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> Politics is hard. Government spending is death by a thousand cuts ... If the solution is not to cut excessive and unchecked spending, you tell us your soluti
by Timber-6539 2y ago
> Politics is hard. Government spending is death by a thousand cuts ...
If the solution is not to cut excessive and unchecked spending, you tell us your solution for the dealing with the problem?
> remove whole departments (remove all of the education, veterans, and defence, that will net you 1.5T)
AFAIK DOGE or rather Elon hasn't specified how they are going to cut $2T from the annual budget so all this is speculation and we don't actually know which sectors might receive the cuts. For all we know it could be a goal setting figure. Even if they don't reach this target, the endeavour is still worthwhile. They have 4 years to sell their plans to Congress after all.
In summary you fail to make a good case for why DOGE is a bad idea other than Elon bad. I challenge you to remove this bias from your thinking, it alone just may help you avoid missing the forest for the trees on the issue of government overspend and the relation to uncontrollable public debt.
- filoeleven 2y agoDOGE is bad because the Government Accountability Office already exists, and “auditing agency operations to determine whether federal funds are being spent efficiently and effectively” is already part of its mandate. There is no need to create another new program instead of improving what already exists, except that GAO is non-partisan so it won’t cut whatever the new administration says it should, and Musk wouldn’t join it unless he’s at the top.
- Timber-6539 2y agoGAO claims to have saved a paltry $70B [0] in taxpayer dollars last year. Here's them in 2022 saying $247B [1] got lost in that year due to "payment errors". Looks like their job is to only make recommendations on spending and nothing more. [0] https://www.gao.gov/blog/gaos-scorecard-how-we-saved-federal-government-70.4-billion-year https://www.gao.gov/blog/gaos-scorecard-how-we-saved-federal... [1] https://www.gao.gov/blog/federal-payment-errors-known-improper-payments-are-continuing-concern https://www.gao.gov/blog/federal-payment-errors-known-improp...
- filoeleven 2y ago> Looks like their job is to only make recommendations on spending and nothing more. The new department will do exactly the same. Congress controls spending, so recommendations are all any executive department can do. If GAO should be able to find more inefficiencies, or should be given the power to cut stuff on its own (it shouldn’t), then the focus ought to be on making them do that. Adding a whole new redundant department seems…inefficient.
- Timber-6539 2y agoDOGE, the idea, exists today because in their 100+ year history GAO has nothing to show for responsible government spending. It's that simple.