[guywithahat]

The most incredible piece of logical gymnastics I remember from civics/history class in high school was that during economic downturns, we need government to spend more to help people, and during economic growth we of course also need more government to manage all the new growth. At no point do we cut the spending we've added, because it would always hurt those who have jobs.

People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle

[mattkrause]

That's not a fair---or accurate---summary of Keynes.

The claim is that the government should act as a stabilizer: spending to drive aggregate demand during downswings (especially ones caused by external shocks) and regulating during up-swings.

In other words, "more" refers to different things and in different proportions in different phases of the business cycle; it's emphatically not a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" sort of thing.

[kube-system]

> The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle

In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.

The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.

[guywithahat]

The OMB has been trying to slowly and thoughtfully cut spending since the 70's, and they've struggled to see success. I think in terms of cutting spending, the slower it happens the less likely anything productive will come from it. It's why companies tend to cut whole departments at once, and the government desperately needs a way to cut funding from things that aren't working to reallocate it where the money is needed.

From what I've seen the DOGE cuts have been incredibly efficient in isolating poorly spent (or corrupt) money. Lots of corrupt foreign programs or government donations into partisan political groups. Most of the time when someone says they shouldn't have cut money, they're talking about an NGO or some research that benefits their particular partisanship at the cost of fairness or scientific rigor; which is exactly what we shouldn't be funding.

[kube-system]

The Clinton admin was successful in the 90s. They cut costs enough to pull the US entirely out of the deficit. They did things slowly and methodically over 5 years, making sure the things they cut were unnecessary before cutting them. They also followed the law, avoiding the legal issues and consequential costs that DOGE is incurring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Clinton...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...

Federal spending is up during this administration, the deficit is at modern-day averages, and the bills recently passed by this administration are going to increase it even further. The slash-and-burn style of cuts that DOGE is sloppy and ineffective. They are Chesterton's fencing themselves -- cutting things that they later find to be important. And on the other hand, not spending the time to actually seek out waste that is hard to find. A tech company works very differently than the government does, and they are slowly starting to discover that the hard way.

[psunavy03]

> They are Chesterton's fencing themselves

Which is incredibly ironic for people who claim to be "conservative."

[amanaplanacanal]

MAGA isn't anything like conservative. They just claim the title to dupe people.

[psunavy03]

That was my point.

[actionfromafar]

Another incredible thing you maybe didn't study in civics class is that the US had an "exorbitant privilege" it's now pissing away. The ability to borrow at extremely low rates from the rest of the world, because the US was so productive. We will miss it when it's gone.

[nobody9999]

>People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle

Right. And those hundreds of millions went to tax cuts/benefits for the wealthiest (top 10%) among us, and less benefit to the bottom 10%, as well as trillions (3.8, in fact[0]) more in debt to actually pay for those cuts.

Yeah. We need more of that, right?

[0] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliatio...

[SantalBlush]

You didn't learn that in civics/history class; you made it up.