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Comment by anoxor | Hacker News Reader

I like that the focus is on the issues with the disruptors that have been running for a few weeks, not the egregious spending for decades.

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One could agree with the goals of reducing government spending and still argue that "the disruptors" are moving too fast and breaking too many things.

And illegally

Sure, where are the nytimes articles that praise and highlight the good cuts?

You wanna list those out? So far all I've seen is cutting of body parts to lose weight.

They don't always say negative things, there was positive article praising the success of Elon Musk in promoting Doge-scam:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/technology/dogecoin-bitco...

This disruption are not about spending though.

In their own words what it is about:

"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...

This is exactly right. DOGE deserves no praise. Their goal is not to cut spending to bring money back to the people. Their goal is to gut the government itself and make it ineffective in improving people's lives. They don't actually care whether these departments are "wasteful", and anyone who thinks they do has bought and drunk the snake oil.

don't get fooled by the disruptor narrative, it might very well be just pretentious immaturity

Always was.

Gives me hope that I too one day can benefit from all my psychological flaws

What's wrong with evidence?

I personally wouldn't want my government run by unchecked people who get the value of something off by three orders of magnitude. In a meritocracy private company someone confusing 8M with 8B is at best put in a closet job. More likely getting fired, and probably getting sued. When Jerome Kerviel was off by 5B he went to prison.

People regularly discuss the debt, this is a strawman.

There is a dual point:

- many of the organizations cut certainly have done evil which the average American would not support.

- I do not expect Trump to do less evil. I expect him simply to command it more directly.

That egregious spending bears a family resemblance to the malfeasance that cost Trump the 2020 election and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

I bet back in the day you were the complaining about 200000$ toilet seats in Iraq. Now that’s it’s not on your side of politics it’s a fabrication

It's fun to put thoughts in other people's heads!

I'll try.

I bet back in the day you were eating babies.

Fun!

I don't doubt there is waste in the federal government. I also don't doubt it is largely in programs that tend tend to be lavishly funded, not squeezed to death, so agricultural subsidies, construction projects, and defense. These are programs conservatives love. DOGE is concentrating its "waste, fraud, and abuse cutting" to ideological enemies. In other words, it isn't about finding and cutting waste or fraud; it's about the ideological capture and remolding of government outside of any framework of accountability or democratic input.

A lovely example of their creative approach to their alleged project:

> In another case, DOGE claimed $232 million in savings on a contract providing information technology support to the Social Security Administration. But The Intercept reported that only a sliver of the contract was canceled — a program to let users mark their gender as “X” — bringing the actual savings closer to $560,000.

They lie about what they accomplished, and what they did accomplish was just performative cruelty with negligible effect on the budget.

Both sides for the past decades have been terrible.

And honestly it’s been both parties who have been more than happy to pay lip service to the problem but instead of paring things add additional oversight that has no enforcement power so they only add more weight to the bureaucracy with a few reports no one reads to show for. In the face of deficits, they don’t retrench as individuals and private entities have to.

Totally agree. I think the debt is at 100k per taxpayer. Either taxes or inflation will have to be used to pay that.

Debt goes up during republican goverment and down during democratic one, so anyone who cares for it would not vote for conservatives.

Nor for Trump whose lifetime history is to make debt go up and then fail upwards.

Biden added 1 trillion dollars every 100 days to the debt in the last year. Not in war or recession.

He used inflation to hide the issue in the price of everything else on top of that.

You have to be blindly partisan to be unable to recognize basic facts about the debt load and that republican governments are responsible for the vast majority of it.

> Either taxes or inflation will have to be used to pay that.

Or the .01% class who own the debt could get burned. Sometimes that happens when you make a bad bet, you know?

Now we have the experts advocating for default... truly mindboggling stupidity.

Well I know this - if the 'smart' option is to have every American born into crippling generational debt, I want no part of it.

And I know that when inequality reaches these sorts of levels, heads have a tendency to roll.

One way or another, some form of jubilee is gonna be necessary for a sustainable future.

both parties invoked in highly assymetrical situation is getting old.

Who in the Repubs doesn’t like spending? Like maybe three of them?

You forget they talk about responsible budgeting when Dems are in office. Talk talk talk. Then they balloon the debt when they're running the show. Sure did talk though...

The trashing of a (hopefully) dying octopus.

hopefully to be replaced by something less rotten

it won't be lol, this is the capitalist class stripping the copper out of the walls.

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