https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/17/trum...
We criticize engineers who drop into a code base and try to make changes without understanding. You can be forgiven for doing it a few times, but after that you're doing it intentionally. And if they hired engineers that didn't know this, that's incompetence at both levels.
Not only is this different code bases and IT products, it's across organizations and done very rapidly.
I am also not convinced that they don't simply have malicious intent most of the time.
The "140 year old people in social security DB" post is just the latest example of bad-faith. Either there is actually >>$100B of social security fraud and that's the story or he wants to pretend like that's the case when he knows full well that presence in the DB does not indicate eligibility or payouts.
What about the corner-case person who actually is legitimate and now has incredibly private information out there to make stealing their identity trivial? As a statistical anomaly who is often that corner case, I'm glad you're not the one making the policy. I wish Elon wasn't as well, and I'm sure there's going to be a giant mess at the end, but using government power (which Elon has, whether rightly or wrongly) to publish personal information about people (which they get by force giving their monopoly on government power) especially without trial or due diligence is very wrong IMHO.
Unless you don't actually care about the truth and want to send a convenient lie twice around the world before the truth gets its pants on. Then you should act like Elon is acting.
Elon usually has doesn't have any compunction about throwing innocent people under the bus if he thinks he gains something even if indirectly.
But that aside, you can show evidence of massive fraud, without revealing private information to general public. Can certainly reveal it to relevant authorities.
To steelman the argument though, it seems reasonable to audit these recipients so that we can get their true birthdate entered. The number of recipients who lack a valid birthdate because they found a way to fraudulently claim benefits is likely non-zero, but probably low. But in any event, cleaning up the data can’t be a bad thing.
Given the age of the COBOL programmers I know, that window is rapidly shrinking...
Poor record keeping and bad policies about data validation tied to sending money to people if not today will eventually result in massive fraud.
Furthermore the notion you put forth is trash lazy thinking. Cost or no cost you do things the right way. But I don’t even buy you can calculate the cost of doing it wrong correctly to even have a sound conjecture that fixing it is more costly.
Cost was not the only factor. They seem to be trying to handle missing data the right way rather than use a kludge.
They did not want to add inaccurate death data to Numident records, for a variety of reasons, one being that it could cause release of information for living people when they're accidentally added to dead people records. The SSA also thought adding annotations would legally require a new regulation and would have impacts on other consumers of the data (ie. states, etc).
How to handle missing death data in this case does not appear to have a clear and simple solution. But it also does not appear to be evidence of poor record keeping for modern records or a major cause of concern for "eventual massive fraud".
This creates a driver, somebody who is motivated to get it fixed. If the person does not exist they won’t be calling for their check, or if the entry fraudulent, fraudster will run the risk of exposing them self in the process of trying to get the checks flowing again.
We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the
report currently receive SSA payments. However, SSA issued each of these
individuals a valid SSN and these SSNs could allow for a wide range of
potential abuse.
[...]
We also note we initiated our 2015 review upon the receipt of information
that a man opened several bank accounts using SSNs belonging to
numberholders born in the 1800s who had no death information on the
Numident. In addition to being used to obtain employment or open bank
accounts, identity thieves can potentially use these SSNs to create
synthetic identifies, obtain credit, government benefits, or private
insurance.Imagine the brouhaha these same folks would be raising about "wasting your tax dollars hiring historians" if that other direction was in their self-interest.
Yet audits of individuals making < $25k per year is over 5.5 times higher than those in all other income brackets (1.27% vs 0.25%). So we chase down citizens when likely they probably don't even had a tax burden anyway. Maybe they misfiled some taxes and should be taxed a few hundred or even a thousand dollars more. But the manpower to chase down these little checks is a net negative on the department.
Sure, it is possible you find fraud in some of these low income cases. Someone claims to only make $25k but really they run a cash business and make $80k. But these are likely so limited thanks to other validations the IRS has access to, that the number of cases that reveal this is extremely tiny. So back to another argument on here, there an expectations that fraud is non-zero, and we accept that because getting fraud to zero is not worth the cost.
What is the evidence these exist?
“The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero
He was talking about the banking system. But he was also hinting at something bigger. There is a game theory problem often referred to as the meter maid problem. What is the optimal amount of meter maids in a city, where optimal can be defined in at least a few different ways, but roughly means the cost to revenue optimal. You end up with a couple of obvious extremes, no parking enforcement means no cost, but no revenue (plus parking may end up out of control if charging for parking is more than just revenue generating). The other extreme is thay you have enough people policing parking that no one ever fail to comply, this is the highest cost, but not the highest revenue, because you don’t get revenue from ticketing. So the answer is that the optimal number lies somewhere where the number of meter maids allows some percentage of people get away with failing to comply with parking rules (whether deliberate or accidental can further complicate the problem since both will happen).
