11 ms·
> I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt I’ve got an idea: take some good economics
by akamaka 2y ago
> I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt
I’ve got an idea: take some good economics courses so that you learn how government spending actually works.
- slumpt_ 2y agoThis stood out to me as well. A pitfall for experts in one field to assume their skills are transferable.
- snitty 2y ago>experts in one field [assuming] 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.
- chipgap98 2y agoAnd they’re doing it while unironically shouting about the tyranny of unelected bureaucrats
- mcculley 2y agoIt is a mark against our system that someone can get this rich without seeing a problem with all of this. We are told that capitalism makes smart people rich, but it does not appear to filter out gullible people.
- archagon 2y ago[flagged]
- adamtaylor_13 2y agoHow is DOGE a grift? We need to curb our government’s absolutely excessive waste.
- yks 2y agoThe premise is correct, but the trust in the executors is misplaced. One made money via government so there is a certain conflict of interest, another one is an ordinary American businessman with a questionable track record on the edge of ethics. That's right off the bat, on the merits, not even going into the politics.
- einrealist 2y agoBecause of the messaging, like cutting regulations, entire departments - things that have impact on the entire country and not just a company and its customer base. I believe, there is certainly a lot of room for improvements in government functions. But I also believe, those improvements are hidden in details and require actual work, other than just slashing funds, regulations or entire departments. Things are how they are for reasons. And those reasons will probably withstand deeper scrutiny, but not populism and conflicts of interest.
- sixo 2y agoWhen you name your enlightened government-saving organization after a memecoin you own a mountain of, only bootlickers are going to think you're in it for altruistic reasons. This is similar to elon's tendency to dump boatloads of money in politics to beat the people he claims are cheating by... dumping boatloads of money in politics. If he wants any of this to be taken seriously by anyone other than his horde of bootlickers he needs to make "earning people's trust" a priority, even when it's opposed to his own interest. Instead he acts as though he's entitled to the public's trust because (he's sure) he's such a good guy, and he's (he's sure) actually acting in their interest. Doesn't work that way. Trust is earned by listening to people and by taking seriously what you hear from them—not by egoistic paternalism. Furthermore, these business people constantly talk in terms which reflect basically-wrong beliefs about how money works at a national level. A country is not a company. A dollar spent by a country can return to its coffers as taxes many times over, and this basic fact breaks any analogy between the two.
- BurningFrog 2y agoDOGE hasn't done anything yet, so this is purely expressing prejudice.
- bccdee 2y agoElon Musk has done plenty worth judging already. Am I supposed to give every single venture of his the benefit of the doubt?
- giraffe_lady 2y agoThe people running it have track records we can assess, and have signaled their goals and in some cases stated them outright. This is simply judgement.
- BurningFrog 2y agoElon's track record is to consistently succeed spectacularly with things that most people find laughably impossible to do. That's why I don't dismiss this project. I missed there they stated outright that they're "only interested in enriching themselves and their cronies"?
- archagon 2y agoThere are two things rich Republicans hate more than anything in the world: the government spending "their" money on services for ordinary folks, and regulations preventing them from making even more money. This is often dressed up as "libertarianism," but in reality, it's simply worship of money as the ultimate virtue. What sorts of organizations does DOGE want to defund? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the IRS, the Department of Education, Planned Parenthood, PBS and NPR: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindseychoo/2024/11/27/elon-musk-doge-takes-aim-federal-agencies-where-cuts-can-be-made https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindseychoo/2024/11/27/elon-mus.... Nevermind that these make up a tiny portion of the intended 2 trillion in cuts. Adjacent to this, Republican leadership has clearly signaled that they wish to gut Social Security, Medicaid, and the ACA. Here's Robert Reich reading the tea leaves: https://www.greenevillesun.com/opinion/national_columns/reich-how-the-doge-billionaires-plan-to-kill-medicaid/article_6a3aefe4-bc9c-11ef-9ae7-4f8e2f108e74.html https://www.greenevillesun.com/opinion/national_columns/reic... Oh, I would not be surprised to see Musk "succeed spectacularly" in this endeavor. But that's because money is power, and Musk has more of it than anyone in the country. I mean, he even bought himself a president! It's difficult to lose when you can just keep throwing cash at the problem. By the way, nobody is ever going to tell you outright that they're "only interested in enriching themselves and their cronies." An intelligent adult should be able to interpret reality based on available evidence. If you wait for someone to throw off their mask and reveal themselves a cackling villain, you will find yourself an easy mark.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoIs this about the impossibility of a government defaulting on its debt if that debt is payable in currency that same government can print? Or is it some stimulus thing?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- VectorLock 2y agoThere is no upper bound on how much debt the US gov can carry as long as they're paying their interest and people still have trust that they will. Its the TRUST part that is at most risk right now.
