Musk, Vivek to host weekly DOGEcast on cost-cutting

[pianopraze]

UPDATE:

Elon Musk asked me to advise the new Dept. of Government Efficiency. I’d love to help bring sanity back!

Ron Paul

[jaded]

so there is also the narrative that government spending is like household spending, and government debt is like household debt.it's not. they're conflated. that conflation is a control mechanism.governments invent money.or the thing that invents governments also invents money.it's pretend.case in point: defense spending.making government more dollar-efficient ain't gonna do jack squat.

Erik Prince has been making the rounds on podcasts.
His beef, legitimately so, is not only is our military top-heavy to the point of being nonfunctional but that the products they keep ordering are so out of date, so expensive, so currently useless in the face of drone technology & modern warfare that every penny spent is wasted. 

The military govt contractors (given the automatic gravytrain of cash) are reluctant & would have to retool their facilities, delve into serious R&D programs, oh my gosh! Innovate & earn their keep. 

Since the military answers to the President downsizing is doable. Musk & Vivek don't seem to be delusional in the actual scope of the job. They've made clear there are ridiculous redundancies, thousands of regulations that are unconstitutional but more importantly those regulations have spawned their own depts to administer. 

As much fun for the media as it is every time a multimillion dollar project is discovered that is insane. Those are low hanging fruit. So far Musk & Vivek have been looking at Javier Milie of Argentina as inspiration. JM also got elected under a tsunami of votes by Argentianians then did as promised an slashed something like 5 out of 9 govt agencies, cut payments to provinces (used as graft mostly) plus about 100 other things & now after a first rocky yr the country is looking at exponential growth of their GDP. Poverty has been drastically reduced, altho JM is focused on improving it for everyone. Crime is also
been reduced phenomenally. 

Despite pushback none of DOGE appears to be a "vanity exercise". We are just as broke & overextended as any third world country with about the same amount of domestic manufacturing capability. Just completely screwed if the US doesn't start "adulting". 

If anyone cares Javier Milei did a great interview over on Lex Fridman. 
(spoiler- it's just as painful to listen to as any Robert Kennedy jr interview) I actually did listen to the whole thing, it was educational...ahem...or character building? Accidentally got exposed to a level of economic authors way beyond my pay grade. 

[UltraBudgie]

you are not wrong jaded and lex is one of my favourite robots haha have you seen him play guitar he can jam! very surprising interesting fellow.

sure enough waste and slop and misuse in mic and its part of the process to review and adress the outrageous. perhaps contrast with a totally efficient non wasteful on point support industry for pentagon i wonder if that is what is really wanted because they seem to throw money and resources into big huge vat and see what makes soup somehow, like if everything got well planned non wasteful then perhaps some useful happen-by-accident would be lost? also there is huge hidden economic tail that lives off those 'inefficiencies' and massive indistry wouldnt be able to exist without it, i hesitate to call it a command economy because thats socialist but thats what govmt spending is sometimes haha!

a point about gdp: it is not what you think. often treated as a measure of productivity of economy, more is better, etc. it is that, in some respect, but it is a measure that is modulated by another factor: how much each individual thing in life has been transactionalized, turned into a dollar-measured thing. for example if you grow your own food, that doesn't hurt gdp by only the difference in labor efficiency of you doing it yourself, gdp goes down by the amount of the sale of you buying your food from someone else, of the job you would work to earn money to buy that food, of the shipping costs of that food to market, etc. or if you fix things yourself or provide your own child care, that hurts gdp not because it's worse or less productive, but because there's less dollar-measured transactions going on. especially true in a service economy. so bigger gdp isn't always better, except for systems that feed on everything in life turning into an economic transaction. average gdp in usa is $80k/person; that is $80k of economic churn not necessarily $80k of value created for individuals!

usa system has same problems as third-world as you point out, but survives nonetheless. hmm why? its relationship to global externalities i think. its not as simple as colonialism or extractionism or whatever hippie label, but it does have to do with the place of usa in larger rules-based economic order. why usa spends like 10x as much on hahadefense as other countries. its scary that many things make much more sense if you think of that not as something done to support other nebulous goals of usa in terms of freedom, our way of life, etc., but as the primary purpose of the usa, which is why it always gets as much off the table as needed and desired, and everything else is simply to support that system as viable. not the whole picture, but its hard to call it paranoid when it accurately predicts reality so often.

so with doge, which is by the way part of omb and will phase out in 2026, it will dig up slop to clean up, that will be filtered by determinability (non-secret) and addressability (separate thing to point to), then by what the public can be aroused by (political utility), then doge doesn't actually have power themselves so it will go to mtg's thing in congress (haha that will be fun), chewed over and forwarded to subcommittees, then vetted by the economic interests involved (lobbiests), and any little scraps of reform left rolled into a take-it-or-leave-it omnibus spending bill. how much of this is a process that would have occured anyway is uncertain, politicans always like to play the spendthrift so that's what omb has been the for for a long time already. but it will certainly make fun news stories with musk and mtg and trump and such and their big personalities and lovehate evocativeness.

okay enough rant for first cup of coffee today haha! thank you jaded very fun.

[xuenchen]

A couple of Very Rich Dudes with not a lot of life experience (other than being really rich and privileged) are going to cost-cut the government.  Looking at their financial histories and how they treat companies, I have no faith in their ability to sort out the real issues.  

Oh -- and let's not forget that Marjorie Taylor Greene is now part of DOGE.

This... will be interesting.

Yeah maybe somebody will now be able to actually point out and identify the spending that gets channeled and sifted off to cronies. Their experiences mean nothing because anything they publish is easily proven right? Seems people are afraid of billionaires with no experience in spending money efficiently. 

[xuenchen]

Hot potatoes 

Pentagon’s Budget Is Nearly $1 Trillion. It’s Now Failed 7 Audits in a Row
 

 
The Pentagon announced late last week that it failed its seventh consecutive audit as the sprawling, profiteering-ridden department wasn’t able to fully account for its trillions of dollars in assets.
 
As with its past failures to achieve a clean audit, the U.S. Defense Department attempted to cast the 2024 results in a positive light, with the Pentagon’s chief financial officer declaring in a statement that “momentum is on our side.”
 
The Pentagon is the largest U.S. federal agency and is responsible for roughly half of the government’s annual discretionary spending, with its yearly budget approaching $1 trillion despite long-standing concerns about the department’s inability to account for vast sums of money approved by lawmakers and presidents from both major parties.
 

[Maxmars]

Hot potatoes 

Pentagon’s Budget Is Nearly $1 Trillion. It’s Now Failed 7 Audits in a Row
 

The Pentagon will always fail audits as long a black budget projects are part of it's function.  Classification is just one way to hide money movement, then there are unacknowledged projects and 'fronted' operations... all leading to entries that can not be reported or addressed except through 'special channels.' 

The DoD needs to refine its processes to offer a direct reflection of the magnitude of the "we can't talk about it" variety and the authority under which they seek 'immunity' from financial oversight... but they are so paranoid (or guilty) of deflection and misdirection that they will soon be testifying in court with an "I plead the fifth amendment" approach.

There is a strategy of hiding behind defense needs to conceal the level of profiteering that's going on, and exactly what that entails, I think.

Wanna see an example of DoD spending in action?... look at NASA... what it can't do... and how many different contractors it takes it to even try to do anything.

[UltraBudgie]

Inside the Pentagon, things are (DoD)ifferent. Money is a tool, not a resource. You get what you need. There are teams that make that happen.

DOGE is going to have fun when the look closely inside DoE and HUD, too -- hope they brought their flashlights.