DOGE is shooting for optics, not actual savings. Cutting penny production is about $90M out of the $6.1T deficit. Which isn’t as useful to the American people as the headline is for DOGE. Their goal is to get one of these headlines every month to make it look like they’re doing something useful.
But 70% of our deficit is: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Military, and Interest payments on debt.
They can’t cut interest payments, period.
They won’t cut military, obviously, but there is probably a lot of low hanging fruit here that they should be scrutinizing.
They might cut SS or Medi*, predictably eating the faces of their base.
And if they cut literally everything except for these, we’d still run over a $4T deficit. Meanwhile, the quality of life for Americans by cutting all that will get measurably worse.
So yeah, more likely is that they’ll keep aiming for random little optics opportunities, while trying to find ways to funnel more of this money to Musk and his buddies via govt contracts.
DOGE is shooting for optics, not actual savings. Cutting penny production is about $90M out of the $6.1T deficit. Which isn’t as useful to the American people as the headline is for DOGE. Their goal is to get one of these headlines every month to make it look like they’re doing something useful.
But 70% of our deficit is: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Military, and Interest payments on debt.
And if they cut literally everything except for these, we’d still run over a $4T deficit. Meanwhile, the quality of life for Americans by cutting all that will get measurably worse.
So yeah, more likely is that they’ll keep aiming for random little optics opportunities, while trying to find ways to funnel more of this money to Musk and his buddies via govt contracts.
Or assume they’re only pretending to save money and it’s all about crippling our government…
Yes, that’s exactly the point I made.
What part of the deficit is Social Security? It’s self-funded, no?
The boomer generation is getting old. There are more people drawing from SS than paying into it.
Does that include all the money "borrowed"from SS, or the interest that is supposed to be paid for the “borrowed” money?
I do not claim to be an expert on this, just some dude with the internet, so answering that is going to be a team effort.
I’m not sure I follow what you mean by “borrowed” here. Do you mean money borrowed by the Treasury, or by people?