I'm saying that focusing on an incorrect zero ($8b) distracts from the fact that $8m is easily spent wastefully by people (and systems) whose job it should be to be accurate.
Surely the people doing an audit should be just as accurate no? If they can't keep track of (several) zeros how can you trust them to accurately work through all the documentation involved in figuring out what is waste, what is fraud, and what is legitimate spending?
I'd actually support this effort if there was evidence any care was being taken. Instead I see wild statements like this, 100 million spent on condoms, people in the SSA database being too old with no discussion of if they are actually receiving payments or not (oh look they aren't!)
A real audit take time, discipline and attention to detail. I see none of that.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you refuse objectivity and spend all your time getting high on your own farts.
Yet teslas are still selling like hot cakes. If there were actual humans struggling we’d see an obvious decrease in sales.
Yes they should. These are not auditors though. They have an axe to grind with confirmation bias driving the zealotry.
The plus side is that they are publishing information in real time so we can all judge it, which one could argue is an improvement over not publishing.
A counter argument would be that this is just to create the illusion of transparency, but I suspect they are not playing 5D chess.
Beyond that, you're not going to make the Federal government efficient by cutting $8 million at a time. Musk's goal is $2 trillion in cuts. He said he thinks there's a good shot at achieving $1 trillion. The deficit in 2024 was $1.8 trillion. If your top item is $8 million, your task is utterly hopeless. Imagine being a family drowning in debt, with expenses exceeding income by $330,000/year, and a financial planner comes in and says that your top priority is not to buy that hot dog at the Costco food court this weekend. Not even that you should stop buying hot dogs weekly, that you should not buy one. They make you a list of things you should stop spending money on, and "One Costco hot dog combo planned to be purchased sometime in the coming year" is top of the list. Oh, and they also have it listed as saving you $1,500 because they didn't actually check the cost of a hot dog before they gave you the list.
No we can’t because they control the narrative. There should be more transparency in an objective manner without using the qualifiers like “wasteful” so that readers can decide for themselves. Or at the very least express both the arguments for and against, similar to how voter guides often come with a listing of arguments from both sides of the coin.
They're claiming to cut $16b and actually only cut like $6b and none of it was actually fraudulent it just literally matched grep trans or something.
I know this is how I and my definitely not a bot liberal friend want our country to be governed, fellow humans. beep boop bzzzzzzt
Do you have a source for this opinion presented as a fact?
There is no rhyme or reason, other than stripping off the parts.
I'll bet you. Once the stripping is complete, Musk and Trump have the brilliant idea of replacing the old, "bloated" government functions that were cut with private for profit contractors (that are obviously "more efficiently" run because they're for profit).
For example, when the NLRB was crippled by trump firing a member and losing quoroum, they forgot an important part of union history.
Prior to a proper process of grievances, the old answer was to basically wage war, guns and all, against the bosses and their families. The companies also hired Pinkerton's and every so often had the national guard also fight for the companies.
Union history is a bloody and murderous affair.
The NLRB was the compromise to "go to the bosses house and shoot it up to leave a message". With the NLRB effective destruction, the next logical devolution for worker rights is violence, and a lot of it.
As for me, I'm looking at what it would take to get out of the USA. Already interviewing with a few places in EU. The USA is basically an invaded country at this point. And I really dont want to be around when the violence picks up.
The problem is that they benefit workers not through productivity increases, but via collective bargaining, i.e. at the expense of society. Consider that when unions go on strike, they reduce economic productivity and disrupt the economy. Likewise, when unions fight to prevent factories from closing to protect the jobs of workers, this causes an inefficient allocation of resources - so now companies must bid up the prices of raw materials to produce things that nobody wants just to keep some people employed. Unions oppose automation for similar reasons, which is why we have the most inefficient ports in the world (worse than Africa!).
So in sum, unions do literally nothing to make society better off. What benefits unionized workers receive come at cost of society (including other unionized workers!)
>If you could come up with an equitable and non exploitative system that works for everyone, suddenly you no longer have a need for unions.
Capitalism is working great, actually. It would work better without unions.
"Economics" in the sense of "any sort of understanding of how the world works", not so much.
Drain the rot from your brain. Ew.
By denouncing this right of peaceably assembling and negotiating at a table of law, means that you're wanting the old solution of mass widespread violence against workers and management. Because this is exactly what happened before. But dont believe me - go read how unions were formed.
Most civilized countries have good worker protections. The USA is speedrunning the elimination of worker protections. And it doesn't take too much history knowledge to figure out how that works out.
I think the zoomer term is "fuck around and find out". We're in the 'fuck around' stage. I dont want to be here during the 'find out' stage.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/how-did-adolf...
Hitler was elected, loved to hear himself talk, many people did not take him seriously, blamed Germany's weaknesses on minorities, anti democratic.
Even teamed up with Stalin's Russia to invade Poland.
If the pattern continues then the push back will be used to grant himself emergency powers.
Doubt anything short of a military coup that dismantles maga can stop this. Hopefully neither party survives and the US will have an actual democracy.
Meanwhile we are actually losing vision and dying of obesity.
There is plenty to do to get more healthy for real; but that's not where we are heading with these initiatives so far:
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-27-we-found-the-2-trill...
This is peak ostriching. They haven't turned up anything so far, they've just been making monumental messes and lying about progress.