I hate that in this country, everything is political and everything has only 2 sides. Is there waste and inefficiency in government spending? Yes, I think so. Should we do our best to cut and trim this? Absolutely. Is DOGE's ham-fisted, half-assed version of this "doing our best"? Of course not.
But apparently in this country, you have to be either pro government waste or pro DOGE. No middle ground or common sense allowed.
If we can define what "pro DOGE" means and say that anyone who does not fall under that definition is therefore not "pro DOGE", then we've got two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive groups. Failing those two things, we've got what's called a "false dichotomy". OP is saying there are two groups: those who are "pro government waste" and those who are "pro DOGE". Who do you think is creating that false dichotomy?
edit:
Just adding that I realize the parent comment is making a joke, just expanding on my thoughts with this one.
The last budget surplus we had was under Bill Clinton - Democrat. But instead we had to go to war in the middle east, give massive tax breaks to corporations, and rain helicopter money during COVID. Those happened under Republican administrations. You can't pretend anymore that Republicans are the fiscally sound ones. And they're going to do it again. Despite all this talk about cutting spending and reducing the deficit, that debt clock is going to keep going up for four years straight, just as the time before, and the time before that.
>The last budget surplus we had was under Bill Clinton - Democrat
Yes, and that made us very proud of him. Bill Clinton’s administration was a great administration.
>But instead we had to go to war in the middle east.
First, Trump campaigned promising the American People that if he won the election, he would end the war in Israel with the Palestinians before he even took office to bring peace to the Middle East. True to his word, the war ended a couple of days before he even became president.
Second, these political parties change faster and more often than we do. Historically the Republican Party (Chenny/bush era) was the party of war. Now the Democrat party is the party of war. The Republican Party as you knew it is not more. It was subverted into a controlled opposition party managed by some very smart people on the left.
The party is now The Party of Trump. He controls the party. It’s the other way around like it is in the Democrat Party. Precisely one of the reasons he became the nominee instead of the other candidates.
In 2016: the question was asked “Is there any one on stage… who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican Party and pledge and independent campaign against that person?” Out of the 10 nominees on stage, only Donald Trump raised his hand. That set him apart from everyone else.
> Give massive tax breaks to the corporations.
Trump was asked about things he would do differently in his second term compared to his first term. A study was done that showed his focus on cutting regulations were significantly more beneficial economically than cutting taxes. This study surprised him and he quipped, it doesn’t cost us [any tax revenue] to cut regulations. Thus, he said he would focus more on cutting regulations than on cutting business taxes. That isn’t to say he won’t cut business taxes; he will, just less than before. His goals are to make America a rather competitive and attractive place to do business and host your company. According to economics, this should increase the number of businesses here that pay taxes here, as that is the primary goal and focus. It’s expected there will be lower taxes for businesses with most of their workers in the USA because their employees will all pay taxes.
>and rain helicopter money during COVID.
We had a global pandemic and that’s a pretty good excuse that’s often ignored. Each American received one or two stimulus checks then. A problem was, after the pandemic was over, the Biden administration didn’t cut the helicopter money. Now Doge team has to come in and cut it all out. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was supposed to address it, but it turned out to just be a giant spending package and you can’t spend your way out of inflation.
> You can’t pretend anymore that Republicans are the fiscally sound ones.
The old conservatives of your Bush era forgot they were supposed to be the fiscally conservative as opposed to being fiscally liberal ones. Trump admitted at the beginning of his recent campaign during an early livestream on X with Elon Musk that while the growing debt/deficit was a problem, there wasn’t (isn’t then) so much support for addressing it. Elon Musk became that much needed support and deserves the credit for making the conservative side fiscally conservative again. Elon made it popular and cool to be fiscally sound again like it was in the Bill Clinton era.
We can see the results on the near-daily updates by Doge on X.
Here are 12 things the Doge team has identified or removed:
-$7 million on various projects studying magic
-$1,513,299 to use kittens in a study to analyze motion sickness.
-State Department spent $2.1 million on border security—for Paraguay.
-USAID spending $20 million on “Ahlan Simsim” a new Sesame Street show in Iraq
-USAID paid $3 million to a rapper in Gaza to produce antisemetic rap songs
- $2.5 MILLION to DEI in Serbia
- $70,000 on an Irish DEI musical
- $47,000 on transgender operas in Colombia
- $32,000 on a trans comic book in Peru
-The National Endowment for the Arts awarded the Bearded Ladies Cabaret a $10,000 grant to support a cabaret show on ice skates focused on climate change
-2 million for sex changes in Guatemala
- $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt
Do you support keeping all of this (wasteful or fraudulent) spending or do you support them cutting it?
The list goes on and on with USAID. Here’s a viral photo of ISUS taking a photo with a RPG from inside a USAID tent — giving us pause and evidence to where our USAID dollars are or were going.
> Can you look at the chart "Federal Debt Trends Over Time, FY 1948 – 2024" and tell me what you see?
I see a benign and calming treasury.gov website that has been overseen by Janet Yellen the former treasury secretary who inspired confidence in pretty much no one in her video interviews and press conferences.
Janet Yellen caused billions of unnecessary debt to be added to the debt by not proactively selling treasury bonds at the lowest interest rates instead waiting until interest rates were much much larger. When you’re rolling over $36 Trillion of debt, a difference in treasury interest rates from 0.25% to 4.5% is massive. Massive actually isn’t a strong enough word to describe numbers of that magnitude.
My impression from this website is that it’s downplaying the problem while also having a recent history of incompetence and ineptitude hoping people will complain less.
I prefer the usdebtclock.org website because the numbers stay up to date on it. It also doesn’t downplay the problem, it merely shows the numbers and lets you draw your own conclusions from it.
>That debt clock is going to keep going up for four years straight.
Would that make you happy? It would be better if they can stop the clock. But balancing the budget is a lofty goal to some. According to Elon Musk, if they can cut federal deficit spending from $2T to $1T and we can grow the economy by $1T then we get to have no inflation in 2026.
“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?” Musk was asked on stage during the Madison square gardens rally. “Well, I think we can do at least $2 trillion.”
To be fair, I’m not aware of him being asked whether that will take 2, 4 or 8 years as it takes time for preexisting contracts to expire and not be renewed. It’s expected that the Democrats will step into congress to block further cuts after the two year mark — so all of the cuts have to be made quickly and be made now while we still have a real shot at improving America’s fiscal outlook… because it’s probably the last shot we’ll get —- at giving our kids and the young people of our country a future rather than a debt for them to pay off.
Next, as sure as gravity, international confidence in the U.S. government finally reigning in spending (again) will cause investors to be willing to buy U.S. treasuries at lower interest rates. This allows the government to be able refinance the debt, further lowering wasteful government spending. On a local note, it also lowers borrowing costs for (for example) young people that want to buy their first home making mortgages more affordable.
Have you ever tried to balance the Federal Budget? I have. It was required as the final project in our Macroeconomics class. It’s not easy but I did it. The far-left fiscally-liberal Democrats can and will block DOGE from making progress in many ways. One example to blame already: Judge Paul Engelmayer, a temporary judge, recently blocked DOGE Treasury data access.
I don't think there are many people who are "pro-government waste". That would be a strange position to hold.
I do think that Elon Musk and DOGE are attempting to create a "with us or against us" binary narrative that leaves no room for even-handed nuance (not unlike Trump), in an effort to push an agenda that maybe doesn't have much to do with government efficiency (for example, MTG's clampdown on allegedly-liberal media [0]).
But apparently in this country, you have to be either pro government waste or pro DOGE. No middle ground or common sense allowed.