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Comment by 1shooner | Hacker News Reader

>But he’s not looking to tear things down—he’s here to protect democracy.

Someone just sent me an article about lamprey control in the Great Lakes. It existed before Musk, now it doesn't. So those fisheries are on borrowed time. And I imagine that unintended consequence multiplied so many thousands of times across the country.

If he's looking to not tear things down, he's failing. Separating the wheat from the chaff in federal spending would be hard, so he's just not bothering. That laziness is going to intimately and negatively touch the lives of most Americans within about a year, and most of those people aren't going to care what Ray Dalio says.

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Some losses are inevitable when you overhaul a system. The bigger threat is letting the government drown in debt, which would be an existential risk to democracy. If the U.S. collapses financially, lamprey control is the least of our problems. The idea isn’t to nuke every program. It’s about cutting bloat and reallocating resources. Sure, some useful things might get trimmed. But staying on our current path until the whole system fails would be worse.

I’m tired of the old “if you’re not for this, you’re against us” absurd logic fallacies. There is no binary choice here.

It’s not like we haven’t balanced the budget before without completely destroying the whole place. Within my lifetime even. Unfortunately an entire political party and more recently a reality tv star teamed up with the richest man in the world have joined forces to throw the country into chaos in a misguided attempt at … cleaning up DEI in order to save a trillion dollars? Please.

If you scroll through the doge “receipts”, it’s riddled with elementary errors ($8m contract that is listed as $8b- ya know just a little $7.992b error), stuff that’s already been canceled before Trump even showed up, and a bunch of dei stuff.

Color me unimpressed.

>Sure, some useful things might get trimmed. But staying on our current path until the whole system fails would be worse.

I'm suggesting that there will be a strong political backlash. If this were as easy as Musk acts like it is, it would have been done already. I agree that Musk is not doing this to serve the people that didn't vote for him, whose representatives did not vet and confirm him. He's doing this, as you say, to position himself for greater power. And I think he is at the very beginning of a strong popular rejection as he himself becomes increasingly perceived as an existential risk to democracy.

Republicans are presently pushing for a $4T debt ceiling increase and $4.5T in tax cuts. If you think DOGE has anything to do with the national debt, I’m afraid you’ve been deceived.

"some of you may die. But that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"

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