- lovecg 2y agoYeah but that’s almost a tautology. This has been true for every government that ended up in hyperinflation (Germany in the 20s, Russia in the 90s, etc. etc.).
- marcusverus 2y ago> There is no upper bound on how much debt the US gov can carry as long as they're paying their interest... 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?
- bennofs 2y agoThe limit could depend on a lot of other things. In theory, it's possible that you are paying 100% of revenue on debt service yet still the best option is to take on more debt. This is if you believe that investing the money raised via additional debt provides returns that outweigh the increase in debt service costs. So in that situation, additional debt can even lower the debt service / income ratio. So this is meant to illustrate that the limit on debt is more a function of the concrete circumstances. In this line of argumentation, debt is not limited by a mathematical formula that just takes GDP and similar statistics as input.
- bko 2y agoWouldn't this be the equivalent of telling someone "before you try and build a business, try to take some business courses and learn how business works. Perhaps even an MBA".
- akamaka 2y agoNot quite, because a successful business could be as simple as a lemonade stand. Government finance, on the other hand, is an exceptionally delicate game of safely maximizing spending to stimulate economic growth (and therefore future tax revenue).
- kortilla 2y agoYet nobody with an economics degree is in control of government spending. Funny that
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken Wake me when a majority of actual US voters would pick someone based on their educational qualifications for the job.
- krainboltgreene 2y agoWe do that all the time.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoNot in any election that I've seen in the last 35 years.
- krainboltgreene 2y agoI don’t think that’s true, frankly. I guess maybe if you don’t vote in local elections and also don’t pay attention to congressional elections.
- Palomides 2y agodon't worry, he's starting with physics and will invent economics from first principles on his own because he's a genius
- bogwog 2y agoYou gotta admit, building a desktop recording app is only a few short hops away from building our civilization.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoCrazy idea: work for DOGE but secretly just do whatever the most educated (and compassionate) people on the topic say to do. Don’t let Elon know you’re poisoning his well with good ideas.
- lazyasciiart 2y agoI have serious doubts that this guy would identify anyone I consider "the most educated or compassionate" for any topic, though.
- ETH_start 2y agoA lot of people consider Elon to be highly compassionate (in the balanced sense of taking into consideration second-order effects) and educated (in the non-credentialled sense of being informed). So comments like your are little more than flamebait.
- entropicdrifter 2y ago>A lot of people consider Elon to be highly compassionate (in the balanced sense of taking into consideration second-order effects) I suppose if you're into redefining the common meaning of the word, anyone could be considered highly compassionate.
- ETH_start 2y ago
- tayo42 2y agothis part was disturbing. this guy cant run his own life but wants to dictate how others will live and get involved in government. the US is going to have to deal with real consequences from idiots like this. 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.
- louwrentius 2y agoIt either favors or breeds sociopaths
- whateveracct 2y agomost of the startup CEOs I've met / worked for are actually comically inept as people lol. often their business success is clearly more luck than they want to admit, and they love to give lectures/post tweets [1] about things they know nothing about (e.g. ever notice how every CEO is also an enthusiastic authority on the future of population growth and space travel and the like? they're all Elon wannabes nowadays) [1] often ghostwritten
- paulpauper 2y agoYou would not learn this in an economics course. Source: someone who has taken economics courses. Maybe a civics course.
- 4fterd4rk 2y agoDidn't make it to grad school?
- paulpauper 2y agodamn bruh...
