follow all the polite beurocratic processes around suggesting entitlement cuts from an advisory capacity, you will never even get off the ground. Alternatively, you come in and shake shit up by highly publicisizing obvious waste, in efforts of getting populist support and visibility.
I think he actually almost reached escape velocity here, or got as close to a successful system as possible.
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... a more charitable option is that Musk doesn't believe that entitlement cuts are possible while (even if relatively small) discretionary wasteful spending is highly visible.
Focussing the budget conversation on highly visible wasteful spending (as the late, great PJ O'Rourke called it, "balancing the budget by cutting Helium funds") has become pathognomic for saying you want to make large cuts when you don't actually plan to.
There is waste in the non-defense discretionary budget, because there is waste in everything. There may even be marginally more waste in the non-defense discretionary budget than in the average large private-sector organisation. But the idea that America is 30 trillion dollars in debt because of waste in the non-defense discretionary budget is simply false, and the man who says otherwise is either a moron or a liar.
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