So back to your steelman. Cleaning data is most certainly a desirable thing, but it is likely not the optimal thing, especially if the cost is high. And unauditable access to systems is a very high cost. Seems to me much of this auditing could be done in a much more acciuntable way.
Or, as is really common with the federal government, the agency is actually underfunded and hasn't been able to modernize because the Republicans in congress have been trying to starve the administrative capacity the classic, slow way until now.
Like with the IRS. I've made mistakes in filing, and gotten a notice from the IRS about it, but sometimes years later (!). In the meantime, if you "audited" the IRS records, you'd see that my records are out of compliance and could claim "See, there's fraud!". In reality, the IRS just has slow antiquated systems, and is barred from giving taxpayers direct access to their records. Which is by design from the rich and anti-government.
The “super old person” SSN numbers are in the DB mostly because non-citizens are using them to pay into the system. If you delete those numbers, the next payroll run will inject them right back in.
And you would remove important accounting metadata for each payment. Metadata that is consumed by the systems that prevent fraudulent payments from going out.
The only way to stop the fake/bad SSNs is to go into the field and address each instance with employers. This is time-consuming and expensive, which is why no one has done it much.
The no administrative benefit bit checks out with napkin math. Of the 18.9 million entries for people age 100 or older they are paying out benefits to 44,000. The total number of people in the US age 100 or older is around 90k to 100k, depending on time period for comparison.
There's an Inspector General audit report in a nearby comment for source.
That's like saying null columns in a particular database table must be filled in (or have the row entirely erased) because someone, somewhere, somehow, might infer the wrong thing about them, if they completely ignore all the other tables and business rules.
___
"Hello, I am Oldy McOldperson. Give me money."
"...Sorry sir, but that person would be almost 150 years old now, and that's well past our Impossibly Old threshold of 115 years. Furthermore, one our other databases says that person was reported as missing 90 years ago."
"But Oldy's--I mean, my precise confirmed date of death is still blank, therefore I'm alive, so give me money!"
"Sir, only a complete moron would believe that's how it works."
There is certainly a level of incompetence that requires active ignorance to one's naivety. I'd certainly consider a stubborn person who arrogantly ignores concerns of experts malicious. The active nature certainly matters.
The reason I still give them benefit of the doubt on their intentions is...because they did come out and say that 20% of the savings should go back to taxpayers as a refund and that 20% should go directly to reducing the debt. That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention.
I'd rather the government keep the money and use it to pay for the many services that it provides. Like ensuring that I have clean water, unadulterated food, clean air, a functional banking system, healthcare, safe vehicles, making sure that unemployed people don't starve, researching infectious disease remediation, performing scientific research, maintaining national parks, making sure that kids have a baseline education, doing humanitarian work around the globe, and a thousand other things I don't have the time to enumerate.
This is the load-bearing idea that is made of toilet tissue.
It will create inefficiency. In the best case because it's not how the decades of built up institutional knowledge knows how to get stuff done. If the worst (and most probable) case, because what you're removing is actually needed... and we'll get an "oops sorry" later when the damage is done.
Needed to save that line,
Sometimes there are no shortcuts: You have to know what you're doing. The "This is 'something', therefore we must do it" bit only gets you so far.
Of course we don't want to toss the baby out with the bath water, but it's high time for a major course correction. In our government it is very hard to turn the ship around, and motivate people to serve.
I'd much prefer if we could magically motivate the 3/5 of govvies who are in cruise mode to try harder.
Who's ignoring it? Once the problem is identified by someone, you fix it and move on. This already happens.
$1,300 coffee cups: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/22... Audit of C-17 Spare Parts: https://www.dodig.mil/In-the-Spotlight/Article/3948604/press...
See also, the myth of the $600 hammer: https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
Trashing whole departments/agencies first and then trying to find all of the 'waste' amongst the wreckage creates more work in the long run when you have to rebuild all of the processes and try to reclaim some portion of the institutional knowledge that got flushed down the toilet for no reason.
I'm sure I'm missing something, I'm no expert by a long shot, but government spending isn't a secret. Budgets get approved by congress and spent by the executive out in the open. Maybe someone interested in curtailing waste could start by auditing budgets? Making sure that the money allocated got spent where it should have and that the budgets weren't padded with unnecessary spending? But that takes a lot of time, effort, and energy, is kind of boring, and wouldn't generate dozens of headlines every day.
It's not an either/or situation. You can have responsible spending and also services to benefit everyone. Cutting me a check to give me back some of the money I've paid into the system doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you only got the money by destroying the CDC or whatever.
