Burnwinter I think they are just more overtly able to embrace being an oligarch and the power that comes with it when you are in the government.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/26/trump-cabinet-elon-musk

"But Doge, mostly consisting of young male software engineers fuelled by pizza and Red Bull, has been a disaster. It fired the people who oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile then hastily tried to rehire them, only to find they were hard to contact because they could not access their work email accounts. It claimed to have saved $8bn on a terminated contract that was actually worth only $8m. Musk falsely stated that the US spent $50m on condoms for Gazans. And it emerged this week Doge quietly deleted the top five items from its public ledger of alleged savings after they turned out to be nothing of the sort."

More unsurprising insights on Musk and Doge from exact reason you should not trust them outright without evidence. We cancelled ebola prevention but don't worry we picked it up. What about things that you cancelled that you don't realise?

      There it is. The "trillion dollars of savings" line. Saw that coming a mile off.

      If you are spending wildly more than you make that position is not sustainable. You either need to raise taxes or cut spending. Total American debt has doubled in the last 10 years, already at like 120% of GDP and think the current deficit is like over $1.5t over the last year, America are on the path to bankruptcy.

      A lot of other Western economies need to get realistic as well about their spending and debt levels.

        I'm sorry, but if you honestly believe proper due diligence is being done around these cuts before they happen and the amount of it he calls "fraud", I don't know to tell you. Any auditor will tell you that it's impossible to conclude about something being fraud that quickly.

        I didn't say I think due diligence is being done. They've decided to move fast and aggressively and that is their choice, DOGE seems to be very popular in America and doesn't take a genius to figure out why. If they do fuck up then there will be political consequences for Trump and Elon Musk.

        I'd be shocked, absolutely gobsmacked if there wasn't rampant fraud happening. Not just in America but even here in the UK. We all know the Tories were at it but Labour aren't any better.

          JazzG I'd be shocked, absolutely gobsmacked if there wasn't rampant fraud happening. Not just in America but even here in the UK. We all know the Tories were at it but Labour aren't any better.

          • Fraud absolutely does happen. The National Audit Office even says so themselves and yes, it's a disgusting waste of resource.
          • Fraud that meaningfully changes the national debt figure does not. Because even £87bn (the upper limit) is only 3% of the UK national debt.
          • There already are audits conducted - at least in the UK. These reports are publicly available.
          • Slashing government spending under the guess of efficiency is literally what austerity was. That is not popular.

            JazzG I didn't say I think due diligence is being done

            Okay... So do you think that is important or just something besides the point?

                JazzG If they do fuck up then there will be political consequences for Trump and Elon Musk.

                No there wont. Trump is in his final term, its not a parliamentary system where they can vote no confidence. He's there for the next 4 years unless he dies in office. 🤞

                    its a farce. muskrat is starting his X propaganda campaign against verizons $2B contract with the FAA. how convenient that he's proposing starlink to supplant verizon. the daft rebuttal that he's not profit-seeking because 'why would he need more money?' is utterly juvenile koolaid chugging. the consequences of what's being done won't end with trumps term.

                    I'm no fan of this buffoon. he's been caught launching crypto scams for the last few months. but he does represent a bellwether of 'trump bro' sentiment. he's not a hardliner like some other MAGA influencers, but trump leaning at a minimum. first it was the H1B visa stuff, then the bizzare Gaza AI clip and now this Epstein files debacle. there are some early signs of at least spider cracks forming in the dam of popular sentiment.

                      JazzG mate that's not how it works, you can't compare how businesses or private individuals run their finances with national economies.

                          Though to roll with the bad analogy for a moment, who congratulates the head of a household for saving money by starving the family? Even in bourgeois economics it's the role of the state to play caretaker making sure society and economy reproduce themselves. 👏

                            jones I'm not comparing, businesses need to obviously turn a profit whereas governments need to not be racking up stupidly deficits every year and sinking under their own debt. The way the US government finances are being handled simply is not sustainable long term, short term nothing is going to happen to be fair. This is also what Trump campaigned on, he said he would balance the budget and use Elon Musk to look at trimming bureaucracy and wastage.

                            Burnwinter Though to roll with the bad analogy for a moment, who congratulates the head of a household for saving money by starving the family?

                            I am not aware of any US citizens being starved by the current government cuts?

                            QuincyAbeyie Of course you'd hope they are looking at things carefully before just cutting them but clear there are mistakes being made. Mistake which they have acknowledged as well.

                            Qwiss I think he does care about his legacy a lot, he probably thinks he is doing this to make the country better. Whether he actually does is another story though, his ego being one of many stumbling blocks! If this goes bad he'll get punished in the midterms and end up a lame duck president, his majority in the house is very thin.

                                      Gazza M Jokes, some of those 'influencers' went there and got their binded copies and parading them around and then found fuck all in them 😆 Some of the stuff redacted has been available online and that information is unredacted lol.

                                        JazzG US government finances not being sustainable long term is something you'll need to substantiate. Generally public debt is not comparable at all to private debt, they're so fundamentally different they shouldn't even be called same name.

                                        Economies have a public (govt), private (businesses and households) and a foreign sector, the sum of their balances always being zero. When the private sector is a net saver (i.e. saves more than it invests) which has been the case in most of the western world for decades then you need either the foreign sector to balance the books in your favour (i.e. get other countries to import more than you import from them, e.g. the German model) or you need the government to step in, otherwise your economy shrinks and nosedives.

                                        What would be unsustainable long term is if governments followed your advice and stopped racking up deficits because that would mean there is no one to balance the private sector's lack of investment, the rest of the world literally can't do it for each other by definition so the only alternative to the govt doing it would be finding aliens willing to go in debt for us.

                                            jones US government finances not being sustainable long term is something you'll need to substantiate.

                                            US debt has grown more in the last 10 years than it did in the previous 200+ years. Deficit has averaged 3.8% of GDP over the past 50 years, it is currently at 6.2% and projected to come down to 5.2% by 2027 and then rise back up to by 2035. I ain't no financial expert like you but that doesn't sound very good to me.

                                            jones What would be unsustainable long term is if governments followed your advice

                                            My advice would be for them to cut down on wasteful spending and fraud, I think they'll be fine if they do that.

                                                  JazzG Of course you'd hope they are looking at things carefully before just cutting them but clear there are mistakes being made. Mistake which they have acknowledged as well.

                                                  That they are aware of, there is a strong likelihood, given the amount of climb downs and admissions, that they are making lots of mistakes and no doubt they will not realise with all of them.

                                                  It's why I and others made the point about you can't just believe what these guys claim without showing the evidence to prove it. Not because I made my mind up about musk but his track record is one of misinformation and lies which looks like it's coming out in this stuff and it's entirely consistent with what he's previously done. He claims everything is fraud that he found 8bn then actually it's 8m and there were big mistakes. How can you have any confidence in the people doing this work and making these claims when they are doing that regularly.

                                                  • Tam replied to this.

                                                      JazzG debt naturally will go up when you have external shocks like covid or when global supply chains are broken like in 2022, on its own it's a number that doesn't mean anything. Algeria has a debt to gdp ratio of under 50%, Italy of 130% and Japan sits at 260%, can you infer anything from these figures?

                                                      Agree cutting down on wasteful spending and fraud is sound advice, but like most sound advice it's pretty much useless in reality - most governments believe it or not already try to do that every day. One positive that came off it in the US at least is that USAID seems to be crippled for the foreseeable.

                                                          The most important thing to do to bring the deficit under control is to collect taxes owed rather than making it impossible for the IRS to do so.
                                                          Your information sources are a stream of raw sewage.