[jfengel]

Here's the thing: you and he are also wrong about the overspending, unaccountability, and the bureaucratic class.

Those things exist in about the same proportion they exist in any other large corporation, and is not special to the government. There has been a decades long campaign of Just Plain Lies to tell you otherwise. He is failing to seek out the waste, fraud, and abuse because they do not exist in anywhere near the numbers you imagine.

The government does not spend its money on employees. Those employees administer grants and spending programs. That is where the money is, authorized by Congress and depended on by industry and states. The administration is not especially expensive. To seriously cut spending you have to cut those things, and just as with the mass firings, you'll find that each dollar is actually doing something important.

Serious control over the budget requires a serious consideration of our actual goals as a country. But the last election sent the decidedly non-serious message "government bad" and everyone seems shocked that that is exactly what they are doing.

[WillPostForFood]

you and he are also wrong about the overspending, unaccountability, and the bureaucratic class.

I see spending at 123% of GDP, never that high outside war.

I see $35.46 trillion in debt, tripled over the last 20 years.

I dunno, looks he is right about overspending.

[jfengel]

The spending is following Congress' priorities. You can't solve it by firing the employees, especially not by firing them at random, and not from departments making up a fraction of a percent of the spending.

As I said, fixing the spending requires us to look at our national priorities. We spend most of our money on defense, social security, and medicare. You can cut everything else and not close the deficit.

That requires a serious conversation. Which I cannot have with somebody telling me that somehow "DEI" is a substantial piece of our budget.

[dashundchen]

I don't know how many times I need to repeat this.

Musk and Trump are not concerned about debt or spending. If they were, Trump and Republicans wouldn't be rushing a billionaire tax cut bill that will add tens of trillions of dollars to the national debt.

If Trump cared about debt he wouldn't have run up $8 trillion in debt his last term with PPP helicopter money and more billionaire tax cuts.

[elhudy]

The context of this discussion is that regardless of who is in office, there is an overspending problem. So it doesn’t exactly bear itself worth repeating here.

[WillPostForFood]

But you at least acknowledge there is a spending problem?