It would be kind of like the gas company tearing my house down because my windows aren't insulated and then giving me a couple hundred bucks because they technically eliminated the source of the wasted energy
There isn’t enough money to be saved to give you back anything.
"That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention."
It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt.
There should be little to doubt at this point, however. "Dismantling of the administrative state" was a mantra for many who are now in positions of power.
Then: "Prices will come down on day 1!" Now: "It's hard to get prices to come down once they're up".
At some point, there's not much reason to doubt someone's goals, regardless of what they say. You can look at past say/do combinations and make reasonable predictions.
Stop giving 'benefits' to people with years of documented track records under the aegis of 'doubt'.
I would implore you to develop the skill of judging one’s character overtime. Some folks have proven they don’t deserve the benefit.
Otherwise, I fear that your good nature will become a vulnerability instead of the strength that I can be.
Then you should be giving the benefit of the doubt to the people and institutions that are accused on flimsy evidence. Then you should be giving benefit of the doubt to Harris and Clinton too, to progressives, to SJWs, feminists, to centrists.
Always has been, always will be.
Also, the capital gains taxes ARE low and the income taxes ARE high, so just paying down the debt and other "even-handed" measures are less even-handed than a refund.
Personal income taxes are the larges revenue source for the U.S. Government, so it is the main way we have decided to tax ourselves. Arguably it is one of the most steerable, and we have long health that progressive taxation is for the common good (as much of a mockery as some high-income individuals have made of that).
So with that as the background, the U.S. ranks towards the bottom of the OCED countries in taxes vs. GDP. Yes we get less than the citizens of the countries paying the most, but not that much less.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxes-co...
That seems insignificant when their other proposed policies are intended to massively increase that debt?
Like.. we could just personally tax Elon a little bit more while changing nothing else and recover more money, most likely.
Elimination (or indefinite pause) of the CFPB that was a trade of 21 billion in consumer savings for like 750 million in expenses.
If they wanted to improve efficiency, there's an easy place to start: the IRS. And you wouldn't start by firing, you'd start hiring lots and lots of people.
Spoiler: Nobody is _directly_ getting a refund. That money will be less than the planned increase in the deficit. (This is the house's budget bill which is the supported version of the president unlike the senate's version).
Deciding at which point that gift was misplaced is a learned skill and one I cannot claim to have expertise in.
I may credulously assume that our poster friend is sincere. However, as I read replies that the poster has made to sincere responses, I observe:
* a claim of mutual empathy via mutual distrust "I've criticized Musk!" ... "I've been contradicting DOGE on things since they became a thing"
* a surrender of high-ground via tenuous appeal-to-authority "Bibi says he's not a nazi"
* a veneer of emotional maturity over others: "we don't have to be so stressed about needing to trust DOGE's changes"
Buffeted yet calm, our poster friend claims the high-ground while having-and-eating cake.
Our poster is in an incredulous superposition of:
"So yeah, I don't trust him." and "I was shocked"
or
"I don't think they'd renege on it. I'm certainly not naive!"
I've wasted too much time discussing our mutual friend. I should not have done my drive-by, and I apologize to you both for the energy consumption of my this and my previous post. I shrink away cowardly from responding anymore.
I do not apologize for lacking credulity.
My interest in having any kind of "superposition" is simply to be impartial and accurate to the greatest degree possible as to get the greatest results possible. That is it. In any case, you got it wrong when you said:
> * a veneer of emotional maturity over others: "we don't have to be so stressed about needing to trust DOGE's changes"
There is nothing like that at all in my posts. What I was saying is that DOGE should operate with such a level of transparency and controls that would eliminate needing to simply trust DOGE's changes. Tthus the stress that goes along with that level of trust would fade away.
> * a surrender of high-ground via tenuous appeal-to-authority "Bibi says he's not a nazi"
That is not an appeal to authority. It is saying that the people who are most equipped to answer the question, because it is a matter of their own history and hide, are the ones saying that it warrants overlooking or good faith. By all means, continue that line of investigation on your own if you want.
> I should not have done my drive-by
I agree! Because it's poor faith and on top of that you're questioning my own consistency and integrity to boot, even though it's clear that in one case X has premium features warranting a credit card...whereas there's no reason at all to blast my bank account details on here...
Anyway, to summarize it all...CAT should audit DOGE and DOGE should be on a tighter leash or quarantined if they cannot be trusted to make changes.
What will you do when they break your benefits of the doubt. Wait for the next time for more of the same words?
The reason I don't consider this to be a lie, per se, is because they make promises around goals with incomplete understanding and data and then recalibrate as more information becomes available.
