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.”
The amount of money it’ll take to fix all this will dwarf the $150B. By several factors at least.
The CFPB people he cut were saving citizens - i.e. the very taxpayers Musk claims to represent without a mandate of any kind - $21 billion already.
He was selling our dollars for pennies.
It doesn’t count unless it goes to the government. Taxes and exploitation are good as long as they come from private companies instead of the government because freedom is a vibe rather than an actual set of circumstances.
Good thing the US is trashing all their trade agreements, then. That’ll make paying for it so much easier.
Also losing 500Bn in tax revenue due to DOGE cutting back IRS staff.