[rat87]

The idea behind DOGE was to

1. fire people who don't automatically support Trump regardless of the law/constitution/good of the nation 2. Fire people who Trump or maga dislike for some reason (LGBTQ, minorities, people who have ever criticized Trump) 3. Destroy government in general (from people on the ideological right who are willing to set aside any principles to work for Trump)

Reducing waste or making government efficient was never one of the goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten rid of people doing actual oversight work for the government. They also wouldn't have fired so many people on whims (that they had to take back in many cases)

[theossuary]

Anyone who thinks DOGE was anything other than an ideological purge is incapable of critical thinking. Though, in all honestly, most who say it wasn't know it was, and are just lying to buy time till the project is complete.

[Tangurena2]

Additionally, the goal of DOGE was to dismantle every agency investigating Musk's businesses. Future James Bond type movies won't have SPECTRE or Blofeld as villains, they'll all be thinly disguised Musks.

[ants_everywhere]

It was also to justify increased government spending, namely the extension of the tax cuts

[MisterMower]

What are you talking about? Reducing government revenue does not increase government spending.

[ants_everywhere]

That's really a matter of accounting.

Under some accounting systems if you have a financial obligation and that obligation is forgiven, then it's an expense (e.g. bad debt expense) for the forgiving party and income for the party that is forgiven.

A big tax cut like this is forgiving the dues everyone owes for living in a society. It's only really a pure loss of revenue if you believe that taxes aren't an inherent part of the social contract.

At least empirically I agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature is nasty brutish and short and that there are no, for example, big tech companies in anarchies. So in both theory and practice taxes are conceptually subscription fees that arise with the social contract in exchange for protection, public services, and the protection of rights. In this sense they are debt and cancelling the debt is an expense.

Of course I recognize that in practice the government does not treat future tax revenue as receivables in terms of accounting. But there are sufficiently many games and white lies in the bill to make it appear budget neutral that I don't think anybody really believes the actual budget accounting is what's driving the bill. It's a political bill and politically I think it's reasonable to consider it an expense.

[Jensson]

> That's really a matter of accounting.

So increasing taxes can be said to reduce government spending? Do you think anyone really buys that argument?

[ants_everywhere]

No and yes I think a lot of people see the tax cuts as a lump sum transfer of wealth from the American public to private hands. In fact after you made this comment I found that the house.gov website says this explicitly.

The argument that taxes are part of the social contract was made by the same people who invented the concept of the social contract, of which the US constitution is famously an explicit example. So yes in general I think the people who founded the country bought the argument that creating a government required the payment of taxes necessarily as an obligation.

Do you think anyone really buys the idea that it's anything else?