It would still be excellent to limit the surface area of what DOGE can touch and do and how fast, though, so we don't have to be so stressed about needing to trust DOGE's changes.
Perhaps you should simply announce an investigation, then deliver findings of the investigation and recommendations.
They're starting with the end in mind - the dismantling of the administrative state - then making cuts. Then finding out what the impact might be, then continuing cuts.
There is no good faith here, and there is nothing in 'doubt' that someone should benefit from.
They didn't even try to formulate an understanding. All of their actions show willful and deliberate disregard for how the system works. That's not "incomplete understanding" or a good faith effort.
How many times do you need to be lied to by the exact same person before you realize that facts don't mean anything to them?
At this point, I'm surprised when I hear something from Musk that is verifiably true.
Wasn't that actually "if you agree to resign and leave next September we'll continue paying your salary until then and you wont have to RTO if you work remotely" rather that actually 8 months of severance?
> then recalibrate as more information becomes available.
So you are waiting until they will start actually lying when they have more information (instead of "just" being incompetent)?
Giving someone who has proven time and time again to be exceptionally dishonest (Trump but also arguably Musk) the benefit of the doubt seems unwise. Why would they suddenly stop lying?
The fact alone that they have promised a huge tax cut to high income earners will will inevitably outweigh any potential savings by DOGE means that any claims about reducing public debt are inherently dishonest.
It won't be, unemployment benefits are a fraction of what the severance benefits are. Its disingenuous to bundle them together due to that fact alone.
> increase good-faith in the masses big time
What incentive is there for anyone in the Trump administration to care about that? I don't see one.
> I don't think they'd renege on it.
Lower prices on day 1. Stopping Ukraine war on day 1.
Trump just says things in the moment to play for approval, then says something contradictory later if need be. There is no fallout, pushback or consequence from his supporters, and they have control of ... all branches of government right now.
Trump has no interest in increasing good faith. He doesn't need to. He can't run for office anymore, and even if he could, there's literally nothing he could do to lose voters. And he certainly doesn't give a shit about the future of the Republican party.
The people that voted for Trump fully support everything that's being done.
The core issue is the idea that they are incentivized to act in good faith.
Theres a great article which was shared here: "Why is it so hard to buy things that work" https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ The idea here is that since its the right thing to do, firms will do the right thing. or: "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive" > Although it's possible to find people who don't do shoddy work, it's generally difficult for someone who isn't an expert in the field to determine if someone is going to do shoddy work in the field. and > More generally, in many markets, consumers are uninformed and it's fairly difficult to figure out which products are even half decent, let alone good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_information_voter
Sadly, there were enough people like you to enable a fascist coup.
It's what authoritarian populists do when they get control of governments. They "hack" the economy with short-term stimulus and giveaways to keep the rubes content and happy while they dismantle civil society and the rule of law and entrench themselves.
Economic stagnation and decline usually follow within a couple year, but if they've entrenched themselves well enough, they don't have to care about public opinion very much and can shift to repression.
In fact, their operations -- in as little as they've been made public -- have been pretty opaque and sweeping (i.e. not detailed, as in transparency), and what little we have seen of their analysis techniques seem to be shallow and unconventional (i.e. not formal and measured, as in auditing).
I'd warn you not just take what public figures say at face value. Transparency and auditing are indeed virtues to strive for in governance (and we have many running systems for those already), and maybe they'll someday reveal that they're actually contributing to those virtues themselves. To date, they have not done so.
Doge is using a sledgehammer when they need to be using a scalpel. There's already been so much chaos with things like federal disbursements being frozen then unfrozen, firing and rehiring employees, moves being blocked by courts due to being unlawful, etc. You can't "move fast and break things" with a trillion dollar bureaucracy, people's lives are at stake and something might break catastrophically.
I also don't trust Musk with so much power because (1) he's an ideologue and (2) there are numerous conflicts of interest. I am skeptical he would be held accountable for any potential wrongdoing in this political environment.
We all should know the way this is being done is wrong and it will either have to be removed or redone, which is equivalently costly and might as well be the same thing at the end of the day.
I would expect the same practices from all of you in your own day to day work. We expect it from each other.
The lack of transparency is enough for anyone here to worry. It bucks every best practice and is a red flag in itself. We do not accept this in our work - it is what we all value and that has to be the north star.
This is why I do suspect their intent. They are not walking the talk.
Where are the forensic accountants? Who uses CompSci-track college kids to audit billion-dollar orgs?
Whether it benefits from being in a single datalake idk. We really don't know how the operations are being done, we're mostly just reacting to news reports and outside guessing.
I'm assuming it will be basically how Palantir works in government health care and intelligence agencies where they aggregate multiple data sources from a bunch of old and new databases and have complex analytical tools on top.
