Summary
$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his DOGE team are “expecting” to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts.
To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.
In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden.
“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”
He did the absolute reverse of saving. He destroyed and cost the US TRILLIONS of dollars. The IRS alone will not collect an additional +$500 billion in revenue this year and every year going forward. Over ten years, that’s $5 trillion in extra uncollected revenue, and I’m sure this is a conservative estimate.
You mean the IRS alone will not steal an additional +$500 billion from the poor, helpless billionaires this year, right? /s
for half a second I thought this comment was just poor because of how late the billionaires part came in the sentence.
Just enough to get the libertarians frothing before the scowl.
Actually, I’m not sure he does mean that. Is he taking about destroying the IRS’ efficiency collecting taxes from billionaires, or is he talking about destroying the entire US economy so the billionaires never
earncapture that money in the first place? It genuinely could be either.