US National Debt Adds $1 Trillion Every 100 Days.
15 of those days are national defense.
9 of those days are what Elon hopes to cut in half.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
The deficit is a huge problem. I don't know how to fix it. But, what DOGE has done so far is exactly the opposite of what makes sense.
My point is that a lot of people seem to be in an "ends justify the means" mindset here where it's OK to rubber-stamp over laws, security, any sort of requirements for competence, or even basic understanding of what's being destroyed because in the end, this is chaos is going to have such a tremendous impact.
But, it's not. It mathematically can't. Even if it all turns out amazing it will be a small dent in the problem it's claiming to solve.
So, in the end, all of this is actually just chaos for sake of chaos. In the process, a whole lot of real people will be hurt in real ways. It's not bad at the same scale that "Turn off Medicare until we understand how it works" would be. But, it's nonsensically destructive in exactly the same way.
Exactly my point. This is (one of the reasons) why Trump is cutting these small programs. People would really flip out if he cut social programs for Americans
Turning off the entire flow of money is unnecessary, even counter-productive, to understanding how the money is flowing. Even if half of the money is waste, turning off the other half is causing tremendous real harm for no reason.
It is completely unnecessary and horrific to rubber stamp around national security protocol for something as incomprehensibly impactful as the federal payments system.
And, in the end, what are we going to get out of all of it? What I'm seeing out of Elon is propaganda about programs like "studying shrimp on treadmills" which was an microscopic piece of a very sensible study on marine safety and security. That's exactly the kind of work the government is supposed to be doing. But, if you frame it badly enough, you can destroy it for everyone and claim it as a victory.
I mostly agree with you, except I would add that the waste is causing real harm as well, as it could be better spent.
But, the demographic crisis means that moving forward our growth in entitlement spending for the growing population of seniors is far outpacing our growth in GDP from our slowing population of workers.
We can't tax or cut out way out of this. Elon's cuts are going to be performative at best. Real cuts would put tens of millions of seniors, vets and disabled people into destitution. Taxing the billionaires more would be nice. But, taxing them to zero would only paper over a few years of the problem.
The only way out I see is through massive investment to increase per-capita GDP long term. As a super duper liberal, I'm gung ho on "Bring manufacturing back!" in the form of
1. Re-prioritize trade schools and trade skills so we can actually perform high-skill work in factories if/when we build them. 2. Do everything we can to catch up with China making locally-built green energy tech dirt-cheap and highly effective. 3. Figure out how to incentivize the market to local build the interconnected web of advanced manufacturing capabilities needed to produce high tech goods fast and cheap.
I see the work of https://www.hadrian.co/ as an example of what I'm talking about. I'm starting to see some senators act like they need to stop talking about it and actually do something about it. But, the "best" I've heard from Trump is "Drill, baby. Drill!" and "Tariffs are magic."
If Trump laid out a plan for how to target tariffs surgically and use those proceeds to build up manufacturing, I'd be on board. But, he hasn't. Instead, he has made it clear his only plan is to create chaos, achieve performative concessions, and declare personal triumph while netting great harm for everyone in the end.
it isn’t good when a group of people tries to destroy the entity that’s making those investments. These shitheads are basically corporate raiders coming in to tear things apart for personal gain.
Ironically, it is the “fiscally responsible”, “WhY nOt RuN gOvErNmEnT lIkE a BuSiNeSs” gang who want to destroy any fiscally responsible investment.
If they want to reduce spending meaningfully, they need to cut defense, social security, and Medicare. They won’t, because it’s political suicide.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/pete-buttigieg-did-not-sp...
The most charitable interpretation is 243 Chargers.
According to the AP[0] it's 214
[0] https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-electric-vehicle-charg...
It’s a decade long project, with phases and 50 different state governments doing the actual contracting. The Fed side is mostly funding and establishing the Tesla charger as the national standard - which required quite a bit of diplomacy to get all the car manufacturers onboard.