Furthermore, another comment went in depth about how boosting the irs and following other agencies guidelines would have had a positive return, but none of this happened. On the contrary, we're seeing agencies such as the irs being infiltrated by this thing that resembles a metastasis
Whereas the regulation in your context pertains to regulations that are codified as laws or rules to follow.
Audits measure compliance to an process or objective. They require that you have written down the process or objective, and retain sufficient information to measure whether you achieved it or not.
In this case, the DOGE boys do whatever Elon says. What is said isn’t recorded or written. People who attempt to do their duty who are seen as obstructive of the whim of the DOGE “agent” are fired.
But remember, Elon doesn’t follow the rule of law, and has no doubt engineered things in such a way that his little minions are accountable.
Perhaps you could read their statements? DOGE communications are filled with ill intent, and their publicly stated goal, and the goal for which their supports seem to support them, is the destruction of the bureaucracy. That's ill intent.
That's before we look at their actions.
Eh, they are going in like a bunch of bloodhounds smelling blood.
Musk killed USAID because he had a personal axe to grind.
So yeah, I don't trust him. Ever since he reneged on interns, I noticed that...he has a tendency to think about things as if they're entirely meat and to worship the false god Scarcity. He's been gargling Ron Paul's gold coins so much that he completely fails to comprehend basic nation state financing and why deficits are manageable and our debt is also manageable given our $160T+ net worth and climbing...
https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279?lang=en
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...
The ADL doesn’t want to get sued out of existence so… of course they going to say it wasn’t a Nazi salute.
This is the same chilling effect that Trump suing ABC and ABC settling so yeah nobody feels comfortable enough to speak truth to power because nobody has the money or the army to back it up
But those of us with ears to hear and eyes to see know what we saw. He might not want to exterminate Jews but he knows what MAGA likes and he like they loves the power a fascist dictator like Hitler wielded
Of course they'll claim not.
It was a nazi salute.
You should read more about the things he says, does, and the way he treats people, especially from those who are close to him. The picture it paints is something I'd consider "cruel, bordering on inhuman" (and thats before the nazi salute.)
Alternatively, I have a lucrative investment opportunity I'd love to get you in on.
https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...
Definitely good to keep a watch, though.
Even their stated reason - to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1% [0] - is heinous. Inequality is already breaking the economy. 4.5 trillion dollars ($13k for each and every American) being transferred to the yacht class will inflict generational harm.
0 - https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-01-10/trump-tax...
Also what's with the blue non-link links? Never seen that before on HN.
It really is. There have always been 'third rail' topics that get rapidly flagged despite community interest, but I've never seen so many.
> what's with the blue non-link links? Never seen that before on HN.
No idea; all the links seem to work for me anyway.
A quick search will show that it used to be fine to talk about Curtis Yarvin on here a decade ago but now that he's more relevant than ever it's suddenly taboo?
Did Curtis Yarvin and the ideas he espouses suddenly become less interesting or are a group of people working together to prevent critical discussion of his ideas?
In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks.
In fact, it's cover to let him destroy/neuter agencies they don't like and get endless material to pressurise any opponents.
One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.
A lot of this depends on how you measure. For example, there are a lot of social assistance programs that provide in-kind benefits (e.g. you get subsidized housing) and those programs both require a bureaucracy to administer them and are less efficient than cash transfer payments, so they could be converted into refundable tax credits. Then the program costs somewhat less (you eliminate the administrative bureaucracy) and is more efficient and with better outcomes, but you can count the entire cost of the program as a reduction because it's now a tax credit (i.e. a tax cut) instead of a government budget item.
Do that with the entire social assistance system and you could get a sizable budget reduction before you even get into overpriced government contracts etc.
That tech has been handed over to the private sector as a precaution and also as a method of keeping the politicians' hands off it. Gives them cover to honestly say "I know nothing, I was briefed on nothing, we have nothing". Plausible deniability.
Elon Musk is also quite possibly the last person I'd ever want to touch world-changing technology. let alone be the sole arbiter of who gets to get near it.
That isn't even what your link is saying. To begin with, it's citing a Treasury Department document requested by the Biden administration to do an analysis comparing the proposed tax cuts with a contrived alternative.
If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts, not targeting any particular income group, everyone's taxes are reduced in proportion to how much they were paying to begin with. Obviously then the people who make more money and pay more taxes have them reduced by the given percentage and that is a larger absolute number.