- s1artibartfast 2y agoYou don't have to have a PhD in macroeconomics to have useful policy insights. 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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoAssuming that you are correct, you have observed (a) one or more problems (b) a proximal cause of the problem(s) (c) a potential solution. Congratulations! None of that can be said for making a facile observation about US government spending.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI can think of dozens of similar examples from my local government where entrenched local incentives or disinterest lead to completely wasteful outcomes. All of my friends in government have stories of egregious waste, 8-9 digit programs where not even the people working on them think they are effective. 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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoYou've already started from a couple of assumptions that I don't believe are true. > there are abundant opportunities for improvement and cost saving if there is a stakeholder that actually cares about cost savings. This fails to explain why private corporations (which presumably have from one to millions of stakeholders that care about cost saving) would waste millions of dollars. The idea that "for profit" organizations have some builtin magic trick that means that they improve and save money in ways that other sorts of organizations cannot is just demonstrably untrue. What is true, of course, is that no matter what the type of organization, if there are people who care about and are empowered to meaningfully tackle waste and inefficiency, then things can improve. And this happens, both in government and non-governmental organizations. You don't hear about it much, for broadly the same reason you don't hear about for-profit organizations wasting money: it just isn't news. The second assumption that I think you're making is that "wasteful outcomes" are by definition a bad thing. The problem is that government often is tasked with tackling problems where wasteful outcomes are a more or less builtin part of the way things get done, and we accept that (sometimes) because the full cost (not just financial cost) of trying to reduce waste is higher than the waste itself. A typical example: yes, there's no doubt that some government benefits go to people who are not eligible for them. However, the task of identifying all those people has many costs, both direct and indirect. The whole system becomes massively more invasive of everyone's lives when one of its prime directives is "make sure that not one cent goes to some not entitled to it". So most societies accept that there will be a level of waste, which is made up for by the benefits of treating things as if they are closer to a universal benefit. There are plenty of other examples of this in different domains where the government operates.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kortilla 2y agoThis is a facile dunk. Economics literature is filled with examples of debt destroying countries’ economies either through hyper inflation or default. Since the US controls its currency, it is very likely to take the inflation route, but if you get enough hawks they might choose to default.
- rtpg 2y agoBut perhaps people supposedly becoming in charge of material results should in fact at least have a sketch of an actual nuanced understanding of things. 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.
- roenxi 2y agoThe US is transitioning from being a dominant superpower to being one in a herd. Saying that the current approach is works is also difficult position to sustain. They probably should try something different. 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- akamaka 2y agoA good economics education would let someone be specific about what they think the problem is. What year will the US default on its debt? How much money needs to be cut from the budget to avoid that? To what extent will those cuts slow down the economy and be self-defeating? If he arms himself with the right mathematical tools, he might just discover that the default he’s expecting is actually not imminent.
- goalieca 2y agoI think you missed the point of DOGE. This isn't a problem about navigating and optimizing a complex bureaucracy, it's to call out that massive bureaucracy exactly where it comes at a high cost and little, perhaps even negative, value. This is a managerial problem and a political problem at its core. We should all be rooting for them to succeed and table their findings, in plain speak for all the public to see. Then it will be up to the elected officials to act on it.
- bdangubic 2y ago[flagged]
- giraffe_lady 2y agoThat is transparently not the point of it at all. Musk in particular is a proven self-interested liar and there's no reason to believe his stated intentions here. It's another right wing campaign to dismantle the parts of the state that benefit anyone other than investors.
- rgmerk 2y agoDOGE is BS. 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paxys 2y agoI don't fault this guy for wanting to join DOGE and make a difference. The fact that he was able to make a few phone calls and actually get hired into an influential position despite having zero background in government, civics, economics, finance etc. should, however, tell you everything you need to know about the department and its brain trust. 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?
- khazhoux 2y ago> The fact that he was able to make a few phone calls and actually get hired into an influential position despite having zero background in government, civics, economics, finance etc. should, however, tell you everything you need to know about the department and its brain trust 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.
- gkoberger 2y agoThere's a difference between "building tech for the government" and whatever governmental cosplaying DOGE is doing.
- paxys 2y agoSlight difference between asking techies to modernize government tech and asking them to retool the entire federal government.
- 616c 2y agoYou can listen to their own description of their strategy and tactics. It was every different from the contemporary counterpoint. They reformed one system one subsystem at a time by working with the current owners and tech staff and teaching them their approach. https://changelog.com/gotime/154 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.
- thrance 2y agoHe pulled millions from the economy and now wants to work with the oligarchs towards having even less redistribution. He is a small part of the reason why his country is going to s***.
- wodderam 2y agoDefaulting on the debt is not going to happen but the consequences of avoiding default will not be good. 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.
- verall 2y agoHow will it be a brutal lesson in youthful ignorance and stupidity when the youth have nearly no political power? We have a full-on gerontocracy and the problem is youthful naivete?
- torginus 2y agoI don't fucking understand these people. They built a startup of questionable value which can be replicated with open source software, which is debatable if it even solves real world problem, somehow got a huge payday from freely printed VC money, and now they made it their life's calling to fire a bunch of people who don't make that money even it they worked for 10k years, but their livelihoods depend on getting paid. 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).
- 1832 2y agoNot just "smart people." The smartest people on the planet, the smartest people he met in his life, maybe ever!
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoIsn’t it convenient how the last people to be hurt by austerity are the ones arguing for it? Crazy how that works, not predictable in any way.
- gota 2y agoThis is so blatantly obvious it hurts. This person lucked out (of course most likely due to talent, opportunity and effort inclusive) in exactly 1 (one) thing and now believes he "can". 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.