Summary
Elon Musk, co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency under Donald Trump’s advisory team, revised his claim of finding $2 trillion in federal budget cuts to a “best-case outcome” of $1 trillion.
Musk’s earlier target, dismissed as unrealistic by experts, had included the entire discretionary budget of $1.7 trillion.
While Musk and co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy plan to recommend cuts, specifics remain unclear.
Experts warn savings may require targeting mandatory programs like Medicaid, potentially causing hardships.
Elon is such a dumbass.
Edit: I’m sorry, *President Elon is such a dumbass.
It’ll be 2 million, and way less than the amount the DOGE department manages to embezzle itself.
Wherever he cut, you can safely assume it will only hit the people at the bottom, not those at the top.
Whatever supports his companies
i’m actually kind of shocked he admitted this. isn’t his usual strategy to promise super unrealistic things, not deliver, and then make the same promise the next year?
If he cuts anything it’ll be support for middle class and poor people and itll be jack shit, it will fuck everything up and it will be touted by clowns as a success.
I’m shocked, SHOCKED by this revelation!
It’s all going to be healthcare / social safety nets, and it’s going to be dwarfed by the tax cuts Trump gives people.
Anyone who actually believed they would find $2 trillion was an idiot, the rest of us knew they’d just cut the things they hate, bump the subsidies that favor them and their friends, and call it a day.
The funny thing is…it’s not like their voters would care if they lied. They could literally say “We cut the budget by $17 trillion by making sure the trans kids don’t get surgeries!” And their voters would fucking cheer.
They wouldn’t look deep enough to actually care what they cut.
So the question is why even make this announcement? I’m guessing it’s a distraction from something else.
Your comment will age poorly when Trump’s tarrifs lead to a collapsing economy and he prints money like mad to solve it, resulting in hyper-inflation letting President Musk keep his election promise.
Wondering how that connects as I didn’t mention tarrifs?
After hyperinflation, Musk will easily cut $100T from the budget, making your claim that only an idiot would believe he could find $2T in cuts laughable.
Aha, well played!
Makes me glad I don’t hold dollars.
Yeah maybe it’s time to buy some gold
Gold is a good option, and I have some, but I also have some Monero.
Starts thinking of all his old pc equipment How much gold is in this stuff
Not much
Surely it’s essy to find $2tr in the Homeland Security/ military budget?
Not even there. DoD is ~$840B and DHS another sixty. Not even one trillion in the entire US security apparatus, but they were going to so easily find twice that. It was always pure nonsense.
Remember when he landed people on Mars in 2022?
Remember when Tesla released fully autonomous self driving cars?
That was way back in 2014, hard to imagine a world without them now! It’s how I take my cybercab to the hyperloop to get to work!
Monorail!
Mono… d’oh!
Were you sent here by the devil?
Can I get a video of the before and after claims? Gotta make the presentation super simple in this day and age.
Those two clowns couldn’t find their own asses in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight.
Musk’s earlier target, dismissed as unrealistic by experts, had included the entire discretionary budget of $1.7 trillion.
FFS! There’s probably TODDLERS who know more about how the government works than Musk! 🤦
Oh please, you’re not even going to get $100 billion without stepping on some toes in the Military-Industrial complex, and that’s going to make you some lifelong political enemies.
Oh that’s not what he meant at all.
He meant slashing social security and Medicare. Obviously rich people aren’t going to feel the pinch.
It’s because they were told they can’t cut VA, SSI or Medicare, I promise.
The rich assholes always think they can just cut healthcare and retirement payouts but politicians know they will never get re-elected if it happens on their watch. The old people who rely on this shit are the only ones voting anyway.
We did this exercise as a civic learning experience in 9th year government/social studies classes. The teacher had us go through a mock (simplified) Federal budget and decide which line items to cut to achieve a “balanced budget” with debt reduction.
The problem is largely intractable for reasons that become obvious even to middleschool kids. Do you completely cut popular things like the space program? Gut entitlement spending? Massively increase taxes across all brackets? Reduce the military or infrastructure spending to laughable levels? All of those things are very unpopular but that is what it would really take to tackle the problem.
You tax the 1% until they’re the 10% then shove that money into infrastructure and welfare. Then you sit back and watch the American Exceptionalism machine go brrrr again just like the 50’s
The US government is not funded by taxes. Let me repeat that: THE US GOVERNMENT IS NOT FUNDED BY TAXES.
Since the USD is the defacto global currency and is backed by oil, the US can print as much money as it wants to pay it debts or fund government programs. Hence the reason for the US’ constant wars over oil resources. Got to feed the oil machine.
Taxes are used as COLLATERAL for further loans and to pay the interest on the existing government debt.
Money is created by selling bonds and again using the magic of fractional reserve banking to inflate the money supply.
The US is the only country that can pay its debts by printing its own currency.
Problem is, if the goal is to greatly reduce or eliminate the debt, you could confiscate 100% of the 1%s wealth and it would barely make a dent.
This is absolutely false. The top 1% in the US control 50 TRILLION dollars. More than enough to go around with plenty to spare for a rainy day.
Sounds like they’re not an efficient use of government resources and should be cut