The same thing happens even if you target only the brackets for people who make less money. Suppose you lower the rates by 2% for every bracket below $400,000. That's not even enough to be in the 1% (for which you'd need to make ~$800,000), much less the 0.1%, but what happens in that case? Well, everyone's taxes go down by 2% of their income up to $400,000. If you make $40,000, they go down by $800. If you make $400,000, they go down by $8000. If you make $4,000,000, they also go down by $8000, from your first $400,000 in income. The absolute amount of the reduction is still highest for people who make more money, simply because it's a percentage of higher number.
The analysis the Biden administration requested was to do the tax cuts for people making less than $400,000 and then raise the tax rates on people above $400,000 to make sure they didn't get any net reduction, and their contrived example would have people making $400,000 paying a higher tax rate than people making $500,000+. Basically the purpose of the analysis was to generate a large number to put in a headline rather than compare it to a real proposal to lower taxes in general. This is also why they announced the cumulative total over a decade rather than listing the annual number as you would when comparing it against an ordinary government budget. Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".
You can find any number of links talking about how unequal the tax cuts are. No one in the bottom 60% is going to be better off. The .1% are benefiting the most. That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.
> If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts
That's not what these are. The reaction of every billionaire to Trump's admin ought to tell you that on it's own.
> Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".
Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.
A million seconds = ~11.5 days A billion seconds = ~31.7 years A trillion seconds - 31,710 years.
We're not talking about play money, or monopoly money. Musk bought the election for a fraction of a billion dollars, ffs.
And again, America is already on record inequality, about the same or more as right before the French Revolution.
Money IS a zero sum game, and when too much of it is going to the 0.1% it inflicts massive harm to millions of people. If you want to learn more about this, and what's about to happen to the US economy, you can listen to one of the world's best traders talk about it here [0].
All of those links are comparing dollars rather than percentages. It's obvious that a given percentage of $400,000 is more than the same percentage of $40,000.
> That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.
The cause of inequality isn't taxes, it's market consolidation. Rich people are rich because they own a large fraction of a megacorp. Under the existing system, higher corporate taxes, if anything, increase market consolidation because massive international corporations can use cross-border avoidance mechanisms whereas smaller purely domestic corporations can't, so they're effectively a tax on businesses too small to get out of them.
> That's not what these are.
It's essentially what they are, and the rate reduction in the lower brackets was slightly more. The highest bracket was lowered by 2.6% whereas the brackets from ~$12k to ~$100k were each lowered by 3%. And as a percentage of taxes paid, 39.6% was only 7% more than 37% at the top, whereas for the working poor 15% had been 25% more than the current 12%.
> Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.
You can turn any annual amount into trillions of dollars by multiplying it by an arbitrary number of years. And the only reason it can get so big so fast is that the US government spends a stupefying amount of money, so if you reduce it by even a small percentage it's a big number.
> Money IS a zero sum game
This is definitely false and is one of the major fallacies in the taxes vs. inequality problem.
In general people don't actually store wealth as money. Rich people store it as stocks and things. So if you tax them, you're not causing them to have less cash, or even causing them to sell their car or mansion. You're causing them to sell stocks.
If the person you transfer the money to is doing anything with it other than buying the same exact stocks, you're reconfiguring the economy, which is very much not zero sum and could be negative or positive sum depending on who gets it and what they do with it.
But Wall St. and Main St. are somewhat isolated pools of money. Making a transfer from one to the other has effects not entirely unlike printing new money and handing it out, because it gets spent very differently than it would have otherwise. And this is the nasty part: The sources of inequality are money sinks.
If you're paying high rents because there is a housing shortage as a result of captured zoning boards inhibiting new construction, and all the tenants suddenly have more money, the rent is going up. That's one of the reasons you can't solve it with taxes. You have to address the actual causes of inequality -- market consolidation and regulatory capture. Otherwise the incumbents just take the money right back out of your pocket.
If on DOGE, that is ill intent.
...
Elon Musk absolutely has ill intent or else DOGE wouldn't have all this access that they absolutely DO NOT NEED!
We've already had the occasional large leak and survived, why not just leak continuously! Also leave your doors unlocked, you wouldn't want robbers to break an expensive door to get into your house, and most of your stuff isn't worth anything anyway!
How can you possibly disagree with this and call yourself good at your job or a technologist? What an embarrassing take. Seriously you might want to delete your post if you want to ever be employed again. Actually trying to help you here.
What are you even talking about? People (myself included) were fucking livid! The reason we got the 6mo credit check was because so many people tried to claim the monetary compensation (which the court had ruled they were owed!) that Equifax was unable (unwilling) to pay the resulting volume of money. The 6mo credit check was the weasel compromise that the Trump regulatory apparatus rubber stamped.
Perhaps it's cheaper to assume everything leaked or will leak soon.
