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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2100 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 31, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So... what's the Elon deficit reduction strategy here? Get like 5-10% of the government to resign, maybe fire another 5-10%, then go to congress and say look we can spend 10-20% less on salaries, go ahead and pass a reduced budget through reconciliation?

This actually sounds not too crazy.

Hopefully losing 10-20% of the work force doesn't cause a corresponding 10-20% reduction in government revenues but... it's kind of hard to see how it would.

EDIT: maybe something's wrong with me but I consider this topic fun and not weighty which is why I posted it here in the Friday thread. Seems like it has created a more typical CW thread discussion. My bad.

Build up industry and slash costs and pensions allowing boomers to expire in the style they've become accustomed to.

Or maybe just get to enough compute that you can sell Boomers on living more austere lifestyles for the greater glory of the US of A. I believe once we get AGI the better models are going to be able to market welcoming Palestinian immigration to the Israeli settler movement so convincing boomers to live more frugally seems like a no brainer.

Payroll expenses are about 5% of federal spending. Laying off half of the employees would have only a minimal effect on total spending.

Right, though I meant more like the general sketch of the strategy. Congress authorizes spending and revenues are raised and they don't stop being raised just because the executive stops spending it.

So, if it's politically impossible for Congress to pass a bill that cuts expenses by 20%, can it be done in reverse? The executive stops spending 20%, damage done, they own it. But then Congress can just rubber stamp the reduction after the fact? And since it's revenue neutral (negative actually) it only needs the reconciliation process to pass (simple, filibuster proof majority)?

Anything's possible, because laws aren't real, but the President has a constitutional mandate to "take care that the laws be executed faithfully," which includes making the expenditures specified in law. Anyone who's "harmed" by the reduction in spending (e.g. by getting laid off, or by not getting the benefit of the legally mandated spending) has standing to sue, and contrary to the histrionic claims of the left, I think the conservative majority on the Court actually cares about upholding the law.

How has your country devolved into this? You are letting an unelected bilionaire do whatever he wants? And you are ok with that? 'It sounds not too crazy' no it actually sounds absolutely nuts to anyone with a functioning brain. Even if the federal system is that bloated you think musk , with no specialized knowledge, and a bunch of his yes men will fix it without fucking up your country?

Is it fair to call him unelected when Trump was elected and everyone seemed to understand that "power to Elon" was part of the platform? The power held by Elon now surely is still less than the total power held by all members of the federal workforce who are not directly elected under a "normal" administration; why was that not grounds for concern?

Well, in a functional organization you would say we have $4 trillion in revenues and $6 trillion in expenses, year over year. This is obviously unsustainable. We need to cut $2 trillion in expenses or we go bankrupt.

So you ask every department head to produce plans to cut their spending by one third. It's hard but they do it and you implement the cuts and layoffs and move on.

That's not the government we have though.

In our government such a process would take years and the conclusion would be that we can't cut anything. The "experts" would not comply. They probably don't even know how to comply, because they've been shielded from "efficiency or death" forces their whole lives.

Faced with this, you can do it in reverse. Randomly shoot big holes in the agencies. Then drip money back into them. It'll be now be clear what roles were most essential and should be filled back in first.

Is this ideal? No. But what's even more not ideal is the current trajectory.

He was elected. We elected Trump and Elon’s presence is Trump’s will. Elon was important for getting Trump elected, too.

We now know control of the U.S. government's infrastructure has a price tag: About $300 million.

EDIT: Several of you missed the point of my post: Elon donated that amount to get into Trump's good graces to form a faux agency currently wreaking unnecessary damage to the government.

No, you don't. If Biden admin wasn't such a nest of total incompetents Trump would never have won. Ditto for the Uniparty hating the US citizen and wishing him to just die quietly.

If they weren' like that Trump would have no openings to exploit.

Also, it was much, much cheaper to be a functionary in the Biden white house with arguably more control over a smaller subset of federal policy.

One of the unsettling things about democracy is complete randos (and their delegates) can be elected and take control of the entire country despite having built none of it, yes.

I mean, if you ignore the price tag on the DNCs efforts. About $1 billion. If you are going to reduce it to "Whoever spends more buys America", you gotta include that the losing party spent almost 3x more on their failed bid. So perhaps there was a bit more to it than that.

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