Jan 1942: Roosevelt authorizes the atomic bomb
Jul 1945 (55 months later): Trinity
Aug 1945 (56 months later): Little Boy
By comparison:
Nov 2021: IRA becomes law
Feb 2025 (40 months later): <250 charging points
But this would take 120 months to complete. What an interesting comparison.
Zero bombs in early 1945. What a waste of money!
They invented a novel weapon in half the time your heroes dreamed of building a charging station.
It's a plan to build tens of thousands of charging stations, by 2030.
In all 50 states, with the states and local administrations being responsible for contracting, permiting, buying land, utility work, etc. Most of the work is not on the Feds here.
It should not be at all surprising that 10k+ little building projects take some time to get going. Even from the folks who credulously believed the President could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours.
Oh hang on, I can do better. I have a plan to build 3 billion teleportation machines by 2045. This makes for a great mad libs set.
I have a plan to build thousands of Super Star Destroyers on Exegol by a long time ago.
I think your other comment about it being harder because it's an overly complicated plan doesn't convince me. The complexity and feasibility of a plan are also characteristics of its quality.
But this comment I buy. Color me convinced.
> There are currently 214 operational chargers in 12 states that have been funded through the law, with 24,800 projects underway across the country, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
I can see why you omitted the context.
Any "fact" it claims which is bad for it's case, you can believe with > 90% probability
Any "fact" it uses to support it's case should be taken with a tablespoon of sodium.
For example in this case: 24,800 projects underway. I assume if many were mostly built then they would say "10,000 chargers expected to be operational by March".
If they were under construction at all, they would probably say "under construction" This is a statement from the Federal Highway Administration! it's PR! (as it should be, nothing wrong with tooting your own horn) and the most they claim is "underway".
Of course we won't get an investigative story about this, but I'd wager the vast majority is in the earliest possible stage (before even permits to build)
So, the criticism of Buttigieg is well founded, and the "misinformation" is more directionally correct then the "fact check"
Hint: it's not China, the UK or any other foreign government.
It's us silly. We owe ourselves. :)
The only potential problem here is that "we owe ourselves" simplifies things given that some individuals are owed much more than others, i.e. there's inequality. Other than that? The whole debt charade is just political groups weaponizing (and perpetuating) the lack of fairly basic macro-economic understanding in the population.
Just look at Panama this very week. They were threatened to be invaded if they didn't give up economic deals with China and go back to being a servant colony of the US.
The odds of citizens cashing in and demanding all their money at once is pretty slim. The odds of countries that hold US debt doing it are better. But there's a strong deterrent for countries doing that. And it's the reality that the US has no issue with invading, and they've done it countless times this past century to the applause of the voters.
People like to bring up places like Argentina and Venezuela, but their debts weren't denominated in their own currencies, so they had to collect dollars in order to repay debts in dollars. As a currency issuer, since we create dollars, we can never run out of them. Nor do we have to round up dollars and take them back from currency holders before we can repay a debt. Doing so just takes those dollars away from the non-government so that the issuer can zero out a ledger somewhere. The interest is interest we choose to pay, for some reason. The only way we could default on our debt is if we decide to. The only way to "pay off" the "debt" is to take all the dollars away from the non-government, which is _us_.
> The interest is interest we choose to pay, for some reason.
Perhaps this is the best point to talk about, because the precise way in which it's untrue is very concrete. The US government doesn't choose how much interest it feels like paying; it sells securities which promise a specific payout schedule according to an auction-set interest rate. If investors want to buy at a high interest rate, there's no mechanism for the government to demand they accept a lower one.
I think the popular misunderstanding is more harmful than some of the misunderstandings you point out (which some people may indeed have) because it leads to people pushing austerity because of their monetarist dogma.
Nobody ever asks who's going to pay for stuff when it's so-called "defense" spending. But if we want health care or education then it's all apoplectic "debt, hyperinflation, enslavement of future generations, where's the money going to come from!?"
It's looking like this was at least larping as a 40+ billion dollar slush fund. There may have been some legitimate (useful) spending, and they will find out after auditing the system, but it also looks like there was lots of waste and once-removed (one degree of separation) self-dealing.