Thinking of it objectively, almost nobody here can say they would stand for this at any company they worked at or ran. This is not an acceptable IT practice no matter which side of the fence you are currently sitting on - allowing an unvetted entity to modify your internal systems without audit or oversight is completely absurd.
Well Americans voted for the president, and he has final say over these things so I would say the analogy is wrong.
They need to move fast in order to replace the old system. My main concern is that they will half-ass it, and fail to build something new out of what is torn down, making the whole thing seem like a big mistake. The question is are they capable of creating something good and orderly out of the chaotic mess that comes with tearing down.
Why?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/17/trum...
Unacceptable.
Ha! Well there's your first problem.
Also, just because he was duly elected it does not give him carte blanche to do whatever he wants, especially when he's running afoul of the law and firing all of the inspectors general and independent monitors.
[1] https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/120-the-impoundment-crisis-of...
Electing a felon that notoriously managed to bankrupt several casinos and pretty much every business they've ever run is definitely not electing a smart man or even a vaguely competent businessman.
This has always been about racism and wanting to punish "other" people because you failed at life and want a handout.
Maga: Move Fast Break Things
-In other news, the US has lost track of several Nuclear Weapons after cutbacks left building empty
Maga: YOLO. My Uncle Jed going to make the Oklahoma City Bomb look like nothing. Yeeee haaa. Wait and see science nerds. Taking back the country.
Kind of the key issue dontcha think? Maybe woulda been good to know that before burning down the government?
"ideally they have a bunch of smart people thinking about that" is exactly what the government is for. We had a bunch of smart people thinking about a lot of our problems. They're fired now.
Tearing it down and replacing it with something leaner, faster, better (fingers crossed) is just nonsensical libertarianism all over again.
GP: They absolutely will make something good out of it, but for their benefit not the average American.
At this point Musk is Wile E. Coyote. He's run out of road, so he's attempting to improvise an Acme Degovernmentizer to levitate.
He's not interested in "cutting waste" but in covering his ass so US Gov can't Enron his doughy face into prison, where it belongs.
But it's going to explode, like everything else he's ever been solely and personally in charge of.
Continuing: the solution is "people power". Everyone should join a union, for starters.
The kid wouldn’t be an unpaid intern at most companies. He wouldn’t pass the HR screen.
Regardless of politics, they don’t have the credentials.
It's amazing to me how every time DOGE is challenged its supporters come back with "I'm sure they're doing the right thing" despite all evidence to the contrary.
I'm starting to think this ends with DOGE cutting like a few hundred million dollars of random stuff, taking out even more debt to cut everyone $5000 checks, swamp every media channel with bogus "WE CUT FIFTY TRILLION DOLLARS TO GIVE BACK TO THE PEOPLE!!!" and you guys will just lap it up without question.
The debt will go up $3T, the savings will never come (again), poor people will lose healthcare, and when people wisen up, Republicans will revert to talking about how Democrats just want to “tax and spend”.
This has Musk's name stamped on it. No amount of lying and misdirection is going to change that.
What evidence? Be specific.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-mus...
- A multitude of errors in basic math in the claimed savings, like claiming 55 billion in savings when the "receipts" posted on their own site to back up those numbers did not add up to 55 billion even assuming they were accurate. Diving deeper, they clearly misunderstand how government contracts work, claiming they saved the full value of contracts they cut despite said contracts having been partially paid out. In one case they claimed 8 billion in savings for a contract that was worth 8 million, and then apparently tried to change the data to cover up their mistake when called out.
Here's a twitter thread with some more specific examples: https://x.com/electricfutures/status/1892432354016202831
- And here's all the contracts they claim to have canceled: https://doge.gov/savings No verifiable reasons have been given for why these specific contracts were chosen. What made these more wasteful than other contracts? How will canceling them improve efficiency? Nothing more than "Trust us bro", I doubt they know themselves; they certainly haven't had the time or the staff or the expertise to investigate anything with any detail.
- Elon's companies are recipients of massive government contracts and were under investigation by some of the agencies he is attempting to cut. An insane conflict of interest that has not been accounted for beyond "trust us". There is no politically independent oversight of any nature.
- The shutdown of USAID was done so incompetently that employees were left stranded overseas locked out of government networks without support.
- The wholesale gutting of the CFPB, a program which actually made more money for taxpayers than it cost, while claiming to care about financial efficiency.
- Avoidable accidental firings of critical personnel across government agencies. Re-hiring is a non-trivial cost on top the immediate disruption and you won't get a 100% return rate. Complete waste of time of and money while disrupting mission critical activities.
These are not the actions of serious people trying to curtail government waste, fraud and abuse. If they are, they're a sign of rank incompetence. These are the actions of people who, even if given the benefit of the doubt, are falsely convinced that the government does no good whatsoever and they can cut programs and grants with no consequences that matter except to their political enemies.
