Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

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What's wrong? Let me count the ways.

- Much of the spending they're eliminating is good and important (E.g. USAID).

- The way they're cutting is reckless (They accidentally fired nuclear safety workers).

- Many of the workers are Musk sycophants, who were hired from Twitter/Tesla/SpaceX.

- There's a tremendous conflict of interest in this agency being run by a massive government contractor (NASA and the military are both avid SpaceX customers).

- The workers are not experienced with the data they're working with, and misinterpret it constantly in public before verifying it.

- Despite claims of "transparency", Musk asserted that it was illegal to publish the names of his employees.

- Their one product, their government spending portal, is a worse version of a spending portal which already exists, and they didn't even secure their database.

- They say they "use AI" for their decisions. Which AI? Where is confidential data going?

- Do the staff have security clearance?

how does that weigh against the good they are doing? the spending crisis is critical, so of course some collateral damage will be necessary

The only "crisis" in US spending is that each party keeps shutting down the government when they don't like what the other one is doing. That's not going to go away with balanced books, but it sure is a recipe for disaster. It stops being a democracy when the decision making process stops being about majorities and starts being a game of "whoever doesn't blink sets the rules".

The country prints its own money; and right now it's the world reserve currency, giving the US a huge advantage when it comes to borrowing whatever it wants — the biggest threat to continuing to be the world reserve currency right now, is that the scale of cuts being talked about can only be met by cutting at least one of interest payments on government loans or things the US government considers to be "mandatory" such as pensions, social security, etc.

How is growing dept a good thing? How is cutting costs a bad thing? Have you seen Argentina example? How did it turn out? Can the same thing be done in USA? Only reason to say no is because someone is directly profiting from not cutting costs. If you know Musk's story then you know why he is the only best candidate to do so.

> How is growing dept a good thing?

You can afford it, it's fairly close to a neutral thing, for a government to have debt.

Right now, the US gets to set the terms for those loans.

> How is cutting costs a bad thing?

Consider weight as an analogy: Most people can do with loosing weight, losing weight by getting enthusiastic amateurs to perform a quadruple amputation is not advisable.

Musk's target can only be met by deleting your entire armed forces.

And then you have to find another $1.2 trillion.

So the military and the entire CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, NASA, Federal Highway Administration, FAA, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, Department of Justice, the Treasury, …

… all that plus the military still doesn't add up to Musk's target.

Unless you want to cut stuff that's considered "mandatory" (like military pensions), or the interest repayments on the very loans you wish you didn't have.

There are both immediate and long term consequences to the debt. In the short term we are paying a large share of revenue into debt servicing. We are all working months a year to pay interest. In the long term, we are impoverishing the next generations.

The govt can debase the currency by printing money. That only impoverishes people , except for the wealthy, causing greater wealth gap.

> There are both immediate and long term consequences to the debt. In the short term we are paying a large share of revenue into debt servicing. We are all working months a year to pay interest. In the long term, we are impoverishing the next generations.

Only if your economy doesn't grow.

> The govt can debase the currency by printing money. That only impoverishes people , except for the wealthy, causing greater wealth gap.

It impoverishes lenders and savers, but not borrowers. It's not as simple as wealthy or poor, as any can be any.

that's not what's happened in the past 5 years. assets have ballooned. cost of living has skyrocketed. wages have not kept pace. Rich got richer, poor got poorer.

First two points are pretty much the same and ignore all nuance.

Third point is opinion, at best.

Forth point; couldn't this be said about any politician?

Fifth point; So you're saying that no outside group is capable of auditing.

I'll stop there. You've drank the koolaid.

The world’s richest man is gutting the regulatory bodies which were designed to keep him in check, and you’re defending it. I’d say you’ve drank the Kool-aid.

No, seems like you are defending cost cutting and it doesn't make sense why are you so against it? USA is democracy, if after 4 years things go south you can always vote different and get everything back the way it was. Most probable outcome here is financial situation in USA will get better, you make it sound like USA would collapse to stone age era, it wont.

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