This isn't even getting into the legality of what they're doing, but DOGE supporters have made it quite clear at this point that they view the law as the enemy, or at the very least irrelevant.
He has a lot of relevant experience in criminal behavior, actually.
Having been thoroughly investigated by the FBI to not be an enemy or a threat to the United States.
The fact that there isn't any transparency about their hiring process is a big flashing red light that there was no hiring process.
These people are against DEI "because we should only be hiring the best, not focusing on race/etc."
So be transparent and show the damn receipts to prove you hired the best. Who did they screen. How was it that Big Balls beat out a pool of qualified applicants.
I'll wager they can't show their receipts because they don't have them. These anti-DEI people really just want to lazily revert back to a good ol' boys network, hiring only from their in-group or just hiring the very first candidate they personally like, regardless of their actual qualifications. The hiring process went something like this: "this kid was recommended by some billionaire's brother-in-law, and he went to an elite school so obviously he's qualified. The End."
This is what leaves me incredulous about so many people here defending this. I've been on this site daily for how many years I don't know but the one thing that has been consistent is the security idea that an outside entity gaining physical access to your server means that it is irreparably compromised, and that it should be treated as a liability and re-built from the ground up. But somehow it's fine if it's public data in a federal database?
Are we talking about something that happened, or just conjecture?
As a concrete example, if you have read-only access to someone's email inbox that's enough to steal most of their accounts on other services since you can request a password reset link and then click on it.
What about security reasons now? The federal government includes the military. Giving DOGE “God mode” on the federal government is a national security risk right now.
Not to mention the open question of whether we will ever arrive at later.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/doge-dives-into-core-na...
"DOGE currently has far deeper and far more extensive access to U.S. government computer systems — and is far deeper into the national security space — than is conceivably necessary for anything related to their notional brief and goals."
I am honestly shocked at the amount of wrong or naive takes being posted on HN as of late.
Also things are happening at a breakneck pace and, uhm, the media is tragicomically incompetent.
From your link written by John Marshall, a “progressive liberal”: “It’s obvious that you’d want to be very cautious about centralizing this much power in anyone’s hands, especially people working outside all existing frameworks of oversight and accountability.” It’s called.. the President. The whole point of electing a president alongside of congress is to have a consolidated point of power.
There's at least some belief that the people looking at the data haven't been vetted or instructed as they should be when handling data of this nature.
It doesn't help that the guy who is running the show is basically doing it as a friend of the president and has some conflicts of interest.
Second, while that was a major topic in international news for years, it did at least stay in the national security space where access is restricted. A lot of the concerns around DOGE are because they bulled through all of the normal rules for who gets access to sensitive data and how it’s handled. Say what you will about the NSA, and many here have, they didn’t just hand out credentials to inexperienced people with a history of leaking data or condone use of personal computers for government work.
This is especially of concern if the reports of write access being used to push code changes or deploy monitoring keyloggers are true: do you really want to bet that the guys who made a .gov site world-writable couldn’t be compromised by a foreign intelligence agency? There are legitimate concerns about the level of process overhead in government IT but that doesn’t make the reasons for it go away.
>> The question isn't what's being accessed, it's who is accessing it.
There will always be good reasons to access data, and sensitive data. There is always good that can come out of this. But just because you can do something good with it doesn't mean you should. You can do a lot of good with a nuclear bomb, but I don't want any ever built because it takes only a small mistake (not an act of malice!) to have huge consequences. There is always a cost, you must always consider if the costs are worth the benefits.
Did you also miss the global protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq?
It's been there, and growing, ever since.
I and many people would argue to rebuild it based on the lack of transparency we have seen. There are enough people that feel that way that a rebuild is inevitable, regardless if you end up right. The position is that we really don't know, so the only way to be safe is a do-over. Or at the very least, a completely transparent audit, which is also insanely expensive and very hard to scope.
1. To ask for READ access to all the data with PII/sensitive scrubbed.
2. Any action to modify the content/data should ideally have followed the existing path/mechanism
How is that clear? What proof do you have of this other than Musk's word?
…but also much more. It is intellectually dishonest to equate these two.
Cutting through red tape can technically be done by nuking the red tape, but why cause all this harm when you can use scissors?
https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-prosecutor-dallas-white-su... https://gizmodo.com/doge-engineer-resigns-over-extremely-rac... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/07/musk-doge-st...
There’s absolutely no telling what additional software has been installed alongside existing, or which systems have been modified that would require audit. Purging this will be an absolute fucking nightmare to the American taxpayer.
This may turn into one of the most significant IT incidents in world history.